Study Questions for Greenblatt

1. What is the subject of Greenblatt's first essay? What are the issues involved? To what is the discrepancy he alludes?

2. What are the two different conceptions of art outlined by Greenblatt?
   
   
3. What characterizes the approach of someone like Dover Wilson?
   
   
4. How does New Historicism differ from the earlier historicism?
   
   
5. How does New Historicism erode "the firm ground of both criticism and literature"?
   
   
6. How does this new approach change our view of texts and of history?
   
   
7. In his analysis of King Lear, how does Greenblatt challenge existing views of Shakespearean self-consciousness?
   
   
8. What is the importance of Harsnett's text?
   
   
9. Greenblatt calls Harsnett's "Declaration" a "polemical institutional analysis." Explain.
   
   
10. How does King Lear engage the issues found in Harsnett? In what ways, in the end, is Lear self-conscious? What does Greenblatt mean by its "transcendence of all ideology"?
    

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