Cultural Poetics is term Stephen Greenblatt uses in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, meaning the interpretation of literature as an essential element in the cultural creation of identity. Greenblatt’s intention was to “explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity”. He states that all of the English writers he discusses have been drawn to the human subject and to self-fashioning. That the “Renaissance figures we have considered understand that in our culture to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one’s stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction,
Chapter six is used to further discuss Spenser and Marlowe. Greenblatt claims that Spenser and Marlowe are “mighty opposites” according to his study. He claims that Spenser wrote for “an aristocratic and upper-middle-class audience in a self –consciously archaizing manner” while at the same time Marlowe wrote for the “new public theater in blank verse that must have seemed…like reality itself”. During the remainder of chapter six, Greenblatt discusses the improvisation of power between the different authors he discussed throughout the book. In the last part of the chapter, while criticizing Shakespeare, he courageously makes claims that there is, in fact, no individual genius behind Shakespeare’s work.
The purpose of chapter two is to “examine the extent to which the intense inwardness Wyatt
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