Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energies in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

From a review in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1988:

Stephen Greenblatt’s latest work, a collection of five essays, continues his exploration into the relationship between society and literature in Renaissance England. He describes his major critical task as the quest for the “poetics of culture,” an idea loosely analogous to what Raymond Williams has termed “structure of feelings.” A poetics of culture is not a body of facts, a Tillyardesque chapbook, or a manual of beliefs, but a network of exchanges and “negotiations” that permits a social unit to synthesize often contradictory ideas and produce a coherent “reading.” It is precisely this process that legitimizes societies and makes shared experiences like culture and literature possible.

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