SOURCE: “Metacriticism and Materiality: The Case of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,” in ELH, Vol. 58, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 283-304.

In the essay below, Morse examines The Winter’s Tale in order to reveal the shortcomings of New Historical criticism, and finds the ideology of the New Historicist conception to be “simplistic” and “misconceived.”

New Historical criticism of Renaissance literature over the past decade has not only effected a revolution in the way that critics read the literature and its relation to the culture that produces it, but has helped us to reconceive the nature of culture itself. Nevertheless, if the great strength of the school's approach has been the fertility and subtlety of its analyses of the cultural density which produces and is produced by literature, the theoretical models by which it has organized its reading have at times seemed inadequate, and thus misleading. The prevalent New Historicist conception...