lic historicist) rests on an extensive field of early modern European discourse, whose roots can be traced back to Roman and Greek source documents. In his attempt to establish a specific causal relationship, something that Greenblatt's circulation of social energy threatens to erase, Schneider maintains that we must examine the past. He argues that "before we
             declare the Jacobean position on colonialism, shouldn't we know what ethical tools the Jacobeans brought to the task of judging it?" (Schneider 130) This strikes at the heart of Greenblatt's argument, as his anecdotes and subsequent affirmations stem from the Jacobean position on colonialism.
             Greenblatt uses the relationship between The Tempest and one of its presumed sources, William Strachey's account of the tempest that struck an English fleet bound for the fledgling colony at Jamestown, as a model in order to demonstrate the complex circulation between the social dimension of an aesthetic strategy and the aesthetic dimension of a social strategy (Greenblatt 147). The play was performed long before Strachey's narrative was printed, but scholars presume that Shakespeare read a manuscript version of the work, which takes the form of a confidential letter written to a certain "noble lady"(Greenblatt 147). Greenblatt highlights the significance of the relation between the two texts, or rather what he refers to as "the institutions that the texts serve" (Greenblatt 148).
             According to Greenblatt, William Strachey was a shareholder and secretary of the Virginia Company's colony at Jamestown. Apparently, his letter on the events of 1609-10 was unpublished until 1625 because the Virginia Company was engaged in a vigorous propaganda and financial campaign on behalf of the colony, and the company's leaders found Strachey's report too disturbing to allow it into print (Greenblatt 148). Shakespeare was also a shareholder in a joint-stock company, the King's Men, as well as its princi...