Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980.

Greenblatt’s book interprets literature as an important element in the “cultural creation of identity.” The author treats the art of a period as a primary force that causes men and women to be the way they are in a given culture. In this view, art becomes a means of self-fashioning or the power to control identity, one’s own, another person’s, or a group of people.
He examines self-fashioning in Renaissance England by looking at Thomas More’s Utopia, William Tyndale’s English New Testament, the poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Edmond Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and William Shakespeare’s Othello. Each group of three form two groups in which strong opposite responses to community, tradition, and authority cause a third response in which the contrast is repeated and changed. Wyatt is used to illustrate the conflict between More and Tyndale; Shakespeare is the contrast between Spenser and Marlowe.
According to Greenblatt, a self is formed, first, in submission to an “absolute power” or authority, and, second, in relation to the Other, the stranger, a category (the other which is not the authority) is branded by the authority as subversive. As a result, the stranger becomes trapped and deprived of his otherness or destroyed. This entrapment involves a loss of self that enables a dialectical retrieval of the self. Self-fashioning takes place in a double relationship to authority on one hand and to change on the other. The self is governed by the variation between totalization and differentiation.
The book implies that the power to fashion the self is an aspect of the power to control identity, which was done by the state, church , and family in the 16th century. This period in history recognized man’s autonomy but also recognized the adaptability of the self. Since literature, a “cultural artifact,” is an expression of the process of self-fashioning, Greenblatt says it should be defined three ways: (1) as the materialization of the behavior of the author (2) as an expression of codes that govern behavior (3) as a reflection on those codes. Humans fashion, are fashioned, and are aware of being fashioned by discourse.
Greenblatt says that self-fashioning has the following governing conditions:
(1) None of the authors discussed inherits a title, family tradition, or social status that give that writer an identity of a clan or caste. These writers, except Wyatt, are middle-class
(2) Self-fashioning involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated outside self.
(3) Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile (Other) which must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked or destroyed.
(4) The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is chaotic or that which is false or negative.
(5) One man’s authority is another man’s alien.
(6) When one authority is destroyed, another takes its place.
(7) There is always more than one authority and more than one alien in existence at a given time.
(8) If both authority and alien are located outside self, they are at the same time inward necessities; both submission and destruction are always already internalized.
(9) Self-fashioning is always in language.
(10) Self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some undermining, some loss of self.
Greenblatt says his intentions were to look at the ways these writers created their own performances, to analyze their choices in representing themselves, and in fashioning characters, and to understand the role of human autonomy in construction of identity. He realizes in the writing of the book that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state—are all intertwined. According to Greenblatt, the human subject becomes the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. These writers embrace the human subject and self-fashioning, even in suggesting the absorption or corruption or loss of self.
Foucault influenced Greenblatt in explaining the strategies and operations of power in discourse. Greenblatt looks at the totality of power; by undermining and subverting itself, power means to confirm itself. Recurring themes in New Historicism are establishment, stabilization, extension, and subversion of power. Juxtaposition is an often repeated procedure. Foucault, Williams, and Greenblatt deal with power and the subversion of power, and they use comparison and contrast to prove their points.