Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 1-9.

…the verb fashion, a word that does not occur at all in Chaucer’s poetry. 2

But, more significantly for our purposes, fashioning may suggest the achievement of a less tangible shape: a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving. 2

And with representation we return to literature, or rather we may grasp that self-fashioning derives its interest precisely from the fact that it functions without regard for a sharp distinction between literature and social life. It invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary characters, the shaping of one’s own identity, the experience of being molded by forces outside one’s control, the attempt to fashion other selves. 3

Literature functions within this system in three interlocking ways: as a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes. 4

I should add that if cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation , this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth century, of leaving behind one’s own situation: it is everywhere evident in this book that the questions I ask of my material and indeed the very nature of this material are shaped by the questions I ask of myself. 5

I do not shrink from these impurities—they are the price and perhaps among the virtues of this approach—but I have tried to compensate for the indeterminacy and incompleteness they generate by constantly returning to particular lives and particular situations, to the material necessities and social pressures that men and women daily confronted, and to a small number of resonant texts. 5

So from the thousands, we sieve upon a handful of arresting figures who seem to contain within themselves much of what we need, who both reward intense, individual attention and promise access to larger, cultural patterns. 6

We should note in the circumstances of the sixteenth-century figures on whom this study focuses a common factor that may help to explain their sensitivity as writers to the construction of identity: they all embody, in one form or another, a profound mobility. 7

All of these talented middle-class men moved out of a narrowly circumscribed social sphere and into a realm that brought them in close contact with the powerful and the great. All were in a position as well, we should add, to know with some intimacy those with no power, status, or education at all. 7

The closer we approach the figures and their works, the less they appear as convenient counters in a grand historical scheme. A series of shifting, unstable pressures is met with a wide range of discursive and behavioral responses, inventions, and counterpressures. 8

We may, however, conclude by noting a set of governing conditions common to most instances of self-fashioning—whether of the authors themselves or of their characters—examined here:
1. None of the figures inherits a title, an ancient family tradition or hierarchical status that might have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or caste. With the partial exception of Wyatt, all of these writers are middle-class.
2. Self-fashioning for such figures involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self—God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, colonial or military administration. Marlowe is an exception, but his consuming hostility to hierarchical authority has, as we shall see, some of the force of submission.
3. Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed.
4. The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is unformed or chaotic (the absence of order) or that which is false or negative (the demonic parody of order). Since accounts of the former tend inevitably to organize and thematize it, the chaotic constantly slides into the demonic, and consequently the alien is always constructed as a distorted image of the authority.
5. One man’s authority is another man’s alien.
6. When one authority or alien 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 the authority and the alien are located outside the self, they are at the same time experienced as inward necessities, so that both submission and destruction are always already internalized.
9. Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language.
10. The power generated to attack the alien in the name of the authority is produced in excess and threatens the authority it sets out to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self. 8-9

To sum up these observations, before we turn to the rich lives and texts that exemplify and complicate them, we may say that self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss. 9