Wanting to better grasp the roots of the new historicist movement in Renaissance literature, I set out to read a few of the Greenblatt articles written in the early eighties. I was quite impressed with Greenblatt’s early article, Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion. This article really made me think about how sometimes a particular image can be seen in two very different ways. Whereas one group of readers might sympathize with a slain peasant rebel, another group of readers might see justice in the death. Greenblatt points out that oftentimes both readings can stem from the same image (or text). In these cases,
the contingent condition of certain signs at particular historical moments, moments in which the ruling elite, deeply threatened, conjure up images of repression so harsh that they can double as images of protest. (11)
Seeing a prone peasant stabbed in the back might generate sympathy for some, though it might have been intended an image of the power of the ruling elite. Greenblatt suggests that this creates a genre problem for an artist and his or her intended audience. The death of a peasant, or the quashing of a peasant rebellion is not tragic because the antagonist is not worthy of the status of tragic hero;there is nothing heroic in a prince squashing such a rebellion than had the prince slaughtered a rabid dog. Thus, the genre of rebellion is not tragic. But it is not comic either. Such images and texts present a particular genre problem.
Greenblatt really got me thinking about how this issue of genre is really an appropriate issue to approach from a reader response perspective, because the issue of genre, for me, arises in the reception of the work. It is that reception, or perceived reception, that determines genre. If a work is to be categorized within a genre, it is the responsibility of the community of readers to organize any particular work within the schema of their own understanding of the world and art.
Twenty-First audiences are often guilty of impressing their own values and prejudices upon a historic text, something reader response theory has taught them to do. But taking the reader response question beyond the level of the individual, though, comparing our own response to those responses of others drastically different from our own, opens up whole new dimensions for understanding a work of art, be it writing or sculpture or any other form. The art, first the property of its reader, then takes on the added dimension of being the communal property of all who have shared that art, the individual response existing in the context of those responses that came before as well as those that are to follow. This complicates our own understanding of a text, because meaning no longer lies in the transaction between the text and the individual reader, but in the shared transaction between text and its many common readers.
