“Rouse Up a Brave Mind”: The Merchant of Venice and Social Uprising in the 1590s

Summary

In an important early critique of new historicist theory and practice, whose basic insights have by now become fairly widespread, Walter Cohen has famously observed that while new historicists acknowledge that the early modern theater was occasionally subversive and inherently ambivalent their readings of individual plays end up with “a sense of the almost inevitable defeat of the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed.” This interpretive tendency owes theoretically to a vision of society and theater as “organized down to their smallest details for the benefit of those in power”; methodologically, it consists in restricting social and political agency to the elites. Later correctives to this new historicist position, which Patricia Fumerton has recently subsumed under the ingenious rubric of “new new historicism,” have helpfully reclaimed the importance of lower social groups in early modern society and culture, but they have mostly done so at the expense of expressly political concerns, opting instead for a primarily social historicism of everyday life: they have tended to concentrate on extra subtle and mostly apolitical ways in which the common person, in his or her daily activities, “tactically and almost invisibly transforms from within the social structures she or he inhabits.”