Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch 9783110691771, 9783110691672

Citation preview

Benjamin Boysen Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch

Benjamin Boysen

Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch

ISBN 978-3-11-069167-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069177-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069185-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943507 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To my friend, Marianne Børch, dedicated in gratitude

Contents Preface

IX

I     

1 Introduction Premise: The nominalist revolution 1 The argument 4 8 Renaissance resonances Methodological and analytic procedures 16 Chapter summaries

II      

Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile 20 20 Exilic mutations Petrarch’s manifold exiles 22 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile Transcendental homelessness 32 The subject’s existential exile in the other 43 The homecoming of exile

III     

Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror The ambivalence of love 46 Petrarch in the labyrinth 48 59 The demonic mirror of love Crucified in the mirror of love 63 79 Petrarch’s early modernity

IV           

Shakespeare’s “Nihilism” 82 82 The question of nothingness Nominalism and nothingness 86 The nothingness of language 96 106 Reflection and nothingness 113 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance The interest in nothingness 118 The ghost of existence, death, and nothingness 130 Anxiety, desire, and nothingness Desire, representation, and nothingness 135 Sexuality, gender, birth, and nothingness 142 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness

14

25 37

125

149

46

VIII

Contents

V   

Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties Medieval persistence 157 159 The lack of steadfastness 165 Son diviso et sparso

VI

Literature

Index

184

171

157

Preface In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (III.i.143) and Othello (I.i.64), Viola and Iago, in identical phrases, exclaim: “I am not what I am”. And in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the poet-lover cries: “Non son mio, non” [I am not my own, no] (23.100). This book argues that these puzzling statements are typical of a specific negative subjectivity in Shakespeare and Petrarch according to which the subject can only manifest and formulate itself through another person. In each his original way, Shakespeare and Petrarch display the impossibility of becoming conscious of oneself without another subject, a mirror or representation – i. e., somebody non-identical with and outside the subject. Here, then, identity is indebted to difference and negativity. In Petrarch, this line of thought is foregrounded in his staging of himself as inhabiting the space of an all-comprehending exile. An exile, however, whose negativity and pure potentiality allow him to define himself freely and creatively. And even though he yearns to achieve a Stoic ideal of being entirely self-sufficient, Petrarch in his love poetry articulates a conflicted awareness of the need to mirror himself in the other to achieve self-consciousness. Simultaneously, the requirement of self-consciousness deriving from a representation outside itself also implies a chance to construct one’s self anew; even if this means that the subject must surrender part of itself to something outside of itself. Shakespeare, in his turn, is much ado about nothing. Indeed, Shakespeare’s works swarm with playful metaphors and puns on the word “nothing” to describe almost every aspect of human existence: death, time, becoming, nonsense, anxiety, fantasy, lies, creativity, creation and destruction, the female sex, meaninglessness, eroticism, emptiness, jealousy, love, and art. A “nihilist” anthropology is disseminated throughout Shakespeare’s works to depict human existence as intimately determined by the force of nothingness and negativity. Now, the negative subjectivities of Shakespeare and Petrarch are hardly commensurable with worldviews perceiving human reality in terms of substances, essences, or quiddities. Undermining the metaphysical/theological foundation of the medieval world, these negative subjectivities voice a current in early modern subjectivity marked by the ascent of Nominalism. Inscribing exile, otherness, and nothingness into the heart of human existence, Shakespeare and Petrarch encapsulate a Nominalist awareness that is at the furthest possible distance from earlier times’ approval of Paul’s statement that “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15.10). Conversely, the Nominalist idea of a radically individualized world void of divine traces and real universals, in which names

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-001

X

Preface

are nothing but signs or signs of signs, helps this negativity come to the fore and be exploited intellectually and poetically. It is tempting to propose that Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s negative subjectivities – located at the beginning and the closure of what is traditionally referred to as the Renaissance – might illustrate a more general drift within Renaissance poetry and thinking. The present book suggests that these negative subjectivities are not tied exclusively to the figures of Petrarch and Shakespeare. A glance at thinkers and poets contemporary with Shakespeare and Petrarch affirms that there are comparable thought patterns and that other writers formulate similar negative subjectivities under the influence of the intellectual and poetic upheavals of the time. Arguably, however, this more comprehensive argument is insufficiently explored and leaves ample space for future scholarship.

I Introduction 1 Premise: The nominalist revolution Turning the medieval Realist world picture on its head, Nominalism claimed that all entities were particular and individual – not universal. According to this line of thought, universals were mere fictions, and words did not point towards actual universals, but were signs used for human understanding ad placitum. Ockham and his Nominalism thus paved the way for an ontological individualism according to which only particular entities exist. In such a radically individualized world, devoid of real universals, names are nothing but signs or signs of signs. Universals are useful fictions with which we navigate in and understand the world. In The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008), Michael Gillespie shows how the Nominalist revolution, vigorously emerging in the fourteenth century, signalled “the collapse of the medieval world and the rise of modernity” (19). Realism, as the Scholastics of the High Middle Age understood it, advocated the extramental existence of universals as the ultimate real things, thus viewing individual entities as particular embodiments of these. Through a Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle, the Scholastics believed that universals were, indeed, identical with divine reason, accessible either by illumination or through investigation of nature. This Realist ontology dictated that reason and nature mirrored each other and that God as Creator was reflected in the structure of the world, His Creation. Gillespie argues that William of Ockham and the Nominalism of which he is the primary champion and representative changed all that. Creation exists solely because of God’s will and exists only as long as He wills it; Creation is an act of sheer grace and is not comprehensible through reason, but through revelation alone. It follows that there is no external cosmic structure that humans can apprehend by reason alone. God is no longer mirrored in the world and, in consequence, He can no longer be understood by analogy with the structure of the universe. In fact, God could not create universals, as this would limit His omnipotence. In sum, the Scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation was rejected by Ockham, who “in this way undermined the metaphysical/theological foundation of the medieval world” (22). Ockham’s Nominalism proved to be disturbing because it widened the gap between the human being and God, as He could no longer be understood in analogy with His Creation, which was now left as a chaos of entirely disparate things bereft of a certain or secure universal ground. Moreover, Nominalism’s God was capricious and unknowable, fearsome and unpredictable in His https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-002

2

I Introduction

power. Left with a God inaccessible to reason and a natural environment refusing to bespeak the glory of God, and with the world a confusion of individual entities, humanity found itself in a state of metaphysical vulnerability unable to find any point of certainty. If nature does not embody universals, there are no universal ends to be actualized. In terms of metaphysics, with no direction home, human beings achieved a new view of what it meant to be human that gave much more importance to the importance of the will: “[N]ominalism opens up the possibility of a radically new understanding of human freedom” (24). The later arguments, hopes, and struggles of modernity were thus born from the metaphysical challenges raised by Nominalism – a trajectory Gillespie follows from Petrarch and Erasmus’s Humanism over Luther’s Reformation, to Descartes’ Rationalism, Hobbes’ Materialism, and beyond. Against that background I believe that Michael Gillespie is justified in claiming that the early voices of modernity heralded a radical shift in the perception of the relation between the world and humanity.¹ Indeed, the period normally referred to as the Renaissance (roughly starting with Petrarch and ending with Shakespeare) saw a changed view of language come to the surface.² The period

 In the present study, I do not claim to do justice to the complexity of the Nominalist/Realist debates in the period. Furthermore, it is outside the scope of this book to validate that this transition took place. Rather I rely on the extensive studies done by many excellent scholars preceding me. In addition to Michael Gillespie’s massively erudite study mentioned above, I would also refer the reader to his Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 14– 28, to Jürgen Miethke, Ockhams Wege zur Socialphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), and to William Courtney, “Nominalism and Later Medieval Religion,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Later Medieval and Renaissance Religion, eds. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 26 – 58. For the idea of a change from Mediaeval Realism to Renaissance Nominalism, I refer to Meyrick Carré, Realists and Nominalists (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), Friedrich Heer, Mittelalter: Vom Jahr 1000 bis 1350, Teil 2 (Münich: dtv, 1983), Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, Pennsylvania: The Archabbey Press, 1953), 11 ff., 15.ff., and 69 ff., Rosario Assunto, Die Theorie des Schönen im Mittelalter (Cologne: Dumont, 1982), 119 ff., and to Heiko Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism with Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960): 47– 76. For a comprehensive discussion of the Renaissance view of language as defined by an increasing Nominalism, see KarlOtto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963), Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), and Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester, Manchester University, 1975), The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on Intellectual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1976), and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Boston, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985).  By the Renaissance I roughly understand the time span from Petrarch to Shakespeare. There is obviously always something artificial and tentative about operating with the concept of an epoch, because doing so creates the illusion of uniformity. I propose to view an epoch as a

1 Premise: The nominalist revolution

3

experienced a growing unease with the feeling that language no longer seemed to be an ideal reflection of the world, and deplored the failure of words to correspond with things. However, another reaction emerged. The acknowledgment of the conventionalism of language and its capacity for constant change fueled the idea that language was man-made. This fostered the belief that humanity – as creator of language – created itself through language. Language and signs were beginning to be utilized more self-consciously and were increasingly seen as constructs developed and manipulated by humans within specific historical and cultural contexts. They were re-evaluated as historical constructs and products rather than as allegorical and metaphysical entities. As Stephan Otto has pointed out, Renaissance epistemology revolved around words rather than things; and with reference to Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola among others, he accentuates how the humanists believed that the acquisition of knowledge arises through language: “For humans, it is only through language that what exists has reality” (Renaissance und frühe Neuzeit 112).³ In a certain sense, knowledge and truth are only accessible through the mediation of language. Obviously, Nominalism was not invented by the early moderns, nor did the theological upheaval mean that Realism did not coexist with Nominalism. The

time in which a certain set of ideas and practices emerge or tend to dominate, a view well described by Randolph Starn: “Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and endings and consistent content in between, the Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen as a movement of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable persons variously responded in different times and places” (“Renaissance Redux” 124). A period such as the Renaissance is thus perceived less as a well-defined, delimited timespan than as a time especially preoccupied with certain questions or problems more pressing and dominant in this epoch than in others. This means that it is feasible to locate individuals or groups outside of the dates normally delineating a period, who are more in intellectual and artistical accord with other epochs than those in which they happen to be historically situated. The Nominalist outlook, for example, of an author like Geoffrey Chaucer (for Chaucer’s showdown with the universal ordo and Nominalist sign theory, see Marianne Børch, “Geoffrey Chaucer and the Cosmic Text: Rejecting Analogy,” in Text and Voice: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Middle Ages, ed. Marianne Børch (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), 97– 120; cf. also William H. Watts and Richard J. Utz, “Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer’s Poetry: A Bibliographical Essay,” Mediavalia et Humanistica 20 (1993): 147– 73) would align him with some subsequent early modern writers rather than with contemporary medieval ones. Moreover, there are examples of individual poets who display both Realist and Nominalist features. Dante, for example, presents a clear-cut medieval and Realist cosmos in The Divine Comedy; but his character-drawing is highly individualistic and often breaks with a more traditional medieval allegorical style – just as his idea of himself as an inspired poet and his work as “’l poema sacro” (Paradiso XXV.1) points forwards to a newer Renaissance poetics informed by Nominalism.  My translation.

4

I Introduction

discussion existed before the Renaissance, and in the High Middle Ages, Nominalism was energetically debated. Peter Abelard, for example, claimed that Realism with its emphasis on general natures and entities dissolved all distinctions and qualifications; while in contrast, Anselm of Canterbury attacked Nominalism for being too absorbed in individual, empirical things, thus dispersing thinking into sheer particularism. The Realist Franciscan Roger Bacon claimed that universals were substances. Yet Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas modified this extreme version of Realism, claiming that things have a separate existence outside of the mind, but only become fully universal through the intellect. Nonetheless, a full-blown Nominalism arose only with William of Ockham, for whom universals had a purely logical status, meaning that nothing universal exists outside of the mind. While a more or less pronounced Realism was upheld by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, Nominalism was gathering cultural momentum among early moderns, and the ascent of Nominalism was thus crucial in paving the way for the Renaissance as it undermined the dominant medieval world-picture: “The end of the Middle Ages – that also means overcoming the naïve attitude to language that induces one to let an equivalent reality be associated with every linguistic element and that sees in this association a closed circle of accomplishment. Here nominalism first cleared the way critically” (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age 492). It makes sense, therefore, when Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his impressive A History of Christianity, asserts that “nominalism was a corrosive doctrine for the accepted principles of medieval Western Christianity” (565). A point put even more strongly by Michael Gillespie: “[T]he nominalist revolution against scholasticism shattered every aspect of the medieval world” (The Theological Origins of Modernity 14; cf. also note 1 intra).

2 The argument The emergence of Nominalism and its widespread dissemination in the Renaissance gave rise not only to an increased focus on individualism and subjectivity, but also to a sharpened realization of the problems of representation. For the individuation of truth – as known only through particular things – resulted in a keen appreciation of the problems inherent in representation. Nowhere, I believe, is this clearer than in the cases of Petrarch and Shakespeare. With these two poets at the opening and the conclusion of the Renaissance we come face to face with some of the most intellectually and poetically powerful, original, and penetrating reflections and articulations of these problems. Petrarch was directly in contact with the Nominalist theology of the thirteenth century, and one can therefore talk of some theological and philosophical

2 The argument

5

influence on Petrarch’s intellectual and poetic work (although he distanced himself sharply from the “technical” language and logic of these thinkers).⁴ However, this was not the case with Shakespeare, who was probably influenced by a more general and indirect Nominalist Zeitgeist. As a matter of fact, it remains unclear whether there are any direct sources for the Nominalist musings in Shakespeare’s works, but whether he was actually influenced or not, one can, as a minimum, assert that the decline of the allegorical world picture cleared the necessary space for a preoccupation with Nominalist issues.⁵

 See Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity 50 ff. Eckhard Kessler was an enthusiast of Ockham and claimed repeatedly the influence of Ockham’s Nominalism on the Italian humanists, most notably on Petrarca and Lorenzo Valla. See, for example, Petrarca und die Geschichte (München: Fink, 2004) and the article “Die verborgene Gegenwart Ockham’s in der Sprachphilosophie der Renaissance,” in Die Gegenwart Ockham’s, eds. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl and Rolf Schönberger (Weinheim: VCH-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990), 147– 164. But Kessler was also criticised: see Lodi Nauta, “William of Ockham and Lorenzo Villa: False Friends. Semantics and Ontological Reduction,” Renaissance Quarterly 56 (2003): 613 – 651.  For the question of “literary Nominalism,” that is to say, the influence of Nominalist philosophy and Zeitgeist on early modern Renaissance literature, see Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du Roman: Approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), which argues that the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was a transition from the symbol to the sign, Ullrich Langer’s fascinating study Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Michael Randall, Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Renaissance (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), François Cornilliat, “Or ne mens”: Couleurs de l’éloge et du blâme chez les “Grand Rhétoriqueurs” (Paris: Champion, 1994), 85 – 129, and Richard J. Utz, Literarischer Nominalismuz im Spätmittelalter: Eine Untersuchung zu Sprache, Charakterzeichnung und Struktur in Geoffrey Chaucers “Troilus and Criseyde” (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1990). I would also draw attention to the anthology Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives, eds. Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, Richard J. Utz (Amsterdam: Edition Rodopi, 1997), which features important material on the interface between Nominalism and literature in the late medieval and early modern epoch. And finally, as concerns studies devoted to the impact of Nominalist ideas on Petrarch and Shakespeare, I would specially highlight Karlheinz Stierle’s large-scale study Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), which scrutinizes the Nominalist influence in Petrarch’s entire oeuvre, Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 44– 68, Robert Weimann, Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Autorität und Repräsentation im elisabethanischen Theater (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1988), and James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (California, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Some of the poets and thinkers, who the scholars writing on literary Nominalism in the early modern period emphasize, include Geoffrey Chaucer, Francesco Petrarch, the Humanists (foremost Erasmus of Rotterdam), Luigi Pulci, Ludovico Ariosto, the Reformation (especially Martin Luther), François Rabelais, Philip Sidney, Baldassare Castiglione, Christopher Marlowe, Michel de Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Francis Bacon, and William Shakespeare.

6

I Introduction

The awareness of the problem of representation is marked in the works of Petrarch and Shakespeare. Being exposed to the Nominalist expansion in the epoch, Petrarch and Shakespeare are intensely fascinated with Nominalist assumptions about language. The Nominalist awareness shared by these two poets helps a related theme to come to the fore: identity and subjectivity as representation. In this book, I shall demonstrate that (1) Petrarch’s obsession with the notion of total exile, (2) his analysis of the ambivalence of love, and (3) Shakespeare’s excited exploration of the manifold metaphorical meanings attached to the word “nothing” disseminated throughout almost all of his works, encapsulate a shared idea of subjectivity as rooted in negativity, otherness, and re-presentation. The formulation of this idea is made feasible by a more metaphysically indeterminate space that offers both poets the necessary intellectual and artistic leeway to explore and dramatize new and different models of subjectivity. (1). Petrarch’s preoccupation with exile is not only extraordinarily passionate; it is also timeless and original. His intellectual and poetic praxis is accompanied by an obsession with exile, whose intensity and transformations offer him a hitherto unseen freedom, which enables him to create his own self as his own artifact. He orchestrates an all-embracing exile whose ruptures and upheavals secure him an indeterminacy and potentiality out of which he is free to make himself anew. As it is no longer feasible to understand and mirror himself in God’s Creation, he is left alone with himself in a way that in spite of all provides him with a subjective freedom. Exile becomes a strategy through which he endeavors to become his own creator or author. (2). Moreover, in the works of Petrarch (primarily his cycle of poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), the reader is confronted with a highly ambivalent conception of love, entailing more than mere traditional tropes or styles of ambiguity. It involves a kind of phenomenological discussion of the status of the subject as radically decentred in that it it proves to be determined by the other rather than given as a substance or essence. The ambivalence facing Petrarch is the result of the conflict between the Stoic yearning for being alone with and for oneself – in order to keep self-presence and subjectivity unsoiled by the other or alien – and the recognition that it is not possible to see oneself see oneself, since it is impossible to appear to oneself without a medium, the mirror, the other, the representation, i. e., the non-identical. There is, of course, nothing new about mirroring oneself in another, as exemplified in the command

For an overview, see Richard Utz, “Literary Nominalism,” Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages 3, ed. Robert Bjork (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

2 The argument

7

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19.18). But in the Realist world picture, the neighbor is an example of God’s Creation, meaning that the neighbor is a mirror informed by the ideal, metaphysical substance of the Creator. The point made here, however, is that the metaphysical and vertical reality behind the other in the Realist world-picture changes to become contingent and horizontal in the Nominalist one. (3). Shakespeare’s dramatic world performs a litany of nothings and nothingness in the vast majority of his works. Shakespeare’s extensive metaphorical playing and punning on the word “nothing” stage a kind of “nihilist” anthropology, as the word signifies almost every aspect of human existence. In Shakespeare’s works, nothingness mediates a certain sense of freedom and constitutes the very precondition for any possible action on the stage – either expressing itself as (tragic) destruction or (comic) progression. The increased preoccupation of the Renaissance with the Nominalist nature of representation entails an intensified awareness of the unreality of the sign, that is to say, its intrinsic relation to absence or nothingness. The words themselves become suspect as emblems of the mendacious, and they are often perceived and spoken of as pure nothings in Shakespeare. Language seems to determine subjectivity. However, on account of the non-essential quality of language, this is perceived as both a freedom to adopt new roles and identities and as alienating, since the presentation of identity is at the mercy of the exterior and the heterogeneous nature of words. Shakespeare’s notion of nothingness implies a weakening of a metaphysical and theological world picture in favor of a strengthening of a Renaissance perception of man as determined by and in himself. This switch denotes an ambivalent “nihilist” freedom, which expresses either the progressive and increasing power of the mind or a decrease and impoverishment of the freedom of the mind. To a difference in degree from the medieval situation so marked as to be almost a difference in kind, identity is now understood to derive from difference, representation, and (self‐)reflection. This involves a renewed interest in the role that nothingness plays in relation to existence, since nothingness becomes more or less synonymous with freedom, difference, and the other. Nothingness surfaces everywhere in Shakespeare – for example, in the description and perception of death as well as in the portrayal of anxiety and desire. In addition, the metaphors of nothingness appear in connection with the depiction and exploration of gender and sexuality, which utilize notions of absence and nothingness. Finally, an increased preoccupation with the concept of nothingness in the Renaissance leaves its mark upon the perception of art, which in the works of Shakespeare is transformed into a poetics of nothingness. The poetic imagination is a kind of airy nothing, and – like the God of Creation – the poet creates his work from nothing.

8

I Introduction

In the case of Petrarch, identity finds its ground in representation – or to be more precise, in the other as a mirror or representation of the subject. This mirror mediates and confers an identity that would remain inexpressible without it. Yet the process also binds it to something exterior and alien, thus explaining why the mirror as representation is both celestial and diabolical. In the case of Shakespeare, identity is similarly rendered by the unstable and flickering convergence of being and seeming. The poet proves to be intensely preoccupied with the representative nature of subjectivity and identity. It is in this context that nothingness emerges. For in its substance the representation – in which the idea of identity is grounded – has little, if anything, to do with the represented: In a crucial manner, the mirror-image has no part in the essence or substance of that which it mirrors. It is therefore perceived as a strange appendix of nothingness. Petrarch’s obsession with the belief in an absolute exile, his analysis of the ambivalence of love (in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), and Shakespeare’s festive exploration of the rich metaphorical meanings attached to the word “nothing” throughout his work suggest an idea of subjectivity as dependent on otherness and representation. In their poetic and intellectual analysis of exile, amorous ambiguity, and the array of meanings of nothing in all its manifestations, Petrarch and Shakespeare display a subject haunted by otherness, a subject basically beside itself. Hence, they offer highly original versions of early modern subjectivity. Both act on a shared Nominalist insight, but they respond to it each in their own way.

3 Renaissance resonances As Petrarch and Shakespeare delineate the contours of the Renaissance, and, indeed, are typical icons of the art and spirit of the Renaissance, it would seem natural to raise the question of the general view of subjectivity in Renaissance literature. Do the subjectivities of these two poets find any resonance in the currents of Renaissance literature and thinking more broadly? In order to clarify this, we need to take a closer look on how Renaissance subjectivity has been perceived. How, then, has Renaissance subjectivity been conceptualized?⁶  Indisputably, one may find examples of subjectivity in the Renaissance epoch with more medieval Realist leanings (and vice versa, for that matter). By Renaissance subjectivity I therefore tend towards the newer relatively unprecedented articulations of subjectivity in the epoch rather than the specific time span (cf. also note 2 intra). For literature with Nominalists tendencies in medieval culture, I would point to the Morte Artu, concluding the Lancelot-Grail cycle and writ-

3 Renaissance resonances

9

From Jacob Burckhardt to Ernst Cassirer over Max Weber and finally to Stephen Greenblatt – just to name some towering Renaissance scholars – there is a history of scholarly self-reflection in the period.⁷ Amongst perfectly self-aware humanists, moderns or even post-moderns, there is a tendency to gaze back at the Renaissance for reassurance. For Burckhardt, the moment of the Renaissance signaled the birth of the modern individual; for Greenblatt, it entailed the sparks of the postmodern self. One and a half century of Renaissance scholars have been inclined (unconsciously or not) to construe or fabricate the period in their own image. And as

ten around the 1230s, in which the Creator seems to withdraw from His Creation to be followed by an imitatio Christi (probably influenced by Peter Abelard’s Nominalist “Humanism”) as well as Chrétien de Troyes (twelfth century), whose sophisticated play with authorship seems to disrupt the authorial tradition. To some extent, Nominalist leanings can also be detected in the subversive dimensions of popular culture opposing official ideology. The medieval carnival, as famously presented by Michel Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World, where the world is turned topsy-turvy, might be said indirectly to question the Realist world picture. Moreover, popular genres such as the fabliau, for example, could be said to have Nominalist inclinations in virtue of their blatant anti-establishment attitude, i. e., the excessiveness of their sexual and scatological obscenity, their anticlericalism, antifeminism, anticourtliness, and the consistency with which they indulge the senses (for this argument, see Jerry Root, “The Old French Fabliau and the Poetics of Disfiguration,” Medievalia et Humanistica 24 (1997): 17– 32). The countercultural element in medieval popular culture would thus tend to have a discernable anti-allegorical dimension (for the medieval allegorical though and the subsequent attack hereof, see Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 18 – 60). Nonetheless, although it admittedly is possible to point to exceptions to the Realist world picture in the Middle Ages, they would hardly comply straightforwardly with early modern concepts of subjectivity as rooted in negativity, otherness, and representation. Moreover, I believe Delany is right when arguing that the gradual ascent of Nominalism meant that allegory increasingly became obsolete: “Of course this tendency did not mean the end of allegory. Like any obsolescent cultural form it would decline gradually […] Nonetheless allegory did change, and its classic form was rarely practiced” (Medieval Literary Politics 48). For classical views on how the Renaissance was not a break with the Middle Ages but rather a continuation of its analogism, see C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 92 ff., E. M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Penguin, 1990), 91 ff., and finally, for the more general background, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of An Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976) and E. M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Penguin, 1990), 67– 143.  Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Italien. Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860), Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Berlin: Springer, 1927), Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934), and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).

10

I Introduction

self-images change, the image of the Renaissance changes, too. As the literary historian, Douglas Biow noted in 2002, the dominant image of the Renaissance today is not so much an envisioning of “the bright moment when […] individualism found widespread nascent expression” as it is “the far darker moment when the modern fragmented self [… was] painstakingly born” (Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries x). To Burckhard, the kinds of self he encountered in the Renaissance were calm, self-sufficient, accomplished, spontaneous, and autonomous. Thus, they met the demands of his ideals in his time. In contrast to Burckhardt, Greenblatt a century later argues that the Renaissance subject was far less determined and autonomous and far more fragmented and evanescent. With his famous concept of Renaissance self-fashioning, Greenblatt did not imply autonomous individuals who spontaneously fashioned themselves. Instead, he pointed to the way in which diverse political and religious centers of authority (the monarchy or the Church, for example) created a fiction of individual autonomy; the individual was shaped by social forces outside of himself or herself. In other words, there are two contrary assumptions at work in current scholarship from the eighties and on. On the one hand, Roy F. Baumeister (in 1986) perceives inwardness as a new feature of the Renaissance,⁸ a view reiterated by Robin Kirkpatrick in 2002: “So […] the early Renaissance – again largely through Petrarch’s example and the resuscitation of Augustinian considerations, invents the notion of the inner self” (The European Renaissance, 1400 – 1600 126). Similarly, in 2009, Robin Headlam Wells argues in Shakespeare’s Humanism in favor of an essentialist humanist notion of identity in the Renaissance.⁹ Views like these are to a large degree loyal to the Burckhardtian tradition. On the other hand, many scholars have denied the existence of Renaissance interiority altogether. They subscribe to Greenblatt’s view of the Renaissance subject as a social construct. Critics like Francis Barker (1984), Jonathan Dollimore (1984), and Catharine Belsey (1995) maintain with Greenblatt that the Renaissance subject is all artifice and surface, devoid of inwardness, a cultural artifact constructed, and “fashioned” by cultural and trans-individual forces.¹⁰ Greenblatt and his follow-

 Cf. Roy F. Baumeister, Identity, Culture, Change and the Struggle for the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36.  Cf. Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  Cf. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen, 1984), 31 and 58, Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), and Catharine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1995), 48.

3 Renaissance resonances

11

ers conclude that for the Renaissance subject, “there is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical self-representation” (Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture” 222). However, this trend has not remained undisputed. In 1999, for example, Michael Schoenfeld argues that we need to supplement the strictly relational account of Greenblatt’s New Historicism with an understanding of corporeality, which “allows us to see that this self is far more than just an effect of discourses, or the product of sociocultural discourses, institutions, and practices” (Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England 12). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of the Self from 2000, John Lee attacks New Historicism and Cultural Materialism for the view “that neither [Hamlet] nor any other English Renaissance dramatic person has a self-constituting sense of self, but are instead socially produced subjects” (1). If the Burckhardtian perception of the Renaissance is the thesis and Greenblatt’s is the antithesis, then the last decade or two have witnessed the emergence of a synthesis, combining and criticizing both positions. The latest generation of Renaissance scholars argue that it is a mistake to claim that the Renaissance subject asserted an interior substance or essence (the soul, the spirit or the psyche) that represented the self. However, they also argue that it is mistaken to say that Renaissance subjects perceived themselves as shaped purely by the self’s experience in the world and by the social forces surrounding it. John Jeffries Martin writes in Myths of Renaissance Individualism: “Both Burckhardt’s individualist self and Greenblatt’s postmodern self are forms of anachronism. […] Renaissance identities were only rarely about individuality in Burckhardt’s humanist sense of an autonomous and willful individual shaping the world in which he (or she) lived. But neither was the Renaissance self purely a cultural artifact, devoid of interiority, as many of the postmodern theorists envision it” (130). In this book from 2006, Martin claims that an ongoing dialogue between interior sensation and experience in the world characterized the Renaissance knowledge of identity. He argues that the Renaissance self thought of itself neither as an individual (irreducible to anything but itself) nor as a pure surface of exterior forces. The Renaissance subject did not perceive itself as a precisely bounded self; rather it perceived itself as something “that was never sure of the boundaries of the self” (131). In Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (1999), Katharine Maus voices similar reservation about the pure relational model, stressing instead the self-reflexive nature of the self: “The new-historicist critique insists, correctly in my view, that the ‘self’ is not independent of or prior to its social context. Yet that critique often seems to assume that once this dependence is pointed out, inwardness simply evaporates, like the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy’s buck-

12

I Introduction

et of water” (28).¹¹ Drawing attention to the period’s social and religious upheavals, she (like John Jeffries Martin) notes how in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, “the sense of discrepancy between ‘inward disposition’ and ‘outward appearance’ seems unusually urgent and consequential for a very large number of people, who occupy virtually every position on the ideological spectrum” (13). Among the three groups of Renaissance scholars depicted above, I side with the latter. The concept of the subject for which I argue in my readings of Petrarch and Shakespeare, is localized in between Jacob Burckhardt’s strong and perfect individualism and Stephen Greenblatt’s trans-individual “social energies”.¹² Moreover, the subject as constituted in another and beside itself obviously differs from the notion of a complete and self-enclosed individual. Yet it also differs from the notion of the subject as a junction of a general circulation of “social energy” (vide Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations 5 – 6). For even though the subject is de-centred and heterogeneous, it is not merely a collective gathering of social energies, rather it is shaped and marked by self-reflection and desire – phenomena that cannot be explained exclusively in terms of trans-individual configurations. Greenblatt and his followers focus purely upon the relational aspect of the subject and how it is constituted by exterior factors. But they seem to neglect how desire works as a subjective force that yearns to find another, an image, something exterior in which to formulate and reflect itself to gain consciousness of itself. The subjectivity articulated in Renaissance literature and thinking is portrayed not as the product of exterior social forces nor as the spontaneous work of a sovereign individual, but rather as the expression of an inner desire that frustratingly endeavors to mirror and actualize itself in a fickle, exterior mirror. A mirror which dictates that, in order to achieve itself as a self, it must be another. Hence, the Renaissance subject is aptly described

 In Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts from 1995, Richard Strier likewise attacks Stephen Greenblatt on this point. He rightly, I believe, points out that “it is in fact meanings rather than intentions that Greenblatt is interested in […] Greenblatt’s culturally fashioned selves are curiously empty, like the behaviorists’ black boxes” (77– 78).  Criticizing Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1998, Marshall Grossman asks: “Must the question of autonomy take the form of ‘either/or’? […] Self-fashioning either results from ‘an epiphany of identity freely chosen’ or is merely a ‘cultural artefact’?” (The Story of All Things 15). Rather than subscribing to Greenblatt or to Burckhardt, Marshall Grossman’s highly sophisticated and interesting study highlights Renaissance subjects envisaging themselves as “works-inprogress” (23). He perceives of the Renaissance subject as a subject understanding and defining itself in terms of narration: “My interest, then, is the procedures according to which human subjects write themselves into stories and read themselves into stories and read themselves out of stories” (17).

3 Renaissance resonances

13

by John Jeffries Martin as “the porous self” (Myths of Renaissance Individualism 37). Regardless of whether or not these scholars subscribe to the idea of early modern subjectivity as indebted to Nominalist tendencies in the age of transition from medieval to early modern culture, I believe it is fair to say that all of these conceptions of Renaissance subjectivity more or less presuppose a Nominalist world picture. That is to say, all these notions are very hard to integrate with a Realist world picture, since they presuppose a subjective freedom or contingency that quite simply is not available in it. Returning to Petrarch and Shakespeare, it would therefore – if we are to give any credence to the various scholars of the last decades – seem that the two poets run parallel with each other not only as concerns their preoccupation with the question of representation, but also in their articulation of a more general drift within Renaissance poetry and thinking. Seeing that the topic of subjectivity in the Renaissance is comprehensive and cannot be covered adequately in a single book, I do not claim to have established that Renaissance subjectivity generally follows the examples of Petrarchan and Shakespearean subjectivities. That is outside the scope of this book, and will thus have to be left to future critics to undertake (though, as concerns the Nominalist trait of early modern subjectivity, much ground has already been covered by influential commentators such as Julia Kristeva, Ullrich Langer, Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard J. Utz; cf. note 4 intra). I do want to assert, however, that the examples of Petrarch and Shakespeare will be useful in throwing light on other examples of subjectivity in the Renaissance as determined by otherness and by representation. Petrarch and Shakespeare suggest that the existence, identity, and subjectivity articulated in crucial parts of the Renaissance literature and thinking were heterogeneous, alien, and decentred – yet also free, expanding, and open. In other words, these poets give a good idea of the way significant currents in early modernity understood subjectivity as indebted to contingency and otherness. In sum, this book is not a traditional, comparative study of Petrarch and Shakespeare or Petrarchism in Shakespeare, but an analysis of how both authors, each in his own original way, react to Nominalism and how each in his own original way contributes to an understanding of a tendency within Renaissance poetry and thought to perceive subjectivity in terms of negativity and otherness. A comparative study covering Petrarchism in Shakespeare would definitely need to address the contributions of Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, and Sir Philip Sidney to the question of Petrarchan subjectivity leading up to Shakespeare. It would also need to engage with Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured

14

I Introduction

I,¹³ probably one of the most important books to deal with Petrarchan subjectivity in relation to Shakespeare. The present book compares Petrarch and Shakespeare on a more general level against the background of a Nominalist subjectivity and awareness, but it does not embark on a study of Petrarchism or Petrarchan subjectivity in relation to Shakespeare’s poetry. Consequently, it does not, for example, follow in the wake of studies like Fineman’s, which analyzes Petrarchan, poetic subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Moreover, since my analysis of Shakespeare focuses on the many meanings of the word “nothing” disseminated throughout his works, it does not aim at delivering a Gesamtdeutung of each work quoted. This book strives to give a comprehensive view of the richness and nuances of Shakespeare’s preoccupation with “nothing,” which means that the broader dimensions and contexts of the plays or poems are not always fully unfolded. Since I am mainly preoccupied with tracing and identifying a set of ideas and questions pertaining to Shakespeare’s obsession with nothingness, the otherwise rich and diverse dimensions of his plays are far from fully pursued. The reading strategy may therefore seem myopic, as it rarely leaves the signification of the word “nothing” out of sight. The interpretation analyzes various strata and strings of meaning dispersed across Shakespeare’s works with the ambition to help clusters of meaning and ideas to emerge and be discerned. In other words, endeavouring to get a comprehensive idea of the splendid catalogue of Shakespeare’s nothings necessitates a zigzagging reading strategy guided by the endeavour to tease out the philosophical implications of the concept.

4 Methodological and analytic procedures Nothingness, Negativity, and Nominalism in Shakespeare and Petrarch moves between a historical reading and a philosophical approach in which contemporary thinking is evoked. Hence, my analytic procedure is inspired and informed by modern hermeneutics: “It is part of real understanding […] that we regain the concepts of an historical past in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of them” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 337). In the preoccupation with past epochs it is not possible (or, perhaps, even desirable) to erase oneself completely from the picture. We will never exactly know how our predecessors thought. Yet this should not discourage us or exclude a dialogue

 Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured I: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the “Sonnets” (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1986).

4 Methodological and analytic procedures

15

among ourselves and with the past. For recognizing and appreciating one another in this dialogue helps each partner to understand him- or herself in a manner otherwise not feasible. Moreover, understanding oneself implies an alien perspective without which the understanding of identity would remain void. In other words, the present work is sustained by the belief that applying contemporary concepts and ideas to historical materials does not distort or blur any “original” meaning and content. Rather it helps secure a keener and deeper understanding of certain aspects of the philosophical and poetic thinking of the earlier epoch. Moreover, I feel confident that using a contemporary conceptual vocabulary will offer a conciser analysis and interpretation of the materials at hand. I therefore evoke modern thinkers, who have thought about these problems thoroughly. When analysing desire, subjectivity, and representation in Petrarch, I have found it natural to enter into a dialogue with some of the sharpest minds in the fields – such as Freud, Lacan, and Hegel. Moreover, when discussing Nominalist features as well as the concept of nothingness in Shakespeare, I would find it outright eccentric not to involve the most penetrating contemporaries that have given special attention to these issues – for instance, Derrida and Heidegger. This book may therefore be something of an anomaly in that it does not argue from a historicist, but rather from a hermeneutical position. New Historicism might no longer be new, and it is certainly being revisited and critiqued and rewritten, but its effect on scholarship still imposes a historicist imperative on the work of literary critics working with the Renaissance epoch. It is certainly more usual to contextualise Shakespeare in terms of his own historical time and institutions than, say, to illuminate him by entering into discussion with modern thinkers, as happens here. For some it may, perhaps, be unusual to encounter a book in which the history of an idea is established so clearly as its subject, but which also frequently goes on to explain a point of that idea by appealing to reflections and notions outside the historical period under discussion: in this respect, one might feel that this book is more typical of philosophy than of literary history. Moreover, some readers may even feel that by doing so, the book reflects the mores of continental academia. Indeed, this may be so. For the book is based on the hermeneutical conviction that poets and thinkers address matters of existential urgency that continue to matter to readers despite changing historical circumstances. It is these thoughts (which we absorb and which absorb us in turn) that we must try to understand and which we really cannot afford to ignore as thinking and sentient beings. Trying to understand what is being said in a void, as if we were not addressed or involved – as if we stood outside and did not partake as interlocutors – would leave us with a rather artificial and reductive, not to say poor understanding.

16

I Introduction

Recognizing and accepting the existential challenges handed down to us by previous thinkers and poets is what make us contemporary and enter into dialogue with their time. As what is being said does concern us, there is a timeless dimension to what is being expressed from the past that requires a correspondingly timeless attunement and reply on our part, too. History cannot, nor should it, be ignored or evaded, but it does not have the last word on poetic and philosophic issues. Since the book focuses on metaphysical questions about the nature of the self, as articulated by philosophers and poets in the early modern period, it almost exclusively deals with the poetic and philosophical thinking of the epoch. In other words, the book covers literary theory, literary history and the history of ideas, but little, if any, social, political, sociological, scientific or art history. The book is guided by the belief that philosophical and poetic thinking can transcend the historical and materially given. Indeed, philosophical and poetic thinking is capable of formulating insights that cannot be reduced to the conditions and contingencies of their socio-historical and material settings. This point would be the import of Ezra Pound’s wonderful definition of literature as “news that STAYS news” (ABC of Reading 29). I would add that the point is valid for philosophical thinking as well; and what this means is that – in a certain sense unlike the natural sciences – there is no expiry date for original poetic and philosophical thinking. Otherwise, our historical interest would only be that of a custodian or an archivist. But insisting that a work of art or philosophy cannot be reduced to its historical context is not equal to saying that we can or should discard it altogether. Rather, it means that great poetic and philosophical works address and summon us across centuries. They demand and catch our attention because they contain urgent existential matters and reflections that go beyond their and our historical context to which they remain irreducible; they issue a call to which we must respond. This book is an attempt at such a response.

5 Chapter summaries The opening chapter (“II. Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile”) analyzes the way Petrarch stages a comprehensive and far-reaching understanding of himself as utterly exiled, and how this carefully orchestrated and exilic negativity becomes an intellectual and poetic strategy for defining the self as a potentiality to be fashioned and manipulated. Although Petrarch mournfully presents himself as a stranger everywhere, he also identifies with Ulysses’ wanderings and the heroism embodied in these. For

5 Chapter summaries

17

exile enables his intense curiosity and grand individualism, which are, nevertheless, from a theological standpoint, aspects of curiositas, and thus arrogant and sinful. In his famous ascent of Mont Ventoux, Petrarch attempts to legitimize curiosity by means of a theological allegorization that stages the worldly desire to see as a religious ascent to the divine. The legitimization fails as the exterior and the interior worlds refuse to mirror the divine. Moreover, when Petrarch turns his gaze towards his self, he beholds nothing but division, fragmentation, and transitoriness. In the Nominalist world-picture, there are no traces of God or a metaphysical order in the inner or the outer world. When the subject can neither mirror itself in the world nor in the self, it becomes dependent on mirroring itself in the other. Yet this mirroring in the other entails yet another alienation. For as Petrarch stresses that the other is not identical with the self, he inscribes alterity and dependency into the very heart of the self (a point that constitutes one of the dominant themes of the love poems for Laura). Nonetheless, in a paradoxical manner, all these forms of exile finally make it feasible for Petrarch to find his ideal homeland in solitude, reading, and writing, where he can author himself ideally. The next chapter (“III. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s labyrinthine Mirror”) moves on to Petrarch’s collection of poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and its striking ambivalence about love: Love is both that which creates the poet’s identity and that which in turn destroys it; it is creation and destruction, recognition and alienation, pleasure and suffering, life and death. The question now is – and this is the predominant theme of this chapter – why Petrarch’s conception of love is thoroughly saturated with ambivalence? Petrarch’s ambivalent perception of love is rooted in the poet’s special relationship to the beloved other, who is understood both as an opportunity and as an obstacle to establishing self-consciousness and self-regard. In other words, the poet wants to become autonomous, self-sufficient and self-enclosed. This autonomy is the goal of the poet’s desire, which he can never satisfy nor attain, but nevertheless tirelessly pursues. On the one hand, he has an intense yearning to be alone, unique, self-reliant, independent and self-sufficient, and so to a large degree rejecting the other; on the other hand, he frequently emphasizes that selfconsciousness must inevitably make the detour through the other to achieve full understanding and awareness of itself. To begin with, the more general themes of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are unfolded in light of their marked ambivalence. This unfolding forms the basis for a discussion of the interconnected and conflicting nature of desire, reflection, representation, and self-reflection in the poems. Next, I will deal with the ambiv-

18

I Introduction

alence of joyful suffering and the overall longing for the dissolution of the self. All this will issue in a preliminary conclusion in which I briefly consider Petrarch in relation to the emerging early modern period. The longest chapter in the book (“IV. Shakespeare’s ‘Nihilism’”) offers a comprehensive and detailed interpretation of Shakespeare’s manifold meanings of “nothing” in almost all of his works. A comprehensive glossary of meanings of the word “nothing” may be gleaned from Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, history plays, romances, and sonnets. The term assumes a rich variety of metaphorical implications relating to virtually every aspect of human life: death, time, becoming, nonsense, anxiety, the imagination, fantasy, lies, creativity, creation and destruction, the female sex, meaninglessness, eroticism, emptiness, jealousy, love, and art. Each of the rich connotations of the word “nothing” in Shakespeare’s works is discussed in subsequent subsections, which aim to tease out its poetico-philosophical significance and implications. This is done against the background of the Renaissance’s general and enthusiastic preoccupation with the concept of “nothing” in poetry and thought. Moreover, the explosion of meanings attributed to the word “nothing” in Shakespeare’s works is understood as resulting from a Nominalist awareness. The poetic and linguistic reflection on Nominalist ideas paves the way for a “nihilistic” exploration of the imaginative, existential, transcendent, and creative nature of human reality as fundamentally rooted in a freedom that has no ground in anything factual, immanent or positive. The chapter is thus intended to establish a double perspective or dialogue to insure a broad and complex understanding of Shakespeare’s vertiginous play with metaphors and puns on negativity. In Shakespeare, nothingness takes on both destructive and constructive guises, expressing both affirmation and negation, since the “nothing’s” release into freedom brings about the potential for creation and destruction alike. Arguably, then, as they demonstrate how nothingness lies at the very centre of human subjectivity, Shakespeare’s works embody a quasi-“nihilist” anthropology. The final chapter (“V. Epilogue”) sums up the analysis of Petrarch and Shakespeare’s negative subjectivities by a return to question of the transition from Realism to Nominalism. It shows how the rise of Nominalism helped create an early modern view of human beings as free and undetermined. There is nothing static nor substantial in nature, society, or the human mind; everything is open to change and complexity, as nothing can be fully determined by reference to a metaphysical a priori structure. With burgeoning Nominalism followed a tendency to understand identity outwardly, from otherness. In the Middle Ages, the individual was encouraged to identify with an idealized image from Christian thought. This tradition contin-

5 Chapter summaries

19

ued, but the early modern subject was increasingly confronted with a secular mirror that embodied contingency as it refused to be anchored in a Realist metaphysics. Whereas the absolute, divine mirror of the Middle Ages offered reassurance, the contingent, secular and disenchanted mirror of the early modern period promoted fragmentation and alienation. The epilogue, furthermore, establishes that Petrarch and Shakespeare were not the only voices to accentuate the impossibility of seeing one see oneself, i. e., of the eye being incapable of seeing itself. To appear to oneself and gain self-consciousness, it is necessary to reflect oneself in another or something other. Indeed, this essentially Nominalist assumption was to become a commonplace of literature. We cannot know ourselves by our own effort, and in a certain sense we remain strangers to ourselves. Indeed, according to this negative subjectivity – which is not only found in Shakespeare and Petrarch, but also, it is suggested, in other thinkers and poets of the Renaissance, we cannot accord nor coincide with ourselves, but have no choice but to seek ourselves in the other. Hence, I am not what I am.

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile So then, I shall return to the beginning and ask: what is exile? Familiares II.3.5

1 Exilic mutations Taking his point of departure from the medieval Christian conception of life in this world as exile as well as from Classical Stoicism, which traces human exile to the incessant changeability of both the world and human life,¹⁴ Petrarch stages a comprehensive and consequential understanding of himself as exiled.¹⁵ This understanding is, furthermore, nurtured by the fact that Petrarch is geographically and politically exiled from his native city of Florence. However, the tragic and negative insistence on himself as exiled is counterbalanced by a positive and curiosity-driven exploration of the diversity of the world, which the poet aligns with Ulysses’ wanderings and subsequent heroism. For exile enables his intense curiosity and majestic individualism, although this is theologically condemned as arrogant and sinful, i. e., as curiositas. Unlike the Christian, whose joy in the world to come exiles him from the worldly, Petrarch finds himself in a situation in which his curiosity, ambition, and joy in the variety of the world exile him from the divine reality of the beyond, which fades out and disappears from sight. Recording his famous ascent of Mont Ventoux 26 April 1336 (Familiares IV.1), Petrarch makes a dramatic attempt at legitimizing curiosity by means of a theological allegorization by which the worldly desire to see is staged as a religious  The following chapter is partly an edited and revised version of passages in Benjamin Boysen, “The Triumph of Exile: The Ruptures and Transformations of Exile in Petrarch,” Comparative Literature Studies 55/3 (2018): 483 – 511.  On exile in Petrarch, see Thomas M. Greene, “Petrarch’s Viator: The Displacements of Heroism,” Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982), 25 – 57, Bart Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (Yale: Yale University Press, 1984), 12– 32, Dolora Wojciehowski, “Petrarch’s Temporal Exile and the Wounds of History,” in The Literature of Emigration and Exile, eds. James Whitlark and Wendell M. Aycock (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1992), 11– 21, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., “Introduction,” in Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land, ed. and transl. Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 1– 51, W. Scott Blanchard, “Petrarch and the Genealogy of Asceticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62/3 (2001), 401– 423, and recently, Laurence E. Hooper has offered a thorough analysis of the legal-historical background of Petrarch’s exile (“Exile and Petrarch’s Reinvention of Authorship,” Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016): 1217– 56). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-003

1 Exilic mutations

21

ascent towards the divine. The legitimization fails; the revelation of the absolute and God fails to come about. As the world no longer mirrors the divine, Petrarch (here taking Augustine as his model) seeks to trace the absolute mirrored in himself. Nevertheless, as he turns his gaze towards his self, he beholds nothing but division, fragmentation, and impermanence. The divine mirror, therefore, is cracked outwardly as well as inwardsly, and the allegorical world picture of the Middle Ages dictating that the world (the Creature) mirrors God (the Creator) collapses.¹⁶ The exile thus becomes double, since God is now out of sight – a quandary that in her analysis of the letter, Unn Falkeid identifies as “Petrarchan nihilism” (“Petrarch, Mont Ventoux and the Modern Self” 14.). The fiasco at Mont Ventoux becomes an illustration of the breakdown of the Realist language theory that roughly dominated the Middle Ages, paving the way for Nominalism that came to the fore and largely characterized the Renaissance. According to Karlheinz Stierle’s comprehensive study from 2003 (Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts), this Nominalism comes to influence Petrarch’s entire oeuvre (with his knowledge of William of Ockham being particularly decisive). The expansion of the exile, following in the wake of the allegorical crisis that clears the way for Nominalism, enables an unprejudiced pursuit of the analysis of the subject. The exile itself, however, is merely reinforced. For when the subject can mirror itself neither in the world nor in the self, it becomes dependent on mirroring itself in the other. However, this mirroring in the other entails yet another alienation. For Petrarch stresses that the other is not identical with the self, thus inscribing alterity and contingency into the very heart of the self and the identical (a point that will be one of the dominant themes in the love poems for Laura). Where the poet (1) starts with a geographical and political exile, is subsequently (2) in exile through his love of the Creature, which exiles him from the divine, upon which (3) he is exiled once again, as the Creature (both the exterior and the interior worlds) no longer mirrors the Creator, Petrarch is finally (4) exiled through the reluctant relationship with the other, who is essentially different, alien, and exterior as regards the self. Paradoxically, however, these chains or transformations of exile make it feasible for Petrarch at last to find his ideal homeland in solitude, reading, and writing.¹⁷  Cf. Umberto Eco, for example, who in the book Art and Beauty in the Middle (Yale: Yale University Press, 1986) defines the medieval world picture as essentially pan-semiotic, which means that the whole world and all the things in it serve as signs or mirrors of God.  This point has also been made recently by Theodore J. Cachey in his article “The Place of the Itinerarium: Itenerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostril Yhesu Christi”: “it is evident that the con-

22

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

Therefore, the all-embracing negativity of exile becomes an intellectual and poetic strategy for Petrarch, helping him define the self as a virtuality or potentiality that enables him to manipulate and fashion his persona and subjectivity. Against the background of the upheavals of these exiles we can thus tentatively conclude with Karlheinz Stierle, “it is […] hard to find an earlier and more consistent example of what Stephen Greenblatt with reference to the later Renaissance and Shakespeare has labelled ‘self-fashioning’” (Francesco Petrarca 347).¹⁸

2 Petrarch’s manifold exiles Petrarch’s life and writing are haunted by exile, metaphysically as well as existentially. He belongs neither in time nor in space; and exile follows him from the cradle to the grave. Petrarch untiringly emphasizes how he is exiled and without a home. Staging himself as a homeless person, whose exile is absolute, one of his metrical letters reads: “Nullaque iam tellus, nullus mihi permanet aër, / Incola ceu nusquam, sic sum peregrinus ubique” [Neither the earth nor the sky is any longer permanent for me; as I live nowhere, I’m everywhere a stranger/pilgrim] (Epistolae metricae III.19.14– 15).¹⁹ Exile becomes an obsession for him, as Bart Giamatti points out: “Petrarch’s whole existence, his sense of himself, would be determined by his obsession with origin and exile: by his conviction that he was displaced and marginal” (Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature 13). Petrarch describes his exile as inherited from his parents. They were forced to leave Florence in 1302 (like Dante two years before them) because of political conflicts between rivaling Guelf factions. In a letter to his friend Ludwig van Kempen from 1350, Petrarch describes his experience of homelessness as inborn, since it started even before he was born:

stitutionally unsettled spatial state of this son of an exile who was ‘begotten and born in exile,’ as he reports in the dedicatory letter to the Familiares, expressed on the one hand a profound awareness of man’s ultimate irremediable homelessness, and on the other a no less compelling biographical need for dwelling, for some form of temporary shelter. The epochal and epic embodiment of this irresolvable tension is at the heart of Petrarch’s intellectual history and produces as its effect in writing not only the place of Petrarch’s Itenerarium but the entire corpus and eventually the place of what has recently been termed ‘the site of Petrachism’. Long before Theodor Adorno so poignantly expressed it, Petrarch exemplified the fact that ‘for the man who has no home, writing becomes a place to live’” (235 – 236).  All translations from this work, here and elsewhere in the volume, are mine.  All translations from this work, here and elsewhere in the volume, are mine.

2 Petrarch’s manifold exiles

23

Compare my wanderings to those of Ulysses. If the reputation of our name and of our achievements were the same, he indeed travelled neither more nor farther than I. He went beyond the borders of his fatherland when already old […] I, begotten in exile, was born in exile, with so much labor undergone by my mother, and with so much danger, that she was considered dead for a long time […] Thus I experienced danger even before being born and I approached the very threshold of life under the auspices of death. (Familiares I.1.21– 22)

The Ulysses figure, the very exemplar of the alien wanderer, does not go far enough in portraying the extremity of Petrarch’s homelessness, which – if one is to believe him – was much more far-reaching. Petrarch’s life is itself driven forward by fundamental exile; birth itself is an exile, and the mother’s and child’s peril and pain symbolize the pain, alienation, and temporality that was to pursue the wandering unbelonging of the grown-up poet. The exile, furthermore, helps Petrarch describe his spiritual experience of being cut off from the divine. In another letter from 1352 to his ascetic brother, a Carthusian monk, he explains how Gherardo has taught him “how distant I am in my misery from your fatherland, Jerusalem, for which we yearn in our exile except for the distraction of this muddy and filthy prison” (X.5.2). In continuation of a Christian renunciation of the world, Petrarch defines exile as simply having a body, being in this world, where we are truly exiled from our real home in the divinely beyond. In his Secretum meum, a fictitious dialogue between Augustine and himself, Petrarch refers to exile as not only political, metaphysical, and geographical. It is also existential and psychological, that is to say, an exile from oneself. In the third book, Augustinus thus explains to Franciscus (purportedly Petrarch): “See how long you have been a stranger (exulasti) to your own country and your own self (te ipso). It is time to return” ([Eng. trans.] 214/ [Lat. orig.] 149). This return to oneself therefore points to the need of healing a psychological rift. When Franciscus receives Augustinus’s admonition that he should renounce his vain love for Laura and fame (which diverts his attention from God), he cries: “I will pull myself together and collect my scattered wits (sparsa anime fragmenta)” (III, [Eng. trans.] 258/ [Lat. orig.] 191). Petrarch’s exile from himself refers to the decentered and split subjectivity to which his love for Laura has reduced him. In the collection of poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, exile is likewise a frequent metaphor evoked to depict the amorous sufferings associated with Laura (cf. 21.10, 37.37, 45.7, 80.32, 94.8, and 285.5). Giuseppe Mazzotta summarizes this concisely: “Petrarch, as we know, gives thematic weight to the question of exile: the lover is always distant, always somewhere else, forever seeking the time and space of his encounter with Laura” (The Worlds of Petrarch 66). All these geographical, political, metaphysical, religious, existential, psychological, and historical exiles can be explained largely as a result of Petrarch’s

24

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

Christian Stoicism.²⁰ For example, the Stoic Plutarch writes that “all of us […] are sojourners here and strangers and exiles” (De exilio 607d). We are not ourselves in this world, and it is only when we associate with the immortal and turn our attention away from the temporal that we are truly ourselves. Our bodily, temporal, and secular selves do not pertain to our reason and our real self. Consequently, man – as a temporal and worldly Creature – is doomed to irreparable solitude: “We are indeed alone” (Familiares VIII.7.21). And our attempt towards realizing happiness through worldly circumstances is, in that we endeavor to realize it in something frail and transitory, destined to fail: “Thus the spot that we seek is nowhere” (XVII.3.4). The earthly life is forever changing; everything flows and is perpetually moving; and eventually everything will perish. Petrarch writes as follows to his friend Guido Sette: “[I]f the word state derives from standing still, man does not have here on earth a single state but perpetual motion and slipping, and ultimate collapse” (XIX.16.1). Moreover, Petrarch – as a Christian – can agree with Paul and Augustine after him,²¹ who both emphasize that we are strangers in this world: “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13.14). This means that every Christian soul is a pilgrim and “is in exile everywhere until it reaches where it longs to be” (Familiares XXI.9.14). In the Christian Middle Ages, every secular existence was perceived as an exilium from our heavenly home, i. e., paradise,²² and so we shall never be able to find an abode in this earthly life.

 For an account of the Stoics’ preoccupation with exile, see Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nousmemes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 83 – 94.  For an account of Paul as well as Augustine’s preoccupation with exile, see Julia Kristeva,Etrangers à nous-memes 113 – 37.  Where Jews primarily experienced exile in a secular sense, that is to say, culturally and politically (the slavery in Egypt, the Babylonian exile, the Roman occupation of Judea and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 as well as the subsequent expulsion into the diaspora), exile is much more radical for Christians. Where Jews, not operating with a world beyond this one, yearn to come home in this world, the Christian’s world renunciation dictates that it is impossible to return home anywhere in this world. Christianity’s ascetic life- and worldview mean that the idea of belonging to and having a home in this world is irreconcilable with God’s love: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2.15). For a good survey of the theme of the homo viator in the Middle Ages, see Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42/2 (1967), 233 – 259.

3 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile

25

3 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile Petrarch’s Christian Stoicism is not, however, all there is to say about his obsession of the vision of himself as exiled. Petrarch’s metaphysical exile is far more radical than what we find in his Christian medieval background and in Latin Stoicism. Whereas the Christian in his secular exile never loses sight of his metaphysical home in the afterlife, and whereas the Roman Stoic sustains at all times the unaffected reason of his soul as his home in the irreparable homelessness of the inconstant world, home is lost from sight for Petrarch. The depth of Petrarch’s exile is evident if one compares him with his immediate predecessor Dante. Where the latter unites with his beloved Beatrice and prepares for the happy ascent to paradise in his Comedy, Petrarch’s slavery under Amor remains “un lungo error in cieco laberinto” [a long wandering in a blind labyrinth] (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 224.4). Being lost midway through life and endangered at the “mar de l’amor torto” [deep sea of false love] (Paradiso XXVI.62), Dante nevertheless returns home to the Christian port of love and ends his epic beholding the amorous order of the Christian cosmos.²³ Petrarch

 In Dante’s Comedy, exile plays a quite positive and optimistic role. In the Convivio (II.1) and the Epistle to Cangrande (§ 7) he states that the Comedy is patterned upon the Exodus, that is to say, on the biblical story about the Jews’ exile and return home from Egypt to the Promised Land. And in Paradiso (XXV.55 – 56), the pilgrim St James of Compostela explains that Dante has been allowed on a pilgrimage from Egypt to Jerusalem. It is therefore safe to say that part of the “comedic” quality of his epic (i. e., Dante’s claim in the Epistle to Cangrande (§ 10) that it is a comedy because it has a happy ending) stems from a metaphysical confidence that the worldly and historical exile will cease and give place to a divine homecoming: “The method or route of the Divine Comedy is certainly Exodus; but in cultural terms it resembles the model of education envisioned by another Victorine, Honorius of Autun, in that it maps the journey of knowledge through exile to the heavenly fatherland” (Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision of and the Circle of Knowledge 210). In his book on Dante, Mazzotta analyses the poet’s conception and perception of exile. He shows how exile joins theology and poetry, and how Dante conceived of his own political exile as a mode of a more general, religious state of being an alien (peregrino) in this world exiled from heaven. Exile is associated with poetry for Dante since it offers him a position from which, like the prophets, he can address the profane world from the outside as a stranger. As exile is understood as the truth of humans being in history, i. e., of humans’ being outside the divine realm, Mazzotta argues that “Dante casts exile as an ascetic and redemptive experience” (186). Even though Dante displays exile as the bitter salt and hardness of leaving what one loves (cf. Paradiso XVII.55 – 60), he nevertheless maintains that it also embodies a (1) theologico-poetical source of knowledge which (2) contains a prophetic promise of a divine homecoming in the future: “The dislocation, however, is not only theological; it is an existential experience, and in this sense it is part of an existential theology, for it involves the poet’s own irreducible contingency, our history and our understanding of history. It comes from the memory of the Fall, and yet it does not concern the mere past at all; if anything,

26

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

conversely remains paralyzed in the first error of his youth (“mio primo giovenile errore,” 1.3) with no safe port in sight: “i’ ’ncomincio a desperar del porto” [I begin to despair of the port] (189.14). In a metaphor, Dante identifies his Comedy as the vessel (cf. Purgatorio I.2 and Paradiso II.3) that will safely bring him (and the community of readers) metaphysically to port, while Petrarch’s Songbook remains inscribed within the troubled waters of temporality. In contrast to Dante’s vertical poetry, Petrarch’s poetry voices a restless horizontal consciousness, whose state is uncertain (“di suo stato è incerto,” Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 129.13). It is fragmented, disseminated, and variable. Wandering aimlessly, it moves from thought to thought (“Di pensier in pensier,” 129.1), from mountain to mountain (“di monte in monte,” 129.1), from day to day (“di giorno in giorno,” 79.9, 85.2, 94.12 and passim), from forest to forest (“di selva in selva,” 23.159), from shore to shore (“di riva in riva,” 30.29), from time to time (“di tempo in tempo,” 142.19 and 149.1), from knoll to knoll (“di poggio in poggio,” 50.76), from day to day (“Di dì in dì,” 237.7), and finally from coast to coast (“di piaggia in piaggia,” 237.19). Petrarch’s collection of poems is not, in other words, a vessel capable of bringing the poet (and his readers) safely home. Christian Moevs therefore points out that the dangerous voyage constantly threated by shipwreck and drowning may be “the most pervasive image in all of Petrarch’s work” (“Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch” 249). The despair at reaching port or overcoming exile is clear from Petrarch’s repeated mirroring in the Ulysses figure (see, for example, Familiares I.1.21– 22 above). One of the most exciting examples of this occurs in sonnet 189 from the Songbook. The first quartet reads: Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio per aspro mare e mezza notte il verno enfra Scilla e Caribdi, et al governo siede ’l signore anzi ’l nemico mio; [My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy].

Petrarch depicts his being at the mercy of Love and Laura through Ulysses’ dangerous navigation far away from home. Petrarch, like Ulysses, is a stranger on

it concerns the future. The religious imagination looks forward to the future in the belief that there lies the promised new heaven and new earth […] The simultaneity of history and utopia is the heart of Dante’s exilic poetry” (217). The contrast is clear: there is no such utopia in Petrarch’s many exiles.

3 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile

27

the way, who does not know where he is going. In his love for Laura, the Creature, he has forgotten the Creator, that is, He who created her. In his pleasure over poetry and the beauty of the beloved, Petrarch has lost himself in the voyage itself and lost sight of its goal. This homelessness, this pleasurable self-abandon that the joy of poetry and the beloved give rise to, finds an elegant mythological resonance in the image of the oblivion that is both a result of eating the narcotic lotus in the ninth book of The Odyssey and of abandonment to the Siren song of the twelfth book. Both episodes effect total oblivion of returning home, and the danger and alienation pertaining to such oblivion find eloquent expression in Petrarch’s explicit reference to Scylla and Charybdis (who appear in the twelfth book of The Odyssey). The rest of Petrarch’s sonnet accentuates the vulnerable situation of the poetic ego; crazed and restless thoughts row the ship, whose sails are ripped by sighs, hopes, and desire, while a rain of tears and self-contempt threaten the ship. The absence of the eyes of the beloved – stylized as “i duo mei dolci usati segni” [My usual two sweet stars] (189.12) – causes the poetic ego to despair of ever ever reaching port (189.14). Many critics – including Marco Santagata, Enrico Fenzi, and Theodore Cachey – have shown and discussed how Petrarch has utilized Dante’s depiction of the Ulysses figure in The Comedy. ²⁴ Christian Moevs even writes that the “Petrarchan narrator is Dante’s Ulysses, gripped by the idea that if he learns or experiences one more thing, writes one more book, takes one more trip, he will somehow find the stability, understanding, and virtue that he seeks, even in his last days” (“Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch” 250). Dante’s most comprehensive portrait of Ulysses occurs in Inferno XXVI, where the narrator meets the Greek hero among the deceitful in the eighth circle of hell. Through Vergil Dante hears the story about the death of Ulysses; of how, after his return home, he was so driven by curiosity that, utterly restless, he renounced every bond and obligations to his family (Inferno XXVI.94.99), embarked on one last expedition, and encouraged his men by saying: Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

 See Marco Santagata, “Presenza di Dante ‘comico’ nel ‘Canzoniere’ del Petrarca,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 146 (1969), 163 – 211, Enrico Fenzi, Saggi petrarcheschi (Florence: Cadmo, 2003), chapter 14, 493 – 518, and Theodore. J. Cachey, Jr., “From Shipwreck to Port: Rvf 189 and the Making of the ‘Canzoniere’,” MLN 120/1 (2005), 30 – 49.

28

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

[Consider what you came from: you are Greeks! / You were not born to live like mindless brutes / but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge]. (Inferno XXVI.118 – 120)

This appeal to man’s appetite for knowledge and curiosity nevertheless concludes catastrophically: Ulysses and his entire crew are drowned as their ship founders in a fierce storm. Even though Dante deeply admires Odysseus’ thirst for knowledge, he must see him punished for his overreaching desire to overstep the proper Christian limits of man. Not only does Ulysses neglect his family ties: Even worse, he allows himself to be ruled by the desire (“l’ardore,” v. 97) to become an expert on this world (“a divenir del mondo esparto,” v. 98). In other words, his sin also consists in curiositas, inquisitiveness or unbound curiosity, exploring the world (the Creature) without reference to the Creator (God) and the inner foundations of existence.²⁵ In his Confessions, Augustine criticizes curiosity, which he names the sickness of desire (X.35.55), as, in its joy in the manifold wonders of this world, it makes us oblivious of the Creator. In the Middle Ages, curiositas is therefore considered a sin. Bernard de Clairvaux accentuates how it was Lucifer’s and Eve’s curiosity that made them fall. Curiosity is thus “the beginning of all sin” (The Twelve Steps of Humility and Pride X.38). Like Ulysses’ ardore in Dante, Petrarch’s desio in the Ulysses sonnet (189.8) has led the poet astray and to his ruin. For according to Augustinus’ critique in Secretum meum, Petrarch’s love for Laura embodies a sinful and delusional idolization: “She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the Creature more than the Creator” (Secretum meum, III, 186). Ulysses nevertheless remains an admirable and heroic figure in Petrarch. Piero Boitani, in his book Ombra di Ulisse, has shown how Petrarch initiates a shift in the perception of the Greek hero, who begins to represent a positive, humanistic model of human curiosity and ambition.²⁶ In his Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini Iesu Christi, Petrarch lauds Ulysses for that which earns Dante’s reproach – his neglect of family. Indeed, this even constitutes an example of the most outstanding virtue:

 Hans Blumenberg gives an interesting account of curiosity (curiositas) as sinful in Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde: Erweiterte und überarbeitete Neuausgabe von “Die Legitimität der Neuzeit” dritter Teil (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), chapter 5, 103 – 121. See also Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 – 1750 (New York Zone Books, 1998), 120 – 133, as well as Hans Joachim Mette, “‘Curiositas’: Note sur l’histoire d’un mot et d’une notion,” Museum Helveticum 17 (1960), 206 – 224.  Piero Boitani, Ombra di Ulisse (Bologne: Il Mulino, 1992). See also Enrico Fenzi, Saggi petrarcheschi.

3 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile

29

Virtue inspires the generous soul to overcome every difficulty; it does not suffer one to remain in one place, nor that one should look back; it forces one to forget not only pleasures but also more just duties and affections; it does not allow one to choose anything but the ideal of virtue and it does not allow one to desire or think of anything else. This is the stimulus that made Ulysses forget Laertes, Penelope, and Telemachus. (17)

Petrarch perpetuates Dante’s new, modern interpretation of Ulysses as “he who does not return,” as Enrico Fenzi puts it (Saggi Petrarcheschi 512) – in contrast to its Homeric origin where the hero tirelessly struggles to return home from involuntary exile.²⁷ However, the reasons Petrarch gives for turning Ulysses into a role model for the restless, travelling, ambitious, and exploring individual are the very same as those by which the medieval Christian (including Dante) condemns curiosity as sinful. Petrarch, the humanist philologist, clearly reinterprets the Ulysses figure with reference to an earlier Roman conception of virtus, rather than to a Christian. Petrarch’s love for Roman Antiquity plainly allows him to develop an energetic, passionate, and ambitious understanding of virtus as excellence (the Roman concept of virtue) rather than as passive, inactive, and worldforsaking virtus (the Christian concept of virtue). Even though Petrarch builds upon Dante’s reinterpretation of Ulysses, Petrarch’s moral interpretation marks a radical break with his source: what Dante finds reprehensible and sinful in Ulysses is precisely what Petrarch, in stark contrast, praises as entirely laudable and excellent. As for Petrarch’s moral interpretation of Ulysses, Bernard de Clairvaux of the High Middle Ages (Dante’s guide in Paradiso) would shake his head in despair (for this is hardly Christian humility), whereas Renaissance Machiavelli would nod approvingly, since the poet’s thoughts coincide nicely with his own notion of virtù. Petrarch mirrors himself in the fame, diligence, courage, shrewdness, and boundless travelling of Ulysses. For in the end, Ulysses’ admirable character is grounded in the circumstance that he is πολύτροπος (The Odyssey I.1), which means partly that he is “much-travelled,” partly that he is “turning many ways,” i. e., that he is versatile and wily. When he is characterized as πολύτροπος, the adjective mirrors both his admirable character and his many wanderings as well as the connection between them. For it is exile that allows Ulysses to display his honor, excellence, and reputation. In pursuance of this line of thought, Petrarch gives praise to exile. For as he rhetorically asks in a letter: In exile, deprived of one’s home country, is there any better possibility for exercising one’s virtue or excellence (Familiares II.4.29)? In

 All translations from this work, here and elsewhere in the volume, are mine.

30

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

the preceding letter (II.3) it is already clear that exile embodies a chance of demonstrating the greatness of one’s soul, allowing one to display one’s resolution. Exile is an ordeal that separates the sheep from the goats. If deprived of one’s homeland and cast down, one is an exile (exul); but if (like Ulysses) one displays staunch dignity and courageous pride, one is a traveler (peregrinus). Exile thus constitutes a resolute stand or firmness of mind: But if you firmly believe that whoever is absent from his native land is without question an exile, where are those who are not exiles? For what man, unless he were lazy and soft, has not departed from his home and his native land several times either because he was desirous of seeing new things, or of learning, or of enlightening his mind, or was concerned about his health, or was desirous of increasing his wealth, or because of the demands of wars, or at the command of his state, of his master, of his parents? (II.3.5 – 6)

Exile is a grand opportunity for developing one’s character; indeed, not going into exile – understood as leaving one’s home – is even despicable, as it is only the lazy and soft who remain at home. Although Petrarch writes (XV.4.16) that his restlessness is a kind of mental fever, he emphasizes in another letter that by nature he finds stagnation suffocating and movement strengthening (XI.1). And even though Petrarch laments his Stoic recognition that everything is in motion and nothing will last, there is nonetheless something wonderful and progressive about life as movement and restless exploration of the world: “We are indeed […] all wayfarers (viatores) in this life” (XIV.1.4). Petrarch was himself a tireless traveler; he wrote countless travel itineraries and accounts of his journeys; furthermore, in his autobiographical writings, he depicted his life as a voyage (see, for example, the letters Seniles X.2 and Posteritati (Sen. XVIII.1)). Petrarch is well used to the sorrows of homelessness from his ceaseless travels through Europe; yet he is also familiar with the happiness of the wanderer. On the one hand, he expresses the alienation of homelessness; on the other, this strangeness is not merely a state of perdition with no direction home, but rather awakens an enormous appetite for the world and its plenitude, whose unexplored complexity he delights in discovering. Petrarch’s vagabondage through Europe gives him a glimpse into the manifold and extravagant vicissitudes and interactions of time and space: “Wonderful indeed are the variety of things and the changes of seasons which nature gladly planned to combat our boredom. Do not think that you find these things only in the compass of a year. You will find them even more over a long lifetime” (Familiares I.7.15). His constant wanderings are therefore another fulfillment of his intense thirst for knowledge, of his curiosity and pleasure in seeing: “videndi cupidus explorandique” (I.4.4). The desire

3 Ulysses, curiosity, and the heroism of exile

31

to see is key in Petrarch’s descriptions of his pleasure in travelling. The desire to see explains the motivation for leaving one’s home; and the curiosity to roam abroad is explained as an inborn desire to behold new places (XV.4.14). The insatiable desire to see is therefore, says Petrarch, the mark of he who loves to travel, and with a nod to Dante he describes Ulysses as he “che desiò del mondo veder troppo” (Trionfo della Famae II.18). The sin of desiring to see too much that drove Ulysses (and Petrarch) away from home is curiosity. Indeed, for Augustine curiosity (curiositas) is particularly incarnated in the desire to see, which takes pleasure in the most trivial things, and which he thus defines as the vain and prurient desire for sensuous experience (Confessions X.35.54). Curiosity marks a pleasure in gazing at the variable existence of things – such as they appear in their immediate singularity. In his restless and flickering pleasure in beholding the wonderful diversity of the world, the curious inquirer forgets to comprehend the Creature with reference to the Creator. This means that – instead of using things as a means to comprehend the reality behind them, namely God – he foolishly treats them as pleasurable goals in themselves. As travelers in distant climes far from home, the curious are lost in the pleasure of the voyage itself and forget the goal of the voyage, and so – as Augustine writes in his De doctrina christiana (I.4) – they never arrive back home. Curiosity and the desire to see are therefore fateful in their promotion of taking pleasure (frui) in the world, rather than usage (uti) of it. Augustine summarizes: “if we wish to return to the homeland where we can be happy, we must use (utendum) this world, not enjoy (non fruendum) it” (I.4). As Petrarch accompanies Ulysses on his voyages of restless curiosity and desire to see, the exile becomes metaphysical. This, however, also means that the world is opened. Refusing to abandon his curiosity and desire to see, the “transcendental homelessness” – the very quality whereby Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (41) defines the subject of the modern novel – becomes his destiny: “I do not accuse others of what I excuse in ourselves. The desire of seeing many things (multa videndi) also drives us over lands and seas, and especially lately when that passion of mine drove me to the furthest of lands, forced by tedium and repelled by local customs” (Familiares III.2.3).²⁸

 In other words, I concur with KarlHeinz Stierle, who denies that Petrarch’s roaming is only an expression of a negative, sinful secularism and a fall away from God, as it also implies a positive curiosity of the world: “Petrarch’s errare is also and always – like Dante’s Ulysses – an opening of the world” (Karheinz Stierle, Francesco Petrarca 891– 892n100).

32

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

4 Transcendental homelessness The desire to see plays a crucial role in the fateful drama recorded in the famous letter about Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux 26 April 1336 (Familiares IV.1). For initially he makes it clear for the reader that the ascent of the mountain was “led solely by a desire (cupiditate) to view (videndi) the great heights of it”. Right from the start, we find ourselves in a dangerous sphere of seductive curiositas, which embodies an uncanny human temptation. Petrarch and his brother thus meet an elderly shepherd, “who made every effort with many words to keep us from continuing our climb” (IV.1.7). However, the warnings are given in vain, for the shepherd’s admonitions only make their desire increase (IV.1.8). Petrarch describes the mountain climb as an unnatural and monstrous undertaking causing nature to resist this implicitly unnatural act. The shepherd, who himself climbed the mountain in his youth, warns them that he only reaped annoyance and trouble. The whole enterprise appears in an ambivalent light as unholy or sinful. The whole scene of curiositas excited by warnings, prohibitions, and resistance reeks of sin. In his curiosity and desire to see, Petrarch assumes Ulysses’ position, a position that disregards the liminal boundary. In consequence, the letter – as Angela Matilde Capodivacca notes – performs an “oscillatory movement between the affirmation and the negation of curiosity” (“‘Die pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’” 61). Within the framework of a medieval Christian cosmology, the undertaking embodies a transgression that inherently harbours a radical rupture. The letter has traditionally been read this way and has, indeed, become a locus classicus for defining a specific landmark in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.²⁹ Together with his brother Gherardo, Petrarch leaves home far behind as they set out on their projected journey. Consequently, the climb is right from the start a quest into the alien away from home. The mountain path proves quite impassible and Petrarch wanders here and there. Wandering about but getting nowhere, he finally becomes so exhausted and frustrated that he regrets his aberrant roaming. Then after many disappointments, he sits down and allegorizes his wandering from a Christian point of view:

 This view was initiated by Alexander von Humboldt (Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, 1847). It was continued by Jacob Burckhardt (Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860), Ernst Cassirer (Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, 1927), Joachim Ritter (“Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft,” 1963), and Hans Blumenberg (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 1966).

4 Transcendental homelessness

33

I sat in one of the valleys and there proceeding from the physical to the metaphysical in mental flights I reproached myself with these or similar words: ‘What you have experienced so often today in trying to climb this mountain you should know happens to you and to many others as they approach the blessed life. This is not easily realized by men, however, because although the movements of the body are visible, the movements of the mind are invisible and concealed. The life we call blessed is certainly located on high, and, as it is said, a very narrow road leads to it. (IV.1.12– 13)

In an echo of The Gospel of Matthew – “narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life” (7.14) – the goal of the mountain climbing is allegorically identified with the goal of the Christian life, that is to say, heavenly beatitude: “At the summit lies the end of all things and the limit of the path to which our traveling (peregrinatio nostra) is directed” (IV.1.13). The Odyssean framing of the mountain climbing as solely motivated by the desire to see is now transformed into an allegorical journey in which the contemplation of the Creature is a means towards revealing the Creator. In other words, at this point Petrarch is not merely ascending the mountain in order to behold the splendor of the world in itself, but “in order for himself to lovingly make God present through an enjoying view on the great, surrounding nature” (Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft” 410).³⁰ As Karheinz Stierle writes: “The mountain climbing becomes an ascensio of a Christian homo viator” (328). The secular voyage away from home (mentioned in the first part of the letter), directed toward an exploration of the splendor of the world, is now transformed into a Christian exile in this world. And the pleasure in the secular, sensuous, and visible – i. e., the “road of earthly and base pleasures,” in which Petrarch has figuratively “wandered widely (multum erraveris)” – corresponds to Petrarch’s aimless wandering midway on the mountain far from the top. For there is still a long way to “the summit of that blessed life” (IV.1.14). As a Christian pilgrim, he is not yet there, but yearns passionately to arrive at his true, otherworldly home: “How I wish that I could complete with my mind that journey for which I sigh night and day” (IV.1.14). At last, Petrarch reaches the peak of the mountain, the goal of his desires, and he contemplates the unusual and open view, as he stands there, transfixed (IV.1.17). Once again, he contemplates the view, and once again the whole wide world is revealed to him through the secular desire to see. However, the hopedfor religious redemption fails him: reaching his goal, he does not perceive the Creator in His Creation. The attempt to frame the mountain climb within the theological and allegorical world picture of the Middle Ages is an abject failure, since the mountain top, the goal of the journey, has revealed only the Creature.

 My translation.

34

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

The connection to the Creator fails to shine through. As Robert Durling has discussed, Petrarch’s experience, i. e., his transfixion at the peak of Mont Ventoux, points to an allegorical crisis.³¹ A crisis that Karlheinz Stierle in his analysis of the letter interprets as follows: “The crisis of the exemplary as well as the crisis of the universal in Petrarch corresponds to an allegorical crisis to the extent that the latter no longer manages to unite the concrete in its diversity” (329). The Christian ascensio fails, and the allegorical crisis embodies nothing less than the collapse of the world picture that otherwise informed the Middle Ages. However, Unn Falkeid and Albert R. Ascoli offer an interesting critical reply to Renaissance-inspired readings of the letter, as they conversely plead that it culminates in the Christian ideal of humility (humilitas), and thus, rather than pointing forwards, marks a backward look to the Middle Ages: “[Petrarch] remains thoroughly ‘medieval’,” as Ascoli says (“Petrarch’s Middle Age” 42). Both scholars nevertheless accentuate a radical crisis in the letter. As mentioned above, Falkeid even talks about Petrarchan nihilism – even as she goes on to argue that Petrarch draws the contours of the modern self (cf. “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux and the Modern Self” 14). Both scholars accentuate the fragmentation of the self, the restlessness, the emptiness, and the aimless, horizontal wandering; and both, nonetheless, point toward the allegorical crisis and the collapse of a medieval world picture. In the words of Falkeid: “The letter of Mont Ventoux certainly dramatizes a crisis of meaning and a collapse of the Christian allegoresis, the medieval way of experiencing and interpreting the world, and points to the individual and arbitrary in the interpretation process. Universal truths are beyond the reach of the human mind” (23). Finally, both claim that the absolute and metaphysical order no longer constitutes a firm ground for the subject, so that transcendental or metaphysical homelessness becomes the destiny of the letter writer: “Petrarch cannot transcend the paradigmatic dimensions of human existence, remaining permanently in the predicament of a homo viator, without certain hope of ever reaching his transcendental home in the next world” (Albert Ascoli, “Petrarch’s Middle Age” 11– 12). It is worth noting how the ‘medieval apologists’ and the ‘Renaissance apologists’ seem to agree about the premise; the difference of opinion appears only when a conclusion must be drawn. As this is not the place for a comprehensive reply, suffice it to say that I find that the description of the above can with equal right be said to point forward to the individualism, secularism, and Nominalism of the Renaissance and backward toward the Christian, humble, and ascetic position of the

 Robert Durling, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory,” Italian Quarterly18/69 (1974), 7– 28.

4 Transcendental homelessness

35

Middle Ages. And I consider Falkeid’s description of Petrarch’s situation at Mont Ventoux as an apt description of tendencies that came to characterize the Renaissance: “all the exemplars of the species are subjected to the inconstancy of time and space. Petrarch the wanderer, peregrinus ubique, demonstrates in this way that every human being is an irreplaceable and unique individual on his physical and spiritual journey throughout this earthly life” (23). In any case, Petrarch’s transfixion signifies a crisis in which the world and nature no longer serve as mirrors or signs of the divine. His transfixion signifies a metaphysical exile, meaning that the world can no longer show the way to that desired goal of the religious traveler which is beatitude in union with God. (That the medieval, religious compass or roadmap is lost obviously does not imply atheism, but rather an altered theology and worldview.) Up to the Renaissance, knowledge was directed towards integration (cosmos), but in the Renaissance man became an external observer in a nature that had become alien to him. The role of science in the Middle Ages consisted in teazing out God’s traces in nature and demonstrating how man’s place in the world was determined by divine Providence. Science was primarily accorded a role in religious exegesis in that natural phenomena were interpreted in accordance with metaphysical hermeneutics. However, the Bible’s narrative was gradually replaced by that of the natural sciences, which meant that man became alienated, but also more liberated from a strict metaphysical world picture. Humans are seen as alienated for better or for worse in that it is no longer possible to know oneself per analogiam. The theological understanding of the human being no longer corresponds with human self-knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the world tends to be conceived as a book written by the finger of God, as explained by Hugh of Saint Victor (1096 – 1141) in his Didascalicon: “quasi quidam liber est scriptus digito Dei” (VII.4). The world assumes the form of an alphabet where things are letters and letters things; but from now on, the world is increasingly de-allegorized and de-theologized. Humans increasingly make themselves objects of scrutiny – not within a theological cosmology given in advance, but rather by stepping away from the ladder of being, the scala entis. Knowledge of oneself is now thought to be achievable through introspection, making oneself an object of reflection. The world, which up to Thomas Aquinas and Dante, was portrayed through grandiose images and systems typical of a metaphysical totality, now dissolves into an infinite diversity, leaving the question of the world’s overall order blowing in the wind. The order or the system, ordo, becomes a provisional result of human achievement and human conceptualization in a process that admittedly has great practical value as knowledge, but which no longer possesses metaphysical legitimacy or certainty. As a result, language, too, loses its metaphysical

36

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

dignity as the privileged matrix of universality that favors beings with the status of reality. In this context, Petrarch’s allegorical crisis at the peak of Mont Ventoux may be perceived as an illustration of the movement from a medieval predominantly Realist worldview to a Nominalism ascending towards the Renaissance. In his classic The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Cassirer argues that the Renaissance marks a move that gave a new formulation of the relationship between the universal and the particular. He claims that the Renaissance – unlike medieval thought, which operated within a metaphysical system of transcendence, embodying a universal hierarchy leading up to God – understood the universal and intelligible in and through the sensible and particular. This development led to the problem of the individual: “There can be no doubt that the Renaissance directed all its intellectually productive forces towards a profound examination of the problem of the individual” (35). Like the subject, who has to realize itself in another alien self-consciousness, science and philosophy also had to realize its rationality through a nature alien to it: “For in the ‘otherness’ of the sensible world the intellect finds its own indissoluble unity and identity; in giving itself over to what seems to be essentially foreign to it, the intellect finds its own fulfilment, its unfolding and conceiving of itself” (171). Turning back to Petrarch at the summit of the mountain, we will note how the allegorical crisis of his transfixion gives rise to an acute intensification of his feelings of homelessness: “I heaved a deep sigh toward the sky of Italy which was visible to my mind rather than to my eyes, and I was overcome by an overwhelming desire to see once again my friend and my homeland” (IV.1.18). The exile is doubled now, since the missing allegorical epiphany at the mountain top leaves him not only keenly confronted with his worldly exile (whose intensity is elegantly accentuated by his usage of the verb invado, which among other things denotes “assault,” “attack,” and “invade,” thus implying that his yearning invades him like an alien, exterior, and hostile force); it also makes him confront a metaphysical exile: “since not yet being in port I cannot recall in security the storms through which I have passed” (IV.1.19).³² Remaining paralyzed by the beauty of the world and the Creature, Petrarch is in exile from the Creator, and he therefore alludes to Augustine’s psychological splitting and battle with himself in the Confessions (II.1.1 and III.1.1). The exile is  The Odyssean experience of being lost at sea with no port in sight is repeated in another letter that is also preoccupied with how Petrarch is unable to liberate himself from the Creature: “I, being entangled in the web of my sins, have not yet been able to take refuge in a port, but am being cast about by that same storm in which you left me still battered by the waves” (Familiares II.5.6).

5 The subject’s existential exile in the other

37

even reinforced, for it now becomes existential in that he is confronted with the redoubled man (IV.1.22), each side of which fights for mastery in him (cf. the Augustan strife between caritas and concupiscentia). The exile is nearly total: Petrarch is at home neither in the world nor in himself; nor even in the divine cosmos. At this point, Petrach opens Augustine’s Confessions, which he always carries with him, at random, and his gaze falls on the tenth book, where the joy of exterior things is condemned, since “I ought to consider nothing wonderful except the human mind” (IV.1.28). The tenth book is also the book in which Augustine condemns curiosity, curiositas (Confessions X.35), and almost as a matter of course Petrarch alludes to the passage as he declares, “having seen enough of the mountain I turned my inner eyes within” (IV.1.29). Unfortunately, the problems do not cease: the inward gaze in no way reveals any firm ground – on the contrary. Petrarch therefore concludes his letter with a prayer for the salvation of his unstable and inconstant soul. He begs the Augustinian Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, to whom the letter is addressed, to pray for his thoughts, “so that having been rambling and unstable for so long, they may sometimes find rest, and having been tossed about hither and yon, they may be directed to the one, the good, the true, the certain and the stable” (IV.1.36). The absolute and metaphysical ground is passionately pursued, but what remains are only scattered, straying and exiled thoughts.

5 The subject’s existential exile in the other After allegorical crisis and metaphysical exile, the question is now: If the structure of the world remains inaccessible to a reflected investigation, where is one to turn next? For better or for worse, one is left with oneself, which means – as Giuseppe Mazzotta has also noted (cf. The Worlds of Petrarch 40) – that what matters now is the self, the subject itself. In anticipation of Montaigne, Petrarch therefore declares that it is now the self or the “I” that is at the center of knowing: “If it is denied me to search out these hiding places of nature and to know their secrets, I shall be satisfied with knowing myself (me ipsum nosse sufficiet). It is here that I shall be open-eyed and fix my gaze” (Familiares III.1).³³ The self, however, is not something given as a substance or entity, quite the opposite,  For a short and informative survey of the renewed and intense interest in the self in the Renaissance, see Peter Burke’s “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 17– 28.

38

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

since it contains a fleeting virtuality or inconstancy, making it difficult to pin down its essential nature: Who among us, I ask, desires the same thing in his old age as in his youth? I shall take an even simpler example: Who of us wishes the same thing in the winter as in the summer? Still I have not expressed what I intended: Who of us really wishes today what we wished yesterday or, even more, wishes in the evening what we wished in the morning? Divide the day into hours, and the hours into minutes, and you will find the desires of a single man more numerous than the number of minutes. (X.5.16)

Since the subject can no longer mirror itself in the world or the metaphysical order, it is – in its exile – fundamentally left to itself. This means that Petrarch constantly returns to the idea of the self, but since this mental swarm of bees is impossible to fix or map, knowing oneself proves terribly difficult. In other words, it is the liberation of the subject from a metaphysical basis of understanding that enables an unprejudiced confrontation with the problematics of subjectivity. Petrarch discovers – as he himself continuously and tirelessly observes – that the self is not a fixed entity, but rather a dynamic force of boundless freedom. A safe port, home or ground are in sight neither in nature, nor in a metaphysical order, nor even in the ego itself. What troubled Petrarch was precisely the lack of permanence in the self, the lack of continuity in all those impulses and desires – or deadly complexity, “varietas mortifera” as he calls them in Secretum meum (I, 94) – that distracted him in his quest for the one, true and right path towards the good. The unprejudiced perspective on human beings, made possible by the allegorical crisis, implies a renunciation of an already given framework of understanding, a renunciation of a given system or ordo that in advance designates the place and identity of every element. As Karlheinz Stierle explains, the world “is a world in the name of radical Nominalism in which there no longer is any hierarchy to guarantee an order” (715). However, this freedom, which enables a process of knowing that seeks to approach matters or things themselves individually, inevitably finds itself face to face with major difficulties in its attempt to uncover the cognizant self. For subjectivity may have opened up and become its own free ground or center. In the process, however, the subject has also become painfully aware that, in its endeavor to concretize self-consciousness and identity, it is powerless in that it is unable – unlike Munchhausen, who could pull himself up by the hair – to mirror itself or become conscious of itself solely by itself. It would seem impossible to be both the mover and the moved, the mirror and the mirrored, reflection and reflected, object and subject, and so the Petrarchan subject reluctantly turns to the other. The subjectivity or identity of the individual must manifest itself in the other, whose distance and unfamiliarity from now on point to a distance and un-

5 The subject’s existential exile in the other

39

familiarity within the subject itself, a subject that is now split and alienated. It becomes increasingly clear that the non-identical and the alien are the very conditions of the identical. Through this exteriorization in the other (Entäußerung, as Hegel has it), the subject displaces and loses its immediate self-presence, but there would be no self-presence in the first place without this constitutive strangeness. Moreover, the other’s intermediate quality as representation of the subject points to the freedom of creating oneself. Along with the subjective identity, bestowed by the image or representation of the other, emerges also the freedom to shape or manipulate subjectivity through the manipulation and fashioning of representation. In other words, Petrarch’s Stoic endeavor (also inspired by Augustine) to turn to himself in order to establish a pure, self-determined self-identity (in which the goal is to be in perfect accordance and identity with oneself) entails yet another exile. This situation is clearly articulated in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, where the attempt to establish a secure subjective foundation leads to ambivalence and fragmentation. Through incessant approximations, Petrarch seeks desperately to overcome the difference between the self and the other, the lover and the beloved, and the difference between signifier and signified. Yet what is left is that he remains lost and exiled as “l’alma disviata” (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 365.7), i. e., a soul gone astray. The circumstance that Petrarch’s soul is exiled and gone astray comes from “the knowledge that the self, in the mirror of self-reflection – as he is the object of his own thoughts – can never coincide with his own specular images” (Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch 60). It is precisely this circumstance that the pervasive metaphor in the collection of poems expresses (21.10, 37.37, 45.7, 80.32, 94.8, and 285.5). A circumstance which Gur Zak has also pointed out: “The experience of inner exile and alienation is therefore, according to the collection, an insurmountable aspect of human existence in time” (Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self 77). Inasmuch as love displays the subject’s dependency on the other, the subject in love becomes abandoned to the other. Finding its existential home in the other, the subject is displaced, unfree, and exiled from itself, as it is at the mercy of the whims of another: “Amor con sue promesse lusingando / mi rocondusse a la prigione antica, / et die’ le chiavi a quella mia nemica / ch’ancor me di me stesso tene in bando” [Alluring me with his promises, Love led me back to my former prison and gave the keys to that enemy of mine which still keeps me banished from myself] (76.1– 4). The capricious presence of the beloved other entails an exile, and the absence of the other is equal to subjective alienation and expulsion:

40

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

Ogni loco m’atrista ov’io non veggio quei begli occhi soavi che portaron le chiavi de’ miei dolci pensier mentre a Dio piacque, et perché ’l duro esilio più m’aggravi, s’io dormo o vado o seggio altro giamai non cheggio, et ciò ch’ i’ vidi dopo lor mi spiacque. [Every place makes me sad where I do not see those lovely sweet eyes that carried off the keys of my thoughts, which were sweet as long as it pleased God; and – so that harsh exile may weigh me down even more – if I sleep or walk or sit, I call out for nothing else, and all I have seen since then displeases me]. (37.33 – 41)

The past memory of the beloved entails a splitting of the poetic subject, whose present becomes an exile since her eyes, which denote his existential abode, are far away. Indeed, desire and love entail a journey in distant lands in which, paradoxically, the enamored poetic ego seeks his home far away from home: Solea de la fontana di mia vita Allontanarme et cercar terre et mari, non mio voler ma mia stella seguendo, et sempre andai (tal Amor diemmi aita) in quelli esilii, quanto e’ vide amari, di memoria et di speme il cor pascendo. [I used to go far from the fountain of my life and search through lands and seas, following not my will, but my star, and (Love always gave me such help) I always went into those exiles, as bitter ones as he had ever seen, feeding my heart on memory and hope]. (331.1– 6)

His subjective exile is mirrored in his wide-ranging travels over lands and seas: Nelli occhi ov’ abitar solea ’l mio core (fin che mia dura sorte invidia n’ebbe, che di sì ricco albergo il pose in bando), di sua man propria avea descritto Amore con lettre di pietà quel ch’ averrebbe tosto del mio sì lungo ir desiando. [In her eyes, where my heart was wont to dwell (until my harsh fate envied it and banished it from so rich a dwelling), with his own hand Love had written in letters of piety what would soon become of my long yearning]. (331.37– 42)

5 The subject’s existential exile in the other

41

The poetic subject’s long journey of desire in pursuit of the elusive and imaginary presence of Laura is at one and the same time an exile and a home. But now that she is dead, the exile is total. In the myth of Narcissus, Echo’s destiny was to be able only to reproduce the speech of others instead of her own, and it is with this part of the myth that Petrarch most explicitly identifies: “così scossa / voce rimasi de l’antiche some, / chiamando Morte et lei sola per nome” [thus I remained a voice shaken from my former burden, calling Death and only her by name] (23.138 – 140). Petrarch, then, turns the situation upside down by means of a subtle projection in which it is not he that assumes the position of Narcissus, but Laura.³⁴ She is not just his narcissistic mirror, on the contrary, it is he who is put in the situation of Echo, inasmuch as he fades away in her reflection, causing him to cry in despair: “Non son mio, no” [I am not my own, no] (23.100); and this is why it is Laura who on the other hand takes on the role of Narcissus: “in voi finir vostro desio” [your desire ended in yourself] (46.11). Thus, she correspondingly mirrors herself in herself: “ma più ne colpo i micidiali specchi / che ’n vagheggiar voi stessa avete stanchi” [but most I blame those murderous mirrors which you have tired out with your love of yourself] (46.7– 8). One reason why the mirrors are murderous is that they lead Laura’s attention away from him, whose desire is directed both at mirroring himself in her, and toward mirroring her as well. Thus, in sonnet 45, Laura and the mirror reflect each other in a self-enclosed, self-fulfilling unity: Il mio adversario in cui veder solete gli occhi vostri ch’ Amore e ’l Ciel onora colle non sue bellezze v’innamora più che ’n guisa mortal soavi et liete. Per consiglio di lui, Donna, m’avete scacciato del mio dolce albergo fora: misero esilio! avegna ch’ i’ non fora d’abitar degno ove voi sola siete.

 Petrarch’s projection of his own narcissism unto Laura (his disapproval of her self-sufficiency) suggests an extensive confusion in Rime sparse between reality and fiction, subject and object, signifier and signified, and the reflection and the mirrored (the self). It is therefore, in connection with the poet’s disapproval of Laura’s self-sufficiency, reasonable for Kathleen Perry to raise the following question: “Is he criticizing his own fruitless, self-indulgent love, or is he criticizing the Lady?” (Another Reality 95). Mazzotta unhesitatingly asserts that “there is always a narcissism in Petrarchan love” (The Worlds of Petrarch 53)

42

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

Ma s’ io v’era con saldi chiovi fisso, non dovea specchio farvi per mio danno a voi stessa piacendo aspra et superba. Certo, se vi rimembra di Narcisso, questo et quel corso ad un termino vanno – ben che di sì bel fior sia idegna l’erba. [My adversary in which you are wont to see your eyes, which Love and Heaven honor, enamors you with beauties not his but sweet and happy beyond mortal guise. By his counsel, Lady, you have driven me out of my sweet dwelling: miserable exile! Even though I may not be worthy to dwell where you alone are. But if I had been nailed there firmly, a mirror should not have made you, because you pleased yourself, harsh and proud to my harm. Certainly, if you remember Narcissus, this and that course lead to one goal – although the grass is unworthy of so lovely a flower].

Petrarch reproaches Laura that (like Narcissus) she fell in love with a reflection containing a beauty not its own, which is merely an image, a shadow without a substance, as Ovid has it: “imaginis umbra est: / nil habet ista sui” (Metamorphoses III.432– 3). The poet blames her, furthermore, for exiling him from his own hearth, even as Echo was exiled from herself by Narcissus. Giuseppe Mazzotta claims – rightfully, I believe – that the figure of Echo is an apt image of the general conflict in the poetry of Petrarch. For Echo is the embodiment of a desire that can never coincide with the desired object; her body withers away, as she exists solely through the other, whose speech she mechanically repeats. She is never herself, but always another: “With Laura cast as Narcissus – as Petrarch explicitly does in sonnet 45, for instance – the poet becomes Echo, each the insubstantial and forever elusive shadow of the other, and each the double of itself” (The Worlds of Petrarch 180). The lover disapproves of her self-sufficiency and her self-endearment, and he emphasizes that the destiny of Narcissus and Echo were alike as both suffered the violent paralysis of an impossible love, and neither was able to create an interchange with the other, and so was eventually led to die. It follows that in Petrarch’s poetry, self-sufficiency (Narcissus) and self-abandonment (Echo) are equivalent. The poet’s narcissistic contemplation mixes the poetic identity with the beloved even though her narcissism isolates him from her. Echo is never herself, always another; but paradoxically, the same applies to Ovid’s Narcissus, who inevitably has to recognize himself in something different from himself, for the moment he falls in love with his mirror-image and recognizes it as his own, he cries: “Iste ego sum!” [I am he!] (Metamorphoses III.463). It is, in other words, impossible (for Echo as well as for Narcissus) to avoid being cast into exile in the mirror. In a bold identification with Christ, the Son of God, the poet toys with the hypothesis of having been crucified in the mirror of

6 The homecoming of exile

43

love (cf. the strong nails, “saldi chiovi,” v. 9). The Passion – the story about how God allowed himself to be exiled by taking on a human guise and caused himself to be cast out of the human community at Golgotha (the sacrificial offering of the only begotten Son) – becomes sounding board or mirror in Petrarch’s staging of his own love story. The Passion sets the scene for the Songbook, since Good Friday was both the day when Petrarch saw Laura for the first time and the day she died.³⁵ Petrarch thus mirrors himself in Christ – who was also, after the resurrection, mistaken for a stranger, a peregrinus (Luke 24.18) – as a exiled lover of both God and man. In this manner, exile threatens Petrarch from all sides: politically and geographically he is exiled; he is in worldly exile on account of his Stoic Christianity; moreover, he is in a metaphysical exile because of the allegorical crisis; and as he turns inwards upon himself, he is yet again confronted with exile, as the desiring ego is split and fragmented since, in order to appeare to itself, it has to make the detour by the other.

6 The homecoming of exile Exile, as we have seen, is crucial to a comprehension of Petrarch’s self-understanding. Exile becomes a modus vivendi that offers him the freedom to determine himself, “for only in perpetual exile could Petrarch gain the necessary perspective on himself truly to determine, or create, who he was” (Bart Giamatti, Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature 13). For him exile was precious and essential, which is why he refused to return home when given the chance: In March 1351 the governors of Florence offered Petrarch an annulment of his exile, the reestablishment of his inheritance, and a position at the new university. In two letters (Epistolae metricae III.8 and Familiares XI.5), he turns the offer down. Exile and solitude allow Petrarch truly to be himself: “Only there and not elsewhere am I myself” (Familiares VI.2.21). Indeed, for Petrarch (like Rousseau after him) the greatest exile is social intercourse and sociality as such. Harry Levin’s concluding remarks in his essay “Literature and Exile” are very much to the point in this regard: “exile has often proved to be a vocation, reinforcing other gifts with courage and looking forward to a final triumph of independence over conformity” (Refractions 81). For Petrarch, the exile becomes a strategy

 This date is mentioned in sonnet 211, Trionfa della Morte (vv. 133 – 134), and in the margin of one of Petrarch’s manuscripts of Virgil (cf. E. H. Wilkins: Life of Petrarch 77).

44

II Petrarch and the Triumph of Exile

that secures him a hitherto unseen degree of poetic and intellectual freedom to explore and rediscover the world and himself. Petrarch’s portrayal of himself as someone who “wandered and reflected (vagando et cogitando)” in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (III.38) succinctly captures the essence of this circumstance. And thus, exile accompanies the free, independent, and proud individual, who (in his own words) insists on being left free to follow his own path at his own will: I am one who much prefers not having a guide than being compelled to follow one slavishly. I do want a guide who leads me, not one who binds me to him, one who leaves me free use of my own sight, judgement, and freedom; I do not want him to forbid me to step where I wish, to go beyond him in some things, to attempt the inaccessible, to follow a shorter or, if I wish, an easier path, and to hasten or stop or even to part ways and to return. (Familiares XXII.2.21)

Petrarch often lauds solitude as a space of spiritual freedom and perfection; he also often mentions solitude in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and he even devotes an entire book to its appraisal. In De vita solitaria he proclaims loneliness to be the only true life (II.ii.9). Yet solitude for Petrarch would be torment without literature: “isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; supply literature, and it becomes your country (patria), freedom and delight” (I.iv.1). By choosing complete exile, which finds its perfection in literature, Petrarch creates his own private homeland. Literature and language make up this homeland (patria). His homecoming is therefore a homecoming to his call as author, i. e., as reader and writer. Exile enables him to transform himself into art, that is to say, to create himself ideally; it allows him to be his own author – as in canzone 23 (vv. 38 – 40), where the love for Laura transforms him into the laurel (the myth of Daphne and Apollo), pointing to his desire to become his own self-created work. Petrarch treasured exile since it embodied the necessary artistic and existential leeway and negativity with which he could define himself freely. Petrarch sought exile, for by exiling himself he was able to achieve artistic mastery of himself; through splitting, alienation, and exile, he negatively set up the freedom necessary to mirror himself ideally and to create his own reflected image. A certain unbelonging is crucial to Petrarch, as he always belongs elsewhere – to wit, in his own writing, where he settles down in a new, alternative, mythopoetic home. In the essay “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said writes: “Much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (Reflections on exile and other literary and cultural essays 181). Petrarch was very well aware – as was another modern, self-proclaimed and selfchosen exile, James Joyce – that his greatness derived from his success in creat-

6 The homecoming of exile

45

ing a “self exiled in upon his own ego,” as Finnegans Wake has it (184). For exile is necessary as a self-imposed alienation that gives rise to the emergence of new, creative forces. Petrarch’s deeply fascinating and original vision, which helped pave the way for a new epoch, thus originate in a radical feeling of homelessness, perceiving the whole world and the poet himself as alien. Petrarch’s exile was nearly absolute on all levels, but in a paradoxical manner it enabled him to settle down. For as Petrarch elegantly says with a double negative: “fuggo per piú non esser pellegrino” [I flee in order to be no longer a traveler] (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 331.23). Exile became Petrarch’s homecoming.

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de l’or’ en sai Que·m laisset en sos olhs vezer en un miralh que mout me plai. miralhs, pus me mirei en te, m’an mort li sospir de preon, c’aissi·m perdei com perdet se lo bels Narcisus en la fon. [I have never had power over myself / not have I been mine from that hour until the present / that she let me see myself in her eyes / in a mirror which much pleases me. / Mirror, since I was mirrored in you, / sighs from my depth have slain me, / for I lost myself as the handsome Narcissus lost himself / in the fountain]. Bernart de Ventadorn XLIII.17– 24

1 The ambivalence of love “Love is a death-sentence that causes me to be,” claims Julia Kristeva in Tales of Love (36).³⁶ This intense and paradoxical statement brilliantly captures what is going on in Francesco Petrarch’s endless dialogues between himself and Cupid in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. It aptly encapsulates the way Petrarch’s poems show, in an unprecedented way, how love is essentially ambiguous. Love for the poet is both what creates his identity and what in turn destroys it. It is creation and destruction, recognition and alienation, pleasure and suffering – life and death. All these opposites come together in Petrarch’s love poetry, whose figurative characteristic is the oxymoron, which brings two conflicting opposites together in one semantic whole: “O viva morte, o dilettoso male” [O living death, O delightful harm] (132.7). The oxymoron is one of the key figures in Petrarch’s Canzoniere as it eminently captures his amorous passions, which according to the Petrarch scholar Sara Sturm-Maddox, are “profoundly ambigugous” in a diabolical way (Petrarch’s Laurels 9). Another critic, Glauco Cambon, similarly claims that Petrarch’s obsession with the image of Laura is highly ambivalent, since

 The following chapter is partly an edited and revised version of passages in Benjamin Boysen, “Crucified in the Mirror of Love: On Petrarch’s Ambivalent Conception of Love in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” Orbis Litterarum 58/3 (2003), 163 – 88. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-004

1 The ambivalence of love

47

the image is both holy and demonic, “sacred and diabolic at one and the same time” (“L’eterno femminino petrarchesco” 15).³⁷ The poet himself says about Laura and his relationship to her that “non so se vero o falso” [I know not whether true or false] (90.6). In other words, Petrarch’s image of Laura and his perception of love are inherently contradictory. The question why Petrarch’s conception of love is so thoroughly saturated with ambivalence will be the predominant theme of this chapter. One answer might be – as Augustine blames Petrarch in Secretum meum – that love for something temporal (in this case Laura) leads the soul away from the eternal; or in the medieval terminology: A too passionate love for the Creature diverts attention from the Creator, a dangerous road, which eventually leads to spiritual perdition. The answer is valid, but the dichotomy is also rooted in more specific poetic issues. In her Sêmeiôtikê, Kristeva argues that poetic content is fundamentally ambivalent (252), since “the poetic at one and the same time refers and does not refer to a referent; it exists and does not exist, it is both being and not-being” (253).³⁸ Kristeva claims that poetry’s content is ambivalent because it is at one and the same time particular and universal, being and non-being, affirmation and negation, non-identical and identical, literal and figurative, constative and performative, and representation and represented. In other words, the poet strives to render the existing present in something which has no being, to let representation and represented come together, and to express the particular in the universal, the universal in the particular. Poetic content is fundamentally ambivalent, because (still according to Kristeva) it rejects individualization (cf. 252), which means that the subject-object relation is rejected in favor of a regressive quest for a narcissistic unity where object-libido and ego-libido coincide. The poet, in other words, wants to become autonomous, self-sufficient, and self-enclosed – like a narcissistic god who is simultaneously the beloved and love itself. This desired state of a perfectly autonomous, subjective unity constitutes the poet’s unattainable, but urgently pursued goal. A goal never to be reached, but nevertheless tirelessly sought. In this sense, the poet’s project is monologic, a quest for establishing a unity with himself; a unity in which the poet hears himself talk, thus making him his own sender and addressee. The poet must therefore, at one and the same time, affirm and reject the other, who mirrors his own consciousness, but who also alienates him: He will

 My translation.  My translation.

48

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

have to express himself through the other and then return to himself, thereby reluctantly making the monologic project dialogic. It is this fundamentally ambivalent, poetic conflict that Petrarch brilliantly and subtly analyzes in his magnum opus, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. On the one hand, he has a yearning to be alone, unique, self-reliant, independent and self-enclosed, and therefore to a large degree rejecting the other. On the other hand, he frequently emphasizes that self-consciousness will have to make the detour through the other to achieve full understanding and awareness of itself. This explains why his poetic project is monologic, but also inevitably (due to his acute intelligence and intuition) becomes dialogic. In other words, Petrarch’s poetry articulates “the knowledge that the self, in the mirror of self-reflection – as he is the object of his own thoughts – can never coincide with his own specular images,” as Mazzotta has it (The Worlds of Petrarch 60). In the following, I will show partly how Petrarch’s perception of love is ambivalent, and partly that it is the result of the poet’s conflicted relationship with the other, both understood as an opportunity and as an obstacle to the establishment of self-consciousness and auto-affection. To begin with, I shall unfold the more general themes in the cycle and go on to discuss the questions of desire, self-love, representation, and self-reflection. Subsequently, I shall discuss the ambivalence of joyful suffering and the general longing for the dissolution of the self. All this will issue in a preliminary conclusion in which I briefly place Petrarch in relation to the Middle Ages and early modernity.

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth Ich bin dein Labyrinth… Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithyramben

Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is a miscellany, a variety of fragments plucked from previous love paradigms. Indeed, Petrarch’s themes are traditional, but the way he employs them is profound and original. The collection consists of 365 poems, which probably, according to Roche with whom I agree,³⁹ corre In his book The Structure of Petrarch’s “Canzoniere”: A Chronological, Psychological, and Stylistic Analysis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), Frederic J. Jones argues that Petrarch consciously aimed “to produce a pre-determined number of poems, probably to conform to the calendar of a leap-year” (47). This point of view was first advanced by Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’,” Studies in Philology 71/2 (1974), 152– 172.

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth

49

spond to each of the days of the year plus one canzone 366, which, outside the cycle of the year, is added as a religious, apostrophic call to the Virgin Mary.⁴⁰ The work stands as a pure, poetic autobiography of the poet’s encounter with love, in which the only thing that is beyond doubt is that he fell in love with a woman called Laura, whose spiritual qualities and physical beauty enthralled him for the rest of his life. In these “Fragments of vernacular poetry” the only fixed point is Laura, who is the sun among all other women (9.10). In comparing her with the sun, Petrarch makes her at one and the same time that which determines and embodies all that is alive and present, “l’aura [= Laura] amorosa che rinova il tempo” [the loving breeze that renews the season] (142.5), and that which blinds and threatens life: “’l sole abbaglia chi ben fiso ’l guarda” [the sun dazzles him who looks on it fixedly] (48.11). Laura’s absolute ideality undermines the mental stability of the lyrical self – “perir mi dà ’l ciel per questa luce” [the heavens give me death in this light] (194.13) – ultimately resulting in a melancholy longing for death. In other words, Petrarch is always ambivalent in his praise of Laura. Portraying her, he points to the play of light and darkness in the chiaroscuro of Renaissance painting, and consequently, it is unsurprising that one of Petrarch’s favorite rhetorical tropes is the oxymoron,⁴¹ by which he produces numerous antitheses. Fire and ice, light and darkness, soaring and falling, pleasure and suffering become inseparable in his poetry, simply because he perceives himself as a battleground of conflicting passions. His contradictions paralyze him up to the moment when new contradictions arise and yet again set him in motion into endless debates with himself. This quandary is, for example, expressed in the strings of sonnets, where a sonnet is born so as to be incorporated into a new one, thus making the poems fragments of a dynamic whole by virtue of their intra-dialogical form.⁴² In addition, he is torn between life and

 Glauco Cambon suggests that the last canzone 366 is an expression of Petrarch’s attempt to escape the fierce ambivalence of the passions (from which he has suffered terrible agonies throughout the Songbook) by separating the two dominant aspects of Laura’s femininity: Laura is ascribed the demonic, dark and paralyzing qualities (she is compared, for example, with Medusa, v. 111), whereas the Virgin Mary is endowed with redemptive, radiant and maternal qualities (cf. “L’eterno femminino petrarchesco” 9).  In the secular poetry of the Middle Ages, love was to a great extent the subject of ambivalent descriptions, as, for instance, in Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’ allegorical Roman de la Rose, where Reason, for example, defines love in an extremely paradoxical and oxymoronic manner (cf. vv. 4263 et seq.).  Cf. also Sara Sturm-Maddox, who characterizes the Canzoniere as “a play of insufficiencies and complementarities inviting the reader to participate in the progressive integration of the poems as a signifying system whose dimension is the collection as a whole” (Petrarch’s Laurels 9).

50

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

death (36), between success and failure (40), between possession and loss (139), between God and Laura (68), and between heaven and hell (366). The tribulations and joys reflected in the work are those of a complex and time-bound personality; and it is significant that, unlike Dante, Petrarch does not pursue his Laura in a transcendent realm, but within a temporal and earthly horizon: Ma perché vola il tempo et fuggon gli anni sì ch’ a la morte in un punto s’arriva o colle brune o colle bianche chiome, seguirò l’ombra di quel dolce lauro per lo più ardente sole et per la neve, fin che l’ultimo dì chiuda quest’occhi. [But because time flies and the years flee and one arrives quickly at death either with dark or with white locks, I shall follow the shadow of that sweet laurel in the most ardent sun or through the snow, until the last day closes my eyes]. (30.13 – 18)

In Petrarch’s three fictional dialogues with Augustine, Secretum meum (which he wrote late in life), the Church Father blames him for jeopardizing his salvation through earthly desire. From a theological point of view, the lover’s passions are desires for temporal and vain pleasures, and after many harsh rebukes Petrarch consequently renounces the great love of his life. Augustine is Petrarch’s greatest literary and spiritual role model, and the Canzoniere in some ways resembles Augustine’s masterpiece, the Confessions. Both are autobiographical representations of the anguish brought about as love and passion seriously threaten their salvation. It is therefore noteworthy that Petrarch concludes his work by letting his great love fade into the background in favor of an apostrophe to the Virgin Mary – to whom he imploringly cries: “raccomandami al tuo Figliuol, verace / omo et verace Dio, / ch’ accolga ’l mio spirto ultimo in pace” [commend me to your Son, true man and true God, that He may receive my last breath in peace] (366.135 – 37). For Petrarch intertextually refers to Augustine’s Confessions, which has a similar conclusion: “Domine deus, pacem da nobis” [Grant, O Lord God, thy peace unto us] (XIII.xxxv). And this means that Petrarch’s conclusion, marking a Christian renunciation of this earthly world in favor of the spiritual afterlife, is supported by a theologian whose authority Petrarch most likely deemed supreme. As we saw above, when Franciscus (i. e., Petrarch) hears Augustinus’s warning to renounce the great love of his life, he declares, “I will gather myself together and collect my scattered wits (sparsa anime fragmenta)” (Secretum meum III, [Eng. trans.] 258/ [Lat. orig.] 191). This, of course, indirectly refers to Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, as that title points not only to the loose structure

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth

51

of its content, but also to the poet’s disjointed and decentered amorous subjectivity. This subjectivity stands in stark contrast to that of his immediate predecessor, Dante, in whom the experience of love is consistently tied to a theological and metaphysical system. The difference is evidenced from the very beginning of the collection of poems, in which Petrarch’s “fragmented verses,” Rime sparse (the Italian title of the work), are made synonymous with his fragmented and divided state of mind: Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’ io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore, quand’ era in parte altr’ uom da quel ch’ i’ sono: del vario stile in ch’ io piango et ragiono fra le vane speranze e ’l van dolore [You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now; for the varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow]. (1.1– 6)

Besides describing Petrarch’s split mind assailed by love pangs, the title also points to the decentralized structure of the Songbook, whose poems are dispersed over every day of the year, thus linking them with temporality and contingency. Yet, the latter are counterbalanced by a phantasmagoric desire for omnipotence and omnipresence in time and space. For the division of the work into the days of the year indicates both a temporal attachment and a transcendence of the worldly dissolved in the permanency of the work. The evanescent days of the year and Petrarch’s bewildered love life are forever fixed in poetry; the fleeting passions are commemorated and imprinted in the work, which like a tomb or mausoleum subjugates temporality. Petrarch thus overcomes the earthly by a negation of the negation. The term fragmenta therefore has an ambiguous meaning. On the one hand, it points to Laura as an icon of temporal love; and on the other, it alludes to a poetic and transcendent love, i. e., the longing for eternity. Giuzeppe Mazzotta makes a similar point when noting how the “the unity of the work is the unity of fragments in fragments” (The Worlds of Petrarch 78). This becomes apparent in the description of Laura as the very source of light, spreading love and light – “la sua luce sparta” [her scattered light] (127.90; my emphasis). A passage reminiscent of the vast, cosmic epiphany in Dante, where the infinite light source, God, similarly spreads light and love everywhere: “Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l’universo si squaderna” [I saw how it contains within its depths / all things bound in a single

52

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

book by love / of which creation is the scattered leaves] (Paradiso XXXIII.85 – 7; my emphasis). This ambivalence about that which is fragmented or scattered becomes clear from the way Petrarch employs the word “sparse” to make one realize that it is used in connection with presence, life and beauty as well as with absence, death, and decay: Presence “Lo chiome a l’aura sparse […] / et così bella riede / nel cor” [Her locks loosed (sparse) to the breeze […] and so she comes beautifully into my heart] (. – ) “il fior de l’altre belle / stando in se stessa, à la sua luce sparta, / a ciò che mai da lei non mi diparta” [the flower of all beauties, remaining in herself, has scattered her light in order that I may never depart from her] (. – ) “o fiamma, o rose sparse in dolce falda / di viva neve in ch’ io mi spechhio et tergo” [O flame, O roses scattered on a sweet drift of living snow, in which I mirror and polish myself] (. – ) “Purpurea vesta d’un ceruleo lembo / sparso di rose i belli omeri vela” [A scarlet dress with cerulean border sprinkled with roses veils her lovely shoulders] (. – )

Absence “Morte m’à liberato un’altra volta / et rotto ’l nodo, e ’l foco à spento et sparso” [Death has freed me another time, and has broken the knot and has put out and scattered the fire] (. – ) “Bellezza et Onestà […] per Morte son sparse et disgiunte” [Beauty and Chastity […] now Death has scattered and separated them] (. – ) “ch’arsi quanto ’l mio foco ebbi davante, / or vo piangendo il suo cenere sparso” [I burned as long as my fire before me, now I go bewailing the scattering of its ashes] (. – ) “Ogni cosa al fin vola: […] mirando le frondi a terra sparse” [Everything flies to its end; […] seeing the leaves scattered on the earth] (. – )

In Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the fragmented and decentered signify both the joyous, beautiful, sensual, vibrant, and transcendent and what is painful, broken, ugly, dead, and decaying. The dichotomy inherent in the contexts of the word “sparse” in the work may be said to resemble Petrarch’s division of the work into two parts: the first sequence of poems (1– 263) describes love while Laura was still alive (Laura in vita), whereas the latter poems (264– 366) deal with love after her death (Laura in morte). Petrarch’s Rime sparse, whose title literally indicates the structure of the discourse of love, ambivalently display both life and death, the two dynamic poles in his perception of love. The alienating dimension of love is mirrored in Petrarch’s description of Laura as a wild and evil animal, “sì aspra fera” [so cruel a beast] (22.20), cruelly devouring him: Così li affitti et stanchi spirti mei a poco a poco consumando sugge, e ’n sul cor quasi fiero leon rugge la notte, allor quand’ io posar devrei.

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth

53

[Thus little by little she consumes and saps my afflicted, tired spirits, and like a fierce lion she roars over my heart at night, when I ought to rest]. (256.5 – 8)

He also describes her as “la dolce et acerba mia nemica” [my sweet and bitter enemy] (23.69), who threatens to shatter his mental constitution, as she renders him alien to himself: “mia nemica / ch’ ancor me di me stesso tene in bando” [that enemy of mine who still keeps me banished from myself] (76.3 – 4). Petrarch presents a harsh image of love as a savage master, and, furthermore, in his letters he makes it clear that he thinks of love in the Canzoniere as insane and mad. He explains in a famous letter to Giacomo Colonna (who suggested that Laura was just a construct): “I wish […] that she indeed had been a fiction and not a madness (furor)!” (Familiares II.9). In another letter, he describes the work’s theme as “the rambling madness of lovers” (Seniles XIII.11). The strong emphasis on the negative aspect of love is also evident in Petrarch’s De remedii utriusque fortunae, in which he defines love as “an invisible fire, a welcome wound, a savory poison, sweet bitterness, delectable affliction, delightful torment, alluring death” (I.69). Love is paradoxical and radically ambiguous to Petrarch, who links the element of pleasure in love with pain. Love becomes a voluptas dolendi, and in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, the painful is often strongly emphasized along with an intense pleasure as it seduces the poet towards a death that seems alluring and captivating. The poet’s work is thus also fueled by the death-drive.⁴³

 Freud’s concept of the death drive designates the conservative drive to return to an original, regressive feeling of unity: “[T]he turning round of the instinct upon the subject’s own ego, would in that case be a return to an earlier phase of the instinct’s history, a regression” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 54– 55). In continuation of Aristophanes – who explains how every lover wants “to be joined and fused with his beloved that the two might be made one” (Plato, Symposium 192e) – Freud asks whether it is possible “that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts?” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 58). Freud answers in the affirmative, arguing that the living matter (as characterized by tension) longs for the lifeless, i. e., that without tension: “The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state” (38). The myth also illustrates Lacan’s notion of the fantasy, which is a further development of Freud’s death drive as “the passing out of the subject” (Écrits 653; translation modified). The subject wants, according to Lacan, to overcome life’s basic division through a disappearance in the desired object, which by definition is absent, and which introduces “an identity that is based on an absolute non-reciprocity” (653). The phantasm is the utopian dream of desire to cancel temporality and finitude through the formula: ½ + ½ = 1, thus replacing death and the split with absolute presence. The realization of this Platonic formula

54

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

Suffering and doubt are the hallmarks of Petrarch’s encounter with love, in which he suffers an imaginary delirium, tortured as he is in his precarious position between two opposites in rapid alternation: Questa umil fera, un cor di tigre o d’orsa che ’n vista umana o ’n forma d’angel vene, in riso e ’n pianto, fra paura et spene mi rota sì ch’ogni mio stato inforsa. [This humble wild creature, this tiger’s or she-bear’s heart that comes in human appearance and in the shape of an angel, so wheels me about in laughter and tears between fear and hope, that she makes uncertain my every state]. (152.1– 4)

In this way, he becomes a plaything in a violent battle between opposing passions that propel him hither and thither. Nevertheless, Laura remains his supreme ideal despite the fact that she is swiftly leading him towards death: “L’auro e i topacii al sol sopra la neve / vincon le bionde chiome presso a gli occhi / che menan gli anni miei sì tosto a riva” [Gold and topaz in the sun above the snow are vanquished by the golden locks next to those eyes that lead my years so quickly to shore] (30.37– 9). Here Petrarch is getting dangerously close to blasphemy since it is not God who is the object of his love, and whom he loves more than gold –“Therefore I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine gold [topaz]” (Psalms 119.127) – but Laura, who embodies a love that may be ideal and transcendent, but which remains earthly and temporal.⁴⁴ Accordingly, the poet often describes his love as an illusion or error – “mio primo giovenile errore” [my first youthful error] (1.3) – which fixes him in a rigid paralysis characterized by pleasure: “del suo proprio error l’alma s’appaga; / in tante parti et sí bella la veggio / che se l’error durasse, altro non cheggio” [my soul is satisfied by its own deception; in so many places and so beautiful I see her, that, if the deception should last, I ask for nothing more] (129.37– 39). Mistake and error are classical terms employed by theologians and philosophers to condemn the, philosophically speaking, unenlightened consciousness

would result in non-being for the two, but this is precisely the subject’s final aim with the phantasm, namely the desire for the impossible, i. e., the subject’s subversion. Cf. Aristotle: “we know that Aristophanes in the discourse on love describes how the lovers owing to their extreme affection desire to grow together and both become one instead of being two. In such a union it would be inevitable that both would be spoiled, or at least one” (The Politics II.1262b).  Robert Durling points out how Petrarch ends up in an idolatrous reversal: “the lover places Laura’s beauty where the Psalmist places God’s command (“Petrarch’s ‘Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro’” 15). Cf. also Sara Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels 155.

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth

55

content with making the phenomenal (the sensory), the temporal and conditional the subject of its attention. Such a condition is in classical metaphysics labeled as a lack of freedom (hence the body is traditionally described as the prison of the spirit), since the highest degree of freedom (which typically is the goal of metaphysics) can only be realized in the unconditional or absolute. Here one is liberated from the other, and from what is other as such, in order to be oneself through a mirroring in the transcendent, that is, outside of this world – “one sees with one’s self alone That alone, simple single and pure,” as the Neo-Platonist Plotinus puts it in his description of the highest beauty, achieved through leaving everything in favor of becoming one with the One (The Enneads I.6.7). Solitude, from Plotinus to Rousseau, is a central theme of metaphysics and pertains to the idea of spiritual perfection and freedom. Petrarch continues this tradition and evokes the theme of solitude frequently in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, even as he celebrates it in De vita solitaria. He proclaims solitude to be the only true life (II.ii.9), and in sonnet 259, he explains that he has always sought a solitary life in nature, because he has here found a refuge from the vile crowd, which blocks the way to God, who must be sought in solitude. Solitude is paradise, not because one is alone with oneself, but because one is alone with the Other, which in this case means God.⁴⁵ The perfect example of blissful solitude

 In the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Other signifies the authority who, when the subject enters the symbolic (language), is responsible for the rupture with its imaginary narcissism. The Other also guarantees that the continuity of identification is replaced by the process of symbolization which turns the subject’s basic lack of being and frustration into pleasure and mastery through the word, which is “a presence made of absence” (Écrits 228). Therefore, the Other is characterized as “the locus of Speech” (683) and as the seat for the “lack of being” (524). Narcissism’s illusory dream of imaginary self-sufficiency and unity of self (Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic has been crucial to Lacan’s theoretical ideas about the symbolic and the imaginary) is broken at the very moment the subject accepts castration, which is Lacan’s term for the subject’s recognition of its being-onto-death. Since the Other entails the notion of the unconditional, the absolute, and a-temporal, it is also in a position to condemn the subject to death, just like der absolute Herr in Hegel. The Other enters the stage at the moment the subject gains consciousness of death, that is, at the moment it experiences “the fear of death, the absolute Lord” (Phenomenology of Spirit IV, 117), thus forcing it to renounce its fantasies of omnipotence. The endless struggle of the mirror stage for narcissistic recognition and omnipotence is terminated by the arrival of the Other, who as “this locus […] ‘behind the mirror’” (Écrits 568) secures the subject a stable framework for identification within language. The Other is thus at one and the same time associated with desire and anxiety; desire because the Other in its capacity of a-temporality represents a possible abrogation of lack and absence; anxiety because the Other implies lack of being itself, which prevents the absolute totality of presence and subjectivity in the dream of becoming one: “For the Other […] is the One missing” (Encore

56

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

is therefore epitomized in Adam: “as long as he was alone, no man was happier (nemo felicior), but as soon as he received a companion, none more wretched (nemo miserior)” (II.ii.2). In the paradisiacal state, the subject is alone with the Other, but through the encounter with the actual other the symbiosis is destroyed. Apart from the purely metaphysical aspect of solitude, Petrarch also describes some more general and practical issues arising from it. He stresses the all-important significance of literature; for literature substitutes the real other with an image or fiction in which the solitary person (the reader) can mirror himself or contemplate himself. Loneliness is an essential feature of love for Petrarch, for it enables him to be alone with his amorous meditations and the mental image of the beloved. Solitude, love, and contemplation become synonyms, as in the following canzone: Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte mi guida Amor, ch’ogni segnato calle provo contrario a la tranquilla vita. [From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain Love guides me; for I find every trodden path to be contrary to a tranquil life]. (129.1– 3)

Solitude – and ultimately the absence of the beloved – is central to Petrarch’s understanding of love,⁴⁶ because (ideally speaking) love is for him spiritual

X.3, 162). The Other is – as the very site of absence – a location unto which the subject turns with the question about its own existence, that is, “his existence as a subject” (Écrits, 460).  The great predecessor here is, of course, Plato, who emphasizes absence and the negative as the true source of desire and love: “all who feel desire, feel it for what is not provided or present; for something they have not or are not or lack; and that sort of thing is the object of desire and love” (Symposium 200e). This observation is also the basis of Aristophanes’ famous speech about our early fall (191a), which split man – from being one – into two: “Each of us, then, is but a tally of a man (ἀνθρώπου σύμβολον), since every one shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two, and each is ever searching for the tally (σύμβολον) that will fit him” (191d). The Greek σύμβολον refers to an object broken into two parts, of which the two halves are tokens to those who own them, signifying for example old ties between two people or their families; but it also denotes a sign, a contract or some kind of meaning, incomprehensible without its counterpart. Initially man was uni-sexual (ἀνδρόγυνον 189e) – i. e., two in one, a unit where no difference or otherness existed, where the relation to the self was not compromised by the other, where the subject was self-present, immediate and self-sufficient – but because of the splitting up, man has become a symbolic man to whom negativity became inescapable, and for whom the detour through the other has become inevitable. The wound, considered as an expression of man’s fundamental lack of being, is the very modality of love.

2 Petrarch in the labyrinth

57

and intimately connected with poetry, and because both refer to an image generated through meditation, i. e., with a representation of the object of creativity achieved through isolation. The sentiment of love and a measure of solitude are directly proportional in Petrarch: “et quanto in più selvaggio / loco mi trovo e ’n più deserto lido, / tanto più bella il mio pensier l’adombra” [and in whatever wildest place and most deserted shore I find myself, so much the more beautiful does my thought shadow her forth] (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 129.46 – 8). The poet-subject’s pursuit of Laura exiles him from any known human community and from others, since he can only hope to find her in the contemplative and imaginary space of nature, in the uncultivated wild, or in the barbarous territories of strangers (dure genti e costumi) far away from civilization: Cercar m’a fatto deserti paesi, fiere et ladri rapaci, ispidi dumi, dure genti et costumi, et ogni error che’ pellegrini intrica; monti valli paludi et mari et fiumi, mille lacciuoli in ogni parte tesi, e ’l verno in strani mesi con pericol presente et con fatica. [He has made me search among wilderness, wild beasts, rapacious thieves, bristling dunes, hard peoples and customs, and every wandering that entangles travellers, among mountains, valleys, marshes, and seas and rivers, a thousand snares spread everywhere, and winter in unaccustomed months, with present peril and labor]. (360.46 – 53)

Seeking Laura in solitude far away from civilizations among hard and coarse peoples, travelling with strangers (pellegrini), is arduous and painful and goes forward in a hostile space in a time out of joint (’l verno in strani mesi) in deserted lands (deserto paesi) populated by fierce (fiere) birds of prey (rapaci). But the harsh and foreign surroundings in which the poet-subject searches for Laura allude to the anti-social and solipsistic nature of this amorous quest for subjectivity outside sociality or communities. This line of thought is further embodied in the oxymoron of technical political terminology in the brilliant and telling exclamation “Amor femmi un cittadin de’ boschi” (237.15). Saying that “Love made me a citizen of the woods” is remarkable, since citizenship involves the social recognition and the very human institutions that the subject strives to flee. A citizenship of the woods would, in effect, be a solitary community of oneself, the sociality of the atom, harmoniously dictating its own self-determination and social acknowledgement outside sociality.

58

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

Petrarch’s desolate landscapes serve as catalysts for Laura’s image, whether recalled through memory or the imagination, and it is in nature that Petrarch is looking for traces of her – both in vita and in morte. Francesco de Sanctis observes that in the Canzoniere, nature frequently serves “as Laura’s ornament and clothing” (Saggio critico sul Petrarca 90).⁴⁷ And inasmuch as Laura is a mirror for the poetic protagonist, Ernst Cassirer similarly notes, “For Petrarch, landscape becomes the living mirror of the Ego” (The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy 143). Petrarch, then, suffers from the same anguish as did Pygmalion, since Laura the mental or poetic image is at one and the same time present and absent: “sempre m’è sì presso et sì lontano” [always so near to me and so distant] (129.61). However, Petrarch loses the contemplative freedom of solitude in the encounter with the real Laura that enslaves him to love. Consequently, he describes his time under Cupid’s rule as “un lungo error in cieco laberinto” [a long wandering in a blind labyrinth] (224.4). And he describes his meeting with Laura in much the same way: “Mille trecento ventisette, a punto / su l’ora prima, il dì sesto d’aprile, / nel laberinto intrai, né veggio ond’ esca” [One thousand three hundred twenty-seven, exactly at the first hour of the sixth day of April, I entered the labyrinth, nor do I see where I may get out of it] (211.12– 14). Caught in the inconsistencies of desire, wandering about in the illusions of the imagination, the lover is subjected to the seductive powers of the amorous images that lead him into a downward spiral toward the earthly, towards emptiness and nothingness. Desire is directed outward and downward towards a transitoriness that leads the lover to his habitus ad nihilum, i. e., towards repetition, change, instability, perdition, and death. The labyrinth houses the terrible monster, the Minotaur, the result of Queen Pasiphaë’s illegitimate and monstrous lust for the bull, and so the labyrinth is associated with terrible shame (Cf. Ovid’s Metamorphoses VIII.157– 8) and an irrational depravity. Virgil calls the Minotaur haunting the labyrinth a monument of a heinous and abominable love (Veneris monumenta nefandae, The Aenied VI.26). Here the labyrinth is the paradigm of error and is partly inextricable (“inextricabilis error,” VI.27), partly inevitable and incurable (“inremeabilis error,” V.591). In his lyrical letters Epistolae, Petrarch explicitly writes himself into this mythological frame of reference: “non unus opacam / Minotaurus habet perplexi tramitis aulam” [it is not only a Minotaur that roams in the dark confussion of this maze] (III.15.24– 25). Besides, as a product of the inventor Daedalus’ artful genius, the labyrinth represents the intellectual sublimity of the artwork. It is

 My translation.

3 The demonic mirror of love

59

also linked to the idea of a monstrous and lifeless prison, which is how it is described in the anonymous Ovide moralisé (from the 1300s): “une fort prison fermer, / Tel c’onc nulz ne vit sa pareille” [a strongly closed prison of which no one has seen anything like] (VIII.974– 5). The maze is the very paradigm of the lack of freedom in love – remember how Michelangelo talks about love’s labyrinthine metaphor (Rime 23). Or one can simply say with Charles d’Orleans that it is “la prison de desir” (LV.4). Unlike Theseus, Petrarch has no chance of getting out; he has no Ariadne’s thread, because Laura is not outside the labyrinth: she is the labyrinth. Ich bin dein Labyrinth…

3 The demonic mirror of love Have you observed that the face of the person who looks into another’s eye is shown in the optic confronting him, as in a mirror, and we call this the pupil, for in a sort it is an image of the person looking? – That is true. – Then an eye viewing another eye, and looking at the most perfect part of it, the thing wherewith it sees, will thus see itself. Plato, Alkibiadês I 133a-b

In the reading of Rerum vulgarium fragmenta it becomes increasingly clear that Petrarch’s sufferings mirror the sufferings of Narcissus. When asked by the adolescent’s parents, Cephísus and Liriópe, whether Narcissus would live a long life and come to ripe age, the soothsayer Tiresias answered: “si se non noverit” [If he ne’er know himself] (Ovid, Metamorphoses III.348). This confirms that self-consciousness plays a dominant part in the premature death of Narcissus initiated at the moment he falls in love with his own image, which he afterwards recognizes as his own: “iste ego sum!” [I am he!] (III.463). The myth illustrates how the image or the sign (the other) is an inevitable step in the process toward self-consciousness, and how the image, despite its implication of self-consciousness, is nevertheless alienating. The image is a non-subject that affects the self; a non-subject without which the self would not be able to appear to itself or recognize itself, as Hegel (among others) has demonstrated in his Phenomenology of Spirit. ⁴⁸ The image is the other as the non-present that determines the subject.

 In many ways, one can claim that the myth of Narcissus, seeing that it emphasizes self-consciousness in the shaping of desire, anticipates Hegel who ties self-consciousness and desire together: “self-consciousness is desire” (Phenomenology of Spirit IV, 109). Hegel explains how the goal of desire is the reflection of self-consciousness back unto itself – “The satisfaction of Desire

60

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

This recognition helps explain why the poet offers himself to Laura as a mirror in which she can see herself and measure her own beauty: she is unable to see her own self without another to mirror her: luci beate et liete se non che ’l veder voi stesse v’è tolto, ma quante volte a me vi rivolgete conoscete in altrui quel che voi siete. [happy and carefree lights – except that to see yourselves is denied you, but whenever you turn to me you know in another what you are]. (71.57– 60)

The primary source of frustration, suffering and error in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is fundamentally that one cannot see oneself see oneself. The lover desperately seeks to avoid the imperative of consciousness, conoscete in altrui quel che voi siete, in his search for a transcendental point from where he can see himself. Jacques Lacan brilliantly illuminates Petrarch’s dilemma in his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: “When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that – You never look at me from the place from which I see you” (103). Self-consciousness never attains complete relief or satisfaction because it is obliged to make a detour by the other to be perceptible to itself and in general to express itself. The Narcissus myth shows that the difference from the self is essential as regards love and self-consciousness if it is not to end in alienation and death. It is Narcissus’s paradoxical state of pure identity and resemblance with the loved and mirrored object, and his subsequent inability to differ from this, which lead him to death (where, incidentally, he still mirrors himself in Styx): “O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem! / Votum in amante novum: vellem quod amamus abesset!” [Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! and, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love was absent from me!] (III.465 – 6). Absolute identity is the same as absolute emptiness; pure being and pure nothingness are identical, as Hegel has it (Science of Logic 82). The image of the self, that is to say, the reflection, is both the same and the other, both identity and difference, and – operating in this uncanny way, as in Rimbaud’s famous copula “je est un autre” – its relation to self-consciousness

is […] the reflection of self-consciousness into itself” (110) – but adds that self-consciousness inevitably has to make a detour by the other to get back to itself if it is to avoid being turned into emptiness and false conscience: “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (110).

3 The demonic mirror of love

61

remains ambiguous. In the Middle Ages, the status of the mirror is exceedingly equivocal,⁴⁹ as is the status of beauty and art.⁵⁰ The mirror is the medium wherein God appears to us, wherein he lets himself be represented; but beyond that, it threatens to lead the mind away from that which it represents to the representation itself. A representation, which in itself is merely the absence of the object – or quite simply merely shadow (umbre) or image (imago), as Ovid writes. Augustine explains:⁵¹ So those who in their mind insofar as it can be seen, and in it this trinity which I have discussed from many angles as best I could, but do not believe or understand it to be the image of God, see indeed a mirror, but are so far from seeing by the mirror the one who now can only be seen by a mirror, that they do not even know the mirror they see is a mirror, that is to say an image. (Augustine, De Trinitate XV.vi.44)

Thus, it is no surprise that Petrarch is ambivalent about his relation to the mirror, which is linked partly to the wicked and the diabolical, partly to the glorious and the celestial. Petrarch’s poetry incorporates the fountain or mirror of Narcissus in the persona of Laura, in continuation of the Provençal tradition where the Lady acts as

 Cf. Frederick Golding, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric 1– 19.  This ambivalence is well illustrated in Augustine, who stresses that the joy of beauty must not lead to worship of things in themselves because it is God, who behind the visible is the true source of the good and the beautiful: “Mine eyes take delight in fair forms, and vanities of them: in beautiful and pleasant colors. Suffer not these to hold possession of my soul; let my God rather be Lord of it, who made all these: very good they be indeed, yet he is my good, and not they” (Confessions X.34). Compare Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages 4– 16.  Plotinus uses the myth of Narcissus as an example of how one loses oneself, if one does not liberate oneself from the material and the phenomenal world (which from Plato onwards merely signifies the shadows of the ideas of the eternal world): “If he still sees corporeal beauties, he must no longer rush at them, but, knowing that they are only images, traces, and adumbrations of a superior principle, he will flee from them, to approach that Beauty of whom they are merely the reflections. Whoever would let himself be misled by the pursuit of those vain shadows, mistaking them for realities, would grasp only an image as fugitive as the fluctuating form reflected by the waters, and would resemble that senseless man who, wishing to grasp that image himself, according to the fable, disappeared, carried away by the current” (The Enneads I.6.8). In the anonymous, allegorical reinterpretation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Ovide Moralisé), the cricial part of Narcissus’s error consists in his taking the reflection for something real and existent, which is described as an error similar to considering a fluttering shadow something true and permanent: “C’est la fontaine decevable / Qui fet l’ombre fainte et muable / Cuidier vrai et parmanant” [It is the deceiving fountain that makes the faint and changing shadow seem true and permanent] (III.345 – 7).

62

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

the mirror of the poet. God made her in his image and, what is more, He in fact mirrors Himself in her (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23.128), even as nature in all its beauty is mirrored in her radiance (154.3 – 4). In sonnet 146 she performs the role of a flaming and purifying mirror, which allows the poet to see himself as he truly is (in contrast to the poems 45, 46 and 136 where mirrors are associated with the diabolic and the murderous): “o fiamma, o rose sparse in dolce falda / di viva neve in ch’ io mi specchio et tergo” [O flame, O roses scattered on a sweet drift of living snow, in which I mirror and polish myself] (146.5 – 6). Laura is a purifying and purgative mirror because she embodies the universal, the divine and the good: “quelle belle care membra oneste / che specchio eran di vera leggiadria” [those lovely dear virtuous limbs that have been a mirror of true graciousness] (184.10 – 11). In sonnet 330, her eyes are described as the mirrors of the poet: “O lumi amici che gran tempo / con tal dolcezza feste di noi specchi” [O friendly lights, who for a great time with such sweetness have made us your mirrors] (10 – 11). The narcissistic aspect is clear here insofar as it is his own reflection in the eyes of the loved one, Laura, that he enjoys contemplating. It is his own image that he pursues, and which nourishes his desire. John Freccero points to this when he calls attention to the universality of Laura as a pure representation of the poet himself, acting as “a brilliant surface, a pure signifier whose momentary exteriority to the poet serves as an Archimedean point from which he can create himself” (“The Fig Tree and the Laurel” 39). Petrarch seeks his self-consciousness in Laura, who at one and the same time constitutes his identity and dissolves it. This is something of which Petrarch is very conscious, and the Canzoniere is – in the reading of Gérard Genot – characterized by the chiastic interchange between the self and the other; the self progresses toward knowledge of itself in that it “depicts a space, which many times is centered on the ego, whom the caprices of the mirror successively drives back from the centre to the periphery, albeit a periphery that yet again becomes the centre” (“Petrarque et la scène du regard” 9).⁵² Love is alienating, essentially coupling the subject with something fundamentally different from itself, that is to say, something non-identical. But it also allows the subject to emerge as a social and symbolic being. Although Laura is the most beautiful and the most divine mirror, and although she is the dwelling where the poet defines himself as a subject, she is nevertheless often alienating, and the poet describes how she leads him away from his own true and proper image, how she exiles him from his own self, and finally how her face simply consumes him: “il mio volto il consuma” [my face consumes

 My translation.

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

63

him] (240.13). The mirror is a genuine threat to the unity of the subject and recalls Augustine’s Soliloquies, where the mirror signifies the mendacious and the demonic,⁵³ threatening to overtake the identity of the subject: “Does it not seem to you that your image in a mirror wants, in a way, to be you (imago tua de speculo quasi tu ipse velle esse), and is false because it’s not?” (II.ix.2).⁵⁴ The comparison of Laura with the mirror of the poet reinforces the shadow of narcissism that darkens the entire Rime sparse. If her mirrors, which take her attention away from the poet, are labeled murderous (“micidiali specchi,” 46.7), then her eyes reversibly threaten to place him in the same narcissistic situation as her own. Petrarch lived in a stormy matrimony with the mirror.

4 Crucified in the mirror of love il tient la mort et la santé il resane quant a navré. [he both owns death and health; he cures what he has wounded]. Eneas II.7989 – 90

Petrarch’s lyrical protagonist often emphasizes that it was in his left side he was wounded by love – a clear and bold reference to the wounding of Christ with the spear on Golgotha. Furthermore, the tormented Christ is often made an object of identification by the poetical subject,⁵⁵ and one cannot exaggerate the significance of the Christian Passion as a sounding board for the poet’s innamoramento, since it was on Good Friday, feria sexta aprilis, the 6th of April 1327, that he saw Laura for the first time.⁵⁶ Therefore, his remembrance of the eleventh anniversary of

 Though Augustine claims that the mirrors are diabolic, Petrarch, in contrast, lets him state that “mirrors were invented that men might know themselves. Much profit comes thereby. First, knowledge of self: second, wise counsel” (Secretum meum III, 161). Therefore, we can conclude once again that the status of the mirror is highly ambiguous.  The gravity of this statement may be substantiated in fiction, for instance in Rainer Maria Rilke’s deeply neurotic, fictitious autobiography The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), in which the protagonist experiences a veritable existential master-slave, life-and-death struggle with the mirror, which results in complete alienation, with the mirror usurping his identity: “for He was now the stronger, and I was the mirror” (69; my emphasis).  Cf. Familiares (X.4) in which Petrarch compares the god of poetry, Apollo, with Christ.  This date is mentioned in sonnet 211, Trionfa della Morte 133 – 4, and in the margin of one of Petrarch’s manuscripts of Virgil (cf. E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch 77).

64

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

his meeting with Laura is correspondingly a remembrance and evocation of the crucifixion of Christ: “rammenta lor come oggi fusti in croce” [remind them that today you were on the Cross] (62.14). Good Friday in the Middle Ages was a recurrent admonition to man of his sinful state, a day intended for meditation on the wretched nature of man, i. e., a day when one contemplatively turned to God, as in Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, for instance, where Parzival asks the three knights what day it is, to which they answer: – ‘Quex jorz, sire? Si nel savez! C’est li vandredis aorez, Li jorz que l’an doit aorer La croiz et ses pechiez plorer Car hui fu cil an croiz pandus Qui trante deniers fu vanduz. [‘What day, sir? You don’t know! / It is Good Friday, / when one should worship / the Cross and weep for one’s sins, / for today the Man was hung upon the Cross / who was sold for thirty pieces of silver]. (vv. 6231– 6)

Petrarch’s private sufferings under the despotism of Amor – who wounds him with “’l colpo mortal” [the fatal blow] (2.7) – are linked with the redeeming love of the tormented Christ on the cross,⁵⁷ whose wounds bequeath hope of redemption: “ne le cui sante piaghe / prego ch’ appaghe il cor” [In whose whose holy wounds I pray you to quiet my heart] (366.51– 52). Petrarch fuses the Christian depiction of love and the well-known representation of love’s coup de foudre as violent arrows shot by Amor – “benedetto il primo dolce affanno / ch’ i’ ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto, / et l’arco e le saette ond’ i’ fui punto, / et piaghe che ’nfin al cor mi vanno” [blessèd be the first sweet trouble I felt on being made one with Love, and the bow and the arrows that pierced me, and the wounds that reach my heart] (61.5 – 8). Moreover, the poet establishes an analogy between the yearning for God and his own yearning for Laura, comparing his pursuit of her true form (forma vera) with the passionate pilgrimage an old man has undertaken in the hope of seeing the true image of Christ in Rome:

 Furthermore, the god of love, Amor, has a great deal in common with the God of the Old Testament, especially in Lamentations, where the cries directed to the stern God are fully identical with the wailing of Petrarch toward the insensitive Amor. While Petrarch is grieving that “Amor m’à posto come segno a strale” [Love’s made me like a target of his arrows] (133.1), Jeremiah correspondingly laments that God has “set me as a mark for the arrow” (Lamentations 3.12).

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

65

et viene a Roma, seguendo ’l desio, per mirar la sembianza di colui ch’ ancor lassù nel ciel vedere spera. Così, lasso, talor vo cercand’ io, Donna, quanto è possibile in altrui la disiate vostra forma vera. [and he comes to Rome, following his desire, to gaze on the likeness of Him whom he hopes to see again up there in Heaven. Thus, alas, at times I go searching in others, Lady, as much as is possible, for your longed-for true form]. (16.9 – 14)

Petrarch establishes not only an analogy between his own affliction of love and the love of Christ, he also compares the pilgrim’s religious yearning with his own (sensual) craving for Laura – a fact that made the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo consider the poem blasphemous. Petrarch creates another daring connection between Laura and Christ when he not only nominates Good Friday as the anniversary of his meeting with Laura, but furthermore identifies it as the date of her death.⁵⁸ Even as the death of Christ, as witnessed by the evangelists (cf. Matthew 27.45, Mark 15.33, and Luke 23.44), was followed by a three-hour eclipse, so Laura’s death: “Nel tuo partir partì del mondo Amore / et Cortesia, e ’l sole cadde del cielo” [With your departure Love left the world and Courtesy, and the sun fell from the sky] (352.12– 13, cf. in addition 268.17 and 338.1– 2). The identification of Laura with Christ is more than purely amorous and hyperbolic rhetoric, for it serves to denominate her status as an omni-potent Other, who reigns over life and death: Per divina bellezza indarno mira chi gli occhi de costei giamai non vide, come soavemente ella gli gira; non sa come Amor sana et come ancide [He looks in vain for divine beauty who never saw her eyes, how sweetly she turns them; he does not know how Love heals and how he kills]. (159.9 – 12)

A great deal of the Christian discourse on love is characterized by a passionate and intense negativity toward worldly life (cf. 1 John 2.15), rejected in favour of a libidinal investment in death, which becomes desirable as a point of convergence  This appears in sonnet 336, together with the margin of the above-mentioned manuscript of Virgil (cf. E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch 77).

66

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

between man and God. In death man can become one with his deity (cf. Romans 6.4– 7). This is recounted by Bernard de Clairvaux in the following example, where the annulment of the self in the amorous ecstasy of the union with God is crucial: “So to forget (perdere) yourself, that you do not exist, and be totally unconscious of yourself, to become nothing, is not a human feeling, it is a divine experience” (Liber de diligendo deo X.27). This longing for death is also expressive of the poetical subject in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: “i’ cheggio a Morte incontra Morte aita, / di sì scuri penseri Amor m’ingombra” [I ask Death for help against Death, with such dark thoughts Love burdens me] (327.7– 8, cf. in addition 332.42). The longing for death has strong links to the classical, Roman contempt for the futility and insignificance of life sub specie æternitatis; to the Biblical accentuation of the shallowness of worldly life: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1.2); and to Augustine’s belief that life equals death: “a dying life (shall I call it) or a living death rather?” (Confessions I.6).⁵⁹ But the poet’s yearning for death is not just an expression of a classical contemptus mundi, since it is strongly tied to his fantasy of achieving pure subjectivity. The libidinal investment in death is one of the crucial reasons why the poet chooses to place his time with Laura in vita within the framework of Good Friday – the date of his meeting with her as well as the date of her death – out of an understanding of the Christian Passion as a subliminal jouissance, the neutralization of the self in submission to the Other by means of the death drive:⁶⁰ Tu ài li strali et l’arco, fa di tua man, non pur bramand’, io mora;

 Cf. Petrarch’s famous “Italia mia”: “Signor, mirate come ’l tempo vola / et sì come la vita / fugge et la Morte n’è sovra le spalle” [Lords, see how time flies and how life flees, and how Death is at our backs] (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 128.97– 99). He explains, in addition. how life is a kind of death – “questa morte che si chiama vita!” [this death which is called life!] (216.11), “’l mio vivere è morte” [my life is death] (270.43) – and assures the reader that he never appreciated worldly life very much if it was not for Laura (331.25). He is generally extremely occupied with the idea of death’s omnipotence and omnipresence in our lives: “We all are constantly dying, I while writing these words, you while reading them, others while hearing or not hearing them; I too shall be dying while you read this, you are dying while I write this, we both are dying, we all are dying, we are always dying (omnes morimur, semper morimur)” (Familiares XXIV.1).  Cf. Mary Frances Wack, who explains how the Provençal poets were heavily inspired by the Christian Passion where Christ submitted to a violent death by virtue of a transcendental love: “If Christ himself had suffered lovesickness to the death, then his human imitators may have found it possible and strategic to do as well” (Lovesickness in the Middle Ages 173).

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

67

ch’ un bel morir tutta la vita onora. […] O di che vaga luce al cor mi nacque la tenace speme onde l’annoda et preme quella che con tua forza al fin mi mena! [You have your arrows and bow; let me die at your hand, not from this yearning: a good death honors one’s whole life. […] O from how lovely a light was that tenacious hope born in my heart, with which she binds and oppresses it, she who with your power leads me to death!]. (207.63 – 65, 76 – 78)

A strong libidinal investment in death is not uncommon in Provençal poetry; so, it is not just Christianity which imposes a strong influence on Petrarch’s poetry. In his “En amor trob pietat gran” the Provençal poet Pierre Milon dissolves amore into a! mor! – that is to say ah! death! – while Cavalcanti (of il dolce stil novo) correspondingly insists that “morir m’è gioco” [dying for me is joy] (XI.7).⁶¹ In his “Trattato d’amore,” Guittone d’Arezzo likewise confirms that mor in the name amor indicates death, morte: Amor dogliosa morte si po dire, quasi en nomo logica spozione; ch’egli è nome lo qual si po partire en “a” e “mor,” che son due divisione. E “mor” si pone morte a difinire. [Grieving love may be called death, is in its name an almost logical separation; for it is a word which can be parted in “a” and “mor” that are two divisions. And “mor” is written to define death]. (Le rime 242.1– 5)

The deadly love-wound is, as in Christian imagery, a source of both agony and pleasure. The traditional courtly metaphor narrates how the lover is struck by Amor’s mortal arrows, as, for example, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival: manec mîn meister sprichtet sô, daz Amor unt Cupîdô unt der zweier muoter Vênus

 The medievalist scholar Marco Santagata claims that this conjunction is one of the most frequently quoted in the literature of amour courtois: “the juxtaposition love/death (amore-morte) is the most frequent in the literary poetry” (“Il giovane Petrarca e la tradizione poetica romanza: modelli ideologici e letterari” 48 [my translation]).

68

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

den liuten minne gebn alsus, mit geschôze und mit fiure. diu minne ist ungehiure. [Many a master of mine says that Amor and Cupid, and Venus the mother of these two, put love into people with darts and torches. Such love is unwholesome]. (X.532.1– 6)

Love’s attack is perceived both as tremendous pain and tremendous delight caused by “quello stral dal lato manco / che mi consuma et parte mi diletta” [that arrow in my left side whichy destroys me and at the same time delights me] (209.12– 13): “quello aurato et raro / strale onde morte piacque oltra nostro uso!” [that rare golden arrow for which death was pleasing beyond our custom!] (296.7– 8). The medieval representation of innamoramento as a wounding is traditional, and long monologues in the early secular romances are dedicated to the description of this love-wound (cf. the old French Eneas II.8066 – 67 and 8159 – 63, Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès vv. 439 – 40, 445 – 55, 694– 96, and 762– 92, and Le Chevalier au Lion vv. 1366 – 78). Marie de France gives the following concise definition of love: “Amur est plaie dedenz cors / et si ne piert nient defors” [love is a wound in the body, and yet nothing appears on the outside] (Guigemar vv. 483 – 84). The iconography of love is fully elaborated in Le Roman de la Rose, in which the sleeping protagonist discovers the fountain that mortally wounded Narcissus. He looks more closely and beholds an image that is not his own, but that of a rosebud, a symbol of the loved object. At this instant, he senses an immense desire to pick it, which is immediately followed by an attack with five arrows by the god of love (Beauty, Simplicity, Sincerity, Company, and Beautiful Appearance) that “m’a aidié, si m’a neü” [helped me, but also hurt me] (v. 1874). The description of his dramatic enthralment to the god of love is wild and remarkably equivocal, as is the myth of Narcissus. The attack is concurrently delightful and sinister since the rosebud gives him life and death at one and the same time: “ce est ma mort, ce est ma vie, / de nule rien n’ai plus envie” [it is my death and my life and there is nothing that I desire more] (vv. 2889 – 90, cf. furthermore Reason’s paradoxical narration of love, vv. 4263 ff.). In Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s unfinished poem, the lover eventually (after many hardships) gets his rosebud – a thinly disguised allegory of the female genitalia (vv. 21689 – 96). The courtly perception of love chimes well with the myth of Narcissus. This means that the courtly ambivalence is inscribed within the problem of self-consciousness’s relationship with the other, that is to say, the relation between identity, difference, and the other.

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

69

Ambiguity, in Jean de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s unfinished poem, is rooted in the very nature of sensual pleasure. Pleasure is anti-teleological, having no goal besides itself, and it consequently designates a fall from heavenly perfection.⁶² In Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto, the wounding arrow of Amor is plainly termed pleasure (piacere, 2272), and its painful feature is equally declared to originate in pleasure (2330 ff.). In the highly influential De consolatione philosophia by Boethius, the feminine personification of philosophy explains: “All pleasure hath this property, / She woundeth those who have her most […] And in our hearts doth leave her sting” (III.vii). However, the scholastic Thomas Aquinas rejects the notion that love should have any power to wound: “love is not a wounding passion, but rather one that preserves and perfects” (Summa Theologica II.i.28.5), for true love (as amor sui) is incommensurable with that which is foreign to it. Aquinas’ concept of love is here contrary to that of Christian theologians like Abelard and Bernard de Clairvaux, who accentuate the torment and self-abandon in the course of love toward God, who is the only resting place of the soul: “our heart cannot be quieted (inquietum est cor nostrum) till it may find repose in thee,” as Augustine has it in his Confessions (I.1).⁶³ The crucifixion is not only an expression of sorrow and suffering; it also points beyond the wound toward the healing, beyond death toward revival. The sacred wounds of Christ signify suffering, misery, and death (the Fall of Man), but also pity, salvation, and eternal life (the Resurrection). Consequently, the return of Christ is an indispensable step in the Christian dialectics of love, where the Fall of Man is preliminary to the Resurrection achieved through the

 Compare the recounting of Augustine, who remarks how in the garden of Eden before the Fall Adam was a stranger to sensual pleasure. This in no way means that he and Eve could not have sexual intercourse, but it was only an act of the will, meaning Adam felt as little sexual excitement by an erection as he would have felt when he stretched out his finger (cf. Civitas dei XIV.23).  Petrarch is far from the scholasticism of Aquinas and Dante. He is in his De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia most critical toward science and rationality (and in particular the scholastics’ reverence for Aristotle), which distance man from true spirituality, and which make man believe that he can attain knowledge about things that are principally concealed from him, consequently resulting in arrogance. Instead of the philosophical knowledge of virtue, he emphasizes love as the essential source of true spirituality: “For it is one thing to know, and another to love” (IV.108). Petrarch is much closer to the ardently passionate Augustine, whose opening remark in his Confessions about the restlessness of our hearts serves as a superior dictum in Petrarch’s poems if one is to believe Kenelm Foster: “indeed it is fairly clear that the Canzoniere as a whole is intended as a sort of verification of St. Augustine’s inquietum est cor nostrum” (“Beatrice or Medusa” 54).

70

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

crucifixion and death of Christ. The Fall of Man represents suffering and death (Genesis 3.16 ff.), but the Fall is vanquished through a secondary negation (the death and resurrection of Christ) whereby the negative is negated: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15.21– 22).⁶⁴ The Christian dialectics between sorrow and joy, life and death, suffering and bliss, is equally evident in Augustine, who explains how God “smitest us that thou mayest heal us, yea, slayest us, that we should not die away from thee” (Confessions II.ii). Petrarch depicts God in like manner when, after the death of Laura, he cries: “Morte biasmate; anzi laudate Lui / che lega et scioglie, e ’n un punto apre et serra, / et dopo ’l pianto sa far lieto altrui” [Blame Death; rather, praise Him who binds and looses, and in an instant opens and closes, and after weeping can make one glad] (275.12– 14). The continuous oscillation between life and death, affirmation and negation, recalls the common notion of the god of love, who paradoxically both wounds and heals, and who simultaneously deals life and death: As the mother of the innocent Lavinia explains to her daughter, “il tient la mort et la santé / il resane quant a navré” [he both owns death and health; he cures what he has wounded] (Eneas II.7989 – 90). Petrarch is loyal to the traditional amorous imagery of the Middle Ages: “Amor con tal dolcezza m’unge et punge” [Love with so much sweetness both wounds me and anoints my wound] (221.12). But he blends the courtly and the Christian paradigms of love, and so both registers must be taken into account, for instance, in reading the following: “quando / morend’ io, non moria mia vita inseme, / anzi vivea di me l’ottima parte” [when though I died my life would not have died, but rather the best part of me would have lived on] (331.43 – 5). Love for Petrarch is both an expression of a yearning for death (a! mor!) and an expression of a yearning for immortality as a negation of death (a-mor): “Di mia morte mi pasco et vivo in fiamme, / stranio cibo et mirabil salamandra!” [I feed on my own death and live in flames: strange food and a wondrous salamander!] (207.40 – 41). His description of himself as a salamander, which feeds on its own death, and which lives in flames (a common medieval belief), paradoxically associates the flaming and death with something blissful and affirmative. The flame plays a key part in Petrarch’s description of love, and although it represents destructive and negative forces, it likewise embodies purifying and affirmative energies. It is a twofold metaphor for the poet’s erotic desire (the sensual)

 Cf. also Augustine’s De doctrina christiana (I.29 – 30).

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

71

and the spiritual desire for a purification through which the soul elevates itself above matter. Plato explains how purification consists in the abandonment of the sensual in favour of the spiritual in the quest of being oneself for oneself: And does not the purification consist in this which has been mentioned long ago in our discourse, in separating, so far as possible, the soul from the body and teaching the soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together from all parts of the body, and living, so far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone by itself, freed from the body as from fetters? (Phaedo 67c-d)

Petrarch’s iconography of death should be understood within the framework of such otherworldly or idealist thinking – for example when he claims that if his heart is destroyed, it will only grow stronger: “s’ io l’occido più forte rinasce” [if I kill it, it is reborn stronger than before] (264.62). The poet’s panegyric on the torments of love has its origin in a violent negativity characteristic of a theological/ metaphysical sublimation in which the conditional is violently renounced in order to achieve a pure spirituality, where the absolute and pure self is undisturbed and alone with itself. The flame exhibits the purification, the soul’s quest for pure spirituality through negation of the temporal self.⁶⁵ Petrarch’s delight in the painful flames of love is often marked by melancholia. In Secretum meum, he informs Augustine that he enjoys the pain, and that he savors his own tears and sufferings: “But what one may call the climax of the misery is that I so feed upon my tears and sufferings with a morbid attraction that I can only be rescued from it by main force and in spite of myself” (II, 84– 5). The poet is astonished at the human inclination to surrender oneself joyously to that which causes agony and sorrow: Novo piacer che ne gli umani ingegni spesse volte si trova, d’amar qual cosa nova più folta schiera di sospiri accoglia! [Strange pleasure that in human minds is often found, to love whatever strange thing brings the thickest crowd of sighs!]. (37.65 – 68)⁶⁶

 The paradigm of absolute spirit is of course God whose name (according to Johannes of Damascus, ca. 675 – 749) is derived from the word for “fire”: “from αἴθειν, that is, to burn, because God is a fire” (De fide orthodoxa I.9).  Suffering as a necessary condition of love is common in Medieval poetry in which Guido delle Colonne, for instance, declares that: “Niente vale amor sanza penare” [Love has no value without sufferings] (I.37). Odo delle Colonne correspondingly links suffering, joy, and

72

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

In modern times Freud was equally astonished by “the mysterious masochistic trends of the ego” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 14). Where does the tendency to repeat painful remembrances (the repetition-compulsion) come from? Freud solved the riddle when he observed his grandchild playing with a wooden reel with a string attached to it. This it repeatedly tossed away, whereupon it pulled it back crying out o-o-o-o and a-a-a-a. Freud interpreted these vowels as fort (gone) and da (here), and he thought that the reel functioned as a sign of the mother whose disappearance and reappearance were symbolized by the child through playing. The play was an acting-out of something quite painful (the absence of the mother), which through the repeated mastering (the symbolization) was transformed into something active and delightful. One of the most enthusiastic interpreters of this modern fable is Jacques Lacan, who mentions it often because he sees it as an illustration of the symbolization of language. Deeply inspired by Hegel and Heidegger, Lacan claims that the episode demonstrates how the word or the sign creates a dynamic synthesis between absence and presence: “Absence is evoked in presence, and presence in absence” (Freud’s Papers on Technique 174). Moreover, he claims that the scenario reveals how language fundamentally stands in a negative relation to things; and he remarks that desire is situated in this process of negativity and difference, originating in the gap between words and things: “Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Écrits 262). This psychoanalytic digression offers a useful insight into the dynamics of Petrarch’s voluptas dolendi: Love is painful, but it is nevertheless a mastering – love is, through suffering, an evocation of the absent which becomes present in the contemplation – as, indeed, Augustinus tells Franciscus: “By that sad enchantment that belongs to lovers, you will have the power to see her though you are absent, and to hear her though she is absent, and to hear her though she is far away” (Secretum meun III, 143). Moreover, Petrarch explains to his friend Phillippe (Bishop of Sabina) that thus “does love ease the entire loss due to absence and death, and I see them all, whether dead or absent, and you among the first: and although I cannot come to you, I am with you” (Seniles XVI.4). Petrarch regards love as a space from which absence is mastered by means of the image, the sign, or the representation.⁶⁷ love together: “Distretto core ed amoroso / gioioso mi fa cantare” [My heart, tormented by love, / makes me sing joyously] (I.1– 2).  The image or the reflection is preliminary to any understanding of the conception of love in the Middle Ages. Andreas Cappelanus, in his manual of love, writes that love is inconceivable without the contemplation of the loved object: “only from the reflection of the mind upon

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

73

Suffering, then, is the cause of poetical pleasure since it is the poet’s source of inspiration, as is clear from the beginning of Rime sparse, where poetic speech and lamentation are juxtaposed: “vario stile in ch’ io piango e ragiono” [the varied style in which I weep and speak] (1.5). In addition, the poet’s “pure faith” (“pura fede”) in Laura is spoken of as one “per ch’ io tante versai lagrime e ’nchiostro” [for which I poured out so many tears and so much ink] (347.7– 8). And similarly, she is named the one “che i’ canto et piango in rime” [whom I sing and bewail in rhymes] (332.60). Crying and poetical creation are equated throughout the whole Canzoniere to such a degree that suffering is partly something which the poet laments, partly something which gives birth to his poetical production: Là ’ve cantando andai di te molt’anni or, come vedi, vo di te piangendo – [Where I went singing of you many years, now, as you see, I go weeping for you – ]. (282.9 – 10) Piansi et cantai; non so più mutar verso, ma dì et notte il duol ne l’alma accolto per la lingua et per li occhi sfogo et verso. [I wept and sang; I cannot change my style, but day and night I vent through my tongue and my eyes the sorrow accumulated in my soul]. (344.12– 14)

Furthermore, Petrarch fuses absence and presence, life and death, inasmuch as Laura functions as a mirror in which he alternately appears and disappears: “et così avolge et spiega / lo stame de la vita che m’è data / questo sola fra noi del ciel sirena” [and thus she both threads and unwinds the spool of my appointed life, this only heavenly siren among us] (167.12– 14). Laura (as Fate, Lachesis) makes him disappear whereupon she makes him reappear, after which she makes him emerge just to make him go away, etc. Laura is the symbolization itself; like a siren she recalls the celestial and harmonious siren song of the spheres (cf. Plato’s myth of Er in the tenth book of The Republic), but she also revokes the deadly Sirens whose seductive singing lead seamen to a gruesome

what it sees does this passion come” (De amore I.i.8 – 9). In consequence, love is made up by the gaze and thinking (ex visione et cogitatione, I.i.13). That is why Cappelanus maintains that it would be impossible for a blind man to fall in love (cf. I.v.6). Thomas Aquinas affirms something similar when stating that love could not exist without the word (logos): “Now love must proceed from a word. For we do not love anything unless we apprehend it by a mental conception” (Summa Theologica I.36.2).

74

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

death. In this way, the negative (death) is connected with the song and the poetic (the creative), and negativity takes an inevitable part in the unfolding of the poetical project since, as the poet declares: “mille volte il dì moro et mille nasco” [a thousand times a day I die and a thousand am I born] (164.13). The verses and the words are generated by the poet’s desire, which inflames his poetical productivity even as poetic composition raises his passion. Desire and poetry intermingle, and they are directed toward a subversive, auto-erotic and auto-affective pleasure that aims at the dissolution of the self in the Other: “mi struggo al suon de la parole / pur com’ io fusse un uom di ghiaccio al sole” [I melt in the sound of the words, as if I were a man of ice in the sun] (73.14– 15). Poetry for Petrarch is, metaphorically speaking, the reel by which Freud’s grandchild Ernst transformed painful absence into delightful presence by means of symbolization, and poetry serves further as the mirror in which Ernst later on played fort-da, now with the difference that it was not the mother, but himself that he symbolized in his playing fortsein – bending down in front of the mirror crying babi o-o-o-o, that is to say, baby fort. ⁶⁸ Here, the reflection of the self and the consciousness of self likewise involves a perception of the self as absent, different from itself, and ultimately dead – as we saw in the case of Narcissus. Laura is the instrument that renders possible the process of symbolization in Petrarch. She constitutes the dynamics of negativity from which the poet loses and seizes himself anew, from which he “dies” in the alienation of the other only to be “born” anew by means of the return of the self-consciousness into itself, etc. Furthermore, the alliance between deliverance and death, affirmation and negation, creation and destruction is concentrated in the identification of the poet with the mythical bird Phoenix: Là onde il dì ven fore vola un augel che sol, senza consorte, di volontaria morte rinasce et tutto a viver si rinova. Così sol si ritrova lo mio voler, et così in su la cima de’ suoi alti pensieri al sol si volve, et così si risolve, et così torna al suo stato di prima; arde et more et riprende i nervi suoi et vive poi con la fenice a prova.

 Cf. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 15n1.

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

75

[There whence the day comes forth flies a bird that alone, without consort, after voluntary death, is reborn and all renews itself to life. Thus my desire is unique and thus at the summit of its high thoughts it turns to the sun, and thus it is consumed and thus returns to its former state; it burns and dies and takes again its sinews and lives on, vying with the phoenix]. (135.5 – 15; my emphasis)

The poet, like the Phoenix, is unique and alone (sol), without a consort, which means that he is self-enclosed and self-present because self-begotten. The phoenix is like God, who is born of Himself (for and in Himself) through his son Christ, who is inseparable from and identical with His origin: “No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son” (Luke 10.22). It is an image of the poet’s attempt to substantiate his being without the presence of the other in favour of an ecstatic identification with the Other. Instead the poet seeks an ecstatic identification with an omnipotent Other, who lets him emerge into being without the contingent. The image of the phoenix reveals how the contingent, that is to say the inevitable detour of self-consciousness into the other, can be defeated through a flaming, all-embracing negativity, securing the subject absolute autonomy through the formula: I am my own origin, I am made, not begotten, without another, without a consort, by and for myself. The canzone expresses this formula of desire by means of a pun on the homonym sol, which indicates that the poet wants to be self-enclosed, unique, authentic, and autonomous (vv. 6 and 9). This is exactly what Petrarch, in another context, accentuates, namely that the “phoenix is unique” and thus noble (Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie IX.86). Moreover, the goal of desire must be achieved in solitude with the Other, who is Laura figured as the sun (v. 11) in which the poet phantasmagorically seeks to be dissolved, “risolva” (v. 12), and in which the poet’s self is consumed by the sheer negativity of the burning sun merely to be revived. Pure subjectivity is pure negativity: “Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit IV, 118). This is exactly what the poet visualizes in the figure of the Phoenix. It would be evident, even though Petrarch assures us of the opposite, that Laura is not an actual woman to him; she is rather a fictive mytho-poetical abstraction, an aesthetic representation. She is transformed into a poetic image through the negation of her concrete, particular characteristics, and so the poet is defined as an inverse Pygmalion, who – instead of experiencing that

76

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

art is transformed into life – perceives, in contrast, that he has transmuted the living and organic into stony art:⁶⁹ Pigmaliòn, quanto lodar ti dei de l’imagine tua, se mille volte n’avesti quel ch’ i’ sol una vorrei! [Pygmalion, how glad you should be of your statue, since you received a thousand times what I yearn to have just once!]. (78.12– 14)

In opposition to Pygmalion, Petrarch lets Laura undergo a metamorphosis from the particular and organic to the stony and universal. Moreover, it seems evident that, instead of being an actual woman with whom the poet fell in love, Laura is instead given the role of the poet’s artistic creation. It is often emphasized in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta that it is her image (imagine) which ardently engages the poet. This appears from sonnet 96, where the poet explains that love drives him to and fro, since he is paralyzed by the image of her which he passionately painted in his mind: “’l bel viso leggiadro che depinto / porto nel petto et veggio ove ch’ io miri” [that lovely smiling face, which I carry painted in my breast and see wherever I look] (5 – 6). The function of the image, which is at the core of Petrarch’s amorous poetry, is also accurately described by the Sicilian poet Jacopo da Lentini: Avendo gran disio dipinsi una pintura bella, voi simigliante, e quando voi non vio, guardo ’n quella figura, e par ch’eo v’aggia avante [Feeling a great desire, / I painted a picture, / fair lady, which has your likeness; / and when I do not see you, / I look upon that image, / and it seems that I have you before me]. (II.18 – 24)

The Lady is made absent in the image, merely to attain a more prolonged, symbolical presence – just as in the play of fort-da. Is Laura, perhaps, just a virtual alter ego for the poet? A contemporary pen friend, Giacomo Colonna, mocked him on the subject, to which Petrarch robustly responded:  It is probably this circumstance Sandra L. Bermann has in mind when she emphasizes how Laura is “an oddly absent presence” (Sonnet over Time 25).

4 Crucified in the mirror of love

77

What in the world do you say? That I invented the splendid name of Laura so that it might be not only something for me to speak about but occasion to have others speak of me… that the truly live Laura by whose beauty I seem to be captured was completely invented, my poems fictitious and my sighs feigned […] I wish indeed that you were joking about this particular subject, and that she indeed had been a fiction and not a madness! (Familiares II.9)

Critics have for centuries been struggling with this question: Was Laura a real, existing lady or was she a fictional, mythical-poetic construct? In this matter (as mentioned above) I side with Thomas P. Roche: “Laura may have existed. Laura may not have existed. Neither one of these possibilities will affect the reality of the myth that Petrarch created” (“The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s Canzoniere” 161). Let philologists fight over a matter the outcome of which would not change Laura’s basic poetic features, which (contrary to what Petrarch tries to prove to Giacomo Colonna) consist in ensuring the poet’s fame and immortality: “spero per lei gran tempo / viver, quand’ altri mi terrà per morto” [I hope through her to live a long time, when people will suppose I am dead] (119.14– 15). The songs of Laura therefore play a decisive role for Petrarch as the medium through which he ensures himself immortality. The poet’s quest for fame is inextricably linked with his tribute to and commemoration of Laura, as is also evident in one of Petrarch’s bucolic poems, in which Laura’s death is treated allegorically in a conversation between Socrates and Sylvanus (Petrarch). Here the latter regrets that his laurel tree was destroyed by a stroke of lightning: Illicet agnosci incipio digitoque Laurea cognomen tribuit michi, laurea famam; [My name began to be known; one would point me out to another. / The laurel gave me my name; my renown was due to the laurel]. (Bucolicum Carmen X.375 – 6)⁷⁰

Hence it is the laurel tree (Laura) that has secured the poet’s fame, and who has made his name known, making Laura not only his alter ego, but also his alter nomen. Overall, this is what Augustine blames him for in Secretum meum, namely that it is Petrarch’s passionate love for fame that has dictated his excessive desire for Laura. Thus, Laura plays a very active part in the creation of the poet’s identity: she is not merely a passive mirror for the poet, but rather that which creates and pre Cf. also Seniles, in which Petrarch claims that the laurel tree secured his fame: “In short, my laurel has afforded me this: to be known and tormented” (XVII.2).

78

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

supposes his existence. Without poetry Petrarch would not be anything at all, since self-consciousness (for Petrarch) is not just a fixed entity which can mirror itself independently and unaffectedly in the other. For the poet, the other is given by poetry, which in a dynamic process creates his self, and since he himself is the author of the poetry, he avoids the contingent in the evolution of consciousness that the encounter with a concrete other would produce. In this way, Laura is a non-contingent vehicle for the poet’s self-consciousness that not only has pure subjectivity as its objective, but which also seeks omnipotence and omnipresence in time: et se mie rime alcuna cosa ponno, consecrata fra i nobili intelletti fia del tuo nome qui memoria eterna. [and if my rhymes have any power, among noble intellects your name will be consecrated to eternal memory] (327.12– 14)

– as well as in space: del vostro nome se mie rime intese fossin sì lunghe, avrei pien Tyle et Battro, la Tana e l’ Nilo, Atlante Olimpo et Calpe. [with your name, if my rhymes were understood so far away, I would fill Thule and Bactria, the Don and the Nile, Atlas, Olympus, and Calpe]. (146.9 – 11)

Laura’s name will be known to posterity and thereby immortalized; and besides, her name will be spread throughout the world, making it omnipresent in time and space. Seeing that the laurel tree, i. e., Laura, gives her name to the poet (Laurea cognomen tribuit michi), one may conclude that it is also the poet’s own name that, through his alter nomen, will become omnipresent everywhere and at all times. Love’s poetic aim is to make the name present in the immensity of space and time, that is to say, to make subjectivity fully present through the other or the name. As Marcel Proust has it: “Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart” (The Captive 440).

5 Petrarch’s early modernity

79

5 Petrarch’s early modernity Vorrei e non vorrei. Mozart and Da Ponte, Don Giovanni

In Petrarch’s poetry, love is motivated by a desire for self-consciousness to concretize itself, and the immediacy of self-consciousness is therefore the fundamental goal of love. The self must, first and foremost, divide itself into something different whereby it loses its primary immediacy with itself (the doubling in the reflection, the division of the androgynous into two, the expulsion from paradise, etc.). The self must express itself in something other than itself so that alienation and the difference from itself (the negative) become manifest. The self exposes itself to a negativity through this transference of itself to something or someone other. However, the self seeks to overcome this primary loss of immediacy through a second negation, but this time of the other (in which self-consciousness expressed itself). Thus, by negating the other (the contingent), it is capable of reflecting itself back unto itself. In this way self-consciousness seeks to appear to itself (as an independent and positive identity) by a twofold negation where the self – in its course toward immediacy with itself – must first negate itself (ex-press itself), after which it must negate the other and the difference from itself. This is how the object of self-consciousness and love, that is to say, the immediate presence, is attained through a dialectical circle by a negation of the negation: “for the other of the other, the negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the identical, the universal” (Hegel, Science of Logic II.iii.3, 836). The ambiguity of love – which in the Christian and the courtly iconography of the Middle Ages is represented by the wound which simultaneously opens and heals – therefore originates in the ambivalent status which the other has been allotted by self-consciousness. The other must concurrently be subjected to negation and affirmation in relation to the subject, because the other constitutes the possibility of freedom and presence of self for self-consciousness. However, it is also the primary obstacle to this. Self-consciousness and love are condemned to endless frustration as they cannot exist without a fundamental difference from themselves, and it is paradoxically the neutralization of this difference which is their principal goal. It is only God who, in the words of Augustine, is “id ipsum et id ipsum et id ipsum” [the same, and the very, and the very self-

80

III Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: Petrarch’s Labyrinthine Mirror

same] (Confessions XII.vii), and who is able to say: “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3.14).⁷¹ The goal of love in Petrarch is to neutralize the fundamental difference from oneself (due to the inevitable relation to the other). The lover desires to see himself from the position of the other without the other (senza consorte) and to avoid the alienation inherent in the mirroring in the other (who in spite of being different from the self nevertheless constitutes the premise for it). The final goal of the poet’s amorous efforts is clear in sonnet 123 inasmuch as: “Connobbi allor sì come in paradiso / vede l’un l’altro” [I learned then how they see each other in Paradise] (5 – 6). A statement that is clearly a meditation on the First Corinthian Letter in which Paul states: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13.12). In the perfect fulfilment of love, we shall see each other face to face – without an alienating mirror – as we truly are in ourselves. Petrarch dreams of love, but unfortunately, his keen intelligence keeps him from yielding to these transcendental chimeras, since he is well aware of the insurmountable difficulties of this project, and this is why his poetry is fundamentally ambiguous: On the one hand, he emphasizes his aims towards autonomy, solitude, infinite subjectivity, and infinite freedom: “Quando posso mi spetro et sol mi sto” [As much as I can, I disentangle myself and stand free] (105.19). On the other hand, he repeatedly emphasizes that self-consciousness and subjectivity need a mirror, that is to say, another, in order to appear to themselves: “conoscete in altrui quel che voi siete” [you know in another what you are] (71.60). The poet consistently and inexorably demonstrates that it is impossible to see oneself see oneself, i. e., simultaneously to be the mirrored and the mirror: “’l veder voi stesse v’è tolto” [to see yourselves is denied you] (71.58). Yet, through an endless approximation, Petrarch seeks to transcend the difference between the self and the other, the lover and the beloved, and finally the difference between the signifier and the signified. The poet in this way renounces individual-

 According to Aquinas, the most adequate name for God is the name which He gave to Moses in the burning bush, qui est (cf. Summa theologica I.13.11 and Summa contra gentiles I.22). In God, there can be no distinction between essence and existence; He has not been given his existence but is his existence; His essence is to exist. Conversely, there are no other Creatures where a distinction between essence and existence does not apply. No Creature is his own existence, as it is no Creature’s essence to exist. Existence as such (ipsum esse) is God’s essence, and the name derived from it is most adequate for Him. The names that man employs in his speech about God are derived from the conditional forms of experience and primarily express these; but the name, qui est, does not denote a conditional form, but the ocean of infinite substance.

5 Petrarch’s early modernity

81

ization and strives to establish a solitary community with himself (as a self-declared cittadin de’ boschi). But the attempt to attain a state of autonomy, selfsufficiency and unity with himself does not end in manifesting an absolute ground for the self. If anything, the efforts reveal a subjective groundlessness. In Rime sparse, subjectivity is continuously dissolved and fragmented, as the developing self-consciousness is constantly understood in terms of absence, division, suffering, exile, and death. Instead of absolute subjectivity, the poetic endeavour results in a fragmentation of the subject, sparsa anime fragmenta. In the well-chosen words of Giuzeppe Mazzotta, Petrarch’s poetic project executes an “articulation of a fractured persona” (The Worlds of Petrarch 148). Petrarch, then, breaks with a predominant hierarchical and categorical thinking of the Middle Ages in favour of a phenomenology which, for better or worse, underlines the dependency of self-consciousness on a contingent other. The ambivalence of Petrarch’s poetry resides in this conflict. In sum, Petrarch points to the Nominalist transition from the Middle Ages to early modernity, where the idea of the reflection’s determining role for self-consciousness becomes paradigmatic, as in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed Salutes each other with each other’s form. For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all. (III.iii.106 – 112)

No, this is not strange at all, but it was strange prior to Petrarch: The subject is no longer merely a static entity or substance, which mirrors its transparent substance in a metaphysical other (in analogy with another Creature like oneself that ideally mirrors the Creator and the cosmos). From Petrarch and onward through the ascent of the Nominalist worldview in the early modern epoch, the subject becomes a continuous, dynamic process of creation brought into being by the rendezvous with the other. Love is a death sentence that causes me to be.

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism” Can nothing speak? The Two Gentlemen of Verona III.i.199

1 The question of nothingness ‘Nothing’ is the force That renovates the World – Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems # 1563

The works of William Shakespeare perform a veritable “Nichtian glossery,” as Joyce has it in Finnegans Wake (83).⁷² A comprehensive range of meanings of

 The literature dedicated to the question of the signification of “nothing” in the works of Shakespeare is not comprehensive. Nevertheless, there are some excellent studies from which I have benefited greatly. Of the studies of the signification of the word in general in Shakespeare’s works, I would first of all like to draw attention to Rosalie Colie’s eminent Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 219 – 51, which analyses the Renaissance’s great interest in paradoxes – and among these the paradox of nothingness (also in Shakespeare). I also recommend Paul Jorgensen’s article, “Much Ado About Nothing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5/3 (1954), 287– 295. It offers many fine references to the usage of the word “nothing” in the English literature of the Renaissance. David Wilbern has written an indispensable article, “Shakespeare’s Nothing,” in Representing Shakespeare, eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 244– 63, in which he probes the inexhaustible meanings of the word, which he analyses utilizing a psycho-linguistic approach, which stresses the progressive ambivalence of the notion. As concerns studies focusing on single plays, King Lear has probably attracted most attention. From a semiotic perspective Robert Fleissner has written about “The ‘Nothing’ Element in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13/1 (1962), 67– 70, and Brian Sheerin offers an excellent elucidation of the question of nothingness in connection with sovereignty in “Making Use of Nothing: The Sovereignties of King Lear,” Studies in Philology 110/4 (2013), 789 – 811. Others have seen an existential drama in King Lear’s confrontation with nothingness – for example, William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1966), 171– 263 and Thomas R. Roche, Jr., “‘Nothing Almost Sees Miracles’: Tragic Knowledge in King Lear,” in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (New York: G. K. Hall, 1981), 136 – 62. For a more psychologically oriented analysis of nothingness in King Lear, see Sigurd Burckhardt, “King Lear: The Quality of Nothing,” Minnesota Review 2 (1961), 33 – 50. For articles preoccupied with the aspect of creation and destruction pertaining to nothingness in King Lear, see Edward W. Taylor, “King Lear and Negation,” English Literary Renaissance 20/1 (1990), 17– 39, and James L. Calderwood, “Creative Uncreation in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37/1 (1986), 5 – 19. The theme of nothingness as an emblem of evil in Christian theology is analysed by David Levin, “‘Can you make use of nothingness?’: The Role of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-005

1 The question of nothingness

83

the word “nothing” proliferates across the tragedies, comedies, history plays, romances, as well as the sonnets and poems. The term encompasses a rich variety of significations such as: death, nonsense, anxiety, imagination, fantasy, lies, creativity, creation and destruction, the female sex, meaninglessness, eroticism, emptiness, jealousy, love, and art. With an antithesis typical of Shakespeare, one might say that the playwright “speaks an infinite deal of nothing” (The Merchant of Venice I.i.114). In the works of the English bard, one often finds infinity and nothingness within the same sentence. An infinity of nothings is nothing, yet also infinity. And this ambivalence never subsides in the works of the poet. In my reading of Shakespeare, I have often been fascinated and captivated by his playful, metaphorical usage of the word “nothing”. For Shakespeare is, indeed, much ado about nothing, and one is almost tempted – in the words of the passionate Cleopatra’s hyperbolical lament at Antony’s suicide – to exclaim: “All’s but naught” (Antony and Cleopatra IV.xv.82). For Cleopatra, all is reduced to nothing by Antony’s death; but in Shakespeare’s poetical universe there prevails a reversibility between these two cosmic notions – everything and nothing – since everything sometimes dissolves into an all-devouring nothingness, while everything sometimes emerges from sheer nothingness. I would claim that the latter is the case in the comedies, whereas the former is the case in the tragedies. The tragedies are brutally enacted in the negative or destructive dimension of nothingness. Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear depict a scene that offer only loss, fear, anxiety, and death to the characters, as everything is levelled by nothingness. Conversely, the comedies are performed against the background of a positive and creative nothingness that allows the actors to capture an identity

Nothingness in King Lear,” in “And that’s true too”: New Essays on King Lear, eds. Francois Laroque, Pierre Iselin, and Sophie Alatorre (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 141– 164, and the female body in connection to nothingness is examined by Peter L. Rudnytsky, “‘The Dark and Vicious Place’: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear,” Modern Philology 96/3 (1999), 291– 311. Hamlet has also drawn given rise to several studies. Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster give a philosophical reading of the question of nothingness in Hamlet in “It Nothing Must,” in their Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine (New York: Pantheon, 2013), 26 – 40, as does Andrew Cutrofello in “Hamlet’s Nihilism,” in The Movement of Nothingness: Trust in the Emptiness of Time, eds. Daniel M. Price and Ryan J. Johnson (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group, 2012), 117– 140. For the connection between the body and nothing in Hamlet, I refer to Phyllis Gorfain, “When Nothing Really Matters: Body Puns in Hamlet,” in Bodylore, ed. Katharine Young (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 59 – 87 and John Hunt, “A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39/1 (1988), 27– 44. Finally, I would draw attention to a great article on nothingness in Othello by Daniel J. Vitkus, “The “O” in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness,” in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 347– 362.

84

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

and a world which really are not. However, through playing, puns, masquerade, buffoonery, and sweet folly these are enlarged and thus attended by a merry feeling of freedom as the individual (with the help of the imagination) raises himself above necessity. The notion of nothingness, as advanced by the poet, marks a fundamental weakening of metaphysics and theology in favor of a strengthening of the Renaissance conception of man as made by and in himself. This brings about an ambivalent “nihilism”, which signifies either the progressive and increasing power of the mind (active nihilism), or a decline and recession of the mind’s possibilities of manifesting itself (passive nihilism). Furthermore, the ambivalence of nothingness is expressed in Shakespeare’s skepticism towards the metaphysical narcissism to which particularly the characters in the tragedies fall prey, and whose transcendental aspirations towards subjectivity and self-presence end in emptiness and nothingness. John Hunt notes that “[m]ost of Shakespeare’s tragedies tell the story of an arrogant man who mistakes his grandiose constructions of reality for reality itself. From Richard II to Coriolanus, his heroes attempt forcefully to impose a deluded conception of reality on the world, and reality brings them down” (“A Thing of Nothing” 43). The protagonist is faced with the inevitability of nothingness which – while trying to strengthen his power in the face of powerlessness – he heroically, but desperately tries to fight off, insisting on the greatness of his own self. When the mad King Lear recalls how his daughters Goneril and Reagan affirmed his own idea of himself as omnipotent and omnipresent – “they told me I was every / thing” (King Lear IV.vi.104– 5) – the tragedy conversely demonstrates that (in the words of the fool) he is in fact impotent and a nothing: “thou art an O without / a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a / Fool, thou art nothing” (I.iv.189 – 91). Starting out with a megalomaniac idea of embodying absolute sovereignty, King Lear eventually discovers that an entity which is everything literally has nothing to compare itself to and thus implodes into nothingness itself. Being everything implies an elimination of the otherness indispensable for selfknowledge and thus brings about a vacuous state of blank immediacy; entertaining the idea of being everything is equal to defining oneself in absolute terms – a synonym of the emptiness of a tautology. The disquieting thought of being nothing, which characterizes a tragedy like King Lear, is also expounded in other tragedies, such as Coriolanus, where the rejection of family relations and society as a whole is carried out in favor of a heroic feeling of unity with oneself, a choice that results, however, only in tragic nothingness, where everything ends in nothingness. For as Augustine writes in Civitas dei: “to have being in oneself, that is, to follow one’s own pleasure, is not to be nothing already but to come nearer to being nothing” (XIV.13). Hamlet presents a similar case, as the protagonist’s in-

1 The question of nothingness

85

satiable desire for pure, transparent being proves to be a longing for pure nothingness. Bruno Hillebrand has a keen eye for this when in his Ästhetik des Nihilismus he draws attention to an uncanny elective affinity between idealism and nihilism, as the former potentially contains the realization of the latter: “pure ideality turns into nothingness” (12).⁷³ In Shakespeare, “nothing” takes on both destructive and constructive guises, designating both affirmation and negation. The significance of nothing is thus ambiguous in Shakespeare, indicating a radical freedom, whose innermost core is precisely ambiguous insofar as it constitutes the possibility for creation and destruction at the same time. The freedom of nothingness is a doubleedged sword. As seen in the epigraph from Emily Dickinson, nothingness is the force that renovates the world. Nothing is a trope for becoming, and considered as transformation, every becoming is both destruction and production – a realization that proves to be a prominent feature in Shakespeare’s works. In the sense of transformation every becoming involves nothing, for, as Aristotle points out in his Physics, every potential change latently entails a relative and a categorical nothing: “Now we, too (who recognize both ‘form’ and ‘lack of form,’ or ‘shortage,’ as factors in becoming), assert that nothing can ‘come to be,’ in the absolute sense, out of non-existence, but we declare nevertheless that all things which come to be owe their existence to the incidental non-existence of something; for they owe it to the ‘shortage’ from which they started ‘being no longer there’” (I.191b; my emphasis). Transformation involves a change in essence which over time manifests itself as destruction with regard to the past or as production with regard to the future: When something changes, it is no longer that which it was, and thus nothing is present in transformation. Consequently, when he complains about Cressida’s lack of constancy in betraying his love in favor of Diomedes from the opposing camp, Troilus understands this typical inconstancy in matters of love on the part of women with reference to an all-devouring and merciless inconstancy of time, which flattens everything to a dusty nothing: “And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, / And mighty states characterless are grated / To dusty nothing” (Troilus and Cressida III.ii.182– 4). Time is the discursive manifestation of nothingness and negativity, as it is comprised of a nothing both past and future: [T]here is really no such thing as time, or at least […] it has only an equivocal and obscure existence […] Some of it is past and no longer exists, and the rest is future and does not yet exist; and all time, whether in its limitless totality or any given length of time we take, is entirely made up of the no-longer and the not-yet; and how can we conceive of that

 My translation.

86

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

which is composed of non-existents (μὴ ὄντων) sharing in existence (οὐσίας) in any way? (Aristotle, Physics IV.217b-18a)

Time is synonymous with nothing, and this non-being (μή ὀν) of time must be understood in accordance with the modalities of time, that is, the past and the future which determine the present now out of an absence and a nothing. The now is at one and the same time that form from which time can never escape and that form in which it cannot turn into being, and thus one might say that the present now does not really exist. If one thinks of time on the basis of the present now, one will have to conclude that it does not exist. The now is given simultaneously as that which no longer is and as that which has not yet come into being. In consequence, it must be said to be what it is not, and at the same time not to be what it is: “it is nothing as the individual Now, for as I pronounce it, this proudly exclusive Now dissolves, flows away and falls into dust” (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature § 258, 36). Time is indeed a dusty nothing.

2 Nominalism and nothingness Shakespeare’s metaphor of nothing – primarily understood as continuous transformation and becoming – commences with a keen preoccupation with representation. The question of representation comes to the fore in early modernity when the relationship between words and things becomes increasingly problematic. A gap between the two seems to widen, as words no longer function as emblematic icons for things; rather words seem to produce more words, referring to ever more words – and it is here that nothing emerges. The emptiness between words and things – “the gap that is now opened up between things and words,” which according to Foucault dates back to the late Renaissance (The Order of Things 129 – 30) – as well as the emptiness between the words themselves, point to a nothingness that is experienced as an unreal and frightening absence, but also as an inherent chance of renewal, change, and artistic innovation. Within the nothingness of representation, one can both lose and seize oneself; and the schism between the representation and the represented and the freedom following in the wake of this is either perceived as loss of an indispensable logical coherence or as potential for the creation of new relations and meanings. In the Middle Ages, the world was ideally interpreted per speculum creaturarum, i. e., as a perfect system of signs mirroring the Creator, God himself. Thinking was to take its point of departure from a conception of immanence, which on the whole constituted a hierarchical system of slumbering signs (signa) com-

2 Nominalism and nothingness

87

pletely dependent on God. In their own peculiar way, these signs mirrored the Creator. The particular things or beings did not enjoy an autonomous, individual existence, but were rather signa and exempla of the divine exemplar. Augustine warns against the allurement of what he calls a miserable spiritual slavery to which one subjects oneself the moment one is too preoccupied with the representation rather than the represented, that is to say, when one confuses the signs with the things which they in reality represent: “It is, then, a miserable kind of spiritual slavery (miserabilis animæ servitus) to interpret signs as things (signa pro rebus accipere), and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light” (De doctrina christiana III.v). This would, for instance, be the case when love of one’s neighbor would not be conceived as love aimed at God, i. e., if one’s neighbor is loved for his or her own sake – as opposed to being loved as one of God’s transparent signs through which the Creator should rightfully be loved. From Augustine through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, interpretation of the relationship between words and things was founded in a largely Realist idea that taught how words are emblems for the inner substance of things, i. e., their essence. Eight hundred years after Augustine, the Realist worldview still subsisted – for example, in the mystical Platonism of the Franciscan Bonaventura: [A]ll creatures of this sensible world […] are shadows, echoes, and pictures, the traces, simulacra, and reflection of that First Principle […] They are signs divinely bestowed which, I say, are exemplars or rather exemplifications set before our yet untrained minds, limited to sensible things, so that through the sensibles which they see they may be carried forward to the intelligibles which they do not see, as if by signs to the signified. (The Mind’s Road to God II.11)

If we turn to Bonaventura’s friend Thomas Aquinas, who as a Dominican worked from a divergent Aristotelian point of departure, we nevertheless find the same Realist worldview: “and thus, the Creature is an analogy (analogia) of the Creator; for the Creature does not have being except insofar as [it] descends from the first being; nor is it called a being except inasmuch as it imitates the first being” (Scriptum super Sententiis I. prol. 1. Q. 1.2 ad 2 Ad).⁷⁴ The Realists dominated the High Middle Ages and claimed the existence of Platonic ideas in the Christian world of thought in the shape of essences and universals. The Realist philosophy fused with a theological assumption of analogy – inherited from the early Church Fathers – and informed almost all levels of the Middle Ages. In a certain sense, nothing was understood individually, but only by analogy with an overall

 My translation.

88

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

universal pattern. The analogical participation of every element of the Creature implied a metaphysical unity and belonging. In Medieval Literary Politics, Sheila Delany explains how this theory of analogy invites us “to see the cosmos, political society, the family and the individual mind as analogue structures, with God, king or pope, father or husband, and the rational faculty supreme in their respective hierarchies” (47). And according to Paul Tillich, the Realism of the Middle Ages meant that everything has a universal world to which it belongs and in which it participates: “The so-called Realist philosophy of the Middle Ages is a philosophy of participation. It presupposes that universals logically and collectives have more reality than the individual. The particular (literally: being a small part) has its power of being by participation in the universal” (The Courage to Be 94). William of Ockham’s assault on the Realist semiotics seriously compromised this analogous worldview. For his Nominalism privileged the individual entities and did not understand reality and the particular under the aegis of universality. The ontology of Ockham is entirely an ontology of particular beings, insofar as nothing but exclusively singular substances exist in rerum natura. The transcendental Being and the Aristotelian categories, residing under the individual substances and their qualities, lose their metaphysical status and are left as pure conceptual entities, which only possess existence as logical attributes (which include notions like relations, negations, and universals). The loss of metaphysical grounding is crucially important to the relation between words and things: “Consequently there is no necessary and intrinsic correspondence between words and things” (Leff, William of Ockham 135). One might now go along with Pantagruel in François Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel: “It is misleading to claim that there is one natural language. Languages arise from arbitrary impositions and conventions amongst peoples” (III.xix, 482). Ockham’s Nominalism in many ways paved the way for early modernity and the fundamental recognition of the diversity of things. For from Ockham’s point of view, the real is the particular, and the uniqueness of things constitutes the very condition of their reality: “everything outside the soul exists as singular entities (realiter singularis) and as countable unity” (Librum primum sententiarum II.Q. 6, 196).⁷⁵ Consequently, universals have no existence in the world outside of the soul (extra animam); only particular things possess existence in themselves. This means that the world – being no longer understood universally – must necessarily be perceived within a specific lifeworld or a particular and limited horizon:

 All translations from this work, here and elsewhere in the volume, are mine.

2 Nominalism and nothingness

89

Any knowledge begins with the knowledge of individual things, and here from stems diverse peoples’ general notions (notitia universalium) about diverse things of diverse species; so, the student in Greece begins with the knowledge of the individual animals, which he finds there, and many of these are perhaps not to be found in Italy, and this is the same for the students in Italy or France or England or any other region. (III.Q. 6, 502)

In this way, Ockham’s philosophical Nominalism transforms every particular object into something that now exists in its own right. Thus, Ockham justifies the newly acquired dignity of the particular, which turns out to be the basis for a heightened appreciation of the complex diversity of objects and perspectives: “good Lord, how great their diversity and their artfulness, how many different tastes and opinions!” (Petrarch, Familiares X.5). Petrarch is a representative figure of this Nominalist spirit, since he embodies the discovery of the innumerable modes of the soul in his literary work, the multiplicity of the world in his topoi, landscapes and cultures, and finally the radical diversity of the self and of time. Nominalism is an important theme in Shakespeare, too, where the discontinuity between representation and represented is one of the most frequent problems for the characters. For instance, All’s Well that Ends Well is basically about the way the idea of a necessary identity between the word and the thing destroys and falsifies life: “Good alone / Is good, without a name; vileness is so: / The property by what it is should go, / Not by the title” (II.iii.128 – 31). Things, i. e., the represented, are autonomous and unaffected by the name, not part of the actual existence (property) of things, and it merely supplements them with an unreal nothing. Thus, the French king tries to explain to the vain and immature Bertram that the young, beautiful and wise Helena, who is orphaned and without a title, would prove an excellent choice, even if she cannot offer a noble family name – for what is the word in comparison to the thing itself? – to which he himself replies: The mere word’s a slave, Debosh’d on every tomb, on every grave A lying trophy, and as oft is dumb, Where dust and damn’d oblivion is the tomb Of honour’d bones indeed. (II.iii.137– 41)

The mere word is consequently a slave to a content long gone, which therefore no longer is in a strict sense; it is a grave or tomb which in an altogether inadequate way refers to the dead object, and the word is frequently misleading and fraudulent. The name in Shakespeare is often tied to death, to the possibility that the one who gives, receives, or bears the name will be absent from it. The name car-

90

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ries the named towards death, and death seems to cut the bearer loose from the name he carries or used to carry; death marks the event which separates the name from the body that used to bear it, thus making the name a confidante of death. To a certain extent, the name is only meaningful insofar as it can be separated and absent from the bearer, whose presence and reality it must inhabit (damn’d oblivion) in order to gain communicative significance. It follows that it comes to embody a kind of tomb and thus to border on melancholy or grief. After the death of Talbot in the first part of Henry VI, Sir William Lucy praises the departed in a rhetorical passage of eleven verses, all of which pay tribute to the many honorary titles of the great hero and patriot (IV.vii.60 – 71). However, the mean Joan la Pucelle scorns this highly stylized commemoration and confronts it with the inevitable fate of every human being, as she opposes public representation to bodily transitoriness: “Him that thou magnifiest with all these titles, / Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet” (IV.vii.75 – 6). This vicious and cynical Nominalist thought also illustrates how names and titles survive that which they represented in the first place, which is why the name denotes a discrepancy between things and words whose radicality is that of death. Surely it is no coincidence that Shakespeare chooses the name Parolles for Bertrande’s mean, treacherous and mendacious follower, insofar as it means words (implying: without content). The good-natured clown of the play has a keen eye for the nature of Parolles, pointing out that the latter’s essence is in fact nothing, in other words, the character of Parolles contains no real substance, and so he is – like words themselves – a sort of nothing. Parolles: Clown:

Why, I say nothing. Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing. To say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title; which is within a very little of nothing (II.iv.21– 26)

Through his kinship with language – i. e., through his name (title) – Parolles is a diminutive of nothing: he says nothing, does nothing, knows nothing, owns nothing, and has been given the name of nothing! Language in Shakespeare is a kind of nothing,⁷⁶ since words have become ghosts or shadows of something that used to be, and which is no longer present in their linguistic representa-

 The juxtaposition of language and nothingness is also apparent in The two Gentlemen of Verona (I.ii.70 ff.), Hamlet (IV.v.172), and All’s Well That Ends Well (II.i.91).

2 Nominalism and nothingness

91

tions. This, of course, is emphasized by the immanent inclination of words towards mendacity, which is based on their fundamentally metaphorical or fictitious nature, and which manifests itself in this deceitful way because they are under no obligation to anything existing. Therefore, words are to be perceived as “a thousand nothings” (II.v.29). According to the young king in King Henry V, words behave “most truely-falsely” (V.ii.190) since the sincere feelings he has for the French Princess Katherine are distorted in this foreign tongue unknown to both. However, the fundamental ambivalence of language also stems from the fact that in themselves words refer both to something that is and something that is not. Accordingly, the Princess is somewhat suspicious of the king’s courtship, as she is very aware that there is not necessarily a strict correlation between what men say and what they actually feel: “O bon Dieu, les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies!” [Oh, good God, the speech of men is full of deceit] (V.ii.116 – 7). Another of Shakespeare’s wise clowns argues in Twelfth Night that playing with words makes them irresponsible and reckless, and he declares that he would be happy if his sister did not have a name, since playing with it might make her wanton. When the clown makes us laugh at these words, it is because speculations on whether the words significantly affect the reality of the represented are, in fact, ridiculous. In addition, he states that words are rascals because they have no obligations toward facts: “words are very rascals, since bonds disgraced them” (III.i.20 – 21). Words contain a kind of nothing insofar as they denote an insurmountable difference between being and appearance, thus inscribing the lie as a correlate of truth, which is exactly what Prince Hamlet – himself a large-scale consumer of words – bemoans in one of his sardonic remarks: “Words, words, words” (Hamlet II.ii.192). The great French skeptic and humanist Michel de Montaigne, whose essays Shakespeare knew by heart through John Florio’s 1603 translation, similarly observes that humans live in a world where language is unreliable. He draws attention to the lack of coherence between representation and the represented as well as to the absurdly great number of words existing in comparison to the things they represent. Books annotate books; interpretations interpret other interpretations rather than interpret things: “It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other (nous ne faisons que nous entregloser)” (III.xiii – “Of experience” 818). Consequently, the thing itself disappears and the word is drained of its content. Words have become too many and things can not longer keep up with words. In addition, words and texts begin to copy and comment on each other, which from Montaigne’s perspective is a tragic fact. One loses one’s authenticity, which in turn is replaced

92

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

by conversation, which sets up kingdoms in the realm of appearances and outward show. However, examples can be found that this detachment of words from things was experienced as something positive, delightful, and liberating. Such is the case with the brilliant Don Quixote by Cervantes, which in fact thematizes the mistakes that stem from the protagonist’s exaggerated belief in the meaning of words, as well as an exaggerated belief in the reality of chivalric romances. Absolute belief in the inner and essential relationship between words and things appears comical to most people by the early 17th century. What is comical about the protagonist is that he unceasingly and indefatigably tries to bring his actions into accordance with his concepts, the well-known result being that “his actions were always discrediting his ideas, and his ideas his actions” (II.xliii 770). The linguistic situation in the Renaissance is nicely summed up in Cervantes’ masterpiece, which cheerfully encourages the emancipation of representation. Unlike his master, Sancho Panza says it outright: “I know more proverbs than will fill a book, and so many of them come crowding into my mouth when I’m talking that they’re all fighting against each other in there to get out, but my tongue just pushes out the first ones it comes across, even if they aren’t all that apt” (771– 72). Cervantes’s book on comical madness – embodied by the knight of the sorrowful countenance, who insists on the identity between conceptions and the world – has a precursor in Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, in which madness primarily denotes joy and the appropriateness of illusion, appearance and deceit. This stance is, for instance, displayed in artistic representation, which embodies a gentle and favorable illusion that one finds pleasurable to experience and watch, and which besides is “present whenever an amiable dotage of the mind at once frees the spirit from carking cares and anoints it with a complex delight” (51– 52). The Renaissance theory of representation would seem to anticipate that of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who declares: “Speech is a beautiful foolery: with it man dances over all things” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 234). Thus, it is to be expected when Signora Emilia in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier – itself a tribute to eloquence and disciplined sophistry – recalls: “After all, I once heard of a man so ingenious and eloquent that he did not want for material in writing a whole book in praise of a fly, others in praise of the ague and another in praise of baldness” (II, 125). Consequently, the subject matter is just a trivial pretext for the display of eloquence, wit and word play, whose very playfulness teasingly avoids all definite meaning. The rhetorical joy in the playfulness of language can be seen as the culmination of the Nominalist ascent that began in the fourteenth century. For according to Edmund Reiss, writers of fourteenth century texts “were less interested in restating moral and religious commonplaces than in investigating the possibilities and limitation of language. Responding to the developing Nominalism of the

2 Nominalism and nothingness

93

time and the pervasive uncertainty as to exactly what one could know, storytellers joined schoolmen in focusing not on truth itself but on such epistemological matters as the essential ambiguity of signs and the inherent complexity of language” (“Ambiguous Signs and Authorial Deceptions in Fourteenth-Century Fictions” 114– 115). However, the pleasure in language’s irresponsibility is not shared by all. Francis Bacon, for instance, in his Novum Organum deplores that “men believe that their reason rules over words; but it is also the case that words react and in their turn use their influence on the Intellect; and this has rendered Philosophy and the Sciences sophistical and inactive” (I.ii. § 59, 29). The mind has an inherent tendency to form delusions (idols), and if science and philosophy entertain any hope of progress, the mind must first seek to eliminate the prejudices with which language pollutes the power of judgment. Our endeavours to acquire secure knowledge is often unsuccessful, Bacon claims, because our minds may be likened to an uneven mirror which distorts the image, meaning that the ideas which the mind creates are not in accordance with the things they refer to. Insofar as the mind is under the influence of education, interests and its surroundings, its ideas will only to a lesser degree represent aspects of nature; when the mind creates ideas, its own nature is mixed up with these, but it is also influenced by its own prejudices. Like Montaigne, Bacon claims that the human belief that ideas convey aspects of nature is illusory, since man fails to see that to a great extent they mirror only himself. Moreover, he laments – as did Montaigne – that words produce more words; and he sees this as a particularly modern phenomenon, a sad result of the keenness of the Humanists to copy the classics: [T]he admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copy of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement. (The Advancement of Learning I.iv.2, 26)

Words now became more important than things, or to put it differently, the way things are expressed becomes more important than the actual content, which, contrary to all fitting linguistic practice, becomes subordinate to the tyranny of the representation. This tendency is clear in Shakespeare’s works, which are defined by the highest linguistic consciousness. In Shakespeare, language runs amok, especially in the early comedies where verbiage abounds. A circumstance which led Coleridge to note, that “sometimes you see this youthful god of

94

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words expressing them” (Shakespearean Criticism I, 86). Words often link themselves to other words as opposed to actual things, a fact which has led to much disapproval among critics. It is not just Coleridge who is unhappy with this linguistic profusion. Samuel Johnson, too, laments the bard’s waste of words and his surrender to an excessive employment of expressions that betray the basic (and desirable) correspondence between words and things: “In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. […] Not that always where the language is intricate the thought is subtle, or the image always great where the line is bulky; the equality of words to things is very often neglected, and trivial sentiments and vulgar ideas disappoint the attention, to which they are recommended by sonorous epithets and swelling figures” (Preface to Shakespeare’s Plays xxii-xxiii; my emphasis). In Shakespeare, the semblance between words and things are often ignored, Johnson says, and the critic ends his criticism of Shakespeare’s linguistic ambiguity by taking him to task for his quibbling and word play: “A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it” (xxiii-xxiv). Leo Tolstoy – who as a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist in his old age renounced everything he used to love (including Beethoven, Dante, Goethe, etc.) – rages, in his almost hysterical attempt at disproving Shakespeare’s imaginative merits, over the characters, who in his opinion “speak at extraordinary length, and amazingly about matters totally disconnected with the action, suggested by rimes, by puns rather than by thoughts” (Shakespeare IV, 404). In King Lear, according to Tolstoy, Shakespeare only has an eye for “turgid, empty language” (IV, 404), and Tolstoy goes on to conclude that in “all of them [Shakespeare’s works] the premeditated artificiality is manifest – it is manifest that he is not in earnest, that he juggles with words” (VI, 426). These certain types of critics have raged against Shakespeare’s similes, puns, gibberish, deliberate pretension, word play, his sacrifice of reason, truth, decorum, and appropriateness. Shakespeare, however, unceasingly insists on the arbitrariness of the sign, which entails a linguistic unreality and virtuality from which nothingness lets itself be known. Some critics have not appreciated this specific poetic quality in Shakespeare, and one would have to turn the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson for approval of this feature of Shakespeare’s language. For Jacobsen defines the poetical function of language as a “focus on the message for its own sake” (“Linguistics and Poetics” 356), and argues that this is the dominant and determining factor in verbal art, even if it is not the only one.

2 Nominalism and nothingness

95

Jakobson formulates a concept of literature richly represented by Shakespeare when claiming that the poetic function gives an advantage to the self-referential dimension of the sign, and that, moreover, it accentuates a declining referentiality towards a non-semiotic world: “This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (356). Furthermore, one may say that what unsettled Dr. Johnson and made Tolstoy indignant was Shakespeare’s radical freedom from systems: The poet does not articulate a theology, a metaphysic, an ethic, or a clearly defined political theory, which makes him equally emancipated from any ideology with his clever and vigilant heroes: Hamlet, Rosalind and Falstaff. It is this autonomy of representation and the unruliness of the imagination in Shakespeare which has disheartened some of his critics. Words, names, and concepts seem not to contain any substance in themselves, something that, for example, is flaunted in Falstaff’s provocative, but nonetheless most healthy and reasonable catechism on “honor” in the first part of Henry IV. The extra-moral and larger-than-life hero states his views on the unreality of honor and its lack of claim to reality: Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a-Wednessday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scrutcheon – and so ends my catechism. (V.i.131– 41)

“Honor” is but a name and consequently just air, since it is without substance, and seeing that no one can claim it, it is nothing but an ignoble monument over something which no longer is. “Honor” does not signify anything existent, nor anything permanent, which is why it is to be considered as nothing, a point also made clear in Nicholas Breton’s The Scholler and The Souldiour: Now there are diverse honours: one honour is gotten by riches, which is a thing nothing durable: of nothing grows nothing, then riches decayed, dies the honour, then that honour is nothing, in that it is a riches nothing durable. Another honour is got by valiance, and that is in war, whereby the captain wins the arms, that after during life […] do honourably bear; yet for all this, well considered, it is nothing, for that it is not certain: for that in war today is got, that tomorrow is lost: today he gets an ensign, that tomorrow loosest his own arms, body and all […] then this honour, I see likewise is the nothing, that is the nothing durable (24; my emphasis)

When “honor” is juxtaposed with nothing by Falstaff and Breton, they do so from a Nominalist and secular perspective, which denies that words and concepts par-

96

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ticipate in the reality of things (beings). Consequently, “honor” is a kind of creation ex nihilo, where something is created from something that is not, as is evident, too, in Bacon, when in his essay on vain honor he claims that “it often falls out that somewhat is produced of nothing” (Essays LIV – “Of Vain-glory” 137). Words are just words and in their arbitrary relationship with things by no means guarantee that things are represented as they actually are. Faced with lies, chimeras or fiction there is little language can do, and this is why the word is sometimes to be considered a nothing, as when Ophelia’s seemingly mad speech is described as nothing: “her speech is nothing” (Hamlet IV.v.7). Additionally, Shakespeare draws attention to the communicative failure that occurs when language does nothing but communicate with itself, thus proving its discursive nothingness – as when Ajax “raves in saying nothing” (Troilus and Cressida III.ii.54). Words bring forth words, which in turn signify other words, thus continually putting off the content or the represented. The word itself is a nothing if it does not refer to something that actually exists. This is the case in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Philostrate explains to Theseus that the silly play is nothing, just a figment of the imagination: “I have heard it over, / And it is nothing, nothing in the world” (V.i.77– 8). Hippolyta, too, maintains: “He says they can do nothing in this kind” (v. 88), to which Theseus replies: “The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing” (v. 89). Thus, as Aristotle explains, the word is in a sense a mere nothing when it does not signify something that exists – and since being is truth, non-being is simply what is false and deceptive: “Again, ‘to be’ and ‘is’ mean that a thing is true, and ‘not to be’ that it is false” (The Metaphysics V.1017a).

3 The nothingness of language Shakespeare’s interest in wordplay is to some extent, and primarily in the early works, invested in the pleasure of rhetorical sophistry.⁷⁷ However, since success-

 When the servant Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors complains about the thrashing he has received – “Marry, sir, for this something that you gave me for nothing” (II.ii.51– 2) – his master Antipholus of Syracuse brusquely replies: “I’ll make you amends next, to give you nothing / for something” (vv. 53 – 4). Another amusing illustration of the wordplay on “nothing” can be found in As You Like It, where Orlando is unhappy about the fact that his brother Oliver is keeping their father’s inheritance to himself – in conflict with the will – and generously showers him with nothing(!), while at the same time depriving him of that bestowed upon him by nature: “Besides this nothing that he so / plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave / me his countenance seems to take from me” (I.i.16 – 8). Furthermore, there is frequent enjoyable and

3 The nothingness of language

97

ful wordplay must necessarily be given a minimum of meaning to restrain nonsense, Shakespeare frequently endows his verses about “nothing” with a more serious meaning. This is, for example, the case in sonnet 136, which says: “For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold / That nothing me, a something, sweet, to thee” (vv. 11– 12). The beloved can think of the poet as a “nothing” (“one” is considered as “none,” v. 8) so long as she continues to think of this “nothing” (the poet) as a “something” dear to her. There is an obvious sexual pun on “nothing” as “no-thing,” just as there is a pun on “something” as “some-thing”. The final “nothing,” the one held up “to thee”, clearly refers to a penis, yet the “nothing” of the poet just barely escapes being the female sex as “no-thing”. The Dark Lady’s pleasure in holding or touching him would also seem to be motivated, not so much by her pleasure in holding him as “something,” but by her own autoerotic pleasure in touching her own sex – “For nothing hold me”. Hence, a large part of the pleasure enjoyed by the poet and the Dark Lady is rooted in this ambivalent sexuality where “nothing” and “some-thing” continually change place. Nothingness becomes naughtiness. ⁷⁸ Unsurprisingly, love poetry takes refuge in the notion of “nothing” insofar as “the totality” invokes its own opposition,⁷⁹ that is to say, in terms of the recurring dialectics of love and death. Thus, Shakespeare refers to himself as “nothing,” both as “worth nothing” and as a “nothing” after his death. Generally, the poet’s notion of “nothing” is employed in contrast to the beauty and worth of the beloved. Moreover, Shakespeare engages in a rhetorical game with “nothing” in sonnet 72, where he coquettishly – and with genuine false modesty! – declares that his artistic creations, “things,” in reality are nothing but unworthy “nothings”: “For you in me can nothing worthy prove” (v. 4), because “I am shamed by that which I bring forth, / And so should you, to love things nothing worth” (vv. 13 – 14). The allusion embedded here recalls “who will make me a liar, and make my speech nothing worth?” (The Book of Job 24.25). But although the poet’s “things” are deemed “nothings,” it is still by means of these nothings that he will survive his own demise, even if he expresses the hope that his artis-

comical banter that consist in taking nothing for a thing or to juxtapose nothing and something or someone (e. g., The Two Gentlemen of Verona III.i.193 – 203). Finally, the opposite is the case when something or someone is juxtaposed with nothing (cf. Twelfth Night III.i.26 – 31).  Naughty originally signified something worthless (a thing of naught; cf. Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy 157).  Cf. Rosalie Colie who contends how “the ideas of perfection and totality connected with omnis and the image of the circle combine with the nihilisms of the idea of nothing” (Paradoxia Epidemica 225).

98

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

tic reputation will follow him to his grave: “My name be buried where my body is” (v. 11). Of course, this wish is insincere since his name Will refers both to his desire and to his artistic testament. It is the name (and the sonnet functioning as the artist’s signature) that – notwithstanding its status as nothing, something insubstantial and non-existent – ensures that he can challenge his mortality and become a something in the future as opposed to a mere nothing. Art is a matrix in which something and nothing continuously engage dialectically with one another. In sonnet 72, Shakespeare indirectly reflects on the relation between writing and death: (1) All writing is always in the past tense as it posthumously points to a time lost; (2) the immortality of writing is comparable to that of the artistic monuments that paradoxically extend the existence of their creator after his death, although they are dead themselves, i. e., non-living surrogates for the deceased author and originator; (3) writing is apostrophic, and insofar as it exemplifies a form of life after death, it is also on intimate terms with a life shrouded in death; (4) in the act of writing the person addressed is absent, and in the act of reading the author is absent, which is why writing can be seen as expressing an activity lying beyond the death of both sender and recipient. In John Donne’s elegy “A nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day,” we find another example of the interaction between being and nothing. Love has destroyed the poet completely through the death of the beloved, and the inconsolable poet is deprived of everything to such a degree that he is being reborn to a completely negative existence: For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not. (vv. 14– 18; my emphasis)

Saint Lucy’s Day is celebrated on December 13 and was once believed to be the shortest day in the year. For the poet, it is a day when darkness reigns over light, when the world is completely dead, and so the poet is even deader than death. The death of the beloved has metaphorically killed the poet. After her death, the poet has been robbed of his essence – or rather his essence has been transformed into nothingness. The love apostrophized involves nothingness and has turned the poet into the absolute quintessence of nothingness. He is entirely nonexistent and hence does not even possess a shadow (v. 36), i. e., an appearance comprised of something and nothing. Consequently, the poet is “the grave / Of all, that’s nothing” (vv. 21– 22), while the poem itself can be said to be a tombstone erected to tell the story of the lovers. The metaphor is truly ambivalent. On

3 The nothingness of language

99

the one hand, he is the tomb containing all which is nothing, i. e., everything which is nothing or void of existence (evoking absence, darkness, and death) and which cannot die (because they have no existence) and be laid to rest. On the other hand, he is a tomb containing a nothingness that artistically speaking contains everything. Yet, nothingness also points towards a place from which God, the alchemist (v. 13), or the poet through absence, darkness and death can create something where there was nothing before. The poet’s nothingness ensures – despite the way it annihilates him – his greater resurrection in art, which occasions a permanent rebirth through things which are not. This is substantiated in Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Of Weeping” where the descent into nothingness concludes with allness. Separated from each other, the lovers are nothing (v. 9), for as conjoint lovers they possess an existence only possible through the other. Nevertheless, if their love is strong enough, their tears, round as the world itself, will be able to contain the universe, just like the craftsman who knows how to fashion a globe and “quickly make that, which was nothing, All” (v. 12). The artisan’s globe being a large circle, is a nothing, but it is transformed into all things that exist since it has a representation of the world depicted on it.⁸⁰ The image of his beloved transforms the poet’s tears into a world – because she is his world – in the same way that the artisan transforms a blank globe into a world by drawing a map on it. The poem is a fine illustration of how all and nothing become complementary entities through the idea and through representation: The blank globe has the shape of nothingness, but, as it is raised to the level of representation, it comprises all that exists, and the round shape of the tears emphasizes the absence of the beloved. The map of the world is not the actual world, the image of the beloved in the tears is not the beloved herself – they are merely representations and consequently contain presence and absence, everything and nothing, at one and the same time.⁸¹

 This thought also appears in the contemporary Ben Jonson who along similar lines writes: “let this circle be / Thy universe” (The Underwood 30.3 – 4).  In the Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari tells the following anecdote about Luca Signorelli: “It is related of Luca Signorelli that he had a son killed in Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face and person, whom he tenderly loved. In his deep grief, the father caused the child to be despoiled of his clothing, and, with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear, he painted the portrait of his dead child, to the end that he might still have the power of contemplating, by means of the work of his own hands, that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away” (361– 62). Artistic representation is here seen as a supplement to mortality and, in its capacity of supplement, it expresses an acknowledgement of a loss that is conversely sought annulled, thereby rendering the origin and purpose of art potentially ambiguous.

100

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

A similar idea is advanced in an English Renaissance poem entitled “On the Letter O,” which explicitly thematizes the connection between perfection and the idea of totality, as well as the nihilist notion of nothingness: Both concepts are present in the figure “O”. The letter “O” is in itself, the poet claims, framed by nothing, but the whole cosmos is a perfect totality made out of an “O”. “0” on the other hand is a number that, once deciphered, presents nothingness. Thus, the last couplet plays on the triviality and nothingness of paradox: But O enough, I have done my reader wrong, Mine O was round, and I have made it long. (Facetiae II, 400)

It follows that artistic representation at one and the same time involves all and nothing (it is both an “O” and a “0”). In this way, Renaissance poetry demonstrates that the rhetorical play with nothing is in no way harmless fun and folly, rather its playfulness entails true existential gravity and depth. “Can nothing speak?” Launce inquires in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (III.i.199), to which Shakespeare – surpassing everyone with metaphorical punning that embodies the way everything comes of nothing – boldly replies “yes”. Beatrice and Benedick both take refuge – through their exchange of things and nothings – behind a smoke screen of nonsense that nevertheless lets escape a hint at seriousness: Benedick: Beatrice:

I do love nothing in the world so well as you – is not that strange? As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you, but believe me not; and yet I lie not; I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing. I am sorry for my cousin. (Much Ado About Nothing IV.i.266 – 72)

Employing a clever linguistic trick, they succeed in using the word “nothing” in a syntactical structure by which they manage, in a completely indefinable and ambiguous way, to say that they fix the other’s value at either nothing or at more than anything in the world. At the same time, they leave the choice between the one and the other meaning completely to the other person, who in turn is free to choose between the positive or negative option. The alternating play on thing and nothing in the dialogue recalls that of popular literature and the amusing bawdiness of the ballads, as excellently expressed, for example, in Clement Robinson’s A Handful of Pleasant Delights from 1584: Fain would I have a pretty thing, to give unto my Lady: I name no thing,

3 The nothingness of language

101

nor I mean no thing, but as pretty a thing as may be. (vv. 1675 – 80)

In The Tempest, an exchange of words Alonso, Antonio and Gonzalo demonstrates how empty speech is not only ridiculous but also renders the speaker null. Gonzalo engages in wordplay on the word “nothing”, which takes on several meanings: the absence of a specific object (or person), the lack of importance and significance, and finally an object or person not worth mentioning or showing attention: Alonso: Gonzalo:

Antonio: Gonzalo:

Prithee, no more. Thou dost talk nothing to me. I do well believe your highness, and did it to minister occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing. ’Twas you we laughed at. Who, in this kind of merry fooling, am nothing to you, so you may continue and laugh at nothing still. (II.i.172– 9)

Who is ridiculous here? He who speaks nothing or he who laughs at the nothingness of speech? Who is in fact a naught? He who claims to be nothing or he who can take pleasure in nothing at all? The nothingness of speech levels all differences and distinctions, a lesson that merry Falstaff also seems to be teaching Pistol. Offending the ladies of easy virtue in the tavern with his burlesque and lascivious speech (Doll, for instance, with whom Falstaff himself has dealings), Falstaff cries: “Nay, and a do nothing but speak nothing, / a shall be nothing here” (King Henry IV, Part Two II.iv.189 – 90). Both Gonzalo and Falstaff speak in a manner through which nothing designates not only stagnation, lack of actual meaning and empty talk, but also the actual word itself. Words introduce something non-identical with the human subject, i. e., a sort of nothingness; but what is utterly paradoxical is the fact that the absence of the word or the name also opens up for nothing, which is why the word is both an opening toward and a protection against nothingness. If a thing cannot be named straight away it is nothing, as becomes apparent from Vincentio’s bitter remark to Mariana: Vincentio: What, are you married? Mariana: No, my lord. Vincentio: Are you a maid?

102

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

Mariana: Vincentio: Mariana: Vincentio: Lucio:

No, my lord. A widow, then? Neither, my lord. Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife! My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife. (Measure for Measure V.i.173 – 81; my emphasis)

Words contain a virtuality of nothingness latently depraved. But the absence of words also equals nothingness insofar as words and names contribute to ensuring a stable (mostly social) identity. The nothingness of words can result in licentiousness, but the loss of a name is also as good as tantamount to licentiousness in that one risks, then, to be considered a punk (Renaissance slang for a prostitute or a woman of easy virtue).⁸² Although words are deceptive and mendacious – thus introducing the subject to a nothing with which it is involuntarily tied – titles, names and the absence of words also manifest a loss of identity, insofar as one is no one without a name. This is, for example, the case with the desperado Coriolanus in the eponymous tragedy: “‘Coriolanus’ He would not answer to; forbad all names: / He was a kind of nothing, titleless, / Till he had forg’d himself a name o’th’fire / Of burning Rome” (V.i.11– 4). Coriolanus disowns his social identity by disowning his socially determined name, and as he sacks and destroys Rome, he exposes himself to an overwhelming negativity, for in order to disown others, he must disown part of himself. In his wounded narcissism, he casts off his titles and name, all of which he considers unworthy trifles, seeing that they emanate from society and his family. They restrain his endeavor to reach unlimited subjectivity: “I had rather have one scratch my head i’ the sun / When the alarum were struck, than idly sit / To hear my nothings monster’d” (II.ii.75 – 7). He refuses the tribute and acknowledgement paid by the people since he considers them nothings because he – like Francis Bacon – equals praise with nothing in that it is conditioned by the ignorant crowd: “Praise […] is commonly false and naught […] For the common people understand not many excellent virtues” (Bacon, Essays LIII – “Of Praise” 135). On the one hand, one observes how Coriolanus thinks of the name as pure nothingness because it speaks of relations and connections outside of that which it names (family, society, and state). On the other hand, people around Coriolanus argue that one is a kind of nothing if one disowns one’s names and thus is left nameless. That is the tragedy of Coriolanus: When you are bestowed a name, you gain an identity and thus become

 Partridge cautiously suggests that the word could be a type of scholarly slang from the Latin punctum, i. e., a small hole, prick or perforation (Shakespeare’s Bawdy 174).

3 The nothingness of language

103

somebody. But you also lose a part of yourself in the universality of the name, in the name’s union with others, and if you deny the name, you may avoid alienating yourself in others, but you also become unrecognizable and without a stable identity.⁸³ There is no existence outside of the name or outside representation, or, in the words of John Davies: “Man is but in Name” (Wittes Pilgrimage 44). When Coriolanus disowns others in favor of an omnipotent image of himself as begotten by himself – “I’ll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin” (V.iii.34– 36) – this negativity is played out within representation. His violence is directed towards the name and towards language – because they do not belong to those whom they describe. However, all of this comes to pure nothing, since it is impossible to beget oneself. “What’s in a name?” a frustrated Juliet inquires (Romeo and Juliet II.ii.43), to which Shakespeare seems to reply: all and nothing. The name is all and nothing. When Romeo replies that the name does not know how to tell who he is – “By a name / I know not how to tell thee who I am” (II.ii.53 – 54) – this is only a halftruth as it would be just as difficult – if not more so – to tell who he is without the name (as in the case of Coriolanus). In Shakespeare, the name articulates a Nominalist point; for it contains a kind of nothingness (as the name ties the named to something different) while simultaneously keeping nothingness and the heterogeneous in check (as the name indicates and upholds an identity of the named). This ambivalence of the name is succinctly formulated by Derrida who writes: “Romeo is Romeo, and Romeo is not Romeo. He is himself only in abandoning his name, he is himself only in his name” (Psyche: Inventions of the Other 2 136). In King Lear, the drama of representation is again performed in a deeply tragic manner. The king decides the conditions of the discourse through which the words of his daughters will automatically possess validity, and acts from the assumption that whatever they say will be true simply through the act of being said. He is guided by an extreme Realist conviction that reality and language by necessity coincide. He does not want to test his daughters’ devotion from their conduct in the past, and he does not want to treat words as signs ei-

 In an analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Katharine Maus points to Renaissance theater’s staging of the aporia of absolute and undetermined subjectivity. Speaking of Richard, she observes: “The more he struggles to constitute an inwardness by excluding alternative, ‘relational’ modes of determining identity, the more he finds himself unwillingly entangled in a relational mode. The Renaissance theater presents, again and again, both the incommensurability of these two methods of self-definition and the impossibility of separating them” (Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance 53).

104

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ther true or false in their relation to extra-verbal reality. He treats words as substances, as entities carrying their own truth within themselves; they create the point of departure for his daughters’ love, even as they – as a kind of physical twins to his verbal creation – establish the domains that will be allotted to them. Lear makes a fatal error because he takes people literally in the most radical and material fashion. He refuses to subject himself to the embarrassing necessity that ordinary people must accept, i. e., to consider the connection between what is actually the case and the words that present themselves as reality. Lear wants to maintain his royal prestige at any price and remain in a world where seeming is being. That his daughters could be lying to him is just not possible, since in transferring his sovereignty to them, he also endows them with the most noble qualities and qualifications: the ability automatically to speak constructively, substantially and truthfully. If words are, indeed, substantial and emblematic, then his answer to Cordelia is the only possible one: Lear: Cordelia: Lear: Cordelia: Lear:

Speak. Nothing, my lord. Nothing? Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. (I.i.85 – 89)

For Gloucester, speech contains quite the opposite of substance, for he considers words to be insubstantial signs, which could equally be true or false. He does not trust words, only what he can see with his own eyes. Thus, his Let’s see stands in stark contrast to Lear’s Speak: Gloucester: What paper were you reading? Edmund: Nothing, my Lord. Gloucester: No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? the quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see: come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles. (I.ii.30 – 5)

In this scene, Edmund’s fabricated and fraudulent letter becomes the emblem of the dangerous obliqueness and evasiveness, and finally nothingness, of words: Gloucester’s skepticism and distrust of the power of representation (given by his empiricist hypostatization of the literal and the visual) also result in nothingness, as with gruesome irony he ends up being blinded. The empiricist certainty embodied in the self-evidential nature of what is present to the eyes is brutally undercut by the description of Gloucester’s empty eye sockets as “bleeding rings” (V.iii.188), that is, as bloody zeros or nothings.

3 The nothingness of language

105

Lear’s madness reflects the madness of his proud belief in the substantiality of his words. Nothing has now come from nothing. As an entity, the word has created its meaning and brought down the universe to a chaos of universal negation. Hence the fool tells him “thou art nothing” (I.iv.91), and Kent refers to the king’s situation as determined by nothing: “Nothing almost sees miracles, / But misery” (II.ii.161– 62). When Lear is out in the storm, a knight points to the rage of the elements that dissolve the king’s white hair into nothing (III.i.9), forcing him to acknowledge that he has a frail body subjected to finitude. The storm effectively forces Lear to confront his mortality and fragility as a human being, thus deflating his grand and self-indulging ideas of absolute power. And soon it becomes apparent that Lear talks as did his daughter, “I will say nothing” (III.ii.38). Moreover, he slowly begins to comprehend her loyalty: “Couldst thou save nothing?” (III.iv.63). And upon waking, he speaks to Cordelia as she used to speak to him: “I know not what to say” (IV.vii.54). The name has become absolute: Lear, now deprived of everything that could confer meaning upon the royal name, is now but king in name, which paradoxically makes him the epitome of an absolute king. What is strange is not that nothing comes of nothing, but that nothing will come of nothing.⁸⁴ The tragedy illustrates the ambivalence of representation as insubstantial nothingness unable to express the represented in a transparent manner. At the same time, representation forms the only possible translation of the signified, thus enabling representation to confer being upon the represented, i. e., what is absent. The represented is retrieved from the depths of nothingness by representation. The ambiguity of this circumstance is accurately articulated by the French thinker and writer Maurice Blanchot: “the essence of the image is to be entirely outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessible and more mysterious than the innermost thought; without signification, but summoning the profundity of every possible meaning; unrevealed and yet man-

 Lear’s “Nothing will come of nothing” is, disturbingly, both in the imperative and in the future tense, thus making nothingness generic. In that respect, Lear differs from the Epicurean atomists, who, in the words of the Roman satirist Persius, claimed that “nihilo ex nihilum, in nihilum nil posse reverti” [nothing can come out of nothing, and that nothing can into nothing return] (Satires III.83). Contrary to what some critics have asserted, Lear’s wording is not just another way of formulating this classical notion. Although the satirist finds such statements ridiculous, there is no reason to question the seriousness of the statement, for example, when Lucretius in his De rerum natura maintains that: “haud igitur possunt ad nihilum quaeque reverti” [therefore things cannot severally return to nothing] (I.238). Invariably, Lear has suspended this rule in his megalomaniac belief in his own omnipotence.

106

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ifest, having that presence-absence that constitutes the attraction and the fascination of the Sirens” (The Book to Come 14; my emphasis).

4 Reflection and nothingness The increased focus on representation raised considerable interest in otherness in the Renaissance world because individuals were alerted to the fact that it was itself conditioned by the interplay of language and symbols, by a symbolic world – and so discovered itself as a decentered subject. This condition is discussed in Donne’s poem “Negative Love”: If it were possible to know oneself through poetic representation, this knowledge would be a mere nothing and superfluous, and the poet already possesses this negative knowledge: If any who decipher best, What we know not, ourselves, can know Let him teach me that nothing (vv. 14– 16)

He who can decipher the self and translate the self’s secret nothingness into more lucid language eventually ends up with nothing. Nothingness brutally discloses our fundamental lack of knowledge of, even downright unfamiliarity with, ourselves, and it defines the distance between our existence and our finite knowledge about it. In one of his sonnets, Philip Sidney, for instance, writes that he is torn and that paradoxically he is not who he is: “I am not I, pity the tale of me” (Astrophil and Stella 45.14). I am not I, says the amorous subject, since it must discover its essence and identity in the other (the beloved). When the subject takes the detour through the other to gain knowledge of itself, it is no longer concentric with itself. It is no longer identical with itself. This recognition is often explored in love poetry – for example in Idea in Sixtie Three Sonnets written by Shakespeare’s old friend Michael Drayton: “Since You in Me, my Self since out of Me, / Transported from my Self, into Your being” (XI.4– 5). Here the temporal dialectics of love is illustrated with great lyrical beauty in the chiastic interplay between the lovers, who must both deposit their subjectivity in the other to know who they are as they mirror themselves in the other: I recognize you in me, as you recognize yourself in me. Hence, it comes as no surprise when in another sonnet the poet writes: “What most I seem, that surest I am not” (LXII.8). I am not what I seem to be since my potentiality and existence cannot be actualized until I achieve existence via the other (through otherness), that is, through something outside myself, something alien. In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses sim-

4 Reflection and nothingness

107

ilarly explains to Achilles that the self must be reflected in another before it can appear to itself. The spirit must take leave of itself, differentiate itself from itself to become aware of itself: nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed Salutes each other with each other’s form. For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrorred (QF: married) there Where it may see itself. This is not strange at all. (III.iii.106 – 112)

Ulysses encourages Achilles to rejoin the battle, explaining that honor and glory are not phenomena with a fixed substance, something permanent; for they are dependent upon the other from which they receive their being and actuality. In like manner, Cassius in Julius Caesar plants the seed in Brutus’s mind of assassinating Cesar when acting as his mirror, which actualizes the unconscious impetus and potentiality of Brutus’s thoughts. Being asked “can you see your face?” Brutus answers Cassius: Brutus: Cassius:

No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself But by reflection, by some other things. ’Tis just; And it is very much lamented, Brutus, That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye, That you might see your shadow (I.ii.50 – 57)

Not only is Brutus by phenomenological necessity not fully conscious of his thoughts and desires before having consulted some other things; he is also unconscious of his potential thoughts and desires until he is reflected in another. Cassius further instructs Brutus: And since you know you cannot see yourself So well as by reflection, I your glass Will modestly discover to yourself That of yourself which you yet know not of. (I.ii.66 – 69)

Like Petrarch, who stresses that Laura cannot see herself by herself, but needs another (i. e., the poet) to mirror her, Cassius informs Brutus of the way he will discover his yet undisclosed nature in another. In other words, of necessity

108

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

self-consciousness is alienated from itself and now carries this difference within itself. In fact, if it is to attain existence, it must be fundamentally divided from itself. What is paradoxical in Petrarch and Shakespeare is that the subject must turn itself into an object if it is to gain subjectivity. If, indeed, it strives to attain an identity, it must necessarily express itself through that which is not the same, i. e., the non-identical, the unfamiliar, the other – the nothingness of virtuality, potentiality, and difference. In Shakespeare, the tragic characters are sometimes haunted by a feeling that their identity has been stolen or lost. The desperate King Lear thus cries: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (I.iv.227). To which the wise fool responds: “Lear’s shadow” (I.iv.228). Identity must be sought in representation, whose strange heterogeneous unreality equals that of the shadow, which may depict and reflect that of which it is a shadow, but from which it uncannily and radically differs. Shakespeare’s art would appear to be intensely preoccupied with the problem of representation, according to which one – being entangled with representations – is forced to play roles unlike what one is. However, Shakespeare also seems to point out that this challenge must be met with commitment and passion. Julia (The Two Gentlemen of Verona), Portia, Rosalind, Celia, Viola, and Imogen all demonstrate power and strength in their courageous and tenacious adaptability to change and role play by changing clothes and gender. Similarly, Isabella acquires a new flexibility in taking off her nun’s habit, and Helena must put on a pilgrim’s outfit to win back her husband. In contrast, one of the first comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ridicules men for being unable to transform themselves and take on roles and disguises. On the other hand, there is much sympathy for the witty, the attentive, the improvisers – not just Puck and Autolycus, but also Petruchio, Maria (Twelfth Night), and Rosalind. Unlike the comedies, the tragedies typically portray stubborn, fixed, and rigid characters, often heroic and brutal, which then suffer an implosive collapse of meaning and identity. All the tragic heroes insist on their own fixed identity; they refuse to adapt to their surroundings since they are frozen in a self-awareness that seems distorted and anachronistic. As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, they err because they are unable to adapt their temperaments and natures to the changeability of their surroundings, the result being tragic.⁸⁵ Coriolanus is a fine example of a tragic hero

 Perhaps the recipe for success is not the transformation or the refashioning of oneself, but even so, it is characterized by the endless struggle between chance and humans’ surplus of resources. In many ways, Machiavelli is relatively optimistic about the conditions for the realization of these resources (his famous virtù), but he emphasizes that tactical flexibility is the main instrument in ensuring permanent success. Tactical flexibility is a kind of worldly flexibility where one does not rigidly insist on one’s substance, but rather maintains an openness towards

4 Reflection and nothingness

109

too rigid to play the politician’s game, and who consequently fails; Lear cannot move away from the feudal discourse of medieval times; Richard II cannot play the game of power politics; Hamlet detests engaging with his surroundings and is unable to overthrow the usurper; Brutus make a mess of his ungainly role as conspirator; Antony fails in adopting an appropriate role after laying down his Roman uniform; and finally Macbeth never fully succeeds in the murderous role allotted to him by his wife. Shakespeare’s tragedies display how the heroes fall when incapable of playing the social or political game skillfully, or when they play it with too little flexibility. If reality only appears to be presented to us by representations, truth is no longer apparent in itself, since it can only present itself in appearances: “Truth may seem, but cannot be” (The Phoenix and the Turtle 62). Or, in the words of Hamlet, there is no certainty that what is inner can be represented in something on the outside, and so essence and existence cannot be easily equated, since both remain strangers to each other: “I have that within which passes show” (Hamlet I.ii.85). The human psyche is not transparently and directly accessible for examination. The content of the soul does not seem to be straightforwardly deductible from its outward appearance – a fact which leads to the following admonition from Samuel David: “Thou must not fondly think thy self transparent” (The Complaint of Rosamond 283): “For what we seem each sees, none know our heart” (287). Being and seeming do not necessarily coincide, and even though the interior can only be realized in the exterior, it can never render it adequately. It is impossible simply to show what is inside oneself, and this discrepancy between being and seeming is perhaps one of the principal themes in Shakespeare, and probably the central problem for the characters in his plays: “Instead of creating and organizing the assurances of selfhood, Shakespeare divides and dissolves them,” as John Bayley has it (“Time and the Trojans” 70). Being disguised both as a man and played by one on stage (women were not allowed to practise the acting profession in Shakespeare’s day), Viola is, indeed, right in asserting that “I am not what I am” (Twelfth Night III.i.143).⁸⁶ Apart from the self-

changing one’s style, manners, strategies, and procedures, so that they meet the requirements of the world and the constant flux of events: “In my view, he who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well […] if he [man] could adapt his nature to the times and circumstances, his Fortune would not change” (The Prince XXV, 116 – 17).  When Shakespeare has Cleopatra say that “I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore” (V.ii.217– 19), he bravely reminds his audience, who are deeply involved in the “fate” of the Egyptian queen, that “she” is not there at all, since it is merely an English boy squeaking her lines. Shakespeare permits the actor playing Cleopatra to break

110

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

evident truth of the sentence, her declaration, on a more general level, also hints at how desire alienates the lover in relation to the beloved. In Shakespeare’s poetic universe, it often turns out that it is not the loved object that drives the lover’s desire, but rather an imaginary depiction projected onto the beloved: “As a specular mirage, love is essentially deception […] inexplicably I love in you something more than you” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 268). Desire projects an asymmetrical image of the other on to the beloved and therefore alienates the one experiencing it. Moreover, desire weakens the autonomy of the subject. Desire being directed towards that which is not identical with itself, also discovers its own fundamental imperfection and existential lack, since the subject desires that which it is not, or that which it does not possess. This is the reason why Viola asserts that “ourselves we do not owe” (i.v.314). The radical position of the subject in negativity (i. e., the subject as desiring subject) derives from the fact that it is not this desired object itself. Desiring, the subject becomes its own negation. As Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, says in his Amatory Poems, the beloved absorbs the lover. The lover loses himself to what is alien to him, and consequently his life if forced to take place in that which is not himself: “chiefly this I know, / That lovers must transform into the thing beloved, / And live (alas, who could believe?) with spirit from life removed” (XIII.34– 36). Upon the dissolution of their relationship, Troilus admits to Cressida that the “monstruosity in love,” consists in the fact that “the will is infinite and the execution confined,” adding that “the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit” (Troilus and Cressida III.ii.78 – 80). Subjectivity aims at an unlimited feeling of self, but its phenomenal manifestations are always limited and contingent. Hence, desire or love introduce a dissonance between the imaginary and the real that threatens to tear apart the subject. This appears to be the case when Cressida shamelessly betrays Troilus’ love: “O, madness of discourse […] This is and is not Cressid” (V.ii.149 – 53). Desire is deceptive and embodies a deep discord between being and seeming. Machiavelli’s The Prince was widely read in Elizabethan culture and defined the sense of a schism between exteriority (seeming) and interiority (being). Machiavelli was considered extremely cynical and even atheistic in his anti-idealistic analysis of political affairs. For Elizabethan society, Machiavellianism was synonymous with villainy in that it refused to perceive reality differently than it is. Disclosing an uncomfortable truth about human, moral, and religious frail-

the illusion he has created through a reference to what he is actually doing, as if the reality of what is performed was an imitation of the imagined reality, brought about by the actors – which is exactly what it is!

4 Reflection and nothingness

111

ty, Machiavellianism came close to personifying absolute, political evil. Richard III is an example of such a Machiavellist, who exposes his contemporaries for what they truly are. Through him, the times are confronted with their own collapse of values. Another of the great hero-villains embodying the popular conception of Machiavellianism is Iago, who with diabolical glee defines himself as the negative incarnate: “I am not what I am” (Othello I.i.64). What Iago presents to us is the complete absence of conscience and compassion, combined with an all-devouring and insatiable evil, which simultaneously – despite genuine psychological realism – seems to lack any plausible explanation. “Power is my mistress,” Napoleon supposedly said, “but it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin” (Felix Markham, Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe 100). Iago is such a Napoleon, and the inherent nothingness of language is his violin. He is the very emblem of the subtle inscrutability of evil, and he finds his fascinating sense of power in nothingness, which enables him to present things which are not: “oft my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not” (III.iii.150 – 51). Iago is an agent of nothingness, since he is other than what he seems, and because he says what is not – even when saying what is. He is false to everything, and through this falseness towards existence – deemed evil by the Church Fathers – he unremittingly disseminates all around him. His speech transforms all that is into what is not. In his tribute to Shakespeare, Hegel emphasizes the self-representation of the hero-villain: Indeed the more Shakespeare proceeds to portray on the infinite breach of his “worldstage” the extremes of evil and folly, all the more […] does he precisely plunge his figures who dwell on these extremes into their restrictedness; of course he equips them with a wealth of poetry but he actually gives them spirit and imagination, and, by the picture in which they can contemplate and see themselves objectively like a work of art, he makes them free artists of their own selves, and thereby, with his strongly marked and faithful characterization, can interest us not only in criminals but even in the most downright and vulgar clouts and fools. (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts III, 1227– 28; my emphasis)

Hamlet, Edmund, and Iago think of themselves objectively through representations created by their own brilliant minds, making them capable of looking at themselves as dramatic characters or manifestations of art. Aesthetically, they transform themselves into artists, free to create themselves, exercising a freedom to rewrite their own identity, a freedom to make changes within their selves. As they listen in on their own speech and weigh their own expressions, they transform themselves, and thus monitor a difference within. The underlying alienation of the self inherent in the exterior self-representation (the picture) equals

112

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

the nothingness of the self. “For I am nothing if not critical” (II.i.119), as Iago admits to himself. The tragedy gives proof of the immense power of and fascination with nothingness. It is this immense nothingness that invades Othello’s soul and eventually destroys him. On the one hand, Othello claims that all the men in his camp could have had sexual relations with Desdemona if “I had nothing known” (III.iii.350). But on the other, it is exactly this ignorance which enflames his jealousy. This is clear in the scene where he questions Emilia: “You have seen nothing, then? […] nor nothing?” (IV.ii.1– 9). Being an agent of nothingness, Iago is a virtuoso in using the imaginative quality of nothing to ensnare Othello’s imagination: Iago: Othello: Iago:

Ha! I like not that. What dost thou say? Nothing, my lord; or if – I know not what. (III.iii.34– 36)

Nothingness infects Othello, and the minute Iago assures him that “we see nothing done” (III.iii.435), the Moor’s suspicion is instantly stirred up. And rightly so: because nothing is never nothing in the sense of nothing at all, as is illustrated when Iago apparently seeks to diminish Othello’s suspicions, ensuring him that “they do nothing,” which just fuels his suspicions the more. Here Iago’s rhetoric is displayed in all its diabolical force and ambivalence. For on the one hand, it is, by definition, guileless to do nothing with Desdemona, it is the very essence of innocence. But on the other hand, Iago obviously puns on the slang of the day where doing nothing was synonymous with copulating – as instanced in Richard III: Brakenbury: Richard:

With this, my lord, myself have nought to do. Naught with Mistress Shore? I tell thee, fellow, He that doth naught with her (excepting one) Were best to do it secretly, alone. (I.i.97– 100)

As it would appear from Richard’s vulgar speech, to do nothing plainly is not equal to doing nothing – far from it. Othello keeps repeating that he will deny Desdemona nothing (III.iii.76 – 83), and ironically, in the end, this is exactly what he gives her as he strangles her. And Othello realizes that he has been taken by surprise and annihilated himself – “That’s he that was Othello? here I am” (V.ii.281) – thus asserting his own nothingness, which was exactly what Iago strove to achieve all along.

5 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

113

Othello’s final “O! O! O! –” (V.ii.197) is thus forcefully suggestive of death, suicide, and damnation. It articulates a tragic recognition of absolute nothingness at the center of life and the world. In addition, the O-groaning appears elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work as an expression of a nihilistic collapse of meaning in the presence of death, nothingness, and madness. The O-groaning is, for example, emitted by King Lear when Cordelia dies (“Howl, howl, howl, O!,” V.iii.256), by lady Macbeth when sleepwalking (“Oh! oh! oh!,” V.i.49), and by Hamlet when he expires (“O, o, o, o,” F. V.ii.363). In an essay on “The Sound of ‘O’ in Othello,” Joel Fineman singles out the “O” as the privileged symbol of a certain modern subjectivity, as it signifies a “kind of materialized absence of self to self […] the substantialized emptiness that motivates and corroborates […] that psychological interiority for which and by means of which Shakespeare’s major characters are often singled out” (109). As Daniel Vitkus says in conclusion to his analysis of Othello’s name: “His name, beginning and ending in ‘O,’ becomes a cipher signifying nothing” (“The ‘O’ in Othello” 360).

5 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance The medieval Realist world picture claimed that all particular entities were endowed with a universal essence and should properly be understood from a universal system. According to Paul Strohm, this means that “the medieval (and premodern) writer is more likely to deploy the self, not as the ultimate center of interest, but as an imaginative exemplification of broader issues” (England’s Empty Throne 143). According to Jacques le Goff, the Medieval cosmos is hierarchical, and medieval man is not at liberty to choose his station in life: “The duty of mediaeval man was to remain where God had placed him. Rising in society was a sign of pride; demotion was a shameful sin. The organization of society that God had ordained was to be respected, and it was placed on the principle of hierarchy […] In learned or popular form according to his level of culture, man of the Middle Ages was a disciple of Dionysius caught in a hierarchical conception of the structure of the world” (“Introduction: Medieval Man” 34). Medieval Christian cosmology appears as a well-ordered, plenistic and hierarchical universe in which the individual finds his God-given place upon the ladder of being, the scala entis. Subjectivity is God-given and accordingly perceived as an essence, quidditas, which is not (or should not be) split between being and appearance. Douglas Kelly thus concludes that the “Middle Ages knew neither the individual nor the self as desirable, distinct entities with discrete sensibilities and unconscious desires. Rather, the person is defined by moral standards, his or her place in the

114

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

social order, age, sex, and so on” (Medieval French Romance 106). As concerns medieval writers, Stephen Medcalf therefore claims that in “them, moreover, the division between inner and outer does not run deep” (“Inner and Outer” 109). He adds that medieval philosophers and thinkers “assume meaning to be inherent in the world” and that they “are less bothered than later philosophers by any gap between subjectivity and the external world, and concerned rather with the relation of the transcendent and the immediate” (109). In other words, this period – unlike the emergent tendency in early modernity – tends to deny that the self can be changed, and so it is significant when Augustine emphasizes how it is not only impossible, but downright destructive if one seeks to create oneself: “Remove yourself, remove, I repeat, yourself from yourself; you just get in your way. If it’s you that are building yourself, it’s a ruin you’re building” (Sermones CLXIX.11). In the Middle Ages, one obviously reflected on the Creature, the outer and the inner world, and analyzed their nature; but this knowledge would seem worthless unaccompanied by an affirmation of vestigium Dei in nature and of imago Dei within man himself. This was a well-ordered and narrow world structured by the unlimited will of the Creator. The planets and the stars followed their allotted course and were moved by the primum mobile of the universe, and man’s relationship to himself was identical with his relationship with God. Knowing oneself equalled knowing God, and knowing God equalled knowing oneself: “I want to know God and the soul. – Nothing more? – Nothing whatsoever” (Augustine, Soliloquies I.ii.7). According to several modern investigations of subjectivity, medieval thinking includes a strong belief that humans are incapable of changing, as they exist as a God-given substance. This view is especially advanced in Charles Taylor’s canonical Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity from 1989, but also in Jerold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self from 2005, in which Siegel notes how modern writers “rightly see that modern conditions require individuals themselves to participate in forming their selves, and that this need distinguishes modern situations from the typical earlier one in which the self or soul could be viewed as a substance and a kind of cosmic given” (43). Michel Foucault similarly declares that the “idea that from one’s own life one can make a work of art is an idea which was undoubtedly foreign to the Middle Ages and which reappears at the moment of the Renaissance” (“On the Genealogy of Ethics” 278).⁸⁷ Augustine, who in many ways may be seen as a spiritual godfather of the Middle Ages, emphasizes that truth comes from inside: “Do not go outside,

 For a contrasting view to those stated here, see, for example, Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Tweltfh-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

5 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

115

come back into yourself. It is in the inner self that Truth dwells” (De vera religione 39.72). Through introspection, he is convinced of the existence of an inner man not affected by what is outside of him. This subjectivity is involved and fixed by intellect, feeling and will (esse, nosse, and velle), all of which are interconnected in such a way that the self exists as a knowing and volitional Creature, and that the self wants to be and to know (cf. Confessions XIII.11). Introspection and self-examination imply that the self is conscious of its own manifestations as a self-reflective and self-conscious being. The self knows the inner world, but does not know the outer world with any certainty (cf. De Trinitate X.x.16). The self, however, does know for certain that it is. But how can the self be so sure of itself? The self can know for sure that it exists because it can err, and since the self cannot err without existing, Augustine concludes, that self must necessarily exist: “Si enim fallor, sum” [Well, if I am mistaken, I exist] (Civitas dei XI.26). However, in early modernity it became possible with Iago and Violet to declare that “I am not what I am”. For the subject is not what it is, since its activities take place in the difference between being and appearance, that is, within the play of representations. The negative definitions of the self, offered by Iago and Viola acting on the stage of early modernity, squares poorly with the worldview predominant in the Middle Ages. For the subject is no longer exclusively seen to be a God-given substance, meaning that, given Nominalist premises, it comes to realize that it owes its existence to another from whom it gains its identity. As the hierarchal, categorical and substance-based thinking of the Middle Ages wanes, a more individualized idea, emphasizing the dependence of selfconsciousness on the other, comes into circulation. Consequently, nothingness becomes an important theme, for in the sense of difference it becomes a key element in the formation of the subject. As Plato explains, non-being is not the contradiction of being, but the difference from being: “When we say not-being, we speak, I think, not of something that is the opposite of being, but only of something different” (The Sophist 257b). As the sophists contemporary with Socrates turn out to be fakes and frauds, the question arises if dissimulation and lying involve the notion of non-being – an idea vehemently rejected by Parmenides. But Plato rejects Parmenides’ doctrine that non-being cannot exist, arguing that nothingness has a relative existence in those cases where it denotes a difference or condition of existence different from that which can be said to exist. Nothing is not only a negation – the opposite of being – but also a positive notion of difference. The fact that the idea of difference came to play a more crucial role in the Renaissance might help explain why the notion of nothingness now became crucial.

116

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

In the hierarchy of dividing lines – which since medieval times divided entities into ranks and classes – each line marked the limit of self-expression in the particular place allotted. Feudal society tended to be static and, according to its nature, a self-upholding system; and feudal boundaries tended to be restrictive and strove to maintain totality: The concept of individual character or merit has little meaning in feudal society. In the sense that the particular person is comprehended mainly by reference to the general category or class, the feudal concept of human nature is itself, loosely speaking, allegorical: the concrete is meaningful only when translated into the abstract. (Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics 54)

While the official ideology of the Middle Ages concerning human beings, society, and the world is firmly anchored in an abstract, metaphysical system, the Renaissance view of life becomes worldlier and more contingent. For the metaphysical move from conceptual Realism to Nominalism shatters the medieval idea of universal totality. The ascent of Nominalism seriously altered things, for as Sheila Delany explains with reference to the Renaissance: “Neither nature, society, nor the human mind are necessarily permanent or static in their structure; all are open to change and plurality, none can be fully understood by reference to an abstract a priori scheme” (48). Nominalism cuts through and dissociates old totalities, disregarding what things might symbolize in a larger context, and so with renewed interest in what they are in themselves. It is amid this schism that Shakespeare’s dramas take place, i. e., between the medieval belief that life must be lived according to certain guidelines, pointing back to an authority superior to man – and the upcoming conviction that on this earth, man is his own authority. In the Renaissance, the idea of human greatness begins to flourish in a manner previously unknown. Neo-Platonism made it possible for Nicholas of Cusa to emphasize the dignity and greatness of man: “Therefore, the region of humanity encompasses, by means of its human power, God and the entire world. Therefore, man can be a human god; and just as he can be a god humanly, so he can be a human angel, a human beast, a human lion, or a human bear, or any other such thing. For within the power of humanity (humanitas potentiam) all things exist in their own way” (De Coniecturis II.14, 236 – 37). Pico della Mirandola writes along similar lines: At last it seems to me I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of Being – a rank to be envied not only by brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world. It is a matter past faith and wondrous one. Why

5 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

117

should it not be? For it is on this very account that man is rightly called and judged a great miracle and a wonderful creature indeed. (Oratio de hominis dignate 223)

A truly admirable being, Pico says, and this description is echoed later in Hamlet’s praise of man: “What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals” (II.ii.303 – 7). Or in Miranda’s elated speech in The Tempest: O Wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t. (V.i.182– 5)

In the Renaissance, this brave new world is precisely the human being itself, which is from now on the guiding principle for the desire for knowledge. Self-reflection becomes dominant in this age: “My self am centre of my circling thought, / Only my self I study, learn, and know” (Davies, Nosce Teipsum 24). The object of reflection shifts from the metaphysical hierarchy to the self, an example of which we find in Montaigne, who boldly proclaims: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics” (Essays III.xiii – “Of experience” 821). This new philosophy points to the human subject as the basis of knowledge, which causes the reliability of knowledge to be more uncertain than before. We see this, for instance, in the perception of morality. The new Nominalist spirit means that priests, understood as representatives of God, no longer supremely decide what is good or bad, but that it is, to some extent, left to the individual subject to decide for itself. Morality is no longer established from a metaphysical doctrine but becomes the result of a dynamic and judging subject. Spenser’s Melibœ therefore explains that it is foolish to believe that happiness depends on fate, as it is the individual who shapes his own life from personal notions of good and evil: “It is the mind, that makes good or ill, / That makes wretch or happy” (The Faerie Queene VI.ix.30). Montaigne, who constantly makes himself an object of reflection, also accentuates that the idea of good and evil are anchored in the experiencing, empirical subject: “Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves” (Essays I.xiv – “That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them” 33). This is also the case with the traumatized Hamlet, who has lost belief in any absolute moral criterion. In the morally corrupt Denmark, all certain guiding lines as to what is good or bad appear to have vanished: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking

118

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

makes it so” (Hamlet II.ii.249 – 50). In contrast to the Middle Ages, where the question of right and wrong was defined by firm metaphysical standards, moral notions in the Renaissance were – because of growing Nominalism and skepticism that left humans with a contingent world – relativized.

6 The interest in nothingness Human consciousness steps forward in its ambiguous position as both an object of knowledge and as a knowing subjectivity. The human being is in its subjectivity (as sub-iectum) its own foundation – enjoying autonomy and freedom of action, both of which, through their potential boundlessness, allow it to go beyond its own limited finitude, even while remaining subjected to its own authority. Paradoxically, the human subject is thus at the mercy of an inescapable finitude alienating it from itself, since, as a subject, it is transformed into a subjugated ruler. The subject is a strange doublet that both achieves consciousness and grounds it. The human subject becomes its own double, offering itself the reflected consciousness as a blurred projection of that which it is in truth. Humans in the Renaissance ran a serious risk of falling into the trap set up by ϕιλαυτία (“self-love,” “self-conceit”), as William Tyndale and his successors had it. For the weakening of medieval metaphysics entailed a great peril that humans might focus upon themselves without reference to the divine system to which they belong. The weakening authority of the theological and metaphysical worldview of Realism provoked John Donne. In “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,” he depicted a deep, dangerous metaphysical crisis resulting from the contemporary fascination with the self: And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. ’This all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. (vv. 205 – 218; my emphasis)

6 The interest in nothingness

119

This new philosophy of doubt, led on by the new sciences, threatens to dissolve the structures of a society that had been organized around the ladder of being, the scala entis. ⁸⁸ A system which consisted of a hierarchal and relational order of differences, placing every element in its appropriate place within the system. When humans take leave of this metaphysical system, some perceive the world as more chaotic and frightening. In a world where differences are suspended, in which kings and subjects, as well as fathers and sons, are placed on an equal footing (seen strictly from a Nominalist perspective), the result may well be experienced as severe instability and confusion. The subject’s new freedom is by some considered to be an undermining of those social structures that define hierarchical differentiation. When the legitimacy is questioned along with the powerful institutions upholding culture, non-differentiation threatens. A crisis of civilization is imminent when the hierarchical guiding lines of society are suspended; and, indeed, such a liminal situation is marked by “the destruction of differences,” as René Girard writes in his Violence and the Sacred (47). As the human subject is increasingly individualized by the ascent of Nominalism, the distinctions and hierarchies upholding the structures of religion, morality or society are weakened. In early modernity, human individualism threatens to undermine the scale of being, i. e., the hierarchal order of distinctions and differences, as Ulysses explains in his famous speech: “O, when degree is shaken, / Which is the ladder to all high designs, / The enterprise is sick” (Troilus and Cressida I.iii.101– 3). This crisis, in which the destruction of differences is given free reign, is a frequent theme in Shakespeare – for example, in Timon of Athens where the eponymous character gives a precise description of the chaos felt by some in the period: “Degrees, observances, customs and laws, / Decline to your confounding contraries” (Timon of Athens IV.i.19 – 20). Even though difference is given as a kind of nothingness, the destruction of differences is also a kind of nothingness, as each separate element loses its individual qualities and characteristics when no longer differentiated from the others – and is thus reduced to nothingness. We have a fine example of this in The Merchant of Venice, where Bassinio (the moment he realizes that he has won the hand of Portia) expresses his joyous surprise by means of an image of the excited and cheering crowd: “Where every something being blend together, / Turns to a wild of nothing” (III.ii.181– 82). In the wake of the breakdown of distinctions, differences, and hierarchies, noth-

 Cf. Pico who narrates how God decided that the human being got “joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being” as “a creature of indeterminate nature” (Oratio the hominis dignate 224), and thus free to unite with the Creator himself.

120

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ingness emerges. Much ado about nothing means a lot of hubbub about (or outside of, or bordering on, or because of) this ghostlike, disquieting nothing: the non-differentiation frequently staged in Shakespeare’s world. It becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate and to separate things. Entities formerly distinct from each other now start to blend. As a result, everything is made up of both mortality and immortality. All and nothing alternate, and it turns out to be ever more difficult to distinguish between the two: “For first of all, the fact is that all human affairs, like the Sileni of Alcibiades, have two aspects, each quite different from the other; even to the point that what at first blush (as the phrase goes) seems to be death may prove, if you look further into it, to be life […] In brief, you find all things suddenly reversed, when you open up the Silenus” (Erasmus, The Praise of Folly 36). Behind everything that exists, nothingness lies dormant: That’s the similitude the lord of life Doth use to show our lives’ unbeing-being: What! in the world, where all things are so rife, Is naught but nothing to the same agreeing? Which not appears, nor scarce suppos’d by seeing! And, being scarce suppos’d: then it is To nothing next, or Nothing’s like to this. (John Davies, Wittes Pilgrimage 44)

When the subject is at the mercy of a world of change and phenomenal appearances, human existence comes to be understood as vanitates. Since the human being is subject to representation, this means not only that it is distanced from the world and the things in it, but also that its existence is muddled, seeing that being and nothingness are getting more and more intertwined. Thus, death and life seem to coalesce – for instance, in Fulke Greville, where man “[s]till dying lives, and living ever dies” (Caelica VII.16). In her brilliant study of the Renaissance, Rosalie Colie hits the nail on the head when asserting that the “problem of ‘nothing’ was crucial in Renaissance thought” (Paradoxia Epidemica ix).⁸⁹ The early modern period is preoccupied with existence as fundamentally split between being and appearance. It increasingly becomes difficult to establish any coherent and transparent correspondence between the two; and human exis-

 Cf. Juan Aguilar who along similar lines writes: “Medieval civilization did not know the figure zero. Renaissance culture, on the other hand, was a culture based on the number zero. It discovered the functions of Nothing; it calculated equations and described the Universe anew because of this discovery: Its symbol was the circle, the number 0” (“The Nothing that from Nothing Came” 122 – 23).

6 The interest in nothingness

121

tence increasingly tends to be defined by this unbeing-being. In the Renaissance, some were inclined to understand existence in the light of a nothingness seriously complicating life and always about to render it incomprehensible. Because to humans, nothingness appears to be far less intelligible than the world it pertains to: “how invisible, how unintelligible a thing then, is this Nothing! […] absolutely nothing, merely nothing, is more incomprehensible than any thing, than all things together” (Donne, The Sermons IV, 100 – 101). In the cosmology of the Middle Ages, nothingness was primarily understood against the background of the first divine creatio ex nihilo (after the Nicene Creed of 325 CE), where this nihil was, through the mouth of God, transformed into the actual cosmos, the universe, perfect being, omnis. Despite the orthodox philosophical and theological rejection of the existence of nothingness, a mainstream notion from Greek philosophy, which proved impossible to suppress, remained. This tradition upheld the existence of nothing or of the vacuum. The atomist philosophy going back to Leucippus, Epicurus and Democritus defended the idea of a vacuum in which the material flux of atoms finds space for physical movement. In the Renaissance, this undercurrent gained momentum, inspiring a new physics represented by men such as Bacon and Galileo – and afterwards men like Pierre Gassendi, Pascal, Boyle, Locke, and Newton. This new current was quite disturbing to the Church. On the whole, the Greek atomists were – along with their Roman representative Lucretius – considered atheists, since acceptance of the idea of the vacuum in a post-Aristotelian universe was ipso facto atheist, contradictory to the teachings of the Church. Claiming the existence of nothingness was considered blasphemous, as God obliterated nothingness through creation; and since “every creature of God is good” (1 Timothy 4.4) it was, for obvious reasons, easy to conclude that nothingness is the nature of evil. Indeed, Augustine initiated an important moral tradition in which evil was understood as defect, negation, emptiness, lack, and nothingness. Hence, the Devil in Augustine’s schema does not possess actual existence, or, in other words, the Devil’s existence is absence of being or non-being. The Devil is a moral vacuum. In yet other words, Augustine equated nothingness and the Devil, who represented a complete sundering from God; he was the negation of everything belonging to God, the ultimate state of sin, the very antithesis of God and the presence of grace. Nothingness represented evil itself: “It tends, therefore, to cause that which is not to be […] evil, is a falling away from being and a tending toward non-being” (The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life II.ii.2). When it is written, “if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself” (Galatians 6.3), it means that nothing was considered to be negative as sin, evil, and vanity within the framework of Christian thought. Thus, Thomas Aquinas concisely summed up the

122

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

Christian view of nothingness in his Summa Contra Gentiles, writing that “the being of anything, as such, is good, and its not-being, as such, is evil” (I.81.2). However, the Renaissance witnessed the surfacing of many texts on the subject of nothing understood as other than evil. The most famous of these was the Latin poem “Nihil,” published by Jean Passerat, a Paris professor of rhetoric. The poem was frequently published, republished, imitated, and commented upon for more than 50 years. Playfully substantivizing the adjective “nothing,” Passerat explains that Nothing is more precious than costly stones and gold; Nothing is superior to diamonds and more noble than the blood of kings; Nothing is sacred in war; Nothing is greater than the wisdom of Socrates – and in his own words, Nothing is the wisdom of Socrates; Nothing is greater than the sky; Nothing overcomes every obstacle in this world; Nothing is more resplendent than virtue, etc., etc. In opposition to the medieval moral rejection of nothing, Jean Passerat writes with enthusiastic ambivalence: “Immortale nihil, nihil omni parte beatum” [Nothing is immortal, Nothing is beautiful in all its parts] (v. 17).⁹⁰ In The Prayse of Nothing, commonly attributed to Edward Dyer (1543 – 1607), the poet not only claims that nothing is the origin and end of all things, he also contemplates how much better it would be if nothing was the cause or determining factor of things. Nothing, moreover, is something completely innocent and harmless and now and then even possesses many beneficial aspects: “nothing is absolutely simple, innocent and harmless in itself […] we may more apparently perceive the good effects which come of nothing, as of the least, or no enemy of life, by whose society many evils depart” (86 – 7). When the poet claims that nothing is not the enemy of life, this statement stands in stark contrast to the medieval interpretation of nothing as the agent of evil. In an anonymous ballad from 1625, also entitled The Praise of Nothing, nothingness is lauded in a similarly paradoxical manner: Nothing was first, and shall be last, for nothing holds for ever, And nothing ever yet escape’s death, so can’t the longer liver: Nothing’s so immortal, nothing can, From crosses ever keep a man, Nothing can live, when the world is gone, for all shall come to nothing. (vv. 9 – 16)

 My translation.

6 The interest in nothingness

123

The rhetorical ambivalence of the word is used to its utmost, and to a certain extent, the renewed interest in nothing is due to an enhanced linguistic (self‐)consciousness that passionately engages itself in the rich array of contradictions and paradoxes inherent in words. As in its title, “Nothing for a New-Year’s Gift”, William Lisle’s poem also employs the word in both positive and negative ways. Lisle pays homage to the creative hardships that follow from meditating on the first creation and nothingness: My troubled thoughts recall the first creation. Searching Arts secrets, at the last I found, Nothing to be of every thing the ground. Excess of study in a trance denies My ravished soul her angel-winged flight: Struggling with Nothing thus my body lies Panting for breath, depriv’d of senses might. At length recovered by this pleasant slumber, The strange effects from Nothing, thus I wonder. (I-II)

Common to these paradoxical panegyrics is that they all stress the feeling that in a peculiar way, nothingness constitutes the foundation of existence, i. e., it is against the background of nothingness that the world exists. These concerns arise not only from the traditional dogma of creation from nothing, as the existence of nothing now seems to be of immediate importance, since nothing can no longer be easily separated from being. Increasingly, people think of the universe in an atomistic way, that is, as a space in which nothing is the context for all that exists. Atoms exist in an immense nothing, and when they are combined to create temporal and changeable forms, it is because they exist without actual limits or boundaries. Leonardo da Vinci writes in his Notebooks that “[n]othingness has no centre, and its boundaries are nothingness. […] nothingness cannot be divided because nothing can be less than it is; and if you were to take part from it this part would be equal to the whole, and the whole to the part” (63). Leonardo was engaged with various questions both metaphysical and physical, and assiduously occupied himself with the problems of emptiness, vacuum, and space. He worked with the notion of nothing both as a metaphysical nothing, and as an actual absence of substance: “That which is termed nothingness is found only in time and speech. In time it is found between the past and the future and retains nothing of the present; in speech likewise when the things spoken of do not exist or are impossible” (71). He emphasizes the indeterminable and transcendent nature of nothingness, and, furthermore, claims that the phenomenon possesses the ability to differen-

124

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

tiate between things. He subscribes to the atomist tradition, stressing the key importance of nothingness for what exists as he believes that nothingness helps separate objects and things from each other. Moreover, Leonardo detects nothingness in language whose referential virtuality and potentiality depend on nothingness. Thus, he considers the chimeras of the imagination to be the result of a creative nothing that confers being to something that is not. Last, he finds nothingness in time, which is comprised of past (which no longer is) and future (which does not yet exist). Consequently, he comes across nothingness in both space (as difference and spatium), in the representations of language, and in the modes of time. For Leonardo, nothingness occupies a preeminent position in the human understanding of the world, which makes it wonderful and majestic, as well as a distinctly human subject: “Among the great things which are to be found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest” (64). In other words, nothingness points to what pertains to human existence, in apparent anticipation of Heidegger, for whom nothing is never just nothing, but the truth of humans: “The nothing is never nothing, and neither is it a something in the sense of an object; it is being itself whose truth will be given over to man when he has overcome himself as subject, when, that is, he no longer represents beings as objects” (Off the Beaten Track 104). Nothingness is the greatest human wonder because human liberty and subjectivity depend upon it: “Without the original manifestness of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom” (Heidegger, Pathmarks 91). Nothingness belongs to existence, that is, to the specific human way of existing, and it points toward both the furthest from humans and the closest. Differently put, human existence takes part in the thing-like quality of the physical, since its existence is grounded in the body, yet it also transcends its immediate materiality, as it is given existence by what has no material being: “True, Dasein is ontically not only what is near or even nearest – we ourselves are it, each of us. Nevertheless, or precicely for this reason, it is ontologically what is farthest […] Dasein is ontically ‘nearest’ to itself, ontologically farthest away” (Heidegger, Being and Time 15 – 6). A human is a hybrid that has existence, but an existence determined by something that does not actually exist. This is Heidegger’s understanding of the way in which humans exist, that is, as an existence outside of the material and phenomenal order (cf. the etymology of “to exist” from the Latin existere/exsistere, derived from ex- “out from” + sistere “cause to stand”).

7 The ghost of existence, death, and nothingness

125

7 The ghost of existence, death, and nothingness Human existence transcends the world’s positive facticity, for it is not only part of the world’s actual beings, rather its fundamental way of existence sine qua non presupposes a difference from beings. What befalls human existence is what Heidegger calls the ontological difference (die ontologische Differenz), i. e., the difference between beings (das Seiende) and being (Sein). According to Heidegger, it is precisely due to humans’ existential kinship with nothingness that the ontological difference is secured. One could claim that Hamlet expresses something similar in one of his cryptic passages, which reads: Hamlet:

The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing – Guildenst.: A thing, my lord? Hamlet: Of nothing. (IV.ii.26 – 9)

The body (Polonius’ body) is with the dead king, but the King (Hamlet the Elder) is no longer in the body, since he has ceased to exist from the moment he died. Of course, the King’s body is where the King is, but the throne, that is, what makes him a king, is not an element of the body. Moreover, the actual King is (in contrast to his predecessor) only king in name, as the body embodying the kingship is unworthy to represent it. The Nominalist view is apparent as is the allusion to the political theory of the king’s two bodies, a body natural and a body politic. The first is a mortal body, while the other is that of the office as majesty, the institution, and the dignity of the position.⁹¹ The king’s body is divided between the institutional and the private, and this gap allows for difference and heterogeneity to emerge within the self – a split which in Hamlet’s speech evokes nothingness. This is obvious in his description of the king both as a thing and as nothing (a no-thing). In addition to the allusion to The Book of Psalms – where we are reminded that “Man is like a thing of nought” (144.4),⁹² which is of course a meditation upon the fact that Polonius is king more of name than of right – clearly the wording also serves as a reflection on the old King’s ontological status as deceased. As a dead body, the deceased is merely a thing – like Yorick’s skull, now an object in Hamlet’s hand; and as a dead body with no life or spirit,

 Cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).  Quoted from The Geneva Bible (1560, as indicated in the bibliography). Although the many editions of the Geneva Bible differ widely regarding terminology and editorial characteristics, the Genevan-Tomson edition of 1595, supposedly read by Shakespeare, would appear to be almost identical to the original of 1560.

126

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

the deceased is also a kind of nothing in the eyes of the surviving relatives. Like an actual object, the corpse is just a thing, but for the surviving relatives it is more than this, namely nothing as the absence of the deceased. An empty sign of something or someone who no longer possesses existence apart from the memories of the surviving. When man is said to be a thing of nothing, and when Hamlet makes the verses of the psalm resonate in his obscure speech, the point refers in both cases to the ontological condition of man as living and dead. For as dead, man is an object but also a sign of something which can never be concretized or exhausted in any concrete facticity, which makes it a kind of nothing. As a living entity, the human body is that which, in all of its tactility, is the paradigm of the presence of sensuous existence. Yet, as a thinking individual, the human subject differentiates and separates itself from material beings, since (being ontologically different) it leans out into nothingness (i. e., that which is not founded in physical existents): “Being and the nothing do belong together […] because being itself is essentially finite and manifests itself only in the transcendence of a Dasein that is held out into the nothing” (Heidegger, Pathmarks 94– 95). As a result, Heidegger points to nothingness as a certain feeling accompanying the human subject throughout its existence: Not only as destined for death (Sein-zum-Tode), but also as a condition inherent in its very existence, that is, as a “Grundbefindlichkeit” (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik 214). It is because the human subject is a thing of nothing that it is capable of reaching out to the world, and this oscillation between the human subject as an object and as nothingness is a source of great wonder, but also of discomfort: “The being (Seiendes) is known to us – but Being (das Sein)? Are we not seized with vertigo when we [try to] determine such a thing, even if we should comprehend it properly? Is Being (das Sein) then not something like the Nothing?” ([Eng. trans..] 204/ [Ger orig.] 158). The description of the King as a thing of nothing does not appear only in Hamlet’s murky speech. In the tragedy’s first scene, the two guards discuss the ghost’s nightly wanderings, and Marcellus asks, “What, has this thing appear’d again tonight?” to which Bernado replies, “I have seen nothing” (Hamlet I.i.24– 5). Some might say that the description of the King as both a thing and a nothing in this case would be self-evident or coincidental. But the metaphors of things and nothings in the description of the dead father, the ghost, certainly stand out in the following passage, in which the father suddenly appears to Hamlet in his mother’s closet: Gertrude: Hamlet: Gertrude:

To whom do you speak this? Do you see nothing there? Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

7 The ghost of existence, death, and nothingness

Hamlet: Gertrude:

127

Nor did you nothing hear? No, nothing but ourselves. (III.iv.131– 5)

The Queen sees nothing but Hamlet and herself. She only sees what is, and not what is not – which is the exact opposite of Hamlet, who sees nothing but the nothingness of the ghost and of existence; who does not see what is, but only that which is not. The queen is blind to life, since she only sees that which is and not the specter coming from the dead. In her “o’er-hasty marriage” (II.ii.57), she confirms that life is for the living, not for the dead. But this lesson turns out to be fatal, for the tragedy in which she participates relentlessly demonstrates that it is not possible to let the dead bury the dead, for although they no longer exist, although they are but nothing, no life exists which is not determined by the dead to some degree: “There is no Dasein of the spectre, but there is no Dasein without the uncanniness, without the strange familiarity (Unheimlichkeit) of some spectre” (Derrida, Specters of Marx 100). Although the dead cannot claim being for themselves, they do have a determining existence for the living – especially for Hamlet, who has a profound awareness of the decisive importance of the dead for the living. In an essay occasioned by the death of Roland Barthes, Derrida offers an accurate observation about ghosts: “Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same […] the completely other, dead, living in me” (Psyche: Inventions of the Other 1 272). The queen does not see the ghost, does not see what no longer is: the dead whose existence now resides in the surviving relatives, and who is thus endowed with a radical heterogeneity, boding alienation and death. As a true melancholic, though, Hamlet knows perfectly well that the living must interiorize and incorporate the dead to save them. Indeed, the living must identify with them to lend them existence and to save them from nothingness. For as John Donne says in one of his sermons on death: “The dust of great persons’ graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing” (The Sermons IV, 53). When the young Hamlet mourns the death of his father, he equally mourns his own future death. In young Hamlet, the death of his father results in an awareness of his own mortality. When Derrida’s beloved mother Aimé died, the son wept “like my own children at the edge of my grave” (Circumfession 40). This beautiful paragraph finely illustrates how the loss of the deceased brings about a sort of death in the bereaved, whose own future death now seems even closer: your turn today, mine tomorrow … Against the background of an increased materialist consciousness in the Renaissance, death gradually loses some of its transcendent status and becomes more secularized. There are several examples of death being considered as something final, that is, as a complete negation of being, where nothingness reigns,

128

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

and where – as expressed by the melancholic Jacques in As You Like It – it is robbed of all being: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (II.vii.166).⁹³ The Renaissance gives birth to a new metaphor for death: nothing. This death metaphor did not emerge before the Renaissance simply because previously death was not considered an absolute negation of being. When Richard II foretells his own rapidly approaching end, he affirms that “I must nothing be” (IV.i.201). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, too, death and nothingness are equated: “for he is dead; he is nothing” (V.i.297). Death annihilates everything, and as a result it is no longer possible to speak of a dead person as if he still had any trace of existence: Hamlet: 1. Clown: Hamlet: 1. Clown: Hamlet: 1. Clown:

What man dost thou dig it for? For no man, sir. What woman then? For none neither. Who is to be buried in’t? One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she’s dead. (Hamlet V.i.126 – 31)

The question of death seems to presuppose the question of nothingness, which does not exactly simplify matters, but rather complicates them. As Augustine’s son Adeodatus states in frustration in De magistro, it is extremely difficult to give an accurate account of this notion: “Though the second word of this line of verse [i. e., “nothing”] is familiar and obvious, in the end we didn’t uncover what it signifies” (119). Nothingness is a word, and as in the case of death, it is a word of which the reference cannot be determined from any immediate phenomenal experience, and so both words (nothing and death) must be understood as ideas, not as bodily or tactile phenomena: “Fundamentally, one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent of this word. It is well known that if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness, it is the word ‘death’” (Derrida, Aporias 22). Death and nothingness are both situated beyond the images and representations that the living body can know, and therefore they can only be understood as pure tropes, i. e., as representations whose content remains incomprehensible and constantly put off – inevitably pointing back to other representations in a self-reflective manner. Death and nothingness both re-

 Montaigne is also of the same opinion, stating that as “our birth brought us the birth of all things, so will our death bring us the death of all things” (Essays I.xx – “That to philosophize is to learn to die” 64).

7 The ghost of existence, death, and nothingness

129

main outside of fixed and definite categories. Like death, nothingness is nowhere to be found, as it is merely a transition between the living body and the corpse. It embodies an instant between a before and an after, constituting an incomprehensible point short of an empirical object. Yet, on the other hand, it is all around us, since death is always a possibility given from the moment we are born, and so it remains tacitly present at every level of our everyday life. On this side of existence, no one has yet succeeded in giving a concrete and adequate explanation of the word, and as death affirms the indeterminable significance of nothingness, it silently calls attention to the general heterogeneity of meaning and signification, since it is impossible to articulate the actual content of the word. Seeing that death is beyond the realm of experience of every speaking subject, it is always a cultural construct, that is to say, it is always metaphorical. It is a representation of an absence that itself lacks a solid substance. It is a certain kind of representation from which all cultural values and institutions are measured and consolidated, but in itself it is inexpressible and only definable in its negativity. As Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet states in his description of the human body post mortem: “it becomes an I don’t know what (un je ne sçay quoy) that no longer has a name in any language” (Oraisons funèbres 60).⁹⁴ Death is thus in all its inexpressible untranslatability the metaphor of a mysterious event, inscribing itself in the conceptual world of humans a priori. In a sense, death occurs when representation cancels its representational presence, when the irrevocable, but nonetheless intense reiteration of representation takes over that which the present loses of its presence. Death denotes the prefix re- in representation, and this prefix points to the power of substitution: something which was present, but which no longer is, is now represented. Death is present in representation in that place which is either somewhere else or no longer – as a simulacrum or ghost, which is now present in all of its unreality. Derrida therefore claims that representation is an agent of death, actively communicating death in the human psyche: “representation – is death and finitude within the psyche” (Writing and Difference 228). Assuming that it emerges as a supplement to (and negation of) humans’ most acute locus for materialization (the body), language achieves its most privileged completion in that very moment when the body loses its materiality in death. In On the Way to Language, Heidegger locates an ineffable, but essential connection between the human subject as a being employing language and his consciousness of his own death: “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either.

 My translation.

130

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought” (107). Representation feeds on death and absence, which are to be regarded as its very modus operandi: “When there is nothing, the image finds in this nothing its necessary condition, but there it disappears. The image needs the neutrality and the fading of the world” (Blanchot, The Space of Literature 254). Consequently, we may at this point conclude that death, nothingness, language, and freedom seem closely intertwined. The nightly wanderings of the dead King Hamlet are an example of this unbeing-being – which, according to John Davies, characterizes human existence – as is this presence-absence employed by Blanchot to denote the nature of representation. The ghost illustrates partly how life is to a certain degree determined by nothingness, i. e., mortality, and partly how every human being is conditioned by a sort of appearance, though not necessarily the outward face of anything that actually exists. The ghost is in itself a representation, an appearance lacking concrete substance – or as Macbeth has it: “The sleeping, and the dead, / Are but as pictures” (II.ii.52– 3). In Shakespeare’s world, the word is often a kind of ghost, a corresponding shadow or imitation of the thing itself, “’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see; / The name and not the thing,” Helena declares in All’s Well That Ends Well (V.iii.301– 2). Thus in itself, the ghost (the shadow) incarnates representation and is in a particular manner atopic, as it is neither in the space of existence nor in that of nothingness, making it an uncanny being-in-between: it is neither living nor dead, neither present nor absent, but a presence simultaneously effacing itself, becoming its own absence.

8 Anxiety, desire, and nothingness Human beings always speak in general terms even though things are individual. In naming them, language blurs the irrefutable particularity of what exists and makes things disappear and retreat behind the words naming them, so that nothingness is added to things. The idea of nothingness enters the stage to accompany the thought of existents, and, according to Heidegger, this is what anxiety lays bare. Anxiety makes us feel lost amongst things and robs us of words, and without words, entities seem to disappear. When entities fade, nothingness emerges, and this is what takes place in anxiety: “Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings slip away, so that precisely the nothing crowds around, all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent in the face of the nothing” (Pathmarks 89). In the experience of anxiety, nothingness coexists with entities in their totality, but the nothing, as the base of existence and truth, is something different from entities, which explains why Heidegger agrees with Hegel when the latter argues: “Pure

8 Anxiety, desire, and nothingness

131

being and pure nothing are […] the same” (Science of Logic 82). However, Heidegger’s reasons for agreeing with Hegel here are not the same as Hegel’s. For where Hegel – seeing that neither pure being nor pure nothingness are subject to reflection, determination, or difference in themselves – claims that the concepts are the same in their pure, indefinable and immediate essence, Heidegger accentuates their ontological difference, i. e., how human existence is held out into nothingness to relate to beings and entities. When existence leans out into the nothing, all beings are transcended. Human existence can only relate to beings if it holds itself out into the nothing. In anxiety, the difference between the totality of beings and the existence of being is momentarily suspended or quashed, and the disappearance of the nothing (that upholds the ontological difference) makes the sensation of existence disappear, too. Anxiety therefore discloses how existence is more than mere things. The revelation of nothingness brought about by anxiety, that is to say, the indefinable objectlessness of anxiety, is beautifully rendered by the Queen in Richard II, who describes her anxiety in the following words: Yet again methinks Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb Is coming towards me, and my inward soul With nothing trembles (II.ii.9 – 12)

The experience of anxiety situates us in a relation to a negation (Nichtung) that is neither a destruction (Vernichtung) nor a rejection or denial (Verneinung). It reveals to us the strangeness (Befremdlichkeit) of beings (das Seiende). Anxiety points to an opening of the question of existence – the structure characterized by what Heidegger calls transcendence and openness. The Queen continues:

Bushy: Queen:

Howe’er it be, I cannot but be sad; so heavy sad, As, though on thinking on no thought I think, Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink. ’Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady. ’Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv’d From some forefather grief; mine is not so, For nothing had begot my something grief, Or something hath the nothing that I grieve – ’Tis in reversion that I do possess – But what it is that is not yet known what I cannot name;’tis nameless woe, I wot. (II.ii.29 – 40; my emphasis)

132

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

The Queen cannot find an explanation for her anxiety. It would seem to be without an object; and on closer inspection, it appears to her to be nothing other than shadows of something which does not exist. Unlike fear, which always occurs for some actual reason, her disquietude appears to lack definite cause. This feeling leads her to claim that nothing has begotten her grief, for contrary to the usual image of disquietude as occasioned by some definite reason, her anxiety is motivated by a nothingness, which would not normally disturb the expected, commonsense reality of things, but which now enjoys a manifest and insistent actuality. The foundation of reality is shaken by nothingness, which usurps the reality of thinking when emerging there as heavy nothing. Nothingness seems to crop up when consciousness is not occupied with any definite object, letting the imaginary and virtual nature of consciousness come to light, precisely because it cannot be defined as having manifest part in material reality. Isabel’s anxiety escapes description. It is nameless and cannot be named (what I cannot name), thus denoting a certain linguistic aspect of anxiety. In her anxiety, she is anxious about something she does not know, something she cannot name. In other words, anxiety points to the fact that, as a human being, she is at the mercy of that unreal nature of language which introduces a necessary segregation from entities into the heart of human existence. Heidegger writes: “Anxiety makes manifest the nothing” (Pathmarks 88). It seems that the disclosure of nothingness in anxiety is based on the fact that language – which defines and informs the existence of man – lacks a definite, substantial foundation in beings. Anxiety reveals that without language, human existence would not be able to distinguish itself from beings: Without language and existential nothingness, humans would be no different from a thing amongst other things. Humans would have no existence if it were not for this existential leaning out into the nothing. Therefore, anxiety shows us that human existence without the ontological difference – primarily incorporated in and given through language – would be nothing but mere nothingness as the total non-differentiation (die völlige Unterschiedslosigkeit) characterized by a numb resting-in-itself. Another tragedy about anxiety and the hell of imagination is Macbeth. The eponymous person can become king, and consequently he must be king. He kills the lawful ruler and must afterwards kill the witnesses to the crime as well as those having suspicions about it. Moreover, he is forced to kill sons and friends of the murdered, and later still, he must kill everyone, seeing that everybody is against him, and in the end, he ends up being murdered himself. At the core of the tragedy is the phenomenon that Donne in one of his sermons on sin labels “this imaginary nothingness” (The Sermons II, 99). The imagination communicates with nothingness, i. e., that which is not, and thus latently threatens to substitute reality with nothing. This is exactly what happens in the case of

8 Anxiety, desire, and nothingness

133

Macbeth, who in the most horrible and traumatizing way is tortured by an existence open to many ambiguous interpretations, and which relentlessly confronts him with the excruciating and terrifying identity between existence and nothingness: Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings, My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smother’d in surmise, And nothing is, but what is not. (I.iii.137– 42; my emphasis)

Through his murder sprees, he projects a nothingness onto the world that eventually ends up annihilating himself. But this nothingness entails a sublimity; and its immense, imaginary grandeur secures the drama its enormous tragic perspective. Just like Julian in Ibsen’s phantasmagorical play Emperor and Galilean I, Macbeth pursues and obeys a chiastic logic dictating: “That, which is, is not; and that, which is not, is” (III, 206). Macbeth adopts this apocalyptic logic because he obliterates what exists in favor of his high-flown fantasmagorical chimeras, a logic which in a sublime but terrifying way usurps reality. This is Wilson Knight’s point, when he notes that Macbeth’s nihilistic vision is “the text of the play. Reality and unreality change places” (The Wheel of Fire 153). Lady Macbeth’s explanation that it is “safer to be that which we destroy” (III.ii.6) also provides a good explanation of why the murders never end, and why the genuine order of things is destroyed to accord with the subjective reality of unrestrained desire. Still, the statement also gives another hint as to why it is necessary to destroy oneself, since uneasiness finds its true source in the self. Even in the initial scenes, Macbeth characterizes himself through negations; in his own eyes, he is what he is not, not the one he is. He is trapped in a world that resembles a void; he is only that which he could potentially be. Macbeth himself chooses who he wants to be, but upon each choice, he experiences himself as even stranger and more resentful: “all that is within him does condemn / Itself, for being there” (V.ii.23 – 4). Macbeth is his own bad dream in which he is at the same time himself and not himself; and he does not wish to be himself since that would mean acknowledging the nightmare, the imaginary nothingness, as reality. His horror is not grounded in that which actually is, but rather in the imagination – and consequently the commotion of nothingness – that terrifies him. He increasingly feels that he and the world are subjected to a massive, leveling nothing:

134

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (V.v.24– 8)

As the very emblem of courage – and thus the exact opposite of a coward – Macbeth is nevertheless in a permanent state of anxiety. Anxious about what? Part of the answer would seem to lie in his anxiety about nothingness: “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (III.i.47). An anxiety both tied to the overwhelming power of his imagination and to his dream of greatness shared and encouraged by his wife, Lady Macbeth. Macbeth is terrorized by anxiety because his imagination presents him with an inner nothingness that constantly threatens him with psychic disintegration; so, he desperately projects this imaginary nothingness outwards through his frantic killings. “And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils, / Which but expressions be of inward evils,” as Fulke Greville has it in his Caelica (C.13 – 14). Stirred by desire and ambition, Macbeth negates the facts ever more fiercely and thus succeeds in assassinating reality; but nevertheless, reality comes back with renewed demonical strength in his imagination and in the delirium of conscience plaguing him in nightmares and hallucinations. The accelerated destruction of meaning is actualized in the general destruction of differences that takes place in the confounding of imagination and reality. Eventually it becomes almost impossible for the couple to distinguish between the two. Where Macbeth to begin with cautiously points to the moral appropriateness of discriminating between reality and imagination (desire and ambition), Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, demands that desire (the imagination) and reality fuse: “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour, / As thou art in desire?” (I.vii.39 – 41). One must act immediately in accordance with one’s desire – it is only a coward who refrains from doing so. Following his wife’s demands, Macbeth unleashes a flood of non-differentiation, in which everything blends wildly as opposites can no longer be kept apart: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I.i.11). Creation and destruction, existence and nothingness coalesce. What used to bestow being now bestows death; the cradle has turned into a grave: “Alas, poor country! / Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot / Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing, / But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile” (IV.iii.164– 67). At this point, nothingness has achieved real being and ousted existence. Nothingness has become tangible, and the actual lived life is now less real than the smiling nothing that destroys everything in its way. Like the protagonist in Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Macbeth senses an anxiety over the immanence of nothing-

9 Desire, representation, and nothingness

135

ness in life: “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was nothing too” (291). This realization isolates him from others, but it is also accompanied by a certain kind of lonely grandeur and a feeling of authenticity: “Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” (291).

9 Desire, representation, and nothingness When Macbeth, recalling the murder of Duncan, compares himself to Tarquin, who raped the chaste Lucretia – “Tarquin’s ravishing strides” (II.i.55) – he subtly hints that the murder (and the flood of killings in its wake) is to a certain degree sexually motivated: “The terror that we experience, as audience or as readers, when we suffer Macbeth seems to me, in many ways, sexual in its nature, if only because murder increasingly becomes Macbeth’s mode of sexual expression. Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them” (Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 529). The terror that shakes Macbeth – and has an interim culmination in the madness-induced suicide of his wife – appears closely related to desire, seeing that both terror and desire phantasmagorically communicate with things not present or non-existent. Macbeth is seized by terror when his imagination evokes his future crimes – which at this point possess no manifest presence or concrete reality. But even as he is seized by terror, he is seized by desire at the thought of the outcome of his future deeds, which are to provide him with what he does not possess at this point. In other words, anxiety and desire are related since both are born of nothing, that is, they lack a present object: “anxiety is a relation linked to desire, since the object is lacking” (Lacan, Le transfert 430).⁹⁵ But what does Tarquin have to say about this? In The Rape of Lucrece, the rapist provides this vivisection of desire: So that in vent’ring ill we leave to be The things we are, for that which we expect; And this ambitious foul infirmity, In having much, torments us with defect Of that we have: so then we do neglect The thing we have, and all for want of wit, Make something nothing by augmenting it. (vv. 148 – 54)

 My translation.

136

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

Desire levels and negates the present now in favor of an absent imaginary object; it negates that which one possesses in favor of what one does not possess. Not only does Tarquin explain how absence and the negative are the true source of desire – as the one desiring desires what is not available or present, that which he does not possess, is not or lacks – he also underscores how desire even negates what is present: “O thoughts of men accurs’d! / Past and to come seems best; things present, worst,” as it similarly says in 2 Henry IV (I.iii.107– 8). The present (something) is destroyed by desire and subjected to the idea of absence (nothing), since absence constitutes the structural dynamics of desire: “Absence doth nurse the fire, / Which starves and feeds desire” (Fulke Greville, Caelica LV.28 – 9). The human subject desires what is absent and is thus in love with a nothing: “Desire is a relation of being to lack […] It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists […] Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable […] In the pursuit of this beyond, which is nothing, it harks back to the feeling of a being with self-consciousness, which is nothing but its own reflection in the world of things” (Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 223 – 24). Human existence is given as this leaning out into the nothing, as it differs from beings. Because humans must understand themselves a posteriori through self-reflection and self-representation (i. e., what is other or the other), desire fundamentally aims at what is absent as absence. Consequently, desire is in a way without an object. According to Lacan, nothingness or existential lack is inscribed in human existence. Employing language and deploying symbols, human reality is necessarily founded in absence and difference. In this manner, the object of desire is the imaginary representation of what is absent (nothing). This point seems to inform Cressida’s claim that men are more likely to think highly of things if they are not in their possession, than if they are: “Men prize the thing ungained more than it is” (Troilus and Cressida I.ii.280). The goal of desire seems directed at some object of crucial ontological importance difficult to attain, and whose desirability appears to be proportionate to its imaginary nature. So, when Coriolanus retorts to his mother Volumnia (entreating him to return to Rome from his exile in enemy camp and to make peace) that “I shall be lov’d when I am lack’d” (Coriolanus IV.i.15), there is some truth to it. For although the remark is waspish it resonates well with a general realization in Shakespeare’s poetic universe, namely that absence determines and nourishes desire. Hamlet does not realize what Ophelia means to him before he has driven her to madness and caused her death, and not before he is literally standing in her grave does he declare his unconditional love; Othello does not comprehend Desdemona’s loyalty and love until he has killed her; Lear does not recognize

9 Desire, representation, and nothingness

137

Cordelia before he holds her dead in his arms; Antony cannot master himself until he believes Cleopatra to have killed herself, while she, on her side, remains indecisive until she believes her master dead; finally, Leontes does not fall in love with his “dead” wife, whom he has grievously wronged, until she has been transformed into a statue. This last example is quite representative, since desire in Shakespeare is the opposite of that of Pygmalion, who conversely yearns for the lifeless statue to be transformed into a living person. In Shakespeare, imagination is the child of death. This circumstance is, for example, clear in Antony and Cleopatra: “That he which is was wished until he were / And the ebb’d man, ne’er lov’d till ne’er worth love, / Comes dear by being lack’d” (I.iv.43 – 4). In the imagination, the desired object is desired because it is absent, but as it becomes present it loses its attraction; desire disappears the moment absence is dissolved. When what is absent is no longer absent, its imaginary status is reduced to the level of reality, and when the object of desire becomes present, it suffers disenchantment as it steps outside of the imagination. As this happens, the object presents itself as one object among others and no longer serves as a phantasmagorical symbol of the subject’s existential lack. When the object of desire becomes present to the desiring person, it conversely loses its existential appeal for that person, for its imaginary nothingness evaporates from the imagination of the subject. The actual thing desired does not appear to be the object of desire but rather that which it represents – and what it represents is basically the subject’s fundamental lack of being, the immanence of nothingness in existence. In Much Ado About Nothing, we encounter an unparalleled analysis of the interrelated nature of desire and absence: for it so falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack’d and lost, Why then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us Whiles it was ours: so will it fare with Claudio. When he shall hear she died upon his words, Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep Into his study imagination, And every lovely organ of her life Shall come apparell’d in more precious habit, More moving-delicate and full of life, Into the eye and prospect of his soul Than when she liv’d indeed. (Much Ado About Nothing IV.i.217– 230)

138

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

The critical role absence plays in the life of desire is accentuated as the monk explains how a staging of Hero’s “death” would make her even more attractive, more present, more beautiful – and more alive, than she would be if she was living. Indeed, the monk urges Hero to die in order to gain more life in the imagination of Claudio: “Come, lady, die to live” (IV.i.253). When Hero is present, Claudio no longer solely beholds her in his imagination inside his mind; he perceives her in her own presence – that is, rather empirical, contingent, and limited than ideal and phantasmagorical. But when absent, the contemplation of her takes place in Claudio’s mind, making the representation of her take place in his imaginative reflection (Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep / Into his study imagination), meaning that reflection and the subjectivity of thinking are no longer limited or conditioned by the actual, phenomenal presence of the other. As the reader may recall, Troilus in frustration claims that desire is boundless, whereas the act is a slave to limit (Troilus and Cressida III.ii.78 – 80). Indeed, desire is nourished by the imaginative nothingness whose immediate subjectivity needs the absence of the object. Being frustrated in the encounter with the object, which limits immediate subjectivity, the presence of the object subjects the desiring subject to mediation. The logic of desire requires that the cathexis in the other shifts from the outward to the inward (from the real to the imaginary), thus interiorizing what is desired in the subject as a symbol, image or ideal of the other – and consequently destroying the independent object that, once externally annihilated, now leads an internal life in the subject itself: Such weight it hath which once is fully possessed That I become a vision, Which hath in other’s head his only being And lives in fancy’s seeing. O wretched state of man in self-division! (Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia I, 63)

The subject experiences an increase of pleasure since object-libido is transformed into ego-libido; the empirical presence of the other is on a symbolic level annihilated, and the heterogeneity and distance of the other are thus cancelled. For the subject cannibalistically installs the image of the other within itself – as if it were a narcissistic crypt or vault. Through the symbolic annihilation of the other, the desiring subject is left with an interiorized image now that the other has been reduced to nothing. The nothingness of the object vis-à-vis desire means that the other no longer determines the subject, which may now define its subjectivity without reference to something beyond itself; the other is now part of the subject itself, residing in interiorized memory. Thus, desire annuls absence and nothingness by absence and nothingness.

9 Desire, representation, and nothingness

139

Being bound up with representation, the subject, according to Lacan, is deprived of a part of itself, of its libidinous life, and of its body. But this privation is nevertheless recaptured on a symbolic level, that is to say, by means of representation: What is no longer present is now re-presented. Something becomes an object of desire the moment it takes the position occupied by the symbol and covers up the missing presence of the subject in relation to itself. As subjectivity desiring self-consciousness, the subject strives to mirror itself in the other to gain awareness of itself. Through an infinite approximation, the subject seeks to create the other, or the mirror image, in accordance with himself – and thus avoid being contaminated by negativity, heterogeneity, and contingency. In other words, desire strives to preclude that subjectivity be infected or delimited by exteriority and heterogeneity. This avoidance of heterogeneity and yearning for pure subjectivity and pure identity constitute a courting of death and nothingness: “The subject thinking the thought of the other, sees in the other the image and the sketch of his own movements. Now, each time the other is the same as the subject, there is no other master than the absolute master, death” (Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique 287). Hegel’s absolute Master (death) – embodied in Lacan’s notion of the Other, representing the relationship of the subject to death and the unconditional – appears to the subject the moment there is no longer a difference from the other. A point that brings us to the aspect of desire characterized as the death drive by psychoanalysis. The death drive indicates a desire to transcend temporality through a return to a pre-organic and lifeless condition beyond division and differentiation. In short, the death drive designates a desire for closure – persuasively demonstrated by Peter Brooks in his classic Reading for the Plot. ⁹⁶ A desire for transparency, for the prenatal condition of a level of zero tension, and finally for the annihilation of division, disintegration, difference, unease, and ambivalence. In the death drive, the subject desires nothingness – a point explored by Donne, who has a keen eye for the irrational and subversive passions of man: We seem ambitious, God’s whole work to undo; Of nothing he made us, and we strive too, To bring ourselves to nothing back (“An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,” vv. 155 – 7)

The verses imply a destructive death drive – the desire to render life undone – that is conservative and nostalgic. As a result, the death drive seems to have  Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992).

140

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

something do with origins anterior to the self with which it yearns to merge. A unity which may require the annihilation of the subject, but which is also considered immense and absolute. The effacement of the self (vis-à-vis the absolute Other) can become attractive because the immersion into nothingness is perceived as an immersion into an immensity. In Shakespeare, the desire for nothing and the annihilation of the self may be found in Richard II, among other plays, in which Richard experiences a strange pleasure in expediting his own end: “Now, mark me how I will undo myself […] Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev’d, / And thou with all pleas’d, that hast all achiev’d!” (IV.i.203 – 17). The king stands idly by when facing Bolingbroke’s threat of dethronement, and rather than laying out a strategy and plan of action, he increasingly engages himself in introvert and imaginary self-contemplation. It is therefore to the point when James Winny observes that the “king repeatedly takes refuge from reality in verbal fantasy” (The Player King 49). Moreover, the king even denies reality in favor of verbal imagination. In accordance with the logic of desire defined by the monk in Much Ado About Nothing, it seems that the king finds pleasure in pondering his own death. Doing so, his self-representation becomes increasingly inflated, since the idea of his own death in a morbid and melancholy way enhances the idea of his self in his imagination; an imagination whose power is augmented by the rejection of the external world now darkened by the reality of death: Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d With being nothing. (V.v.37– 41)

Neither the King nor anyone else can be happy with anything, unless he is accustomed to the thought of becoming nothing; neither the King nor anyone else can be happy with the presence of nothingness, unless he is accustomed to the thought of becoming nothing, that is, to die. The obscure words of the King are not easily interpreted, but they do seem to signify that nothingness is a determining factor of existence, and that the linguistic ambivalence about nothing – which in this case denotes both something and nothing – mirrors the ambivalence between being and nothing (as nothingness is inherent in existence as a being-towards-death). The king is paralyzed by nothingness, being more concerned with contemplating the idea of death than with how to avoid it. He longs for death and welcomes it actively, since he is increasingly thinking of life as a diminutive of nothing that only brings frustration, suffering and grief.

9 Desire, representation, and nothingness

141

Paul Jorgensen puts it nicely when he describes Richard’s obsession with nothing as rooted in “the solacing power of Nothing” (Redeeming Shakespeare’s Words 36). Since Richard can lose his crown to Bolingbroke, human life completely loses its meaning, and everything appears to be futile in the face of life’s contingent forces. In the confrontation with this overwhelming nothing, the King cannot justify his existence, being unable to confer any meaning upon his own life. It is not so much death and suffering that weigh heavily on the king, as their meaninglessness, which is why his subjectivity and sense of self are severely threatened. But as he opens the door to a suicidal and nihilist death drive, he nonetheless rescues the will: since he wills his own downfall, he is no longer subjected to chance – “nothing can we call our own but death” (III.ii.152). In another context, but very much to the point here, Terry Eagleton explains how it “is the death drive which cajoles us into tearing ourselves apart in order to achieve the absolute security of nothingness. Non-being is the ultimate purity. It has the unblemishedness of all negation, the perfection of a blank page” (After Theory 213). Intensifying his desire for nothingness, Richard reinforces his independence of the appearances of this world as well as its contingency. As Nietzsche concludes in his dissection of ascetic morality: “man would much rather will nothingness (das Nichts) than not (nicht) will…” (On the Genealogy of Morality III.28, 118). Pure ideality reverts to nothingness or nihilism, meaning that the tragic protagonists would rather welcome nothingness than renounce the idea of the absolute. Refusing to compromise with the idealist demands they make upon their surroundings and themselves, Coriolanus, Lear, and Richard all prefer the prospect of dying. Idealism reverts to nihilism as idealism contains the seed of nihilism; idealism evokes an idea at the detriment of what is at hand and what cannot comply with the absolutist demands. The ideal – be it inward or outward – is precisely ideal because it transcends what is. It thus inscribes itself into the sphere of nothingness; so, when the protagonists attribute greater reality to the ideal as opposed to what exists, nihilism is lurking in the shadows: “The entire idealism of mankind hitherto is on the point of changing suddenly into nihilism – into the belief in absolute worthlessness, i. e., meaninglessness” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 331). The tacit affinity between idealism and nihilism is advertized in Timon of Athens, where the misanthropist in the role of disappointed idealist hates everybody and everything: “For / these my present friends, as they are to me nothing, so in / nothing bless them, and to nothing are they welcome” (III.vi.79 – 81). To begin with, Timon has complete confidence in the noble nature of humans, but once his confidence is shaken, his naïve faith in humanity is destroyed and turns into a passionate hatred of others as well as himself, thus completing the trans-

142

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

formation of idealism into nihilism: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (IV.iii.301). Where Timon used to be naïve in his love of humanity, he now becomes just as simplemindedly scornful and cynical in his nihilism and entertains no other wish than the destruction of everything – be it himself or others. He is passionately obsessed with thoughts of death, and the thought of going to his grave becomes his greatest pleasure: “My long sickness / Of health and living now begins to mend, / And nothing brings me all things” (V.i.185 – 87). Nothingness provides Timon with all that exists because he detests everything. Furthermore, he prizes nothingness more than anything else, because to him everything is a reminder of the vanity of things. Since life fails to live up to his idealist and moralist demands, it cannot but be scorned. The nihilism of Timon proves to be a disenchanted idealism or absolutism, a belief that if reality and values are not absolute, reality and values are void. Moreover, idealism and absolutism find an uncanny partner in the death drive with its alluring message of perfect tranquility and unity; Timon eventually chooses to commit suicide, the absolute self-negation, thus securing him absolute negative freedom. Warwick’s ironic comment in Henry VI may stand as an apt commentary upon the drive behind Timon’s death wish: “Henry now lives in Scotland at his ease, / Where having nothing, nothing can he lose” (III.iii.151– 52).

10 Sexuality, gender, birth, and nothingness There is a connection between desire, nothingness and death; and it appears that it is not for nothing when the old Capulet asks if it is true that “unsubstantial death is amorous” (Romeo and Juliet V.iii.1014). The minute she kills herself with the poisonous bite of the snake, the hyper-eroticized Cleopatra compares the blow of death to “a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desired” (Antony and Cleopatra V.ii.295). In the Renaissance, the orgasmic climax is often conveyed through images of dying, as in Thomas Campion who invites the beloved to bed, saying: “Here let us harbour all alone, / Die, die in sweet embracing” (A Booke of Ayres XVII.15 – 16). The moment Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is about to consummate her hour of dalliance with Horatio (before her brother Lorenzo and Balthazar surprise and kill them), she passionately explains to her lover “that life in passion dies” (II.iv.47). Orgasm is a dying (cf the French expression for orgasm, “la petite mort”) insofar as it dissolves all distinctions and differences; for at the height of ecstasy, the fundamental distance and difference between the subject and the surrounding world are momentarily sus-

10 Sexuality, gender, birth, and nothingness

143

pended. As we momentarily lose ourselves at the height of ecstacy, we drop into nothingness. Returning to Cleopatra, it therefore makes perfect sense when Enobarbus declares that the Queen loves to die repeatedly: Under a compelling occasion let women die. It were pity to cast them away for nothing, though between them and a great cause they should be esteemed nothing. Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. I do think there is mettle in death which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying. (Antony and Cleopatra I.ii.144– 51)

Death is an important metaphor for the sexual act, as eroticism both entails recognition and rejection of death. On the one hand, the biological aim of sexuality is procreation, securing the species and upholding the continuity of life, thus transcending the mortality of the individual within the framework of species. On the other hand, however, sexuality entails a recognition of death, since the reproduction of life originates in the fact that the individual cannot escape death and is consequently forced to reproduce. Extending life by sexual reproduction is both to deny and to accept death. Sexuality conceived of as dying is somewhat ambiguous, seeing that the production of life is also a production of a future death. Moreover, the sexual act is a kind of dying, as it aims to annul the difference from the other, while at the same time annulling the individual as a separate subject (subjected to tension) through what Freud called Lustbefriedigung. The image of death inherent in sexuality signifies the orgasmic, momentary suspension of differences, opening for a certain nothingness. Moreover, the role that death and nothingness plays in sexuality is metaphorically mirrored in Renaissance bawdy, in which the female sex is compared to nothing: “A paramour is, God bless us, a thing of naught” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream IV.ii.13 – 14).⁹⁷ A delightfully burlesque illustration of the anatomical background for perceiving the female sex as a “nothing” – as compared to the male “thing” – has been provided by Ludvig Holberg in The Fussy Man: “Zero means nothing, but when you add a stroke it becomes something at once. I am as unworthy as a stroke, but / when my insignificant stroke is added to your zero…” (II.iii, 30). In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, we come across another sophisticated illustration of the female sex as “nothing”. In one of the homoerotic poems, the poet la-

 Other examples of passages in which the female sex is likened to nothing (apart from those already mentioned) are, for example, Hamlet (III.ii.119), Romeo and Juliet (I.iv.96), and Henry IV, Part Two (I.iv.180).

144

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

ments that the fair youth was created wrongly by nature, for in the beginning he was fashioned as a woman with a “nothing,” but subsequently he was supplemented with a “thing,” and thus transformed from woman into man – causing the poet great frustration: And for a woman wert thou first created, Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing (20.9 – 12)

Another humorous, yet harsh example of sleazy talk about “things” and “nothings” can be found in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. Here Franceschina bemoans her humiliating fate to the procuress Mary Faugh: “You ha’ brought mine love, mine honor, mine body, all to nothing!” Mary Faugh brusquely replies: “To nothing! I’ll be sworn I have brought them to all the things I could” (II.ii.7– 10). In John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy, a prostitute with similar bluntness exclaims that she will court every “thing,” but never love any “thing”: “I will court any thing; be in love with nothing, nor no–thing” (III.i.74– 6). Within a certain phallocratic tradition, the female sex has been seen as a kind of “nothing,” since it is not visible in the same externally manifest manner as the male penis. Within this tradition, dominant in Western thought, the true instrument for knowing and understanding (metaphorically as well as literally) has been defined by the faculty of seeing as θεωρία (i. e., “spectacle” or “sight”), in which the nature of an object or a meaning is established from its “appearance” or “form” as εἰδός or ἴδεα. Strictly speaking, the female sex cannot be represented within this system, which according to the French philosopher Luce Irigaray is why “her sexual organ […] represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in this systematics of representation and desire. A ‘hole’ in its scoptophilic lens. It is already evident in Greek statuary that this nothing-to-see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a scene of representation” (This Sex which is not One 26). On a more general level, the female sex – considered as the source of sources (vide Courbet’s L’origine du monde) – is the cause of an abysmal vertigo, experienced when one enquires about one’s beginnings: “Where do I come from?” No satisfactory answer can be given to this question since one fundamentally originates from nothing – a realization that inherently points to the uncanny thought that one must return to nothing again; a fact mythopoetically expressed in the words “for

10 Sexuality, gender, birth, and nothingness

145

dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3.19).⁹⁸ So, when the female sex is mockingly defined as a nothing, this is due to some degree of male ambivalence; for her sex is both a productive nothing from which he emerged into existence (and to which he owes his life), and a destructive nothing representing his dependence on the other, as well as his own physical mortality, tying him to death. Men’s ambivalence regarding women is brilliantly described by Simone de Beauvoir: “Thus what man cherishes and detests first of all in woman – loved one or mother – is the fixed image of his animal destiny; it is the life that is necessary to his existence but that condemns him to the finite and death” (The Second Sex 165). From this perspective, the female sex is a gaping nothing, partly reminding the male subject of the mysterious beginning of existence, partly reminding it of its obscure and frightful end, thus making her sex an extremely ambivalent site for birth and death: “Where death is, there also is birth, change, and renewal. The image of birth is no less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows a glimpse of the departing one” (Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World 409). This potentially renders the very idea of birth and coming into existence quite disturbing since it becomes inseparable from the thought of death, perdition, and nothingness. Thus, birth and death are identical entities, if we are to believe the French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard: le naistre est le trepas: Sans naistre icy l’home ne mourroit pas: Fol qui d’ailleurs autre bien se propose, Naissance & mort est une mesme chose. [The birth is in the dying. / Men would not die unless they were born to this / Only a fool could hope some kinder ending. / Dying and being born are the same thing]. (“La Salade,” vv. 154– 55)

Creation and nothingness are juxtaposed, for every creation denotes a negation and consequently nothingness. This brings about a demonization of creation, since every becoming latently points to its own destruction: For in the wide womb of the world there lies, In hateful darkness and in deep horror, An eternal Chaos, which supplies The substances of nature’s fruitful progeny’s. (Spenser, The Faerie Queen III.vi.36)

 If nothing else, this is substantiated by Alfred Tennyson, whose poetic interpretation of the passage goes as follows: “A life of nothings, nothing-worth, / From that first nothing ere his birth / To that last nothing under earth!” (The Lady of Shalott 33).

146

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

The fertile creations of nature originate from an eternal chaos described as darkness and an abysmal void, which stand for the uterus and origin of the world – notwithstanding the fact that the womb creates life and is the seat of the creative impulse. Since the notion of becoming pertains not only to the idea of birth, but also to that of death and destruction, the uterus and the female sex become the very emblems of nothingness and temporality, which may grant life, but a life eventually predestined to die. The increasing misogyny haunting several of Shakespeare’s male characters may thus be explained as the result of a certain form of idealism, which like Parmenides rejects movement and change, because these would imply an acknowledgment of the existence of nothingness. Moreover, since woman reflects corporeal changeability and its connection to the coming and going of generations, she becomes an object of hatred and bitterness, and her sex, particularly, becomes strongly demonized. This demonization of woman by a male whose absolutist ideas degenerate into nihilism and find expression through misogyny, is representatively exemplified in King Lear, in which the King is obsessed by a subversive “nothing” emanating from the destructive female sex: “there’s hell, there’s darkness, / There is the sulphurous pit – burning, scalding, / Stench, consumption” (IV.vi.126 – 8). This extreme, deeply irrational fear of woman (as bearer of hell and perdition) mirrors Lear’s fear of temporality, death, and nothingness. These phenomena are incorporated in the mortal body, whose frailty and changeability find their strongest expression in the genital flesh, which is the metaphor of becoming par excellence. Therefore, the misogynist’s obsession with the despised female “nothing” also includes an anxiety over the bitter and changeable “nothing”: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (I.iv.128 – 9). The fool’s mockery focuses both on female changeability – constituted by this monstrous “nothing” that refuses visual representation (the horror of nothing to see) – and on the fundamental changeability of life, which sooner or later destroys even the most powerful king, reducing him to nothing. Another significant passage in the tragedy is the insightful remark to the King made by the fool: “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool: and yet I would not be thee, nuncle; thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides, and left nothing i’ the middle: here comes one o’ the parings” (I.iv.181– 85). Lear failed in sticking to his middle, as he divided Cordelia’s third of the kingdom between Goneril’s Northern and Regan’s Southern kingdoms. Lear, who in himself was everything, is now that very nothing which he aggressively bestowed on Cordelia to begin with. His disgust with Goneril and Regan turns into an involuntary horror of female sexuality, the nothingness of which is representative of male impotency in the face of nature’s forces, and the king increasingly compares his sufferings with the female qualities that he feels in his own character. As mentioned, Lear initially believes in his own om-

10 Sexuality, gender, birth, and nothingness

147

nipotence (they told me I was every / thing), thus securing his masculine sense of all-powerfulness. However, his megalomania results in complete impotence (thou art nothing), for he becomes completely powerless when faced with those forces of nature which he identifies as feminine. At this point, the blind Gloucester takes his leave of the mad Lear: “O ruin’d piece of Nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (IV.vi.133 – 34). Thus, Lear’s male virility is engulfed and subverted by the female nothing because “woman’s nothing is of a particularly convoluted kind, a yawning abyss within which man can lose his virile identity,” as Terry Eagleton has it (William Shakespeare 64). In Titus Andronicus, the threatening female sexuality represented by Tamora similarly produces sombre images of a void disclosing hell and damnation: “this unhallowed and blodstained hole” (II.ii.210), “this detested, dark, blood-drinking pit” (v. 224), “this fell devouring receptacle, / As hateful as Cocytus’ misty mouth” (vv. 235 – 36), and “the swallowing womb / Of this deep pit” (vv. 239 – 40). These descriptions of the fatal hole become semantically overdetermined when Lavinia is not only raped, but also has her tongue cut out. We need no Sigmund Freud to conclude that the hole holds a complex symbolic significance as vagina, womb, grave, hell and mouth, and that an extremely sadistic kind of metaphorical connection is established between the oscillation of the mouth and vagina as destructively devouring and being violently destroyed. Thus, it is hardly going too far to claim that the conceptualization of sexuality is here extremely destructive. In Romeo and Juliet, the great drama of love is played out against the backdrop of ferocious hatred between two families: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. / Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create!” (I.i.173 – 5). Admittedly, it is Rosaline whom Romeo is talking about here, but the dilemma is equal to that which he is facing with Juliet, since she is a member of the reviled Capulet family. Romeo cuts Mercutio – who has been teasing him with a mock tribute to women and love – short with bawdy: “Thou talk’st of nothing” (I.iv.96). The obscene pun on “nothing” as vagina, meanwhile, proves to be ambiguous: The sex is not simply nothing – or if it is, it is a nothing establishing a background for a creatio ex nihilo of an almost metaphysical nature. Mercutio, however, does have a ready answer: “True, I talk of dreams, / Which are but the children of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy” (vv. 96 – 8). As was the case in Holberg, a nought signifies nothing, even as a dash in itself signifies nothing, but something will come of it, nevertheless, when the two are joined together. Mercutio’s (erotic) dreams and amorous ideas are children begot by the imagination, which is nothing in itself – merely an airy nothing. Divine creation ex nihilo and sexual generation blend on a metaphorical level in such a way that the mental, imaginary

148

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

activity is supplied with an erotic quality, while the erotic activity is supplemented with a mental, imaginary dimension. The creative powers of eroticism and the imagination are consequently related since both – insofar as they are tying “things” and “nothings” together – produce something that did not exist in advance. The power of imagination can conjure up mental images in which a sensory object is absent, thus making it the source of dreams and erotic phantasms. This is formulated in the obscure speech of Leontes trying to reason his way to an understanding of what he interprets as Hermione’s adultery: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams; – how can this be? – With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost. (The Winter’s Tale I.ii.139 – 43)

Leontes believes that the impossible has become all too possible; his line of thought seems to be that carnal fantasies produced by passion – fantasies that admittedly are unreal “nothings” in themselves – help to evoke the realization of erotic reveries and yearnings. The “nothing” of the imagination needs only be coupled with a little real “something” to let the erotic imagination find gratification outside the imagination, he implies. Within the limits of the possible, the imagination engenders things that do not exist, and since passion can endow the “nothing” of the imagination with reality, it is not unlikely that “nothing” could tie itself to “something” in the outside world. The words employed, which in general denote mutual interaction (communicat’st, coactive and co-join), allude to the suspected connection with Polixenes and thus suggest that Hermione’s pregnancy is caused by illegitimate, sexual intercourse. Again, the creative powers of the erotic and the imaginative are fused in such a way that the bantering on “things” and “nothings” not only describes the interaction between the imagination (nothing) and reality (something), but also the way sexual intercourse fuses the male’s member (some-thing) with the female’s vagina (nothing). However, it turns out that Hermione is innocent of joining “things” with “nothings” outside wedlock; it is rather Leontes who confuses the “something” of reality with his own extravagant and jealous chimeras (nothings). Leontes seems obsessed with the idea of infidelity from a nihilistic sense of the abysmal nothingness of personality: is this nothing? Why, then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,

11 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness

149

The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (The Winter’s Tale I.ii.292– 6)

In the play, sexual jealousy and metaphysical nihilism seem to reflect the King’s absolutist tendencies. The ecstatic and crazy litany of nothings reflects how the King (like Lear) feels that his omnipotence is threatened by another, who cannot fully be mastered or subjected to absolute control. The king’s tyrannical selfoverestimation does not tolerate the slightest uncertainty in the face of the other, which is why he would rather launch himself into misogyny and nihilism than allow his wife subjectivity and autonomy. Leontes’s speech thus contains and claims a large part of its energy from an obsessive reworking of woman into nothing: “[H]e reduces Hermione to a vagina,” as Derek Cohen duly remarks (“Patriarchy and Jealousy in Othello and The Winter’s Tale” 217). In reducing Hermione to utter nothingness, he has established a reason for issuing the order for her execution.

11 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness The imagination, then, covers vast areas of human experience, and its dynamics is brought about through communication with a nothing through which creative powers give birth to non-existent chimaeras, images and things that are not. From the intensified focus on the human subject in early modernity follows an altered view of human nature. Human existence is now celebrated as the enabling base for freedom and potentiality. When Nicholas of Cusa emphasized the dignity and greatness of man, and even called man a human god, the seeds had been sown for the renewed concept of the poet as an individual with access to a certain kind of inspiration, that is, possessing powers otherwise reserved for the priesthood. Consequently, it becomes common during the Renaissance to draw parallels between the creative poetic process and divine creation; and the poet’s preoccupation with unknown things deriving from an unsubstantial nothing (the imagination) is compared with divine creation ex nihilo. Taking his cue from God’s creation of the world from nothing, Henry Cuffe, for example, explains why all creation happens through a creation of something from nothing: “we affirm that the world proceeded, from not being to being […] For there is a potential being, incident to things that are not at all […] the making of Creation, is always without any matter subject, being defined to be, a making something of nothing” (The differences of the ages of mans life 26, 29). The theological discus-

150

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

sion of the doctrine failed to stop the more secular, poetological interpretations of this metaphysical terminology. We see this, for example, when George Puttenham analogizes the Christian God with the poet as understood by Classical Greece: The poet is a creator, and like God creates a world from nothing: “A poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conforms to the Greek word: for of poieîn, to make, they call a maker poeta. Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God; who without any travel to his divine imagination made all the world of nought” (The Arte of English Poesie I.1, 3). The Renaissance’s newly discovered understanding of the poet as creator, rather than as mere imitator, marks a fundamental rupture with the medieval conception of art and bestows an unprecedented honour upon him, an honour hitherto reserved for God only. The divine and the human creator both bestow being upon a world from a nothing, and it is precisely this nothingness which is the fulcrum in the relation between poet and God. According to one of the great physicians Andreas Laurentius, who enjoyed great prestige in the Renaissance, the mind receives from the imagination images and forms that are in themselves empty and devoid of substance: “the understanding part of the mind receives from the imaginative the forms of things naked and void of substance” (A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight I.iii, 16). This understanding speaks through Imogen’s words in Cymbeline, when, after waking up to discover Cloten’s bloody body, she asks herself if she is in fact dreaming – a thought she nonetheless rejects, declaring that imagination has played a trick on her: “’Twas but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing, / Which the brain makes of fumes” (IV.ii.300 – 1). The imagination shoots arrows made of nothing, not born of reality, and consequently aimed at nothing. The imagination gets its power and force from nothingness, which makes it possible to imagine things that are not actually there. It is striking, for instance, to learn in John Webster’s The White Devil “how strong / Imagination works! how she can frame / Things which are not!” (IV.i.102– 104). Evidently, the power of imagination consists precisely in its ability to communicate with a nothing potentially infinite, since it latently contains all things either impossible, possible, past, future, absent or just not there. To some extent, the poetics of the Renaissance must be understood as a creatio ad nihilum rather than a creatio ex nihilo, because nothingness plays an active role in creation. This active nothing primarily takes place in representation, as is the case in the anonymous ballad “A Song made of Nothing,” in which language facilitates the creation of something from nothing: “Here you see something of nothing is made, / For of the word ‘nothing’ something is said” (vv. 85 – 86). Hotspur, the proud warrior, scornfully rejects poetry as a “nothing” whose nature is nothing but nothingness: “And that would set my teeth nothing on

11 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness

151

edge, / Nothing so much as mincing poetry” (1 Henry IV, III.i.128 – 9). In Nicholas Breton’s The Scholler and The Souldiour, the author also subtly and amusingly equals his work to a “nothing” from which “something” comes into existence – only to turn to nothing again etc.: Gentle Reader, read no further than you like: if you find any thing to your content, think well of me for my pains. If there be nothing that likes you, my luck is naught: in nothing there can be nothing, yet something may be found, though nothing to any great purpose. Well, there are diverse nothings, which you shall read further off, if you will take pains to turn over the leaf, and peruse the rest that follows. Now, though I will wish you look for no marvellous or worthy thing, yet shall you find something, though in effect (as it were) nothing, yet in conceit a pretty thing to pass away the time withal. Well, if you stand content with this nothing, it may be ere long, I will send you something more to your liking: till then I wish you nothing but well. (22)

Art and poetry stage a fine interaction between nothing and something through which nothingness is given greater reality status, whereas, conversely, things and reality are given a larger share of virtuality and unreality. Thus, the rogue Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale may be right in juxtaposing song, triviality, and nothingness: “no hearing, no feeling, but my sir’s song, / and admiring the nothing of it” (IV.iv.614– 15). Here the pun is on the identical pronunciation of nothing and noting. According to Kökeritz, the pronounciation of o in the word nothing was long and th was pronounced as t,⁹⁹ providing a double meaning in a statement like the following: “I shall have my music for nothing” (The Tempest III.ii.145). In Hamlet, Laertes describes Ophelia’s mad song with the words, “This nothing’s more than matter” (IV.v.172), thus tying the absence of specific meaning in the song to its overall immaterial nonsense. Note is rich in meanings, denoting, for instance, a sign or a mark, a distinctive characteristic, an identity tag, a brief description, a memorandum, a map or informational letter, a note or observation, and also, finally, notes, musical sounds, and tones. This mixture of referents for “noting” is thus combined with nothingness, “nothing,” as the words are homonymous: Balthasar: Note this before my notes; There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting. Don Pedro: Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks! Note notes, forsooth, and nothing. (Much Ado About Nothing II.iii.54– 7)

 Cf. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare’s Pronunciation 132.

152

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

This exchange of words takes place just before Balthasar starts singing and suggests that noting notes is the same as noting nothing (i. e., something of no worth), seeing that song and poetry are nothing. Poetry is thus an affirmation of nothingness, which is why it attains to a certain status outside of the dichotomy of true and false: “Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth,” as Philip Sidney has it in The Defence of Poesy (29). What Plato criticizes in poetry – its production of chimeras (φαντάσματα) and what does not exist (οὐκ ὄντα, The Republic X.599a), so that it borders upon the mendacious – is precisely what poetry is praised for in the Renaissance, since poetry in a magical way not only opens for a communication with what is absent or non-existent, but also bestows existence upon that which has none. In his Musophilus, Samuel Daniel writes: O blessed letters that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead living unto counsel call: By you the unborn shall have communion Of what we feel, and what do us befall. (vv. 189 – 94)

Nothing, as a positive force, produces everything within the poetic universe, where necessity has been suspended; its immense importance for fashioning of human dreams and inspiring the imaginative faculty was for Shakespeare as well as for his contemporaries a fruitful obsession. In his most famous lines on poetry, Shakespeare explains how the poet in the very moment of inspired creation beholds the totality of the world, and how he beholds unknown things as he furnishes them with form and being: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.12– 17)

The poet creates something from nothing, making nothing the actual material from which he creates. He makes the insignificant, insubstantial, unknown or absent the source of a poetic reality. In itself, the poetic subject matter has no real existence; it has no self and is both all and nothing, making the poetic activity a continuous translation of the non-existent into something existent. The

11 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness

153

poet is a host who welcomes the figures of consciousness and the imagination as he gives them a dwelling and a name. What has never ceased to shock certain philosophers and theologians is that poetry’s point of departure is not merely what is, but rather what is not, i. e., the nothing of existence understood as pure speculation and potentiality: “These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable 303). The work of art manifests – more than the imitation of a thing or the hypostatization of an object into a sublime thing – a complex relation between the absence and presence of the thing and the object. Obviously, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their objective is not just representing. By providing an image of the object, they transform it into something else. In other words, they only pretend to be imitating. The object of art is fixed in a certain relation to existence and nothingness, rendering it at one and the same time present and absent, living and dead. Consequently, art is not merely imitation and misrepresentation of what exists, for what the poet imitates is not actually empirically existent, but rather a creation of the imagination, which is a kind of nothing (an airy nothing). Shakespeare states this quite succinctly in Love’s Labour’s Lost where it simply says that “[i]mitari is nothing” (IV.ii.125). As a maker, the poet bestows being upon something that would otherwise remain unactualized in the sphere of nothingness, thus letting the poet generate being rather than disfiguring it. In Shakespeare, we witness an imitation imitating a nothing, since the reference does not refer to existents, but to the representations of the imagination devoid of material being. In the world of art, all is nothing, nothing all: may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O pardon, since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. […] Into a thousand parts divide one man And make imaginary puissance. (Henry V, Prologue 13 – 8, 24– 5)

This wooden O that is the theatre (probably The Globe) is both nothing and everything,¹⁰⁰ and the zero also denotes sheer nothingness. But in the right context,  Stephen Greenblatt emphasizes how the theatre in Shakespeare constitutes a fictitious,

154

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

that is, at the end of a series of numbers, it helps to describe the universe (a million). The actors are merely empty digits signifying nothing, but when the audience, using their imagination, place these digits in their proper place, they suddenly represent everything imaginable. When the actor is reduced to nothing, as he is divided into a thousand parts, he is conversely multiplied a thousand-fold in the audience’s imaginations. In the artistic universe, a division is paradoxically a multiplication, and the actors are phantoms, melting into the thin air: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And – like the baseless fabric of this vision – The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest IV.1.148 – 58)

The entire artistic representation has emerged from nothing, and once the audience has gone home, it returns to nothing, since it has only gained actuality in their minds. Like life itself, the dramatic experience is founded on nothing, it is in a way baseless, having no foundation in reality. The artistic world – including, of course, the theatre (The Globe Playhouse) – signifies an imaginary limbo, disappearing the moment the show is over. The end of the performance signifies a completion that is itself a cipher (a zero) rounded with the sleep of virtuality. In sum, Shakespeare is offering us a “nothing-gift of differing multitudes” (Cymbeline III.vii.58). Yet the gift of nothingness is in no way worthless,¹⁰¹ but rather invaluable, as it teaches us that the only way to speak of nothing is by speaking as if it is something, and that the best way of speaking of something is by speaking as if it is nothing. Poetry’s sublimest task is to communicate with nothingness, and in this way confer meaning and passion onto meaningless things – using the word:

imaginary space, whose quintessence is given through its unreal virtuality. Accordingly, he characterizes the theater as “an institution that calls forth what is not, that signifies absence, that transforms the literal into the metaphorical, that evacuates everything it represents. By doing so the theater makes for itself the hollow round space within which it survives” (Shakespearean Negotiations 127).  Cf. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary 182.

11 The renaissance and the poetics of nothingness

155

Den som säger: Alt er Intet skall du tillsäge mörkt Intet är Allt, du våger tillägge meningslösheten mening och av ord göre ord. [To he who says, “Everything is Nothing” you shall reply: ‘Nothing is Everything’; you dare ascribe meaning to meaninglessness and make words out of words]. (Gunnar Ekelöf, En röst [A Voice] 146)¹⁰²

In other words, nothingness is the very basis of existence, just as silence is the basis of speech – even as les blancs, in Mallarmé’s words, is a prerequisite of every kind of writing. Rephrasing Freud’s famous dictum, and taking our point of departure in Shakespeare, we may conclude: Wo Nichts war soll Ich werden. It is certainly legitimate to claim that nothingness plays a significant and decisive role in Shakespeare’s poetic universe, as the actions of the inhabitants, their thoughts and feelings are accompanied by the dynamic presence of nothingness. When the characters love or make love, desire, die, talk, laugh or cry, experience anxiety, become jealous, write poetry, pretend to be someone else and refashion themselves, their feelings are usually based on a specific kind of nothingness. Indeed, as Hugo von Hofmansthal ascertains in his address to the Shakespeare Society in Weimar in 1905, nothingness constitutes the spirit of the works: “You feel, as I do, this imponderable, this intangible element, this Nothing which is nevertheless everything, and from my lips you take the words wherewith I wish to name it – the Atmosphere of Shakespeare’s works” (“Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen” 258). The human subject is marked by the immanence of nothing, since nothing has indeed proved to be the force that renovates the world, and this renovation is made concrete through the representations in a process that offers consciousness a liberty that either results in the progressive and increasing power of the mind or leads to a decline in the mind’s opportunities to manifest itself. Consequently, Shakespeare recognizes nothingness as a determining factor in human life. Since the human subject exists through representation, it may be subjected to nothingness, but on the other hand, it is only through representation itself that existence is salvaged from nothingness and the immediate non-differentiation of unmediated beings. It is through the affirmation of nothingness that existence acquires meaning and value, and it is through the confrontation with nothingness that life’s fundamental, nihilistic meaninglessness may be challenged. In those cases where the protagonists refuse to think or deal with the issue of nothing, nihilism is the  My translation.

156

IV Shakespeare’s “Nihilism”

great victor. In Shakespeare, the implementation of nothingness into existence is expressed through a massive affirmation of human existence, conceived as a continuous becoming and transformation. Shakespeare thus accedes to Leonardo’s remark that among the wonders that exist among men, nothingness is the greatest. However, since nothingness is an essential feature of human existence, it is also essentially ambiguous. Shakespeare shows that humans find their existential justification in nothingness and that the ambivalent nature of humans is based on the indifference of nothingness towards that which is either most wonderful or most terrible. It is up to the protagonists themselves either to seek one or the other meaning of the word “nothing,” but if they reject the immanence of nothingness in life, they most often involuntarily end up in the grip of utter nada. The concern with nothingness is in Shakespeare the realm of pure potentiality, which alone makes freedom possible. For better or for worse.

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties 1 Medieval persistence In recent decades, scholars of literary and intellectual history have probed the relevance of the Middle Ages to the formation of (early) modernity and have spent considerable critical energy in studying diverse aspects of the assertation that “the early modern was constructed through or in negotiation with the medieval”, as Gordon McMullan and David Mathews, for example, have it (“Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England” 6). Critics like Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, to mention other examples, have – with a critical nod to Hans Blumenberg – worked to assure “the legitimacy of the Middle Ages” for the articulation of modernity, stressing how “‘the medieval’ is never overcome and rarely superseded but rather continuously posited as that necessary anachronism that paradoxically generates ‘the modern’ as we know it” (“Outside Modernity” 28). It has thus been argued that medieval literature and thought pre-empted many of the ideas of subjectivity seen in (early) modernity and that there is a long unbroken tradition of articulations of the self that are in no way inferior to or less sophisticated than the subsequent modern ones. Consequently, David Aers remarks that “there is no reason to think that languages and experiences of inwardness, of interiority, of divided selves, of splits between outer realities and inner forms of being, were unknown before the seventeenth century” (“A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists” 186). Or in the words of Anthony Low: “Subjectivity and individuality – the sense that an individual human being has his own ‘insides,’ feelings, and identity – go back a long way into the past” (Aspects of Subjectivity 184). In Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities, which came out recently in 2017, Danila Sokolov argues that “Petrarchan subjectivity is not an exclusively Renaissance phenomenon” (272) but has strong ties to the Middle Ages. Disputing a traditional view of Petrarch as the forerunner of early modern formulations of subjectivity – formulations that “often,” she claims, “entails a wholesale denial of subjectivity to the pre-Petrarchan Middle Ages” (9) – Sokolov conversely endeavors to draw attention to the way Petrarchan subjectivity “in many instances relies in its expressions of desire and subjectivity on medieval structures of discourse and identity” (271). Another interesting example of this tendency to downplay the eruptive nature of early modern subjectivity, emphasizing continuity instead, is to be found in Eric Caldwell’s The Poetics of Renaissance Subjectivity from 2008. Caldwell argues that Renaissance subjectivity can be seen as “a phenomenon in which selves orient and produce themselves by identifying https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-006

158

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

images of the other as images of the self […] an idealized image of the self” (i). Having said that, however, Caldwell argues that this idea of subjectivity did not imply a departure away from earlier formations of subjectivity, but entailed a prolongation inscribed within “a sacred Christian tradition, founded in Augustine, and a classical tradition, founded in Plato and Aristotle” (ibid.). Indeed, it remains indisputable that the idea of the self as depending on an ideal mirror to define it dates back a long time. Delimiting ourselves to a Christian metaphysics of the high Middle Ages just a century before Petrarch’s, and taking Thomas Aquinas’s scholasticism as illustrative of this idealist metaphysics of subjective mirroring (into which Caldwell inscribes Renaissance subjectivity as the last unbroken chain), we have an example that clearly confirms this dialectic logic of subjectivity. Thomas emphasizes self-love (amor sui) as a necessary and natural step toward the experience of God’s love. He defines love as that which benefits the self and that which affirms the self, and through which the self can ultimately affirm and love itself: “Further, one loves a thing in so far as it is one’s own good” (Summa Theologica II.ii.26.3). For Thomas, the self becomes the crucial point in love, and it rests on the assumption that man’s own goodness is to be found in God as its first and primary cause: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1.27). God is the absolute self, that is, the best of me, more me than myself, the Other who takes pleasure in mirroring himself in me, even as I take pleasure in mirroring myself in him: “it is for this that the gift of charity is bestowed by God on each one, namely, that he may first of all direct his mind to God, and this pertains to a man’s love for himself (dilectionem sui ipsius)” (Summa Theologica II.ii.26.13). In Thomas, love rests on likeness rather than difference, and it is because of this essential identity with the other that we should love him (cf. the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, e. g. Leviticus 19.18 and Matthew 5.43 ff): “As was observed (Article 3), both angel and man naturally love self. Now what is one with a thing, is that thing itself: consequently every thing loves what is one with itself […] And so everything loves another which is one with it in species (quod est secum unum secundum speciem), with a natural affection, in so far as it loves its own species” (Summa Theologica I.60.4). There can be no love of God without loving oneself, and there can be no love of one’s neighbor without loving oneself, since “the lover stands in relation to that which he loves, as though it were himself or part of himself” (II.i.26.2). One loves oneself as a part of God, as part of the good that is constituted by God. In this way love affirms a mutual unity between part and whole, between particular and universal, in which the good is the tertium comparationis.

2 The lack of steadfastness

159

Moreover, if we zoom out on a more general level of high medieval Christian theology, one can hardly deny that mirroring oneself in the ideal and metaphysical essence of the other as God’s Creature is, indeed, held equal to beholding oneself as one really and truly is (that is, of course, as God’s Creature). In the Middle Ages, the individual was typically encouraged to identify with an idealized image from sacred Christian ideology with which the individual was supposed to comply. In sum, the break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance or early modernity is simply not there, and so, modernity is really less modern than some would like to believe. A mirror is no modern invention. Nihil sub sole novum?

2 The lack of steadfastness Although this is not the place to engage thoroughly with or to do full justice to the rich and sophisticated critical literature that stresses the resilient nature of the medieval mindset (continuing to set the cultural, intellectual, and artistic agenda beyond its own epochal horizon), the advent of Nominalism is indisputably a gamechanger, and most of the recent criticism that maintains the continuity between the Middle Ages and early modernity typically fails to take this into consideration. And even though the idea of selfhood was not invented in early modernity, and even though human subjectivity does not belong to any specific period or epoch, this should not prevent us from discerning the differences or emergence of shifting formulations of subjectivity at different times. Athough I naturally acknowledge that early modernity is saturated with medieval ideas and notions (as will be sufficiently clear from my analysis in the above), I maintain that the story of early modern subjectivity is not merely that of an unbroken line of continuity from the Middle Ages. Something new emerges, simply because the metaphysical status of the mirror – in which the subject gazes in search of itself – changes dramatically. If we return to Thomas’s amor sui – as an illustrative example of the way high medieval subjectivity was ideally structured by a metaphysical identification with the other as an idealized image of the self – we must take stock of the way this metaphysics dictates that the subject’s relation to the other, who is at one with it in species (quod est secum unum secundum speciem), is marked by metaphysical identity and homogeneity. Seeing that both form part of the Creator’s Creature, the self and the other share the same ideal God-given substance, in effect dictating that the self essentially is the other and vice versa, i. e., that in an ideal metaphysical sense they are essentially united a priori. According to this

160

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

Realist worldview of metaphysical analogy, alienation only enters the stage when this original unity of the Creature (the self and the other) is ignored, that is to say, when the subject is oblivious to the universal shared substance of itself and the other participating in the same divine reality as itself. This original unity can no longer be assumed after the emergence of Nominalism, where the ideal correlation between the Creator and the Creature is violently disrupted. As the ideal divine order of the Creature disappears from sight (leaving us with nothing but isolated and chaotic entities), the metaphysical sameness of the self and the other, participating in the same ideal substance, slips away entirely. The other is no longer ideally united to the self a priori. It only happens a postiori. Since they do not participate in the same substance and differ radically from each other in their singularity, it becomes, in fact, impossible to entertain the idea of a primordial unity or homogeneity. Unlike the Realist worldview, Nominalism implies that alienation or heterogeneity is not an inherent threat resulting from a neglect of the original unity between the self and the other but is rather the defining condition to begin with – as Montaigne asserts: “The world is all variation and dissimilarity” (Essays II.ii – “On drunkenness” 381). Claiming the singularity of everything, that there are no universals or species outside of the mind, and that all supposed species are merely signs or names, implies that the universal idea of man, for example, designates a disturbing negativity, seeing that what is common to everyone is what is literally specific to no one in particular. Thus, the late medieval morality plays about Everyman were similarly called Noman inasmuch as no one is every man, and every man is no one. Understanding humans as a species (the rational animal posed by Aristotle) became impossible with Nominalism, which insisted on the particularity and uniqueness of the individual. The infinite plurality of radical individuality as well as its latent negativity are accentuated in Petrarch’s Nominalism, which puts into doubt whether humans can be collectively conceptualized, i. e., understood as a species. He thus explains to his brother Gherardo that human inclinations conflict not only for man in general but also for the individual: this I confess and cannot deny, since I know others and myself as well, and since I contemplate the human species in groups and singly. What in truth can I say about all men, or who could enumerate the infinite differences which so mark mortals that they seem to belong neither to a single species nor to a single type? (Familiares X.5)

Pointing to species and types, signifying what is common to everyone, is really (from this Nominalist point of view) equal to referring to no one in particular. At one point, it becomes, in the words of Durand de Saint-Pourçain, “frivolous to say that there is universality in things, for universality cannot be in

2 The lack of steadfastness

161

things, only the particular” (Sententias III.7)¹⁰³: in this Nominalist framework it becomes frivolous, too, to entertain the idea of mirroring oneself in the universal. In other words, whereas the medieval subject was able to gaze in a sacred and ideal mirror offering a universal and predetermined mirror-image, the subject of early modernity was increasingly confronted with a non-metaphysical mirror, which emphasized contingency and potentiality. Whereas the absolute and divine mirror of medieval Realism offered humans reassurance and comfort, the contingent, secular, and disenchanted mirror of Renaissance Nominalism left them anxious and uneasy. The medieval mirror offered cosmological unity and stability, whereas the Renaissance mirror threatened with fragmentation and alienation. This seem to be what George Gascoigne laments in The Steel Glas, namely that nowadays (in the sixteenth century) the world – and we humans inhabiting it – can no longer be perceived as speculum mundi for all things created: That age is dead and vanished long ago, Which thought that steel both trusty was and true, And needed not a foil of contrarieties, But showed all things, even as they were in deed. (147)

Moreover, the sense of a fallen condition of man and language, that is to say, a fall from linguistic faithfulness and perfection, is concisely formulated in Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth century poem “Lak of Steadfastness”: Sometyme the world was so stedfast and stable That mannes word was obligacioun, And now it is so fals and deceivable That word and dede, as in conclusioun, Ben nothing lyk, for turned up-so-doun Is al this world for mede and willfulnesse, That al is lost for lak of steadfastnesse. [Once this world was so steadfast and so stable / That a man’s word was his obligation, / And now it is so false and deceitful, / That word and deed, in their conclusion, / Are unalike, for so turned upside down / Is all this world, by bribery and selfishness, / That all is lost for lack of steadfastness]. (vv. 1– 7)

 My translation.

162

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

Liam Purdon and Rodney Delasanta along with William Watz and Richard Utz perceive this situation to be the result of a Nominalist decline from a former linguistic Golden Age.¹⁰⁴ Obviously, the medieval mindset did not disappear over night and its vocabulary naturally persisted, but, as these examples suggest, its ideology was increasingly shaken and associated with crisis. The great chain or scale of being (scala entis) is still evoked, but its steadfastness can no longer be taken for granted or is even denied. When John Donne alludes to the scala entis in “An Anatomy of the World”, something has clearly changed for the worse as “new philosophy calls all in doubt”, meaning that “’[t]his all in pieces, all coherence gone” (vv. 205, 213). In addition, Shakespeare’s plays (Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear, for example) are frequently informed by the tragic violation of the ideas of the metaphysical order of hierarchal distinctions and differences. Hence, Tillyard was in The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) right in emphasizing the great importance of the great chain of being for understanding Shakespeare’s dramatical world. However, he paid little attention to how the concept of the scala entis – for example, in Ulysses’s speech in Troilus and Cressida (I.iii) or in that of the title person in Timon of Athens (IV.i) – is most often evoked in the context of a world and time “out of joint,” as Hamlet has it (I.v.196). In other words, the dramatic evocation of this medieval concept does not offer a depiction of a perfect metaphysical order or steadfastness. Instead of a world steadfast and stable, the world rather appears chaotic and contingent, bearing witness to a crisis in self-understanding and self-representation. The basic contingency of Shakespeare’s world is at the center of Paul A. Kottman’s Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare from 2009, which argues that the protagonists “of Shakespeare’s dramas – Orlando, Hamlet, Edmund, or Prospero – increasingly find themselves in situations in which the authoritative social ties that bind them to others are undone or shown to be wholly undoable and nonbinding” (12). According to Kottman, Shakespeare questions the inheritability of human relationships by revealing how bonds upon which we depend for meaning and value are extremely fragile and dissolvable. Rather than revealing the consequentiality of a metaphysical ordo of a closed world sustaining the meaning of “authoritative social bonds – kinship ties, civic relations, economic dependencies, political allegiances” (3), Shakespeare’s dramatic universe exhibits  Cf. Liam Purdon, “Chaucer’s Lak of Stedfastnesse: A Revalorization of the Word,” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, eds. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1989), Rodney Delasanta, “Chaucer and the Problem of the Universal,” Mediaevalia 9 (1983), 145 – 163, and “Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer’s Poetry: A Bibliographical Essay,” Mediavalia et Humanistica 20 (1993), 147– 73.

2 The lack of steadfastness

163

how these conditions can be irreparably and instantaneously unravelled before our eyes. Focusing on As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest, Kottman argues that Shakespeare’s characters “move from a closed world to a newly infinite ‘desert’” (12). In sum, Shakespeare’s Globe is one in which we have disinherited the Globe, as Kottman has it. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes a similar claim, yet from a different angle that underlines the importance of Nominalism: “Shakespeare’s nominalistic breakthrough into mortal and infinitely rich individuality – as content – is as much a function of an antitectonic, quasi-epic succession of short scenes as this episodic technique is under the control of the content: a metaphysical experience that explodes the meaning-giving order of the old unities” (213). A heightened sense of human frailty and mortality along with infinitely rich diversity and individuality takes the stage in Shakespeare’s universe, which, according to Adorno, tears medieval metaphysics to pieces. The genre-defying nature of Shakespeare’s unruly theater thus advances a capricious and unpredictable individualism that takes full advantage of the leeway cleared by Nominalism. For Adorno, Shakespeare was thus protomodern in the sense that his nominalistic breakthrough represented an ascending modern tendency to discard exemplary universal thinking: “Art has been caught up in the total process of nominalism’s advance ever since the medieval ordo was broken up. The universal is no longer granted art through types, and older types are being drawn into the whirlpool” (199). Attributing key importance to Nominalism in the formation of (early) modernity, Adorno passes the torch to Ullrich Langer, who in his Lyric in the Renaissance from 2015 argues “that there is a modernity of early modern poetry” (6). Through superb lyrical analysis of Petrarch, Charles d’Orléans, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Montaigne, Langer shows how these poets of early modernity express a Nominalist turn to the singular, “designating the human individual as something radically distinct” (7). These poets embody an early modern tendency to put emphasis on the utterly particular and singular at the expense of a medieval order encompassing categories, analogies, exemplars, types, substances, and universals. In sum, these early modern poets “designate an object, a circumstance, a person, an event that are determined in space and time. The particular or singular is opposed to the general or the universal, as an object in space and time is opposed to categories of objects, circumstances, persons and events that imply no determination in space and time (and hence require no existence to be meaningful)” (7). Pointing to the differences between the positions of Realism and Nominalism, Langer accentuates that – whether we talk about theology, epistemology, or semiotics – these positions have “indirect links to the imaginary worlds that literature constructs” (13). This means that the Nominalist context informing early modern poetry paves the way for a lyric articula-

164

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

tion of “the deictic as existential intention” (20). The kind of existentialism that Langer identifies in these early modern poets designates a keen interest in the individual existence and an obsession with singularity shaped by a passionately Nominalist impetus resistant to conceptual or universal Realism. Langer explains: “I mean ‘existential’ in the sense of pointing to a particular existence, in the sense, also, of radical refusal to be absorbed into a universal or a general rule, category, or group” (22). It is in this sense that there is a lyric modernity in early modern poetry inasmuch as this “absolute turning-to-another […] anticipates a modern notion of lyric as an existential statement” (159). Again: The medieval mindset naturally also turned to another, as we saw in the example of Thoimas’s amor sui, but the turning-to-another of early modernity is absolute in that it implies a turning to another fully other in a singular and unique way, i. e., another not understood universally or from the same genus as the lyrical self. These observations square well with the idea of a negative subjectivity concomitant with the “nihilist” anthropology of Shakespeare that the present book has explored. For the concept of negative subjectivity similarly implies the lack of metaphysical necessity. The lack of metaphysical necessity at the heart of the Nominalist worldview, which enlightens key aspects of the Petrarchan and Shakespearian themes analyzed here (exile, the ambivalence of love, and the complex metaphors of nothingness), goes hand in hand with contingency. Recognizing the lack of a universal metaphysical order in the world similarly entails a recognition of its basic contingency, since we can point to no reason whatsoever why things are the way they are. In the famous words of Blumenberg, the Nominalist theology installed a hidden God, who – having withdrawn beyond reach of his Creature – is pragmatically as good as dead: The modern era began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus – and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be designated as the motive power of the age of science. (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age 346)

Shakespeare’s “nihilist” anthropology similarly depicts a negative and “baseless” subjectivity – to borrow a term describing the human imagination in The Tempest (IV.1.151). A baselessness whose contingency puts nothingness centrestage inasmuch as its lack of metaphysical necessity implies not only that things could be differently, but also that they could not be at all. Taking our cue once again from Adorno, we might say that Shakespeare’s “nihilist” anthropology helps us appreciate how “[w]hat is, is experienced in relation to its possible

3 Son diviso et sparso

165

non-being” (Minima Moralia 81). In other words, Shakespeare’s alphabet of nothingness teaches us how human reality is deeply embedded in a creative nothingness “rooted” in a contingent, ungrounded, and flickering existence. Yet embracing this contingent nothingness and negativity at the core of our existence means embracing our freedom and potentiality to transcend and formulate ourselves anew. Shakespeare’s theatrical nothings display how human consciousness, subjectivity, and representation are not to be confused with things or anything in actual existence. Moreover, humans are deeply embedded in contingent historical time of fleeting becoming – always in the process of restless transformation. With nothingness as a loyal existential companion following our every move, we are always temporally ahead of ourselves. As seen in Shakespeare’s metaphorical depiction of desire as centered on an imaginary nothingness, human existence is always seeking something other than what is at hand, never content (unlike a rock or a speck of dust) with being merely what is presently at hand. Always preoccupied with a not yet rather than a present now, desire is the envoy of nothingness that bears witness to the fact that the present is always openly directed towards future horizons and possibilities not yet actualized. By the grace of nothingness, humans perpetually transcend themselves in acts of freedom.

3 Son diviso et sparso High and late-medieval authors generally did not conceive of their works as free creations ex nihilo. The origin of the work was to be found in pre-established material and traditions on which the author depended. Ullrich Langer explains how the pre-eminence of the tradition was essential to the medieval authorial mind: Recourse to prior themes of elements was usually perceived as authenticating, as enabling, rather than disabling, for the fictional world was believed to celebrate the survival of human culture, not its original reinvention by an individual. Theologically speaking, the human author conceived of himself as an artifex, not as a creator or prima causa efficiens; he was caused to write by conditions outside himself. Human imagination, then, was not the freeing of the mind from the constraints of the existing world, but an ability to reproduce images and spiritual constructs that were already contained in the created fabric of the world itself. The imagination allowed man to uncover the similitudes in the vast network of signs around him, not to produce an alternative to that perfect work. Imagination, thus, in a sense, belonged partly to the objects contemplated, partly to the person contemplating them. (Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance 22)

Langer contends that the Nominalist revolution in theology made a lasting cultural mark and gave rise to a changed view of the new authorial freedom that ran

166

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

in tandem with the changed view of God’s omnipotence: “My contention is that specifically nominalist features of God can be seen in the way Renaissance authors construct their fictional worlds, and that these features often point to the most interesting aspects of those fictional worlds: the feeling of contingency, the feeling that things could easily be otherwise, and that they are dependent on an only partially motivated decision of their author” (22). A good example of this changed Nominalist perception of the artist in early modernity is provided by Petrarch in his fierce attack on an Aristotelian physician in the Invective contra medicum. The doctor criticizes Petrarch in his capacity of poet, because – unlike the mechanical art (ars mechanica) of medicine practiced by the physician – poetry (poesis) is not necessary (necessarium), but superfluous (supervacuum). Indeed, Petrarch agrees that poetry is not necessary (“non necessaria poesis est,” III.106), but disagrees when the physician argues that an art’s necessity proves its nobility (III.108), thus bringing home the argument with palpable polemic irony: “Consider the baker and the wool worker: how necessary they are, and how base (quam viles)! […] The ass is more necessary than the lion, and the hen than the eagle” (III.108 – 109). The poet is more noble than the physician, who concerns himself with the necessity of health (therein limiting himself to God-given nature), because the poet does what is proper to humans as a free, creative spirit. No longer an artifex obeying the laws of necessity, the poet transcends nature, instead creating a “second nature” of his own, as Philip Sidney has it in The Defence of Poesy (217). Sidney, furthermore, along the same line of thought as Petrarch’s, argues that whereas real nature is “brazen,” the ideal second nature, supplemented and rendered by the creative freedom of the poet, is “golden” (216). But this capricious freedom that entails the prospect of possible self-fashioning comes at a price, namely that of an unruly contingency potentially alienating. For the self cannot be understood immediately from the other or itself, but only through reflection in or dialogue with particular others; and again we must bear in mind that this means others no longer identical with the self on a universal level. Having to see oneself through the eyes of another is simply necessary to selfknowledge, as the self is blind to itself. In that sense dialogue, a kind of mirroring in the other, “shows your self to you, who, though he can see everything, does not see himself” (Petrarch, De remedii utriusque fortunae II.114). Because this blindness of the self to itself makes it dependent on the other, the self becomes exposed to the capricious heterogeneity of another individual, thus leaving the self, given back from the other, rather shopsoiled, as Terry Eagleton has it: “My identity lies in the keeping of others, and this – because they perceive me through the thick mesh of their own interests and desires – can never be an en-

3 Son diviso et sparso

167

tirely safe keeping. The self I receive back from others is always rather shopsoiled” (After Theory 212). And because subjectivity is dependent on the other’s image or representation of the self, the inner presence of subjectivity is disseminated out unto an oscillating and contingent exteriority. Moreover, the subject’s sense of self-control and autonomy necessarily becomes limited by the dependence on the other: “If someone’s being includes as such an essential part the showing of himself, he no longer belongs to himself. For example, he can no longer avoid being represented by the picture and, because these representations determine the picture people have of him, he must ultimately show himself as his picture prescribes” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 125). Image, representation, and appearance – all of which dictate the conditions of identity, presence, and self – thus inexorably bode absence, alienation, lack of freedom, and unreality. Representation, without which self-presence and subjectivity would be impossible, is itself an uncanny supplement which does not possess any being or substance in itself, for it is something “[t]hat seem’d and yet was not” (Spenser, The Faerie Queen, IV.xi.45). Having to surrender to representation, external and internal difference and complexity follow, for as Montaigne notes: “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” (Essays II.i – “Of the inconsistency of our actions” 244). And according to Montaigne, this means that the self’s ownership of itself is seriously put into question: “Our mind moves only on faith (à crédit), being bound and constrained to the whim of others’ fancies, a slave and a captive under the authority of their teaching” (I.xxvi – “Education of children” 111). Identity and subjectivity come into play on credit (à crédit), because the individual’s identity, Montaigne argues, is represented by the sum of the networks lived in, stories told, customs, social strategies, representations, fantasies, negotiations and exchanges, which jointly bind the personality to an ambiguity suspended between the self and others. This negative subjectivity therefore seems virtually to pre-empt the insight, formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “I borrow myself from others” (Signs 159). In Saggi petrarcheschi from 2003, Enrico Fenzi argues that Petrarch is the first poet to focus on the dialectics of the amorous relationship rather than the subjective state of the lyrical ego: For the first time in our lyric tradition, love is not conceived as a “state” of the “I”, more or less pathological depending on the various theories in question, but essentially as a “relationship”. A relationship that the Petrarchan condensation of the “I” itself renders inextricable, because in the very moment in which the “I” affirms itself, it also affirms its movement in respect to the other that conditions him, thus constructing the parameters of the truth of his own story. (181)

168

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

Having to acknowledge the dialectical nature of the amorous relationship that dictates the conditions for the formulation of self-consciousness equals having to endure a subjective ambiguity and negativity without which the self could not emerge. And if the other conditions the poetic ego, and the other is divested of the metaphysical ideality otherwise upheld by the Realist world-picture, the poet’s claims to be divided and scattered become understandable: “son diviso et sparso” (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 135.26). A stranger to itself, the self must achieve its subjective reality in the disseminated and contingent reality of others. The self inevitably finds itself divided and fragmented, for being constituted by the other, it is forced to internalize this otherness. Since there can be no self without the other, and since the self is dependent on the other to tell it who it is, the self inevitably becomes estranged from itself, We have seen how both Petrarch (cf. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 71.57– 60) and Shakespeare (cf. Troilus and Cressida III.iii.106 – 112 and Julius Caesar I.ii.50 – 57 and I.ii.66 – 69) both accentuate that it is impossible to see oneself see oneself, how the eye cannot see itself, and how it is consequently necessary to reflect oneself in another or something other in order to appear to oneself and gain self-consciousness. Now, seeing that this idea enjoyed some acceptance among writers in the Renaissance, one might be tempted to extend some of the basic tenets of Petrarch and Shakespeare’s negative subjectivities to other figures in this epoch. Although this cannot be done in this book, but would be a task for future scholarship, it may nevertheless be worth citing some of the examples that indicate that such an approach might be fruitful.¹⁰⁵ In Davies’s Nosce Teipsum, for example, we read: Mine eyes, which [view] all objects nigh and far, Look not into this little world of mine, Nor see my face, wherein they fixed are. (25)

 See, for example, Thomas Nashe’s Dedication of The Unfortunate Traveler (1594): “The eye that sees round about itself, sees not into itself” (201); Robert Cawdray’s A Treasury or StoreHouse of Similes (1600): “As our eyes […] do not see themselves, but looking into a glass […] they perfectly see themselves” (“Knowledge and sight of ourselves” 428 – 29); Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1607– 8): “Look upon those eyes, / That let all pleasure out into the world, / Unhappy that they cannot see themselves!” (I.iii, 403); Joshua Sylvester’s Bartas his Devine Weeks and Works (1605): “As the eye perceives all but itself” (I.vi.584, 217); and John Marston’s Parasitaster (1606): “The eye sees all things but his proper self” (IV.i.584). Left only to itself, the self is, indeed, blind to itself.

3 Son diviso et sparso

169

We cannot know ourselves by our own efforts, and although we may gain insight into many mysteries of the world, we remain strangers to ourselves: All things without, which round about we see, We seek to know, and how therewith to do: But that whereby we reason, live, and be, Within our selves, we strangers are thereto. (20)

Our ground of existence is not transparently present to us but must be probed in the reflection of and from the other. This kind of subjectivity seems to anticipate the Hegelian position, as we now understand that the soul must split itself up in the other as a special kind of Entzweiung by which identity must symbolically express itself through its opposite, or through its otherness. The process in which the identical must manifest itself in the heterogeneous, is thus characteristic of the journey of consciousness towards self-consciousness: The “I” that utters itself is heard or perceived; it is an infection in which it has immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and is a universal self-consciousness. That it is perceived or heard means its real existence dies away; this its otherness (Anderssein) has been taken back into itself; and its real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing (Verschwinden) it is a real existence. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit VI, 309)

The expedition of consciousness toward self-consciousness takes its course as a rhythm in language, alternating between the particular and the universal, the same and the other. A certain vertigo makes itself felt in Petrarch exilic and amorously ambivalent self as well as in Shakespeare’s “nihilist” anthropology, which emerges from the alienating abyss between the subjective and the objective selves, and between the syncretized ego and the unconscious, linguistic subject. Petrarch and Shakespeare bear witness to the word, the expression or representation, as a bond that binds the self to the other, in whom the ego mirrors itself so as to gain knowledge of itself. In order for the self to go beyond its particular existence, it must speak for and in the other, which means that the self – as an immediate and self-reliant consciousness – must lose itself in the other. A paradoxical logic accurately formulated by John Donne in the poem “Lover’s Infiniteness”: “though thy heart depart, / It stays at home, and thou with losing sav’st it” (vv. 29 – 30). This separation from the self, which is brought about by the address to the other, means that the self must take leave of its immediate and particular consciousness – in which it is present as a presence more or

170

V Early Modernity and the Foil of Contrarieties

less void – in favor of a mediate and universal existence in which subjectivity is present as representation. This is the discovery of Petrarch and Shakespeare: that human existence emerges ex nihilo from the impenetrable darkness of the other, which accompanies and determines all its actions and manifestations. With exile, amorous ambiguity, and nothingness as its backdrop, the negative subjectivity of these two early modern poets thus exhibits how, in an uncanny way, you are closest to yourself when you farthest from yourself, and that you are often furthest from yourself when you feel most sure of yourself.

VI Literature Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. New York: Continuum, 2002. —. Minima Moralia. Trans. Dennis Redmond. Lexington, Kentucky: Prism Key Press, 2011. Aers, David. “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’”. Culture and History, 1350 – 1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing. Ed. David Aers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Aguilar, Juan Carlos Rodríguez. “The Nothing that from Nothing Came. From Epicurean to Heideggerian Nothingness in Shakespeare’s King Lear”. Anuario de Letras Modernas 7 (1995 – 1996): 109 – 123. Aristotle, The Metaphysics. The Loeb Classical Library, trans Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. —. The Nicomachean Ethics. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. —. The Physics. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. —. The Politics. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932. Ascoli, Albert R. “Petrarch’s Middle Age: Memory, Imagination, History, and the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux’”. Stanford Italian Review 10/1 (1991): 5 – 43. A Song made of Nothing. The Roxburghe Ballads 2. Hertford (1874): 480 – 85. Augustine. The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichaean Way of Life. Ed. Boniface Ramsey. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/19. New York: New City Press, 2006. —. Confessions. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. William Watts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. —. De Doctrina Christiana. Ed. J. P. Migne. Patrologiae latinae 34. Turnhout, Belgium, 1966. —. Soliloquies. Trans. Kim Paffenroth. New York: New City Press, 2000. —. Against the Academicians. The Teacher. Trans. Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995. —. On Christian Teaching. Trans. R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. —. Sermons. Ed. John E. Rotelle. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/5. New York: New City Press, 1992. —. Soliloquia. Ed. J. P. Migne. Patrologiae latinae 32. Turnhout, Belgum, 1966. —. The City of God against the Pagans. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. David S. Wiesen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. —. The Trinity. Ed. John E. Rotelle. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/5. New York: New City Press, 1991. —. True Religion. Ed. Boniface Ramsey. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/8. New York: New City Press, 2005. Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. New Atlantis. Ed. Arthur Johnston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. —. Essays. Ed. Michael J. Hawkins. London: Everyman, 1994. —. Novum Organum. Trans. G. W. Kitchin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-007

172

VI Literature

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bayley, John. “Time and the Trojans”. Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 55 – 73. Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Cupid’s Revenge. Ed. Henry Weber. The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher 11. Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Company, 1812. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Calder & Boyars, 1966. Bermann, Sandra L. Sonnet over Time: A Study in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Bernard de Clairvaux. Liber de diligendo deo. Ed. J. P. Migne. Patrologia latina 182. Turnhout, Belgium, 1966. Bernard de Clairvaux. The Twelve Steps of Humility and Pride, On loving God. Trans. Halcyon C. Backhouse. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985. Bernart de Ventadorn. A Bilingual Edition of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn in Occitan and English. Trans. Ronnie Apter. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Biow, Douglas. Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. —. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Boston: The MIT Press, 1985. Boethius. Consolation of Philosophy. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. F. Stewart. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bonaventura. The Mind’s Road to God. Trans. George Boas. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1953. Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Oraisons funèbres. Ed. Armand Gasté. Paris: Libraires des Bibliophiles, 1883 Breton, Nicholas. The Scholler and the Souldier, The Will of Wit. The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton 2. New York: AMS Press, 1967. Cachey, Theodore J. “The Place of the Itinerarium: Itenerarium ad sepulchrum domini nostril Yhesu Christi”. Eds. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Caldwell, Eric Thomas. The poetics of Renaissance Subjectivity (Ph.D. dissertation). Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2008. Cambon, Glauco. “L’eterno femminino petrarchesco: Magia e impotenza della metafora”. Italian Quarterly 23 (1982): 5 – 23. Campion, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Campion. Ed. Walter R. Davis. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967. Cappellanus, Andreas. On Love. Trans. P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Editions, 1982. Capodivacca, Angela Matilde. “‘Die pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’: Petrarch’s ‘Modern Curiosity’ in the Familiares”. MLN (Italian Issue Supplement) 127/1 (2012): 54 – 63.

VI Literature

173

Cassirer, Ernst. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans. Mario Domandi. New York: Dover Publications, 2011. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. George Bull. New York: Penguin, 1990. Cavalcanti, Guido. The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti. Trans. Lowry Nelson. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1986. Cawdrey, Robert. A Treasury or Store-house of Similies, 1600. Facsimilé, Menston: Scolar Press Limited, 1969. Cervantes, Miguel Saavedra de. Don Quixote. Trans. John Rutherford. London: Penguin Books, 2001 Charles d’Orleans. The French Chansons of Charles d’Orleans. Trans. Sarah Spence. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1986. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ed. John H. Fischer. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1977. Chrétien de Troyes. The Story of the Grail, or Perceval/Li Contes del Graal ou Perceval. Trans. William W. Kibler. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1990. Cohen, Derek. “Patriarchy and Jealousy in Othello and The Winter’s Tale”. Modern Language Quarterly 48/3 (1987): 207 – 223. Cole, Andrew and D. Vance Smith. “Outside Modernity”. The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory. Eds. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Shakespearean Criticism 1. Ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor. London: Everyman, 1967. Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Cuffe, Henry. The differences of the ages of mans life. London: Clearke, 1607. Daniel, Samuel. Poems. A Defence of Ryme. Ed. Arthur Colby Sprague. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1965 Dante, Alighieri. La Divina Commedia. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1979 – 80. —. The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984. —. The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985. —. The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986. Davies, John. Nosce Teipsum. Ed. Alexander B. Grosart. The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies 1. London: Chatto and Windus, 1876. —. Wittes Pilgrimage. Ed. Alexander B. Grosart. The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1876. Delany, Sheila. Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: dying – awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Circumfession. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. By Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. —. Psyche: Inventions of the Other 1. Trans. Peggy Kamut and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. —. Psyche: Inventions of the Other 2. Trans. Peggy Kamut and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

174

VI Literature

—. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. Dickinson, Emily. Complete Poems. Ed. T. H. Johnson. London: Faber & Faber, 1970. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Penguin Books, 1996. —. The Sermons of John Donne 2 and 4. Eds. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter. University of California Press, 1953 – 62. Drayton, Michael. Idea in Sixtie Three Sonnets. Ed. J. William Hebel. The Works of Michael Drayton 2. Oxford: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1961. Durand de Saint-Pourçain. In sententias theologicas Petri Lombardi 2. Ridgewood: The Gregg Press, 1964. Durling, Robert. “Petrarch’s ‘Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro’”. MLN 86 (1971): 1 – 20. Dyer, Edward. The Prayse of Nothing. Ed. Alexander B. Grossart. Miscellanies of The Fuller Worthies Library 4. Blackburn: St. George, 1872 – 76. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2004. —. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Eco, Umberto. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Trans. Hugh Bredin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Ekelöf, Gunnar. En röst. Ed. Ingrid Ekelöf. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1973. Eneas. Ed. Jacques Salverda de Grave. Genève: Bibliotheca Normanica, 1975. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Falkeid, Unn. “Petrarch, Mont Ventoux and the Modern Self”. Forum Italicum 43/1 (2009): 5 – 28. Fenzi, Enrico. Saggi petrarcheschi. Florence: Cadmo, 2003. Fineman, Joel. “The Sound of ‘O’ in Othello: The Real of Tragedy of Desire”. Ed. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Ford, John. The Lover’s Melancholy. Ed. R. F. Hill. Manchester University Press, 1985. Foster, Kenelm. “Beatrice or Medusa: The Penitential Element in Petrarch’s Canzoniere”. Eds. C. P. Brand, K. Forster, and U. Limentani. Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent. Cambridge: Heffer, 1962. Freccero, John. “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics”. Diacritics 5 (1975): 34 – 40. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. Ed. and trans. J. Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18. London: The Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”. Ed. Paul Rabonow. Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, 1954 – 1984: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. New York: New York Press, 1994. —. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1975. Gascoigne, George. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne 2. Eds. John W. Cunliffe and Grosse Pointe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. The Geneva Bible (facsimile of the 1560 edition). Eds. Berry Lloyd and William Whittingham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

VI Literature

175

Genot, Gérard. “Pétrarque et la scène du regard”. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972): 1 – 17. Giacomo da Lentini. The Poetry of the Sicilian School. Trans. Frede Jensen. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1986. Giamatti, Bart. Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature. Yale: Yale University Press, 1984. Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1979. Goff, Jacques le. “Introduction: Medieval Man”. Ed. Jacques le Goff. Medieval Callings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. —. The Medieval Imagination. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Goldin, Frederick. The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric. New York: Cornell University Press, 1967. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, Greville, Fulke. Selected Poems of Fulke Greville. Ed. Thom Gunn. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. Grossman, Marshall. The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1998. Guido delle Colonne. The Poetry of the Sicilian School. Trans. Frede Jensen. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1986. Guittone d’Arezzo. Le rime. Ed. Francesco Egidi. Bari: Laterza, 1940. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 2. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. —. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Part two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. —. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke in zwanzig Bänden 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. —. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. —. Science of Logic. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. —. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Blomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. —. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965. —. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. —. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. —. Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories. Ed. Finca Vigía. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998. Hillebrand, Bruno. Ästhetik des Nihilismus. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. Holberg, Ludvig. Four Plays by Holberg. Trans. Henry Alexander. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946.

176

VI Literature

Homer. The Odyssey. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”. Selected Prose. Trans. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern. New York: New York: Pantheon Books, 1952. Howard, Henry. Poems. Oxford University Press, 1970. Hugo of St. Viktor. Eruditionis Didascalicœ. Ed. J. P. Migne. Patrologiae Cursus Completus 176. Paris: Series Latina, 1844 – 90. Hunt, John. “A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet”. Shakespeare Quarterly 39/1 (1988): 27 – 44. Ibsen, Henrik. Kejser og Galilæer I. Samlede Værker 3. Kristiania/København: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1907. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics”. Ed Thomas A. Sebeok. Style in Language. Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1971. Johannes of Damascus. Orthodox Faith. Trans. Frederic H. Chase. The Fathers of the Church 37. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1970. Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare’s Plays. Menston: The Scholar Press Limited, 1969. Jonson, Ben. Poems. Ed. Ian Donaldson. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Paul Jorgensen. Redeeming Shakespeare’s Words. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1962. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin Books, 1975. Kelly, Douglas. Medieval French Romance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Kirkpatrick, Robin. The European Renaissance, 1400 – 1600. London: Longman, 2002. Knight, Wilson. The Wheel of Fire. London: Methuen, 1977. Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Kottman, Paul A. Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. —. Sêmeiôtikê: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil1, 1969. Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. Ed. Philip Edwards. London: Methuen & Co, 1969. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The first complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. —. Encore: Le seminaire XX. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1975. —. Freud’s Paper’s on Technique: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan I. Trans. John Forrester. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988. —. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981. —. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan II. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991. —. Le transfert: Le seminaire VIII. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1991. Langer, Ullrich. Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. —. Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

VI Literature

177

Latini, Brunetto. Il Tesoretto – The little Treasure. Trans. Julia Bolton Holloway. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1981. Laurentius, Andreas. A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight. Ed. Sanford V. Larkey. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. Lee, John. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of the Self. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Leff, G. William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975. Levin, Harry. Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. London Oxford University Press, 1968. Leonardo da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci 1. Trans. Edward MacCurdy. London: Richard Clay & Company, 1956. Lisle, William. Nothing for a new-yeares gift. London: William Lugger, 1603. Low, Anthony. Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2003. Lucretius. De rerum natura. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Boston: MIT Press, 1971. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. Peter Constantine. New York: The Modern Library, 2008. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. London: Penguin Books, 2010. Marie de France. Les Lais. Ed. Paul Heitz. Strasbourg: Bibliotheca Romanica, 1921. Markham, Felix. Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Marston, John. Parasitaster or The Fawn. Ed. David A. Blostein. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. —. The Dutch Courtesan. Ed. Martin Wine. London: Edward Arnold, 1965. Martin, John Jeffries. Myths of Renaissance Individualism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Maus, Katharine Eisaman. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Mazzotta, Giuzeppe. Dante’s Vision of and the Circle of Knowledge. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. —. The Worlds of Petrarch. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993. McMullan, Gordon and David Mathews. “Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England”. Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England. Eds. Gordon McMullan and David Mathews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Medcalf, Stephen. “Inner and Outer”. Ed. Stephen Medcalf. The Later Middle Ages. London: Methuen and Company, 1981. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. Richard M. McClearly. Evanston, Illinois: Nortwestern University Press, 1964. Milon, Pierre. “En amor trob pietat gran”. Ed. François-Just-Marie Raynouard. Choix des poésies des troubadours 5. Osnabrück: Billio-Verlag, 1966.

178

VI Literature

Moevs, Christian. “Subjectivity and Conversion in Dante and Petrarch”. Eds. Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. —. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveler. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. The Works of Thomas Nashe 2. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966. Nicholas of Cusa. De Coniecturis. Eds. Josef Koch and Karl Bormann. Opera Omnia 3. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972. —. Metaphysical Speculations 2. Trans. Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Dionysos-Dithyramben. Ed. Karl Schlechta. Werke in drei Bänden 2. Darmstadt: Die Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. —. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. —. On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998. —. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1969. —. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Ed. Karl Schlechta. Werke in drei Bänden 2. Darmstadt: Die Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Odo delle Colonne. The Poetry of the Sicilian School. Trans. Frede Jensen. New York: Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1986. Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. “On the Letter O”. Facetia 2. London: John Campden, 1874. Otto, Stephan. Renaissance und frühe Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Ovid. Metamorphoses. The Loeb Classical Library, transl. Frank J. Miller, revised by G. P. Goold. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ovide moralisé 1 & 3. Ed. C. de Boer. Wiesbaden: Dr. Martin Sändig oHG, 1966. Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. London: Routledge, 1968. Passerat, Jean. “Nihil”. Rien, à Henry de mesmes pour estraines. Paris: E. Prevosteau, 1597. Perry, Kathleen Anne. Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Persius. The Satires. The Loeb Classical Library, transl. G. G. Ramsay. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965. Petrarch, Francesco. Bucolicum Carmen. Trans. Thomas G. Bergin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. —. Epistolae metricae. Opera quae extant omnia 3. Basel: S. Henricpetrum, 1554. —. De remedii utriusque fortunae. Opera quae extant omnia 1. Basel: S. Henricpetrum, 1554. —. De vita solitaria. Eds. Antonietta Bufano, Basile Aracri, and Clara Kraus Reggiani. Opere Latine di Francesco Petrarca 1. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1977.

VI Literature

179

—. Invective against a Detractor of Italy. Ed. David Marsh. Invectives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. —. Invectives Against a Physician. Ed. David Marsh. Invectives. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003. —. Le familiari 1 – 3. Ed. Vittorio Rossi. Florence: Sansoni, 1934 – 1937. —. Le familiari 4. Ed. Umberto Bosco. Florence: Sansoni, 1943. —. Letters of Old Age: Rerum senilium libri 2. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992. —. Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum Familiarium Libri I–VIII. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo. New York: State University of New York Press, 1975. —. Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum Familiarium Libri IX-XVI. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982. —. Letters on Familiar Matters: Rerum Familiarium Libri XVII-XXIV. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982. —. The Life of Solitude. Trans. Jacob Zeitlin. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1924. —. On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others. Ed. David Marsh. Invectives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. —. Petrarch’s Guide to the Holy Land: Itinerary to the Sepulcher of Our Lord. Ed. and trans. Theodore J. Cachey. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. —. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Trans. Robert M. Durling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. —. Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of De Remediis Utriusque Fortune 1 and 3. Trans. Conrad M. Rawski. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991. —. Petrarch’s Secret. Trans. William H. Draper. Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1978. —. Rerum senilium libri. Opera quae extant omnia 2. Basel: S. Henricpetrum, 1554. —. Secretum meum. Eds. Antonietta Bufano, Basile Aracri, and Clara Kraus Reggiani. Opere Latine di Francesco Petrarca 1. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1977. —. Triumphi. Ed. Marco Ariani. Milano: Mursia, 1988. Pico della Mirandola. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Eds. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956. Plato. Charmides. Alcibiades 1 & 2. Hipparchus. The Lovers. Theages. Minos. Epinomis. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. —. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Harold North. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. —. Theaetetus. Sophist. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. —. Lysis. Symposium. Gorgias. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. —. The Republic. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Paul Shorey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Plotinus. The Enneads 1, 4 & 7. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. H. Armstrong. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

180

VI Literature

Plutarch, Moralia 7. The Loeb Classical Library, trans. Phillip H. De Lacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 2010. The Praise of Nothing. London: H. Gosson, 1625. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time 5. Transl. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. London: Vintage, 2000. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesi. Eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. M. A. Screech. London: Penguin, 2006. Reiss, Edmund. “Ambiguous Signs and Authorial Deceptions in Fourteenth-Century Fictions”. Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature. Eds. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1989. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Penguin, 2009. Ritter, Joachim. “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft”. Metaphysik und Politik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003. Robinson, Clement. A Handful of Pleasant Delights. Ed. Hyder E. Rollins. New York: Dover Publications, 1965. Roche, Thomas P., Jr. “The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s Cazoniere”. Studies in Philology 71 (1974): 152 – 72. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la Rose 1. Ed. Félix Lecoy. Paris: Les classiques français du Moyen Age, 1965. Ronsard, Pierre de. Poems of Pierre de Ronsard. Trans. Nicholas Kilmer. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Said, Edward. Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books, 2001. Sanctis, Francesco de. Saggio critico sul Petrarca. Torino: Einaudi, 1983. Santagata, Marco. “Il giovane Petrarca e la tradizione poetica romanza: modelli ideologici e letterari”. Rivista di letteratura italiana 1 (1983): 11 – 61. Schoenfeld, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spencer, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Seigel, Jerold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Shakespeare, William. All’s Well that Ends Well. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. G. K. Hunter. New York: Routledge, 1996. —. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Harold F. Brooks. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Antony and Cleopatra. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. John Wilders. New York: Routledge, 2001. —. As You Like It. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Agnes Latham. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Cymbeline. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. J. M. Nosworthy. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Harold Jenkins. New York: Routledge, 1997.

VI Literature

181

—. Julius Caesar. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. Daniel Daniell. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. —. King Henry IV, Part I. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. A. R. Humphreys. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. King Henry IV, Part II. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. A. R. Humphreys. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. King Henry V. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. T. W. Craik. New York: Routledge, 1995. —. King Henry VI, Part I. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962. —. King Henry VI, Part III. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964. —. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Kenneth Muir. New York: Routledge, 1997. —. Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Macbeth. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Kenneth Muir. New York: Routledge, 1995. —. The Merchant of Venice. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. John Russel Brown. New York: Routledge, 1997. —. Much Ado About Nothing. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. A. R. Humphreys. New York: Routledge, 1997. —. Othello. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. A. J. Honigmann. New York: Routledge, 1996. —. The Poems. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. F. T. Prince. New York: Routledge, 1985. —. Richard II. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Peter Ure. New York: Routledge, 1994. —. Richard III. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. Antony Hammond. New York: Routledge, 1994. —. Romeo and Juliet. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Brian Gibbons. New York: Routledge, 1986. —. The Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Routledge, 1998. —. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. New York: Routledge, 1999. —. Timon of Athens. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. H. J. Olivier. New York: Routledge, 1995. —. Titus Andronicus. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. Jonathan Bate. New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Troilus and Cressida. The Arden Shakespeare 3. series, ed. David Bevington. New York: Routledge, 1998. —. Twelfth Night. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, eds. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik. New York: Routledge, 1995. —. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. Clifford Leech. New York: Routledge, 1999.

182

VI Literature

—. The Winter’s Tale. The Arden Shakespeare 2. series, ed. J. H. P. Pafford. New York: Routledge, 1999. Sidney, Philip. Astrophil and Stella. Ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. —. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. —. The Defence of Poesy. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sokolov, Danila. Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Rethinking Petrarchan Desire from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2017. Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works. Eds. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1985. Starn, Randolph. “Renaissance Redux”. The American Historical Review 103/1 (1998): 122 – 124. Stierle, Karheinz. Francesco Petrarca: Ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Strohm, Paul. England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399 – 1422. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998. Sturm-Maddox, Sara. Petrarch’s Laurels. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Sylvester, Joshua. Bartas his Devine Weeks and Works, 1605. Gainesville, Florida: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965. Tennyson, Alfred. Poems and Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Thomas Aquinas. Commentum in quartum librum Sententiarum. Ed. Stanislaus Fretté. Opera omnia 11. Paris: Vivès, 1874. —. Summa Contra Gentiles 1. Trans. Anton C. Pegis. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. —. Summa Theologica 1 and 2. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, Texas: Tabor Publishing, 1981. —. Summa Theologica. Opera Omnia 1, 2 and 3. New York: Musurgia Publishing, 1948. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000. Tolstoy, Leo. Shakespeare. Christian Teaching. Letters. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1928. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects 2. Trans. E. H., W. Blashfield and A. A. Hopkins. London: George Bells and Sons, 1897. Vergil. The Aeneid. The Loeb Classical Library, trans H. R. Fairclough. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935. Vitkus, Daniel J. “The “O” in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness”. Ed. Philip C. Kolin. Othello: New Critical Essays. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Wack, Mary Frances. Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990. Webster, John. The White Devil. Ed. John Russell Brown. London: Methuen, 1966. Wilkins, E. H. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. William of Ockham. Librum primum sententiarum. Eds. Gedeon Gál and Rega Wood. Opera Theologica 2/2. New York: St. Bonaventura Franciscan Institute, 1970.

VI Literature

183

Winny, James. The Player King. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968. Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival. Bibliothek des Mittelalters 8/1, trans. Dieter Kühn. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. —. Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages. Trans. Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Zak, Gur. Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Index Abelard, Peter 9, 69. Adorno, Theodor W. 163 – 164. Alighieri, Dante 3, 22, 25 – 29, 31, 35, 50 – 51, 69, 164. Aristotle 54, 69, 85 – 86, 96, 158, 160. Augustine 21, 23 – 24, 28, 31, 37, 39, 47, 50, 61, 63, 69 – 71, 78 – 79, 84, 87, 114 – 115, 121, 158. Bacon, Francis 5, 93, 96, 102, 121. Bakhtin, Michel 9, 145. Bernard de Clairvaux 28 – 29, 66, 69. Blanchot, Maurice 105, 130. Blumenberg, Hans 2, 4, 28, 32, 157, 164 Breton, Nicholas 95, 151. Burckhardt, Jacob 9 – 10, 12, 32. Børch, Marianne 3. Cassirer, Ernst 9, 32, 36, 58. Chaucer, Geoffrey 3 – 5, 161. Chrétien de Troyes 9, 64, 68. Davies, John 103, 117, 120, 130, 168. Delany, Sheila 9, 88, 116. Derrida, Jacques 15, 103, 127 – 129. Donne, John 98 – 99, 106, 118, 121, 127, 132, 139, 162, 169. Eagleton, Terry 141, 147, 166. Erasmus of Rotterdam 2, 4, 92, 120. Fenzi, Enrico 29, 167. Foucault, Michel 2, 86, 114. Freud, Sigmund 15, 53, 72, 74, 143, 155. Gadamer, Hans-Georg 14, 167. Gillespie, Michael 1 – 2, 4 – 5. Greenblatt, Stephen 9 – 12, 22, 153. Greville, Fulke 120, 134, 136. Hegel, G. W. F. 15, 39, 55, 59 – 60, 72, 75, 79, 86, 111, 130 – 131, 139, 169. Heidegger, Martin 15, 72, 124 – 126, 129 – 132. Kottman, Paul A. 162 – 163. Kristeva, Julia 5, 13, 24, 46 – 47. Lacan, Jacques 15, 53, 55, 60, 72, 110, 135 – 136, 139. Langer, Ullrich 5, 13, 163 – 165. Leonardo da Vinci 123 – 124. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691771-008

Machiavelli 29, 108, 110 – 111. Mazzotta, Giuseppe 23, 25, 37, 39, 41 – 42, 48, 51, 82. Montaigne, Michel de 5, 37, 91, 93, 117, 128, 160, 163, 167. Ovid 42, 59, 61. Petrarch, Francesco (works) – Bucolicum Carmen 77 – De remedii utriusque fortunae 53, 166 – De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia 44, 69 – De vita solitaria 44, 55 – Epistolae metricae 22, 43, 58 – Familiares 20, 23 – 24, 26, 29 – 32, 36 – 37, 43 – 44, 53, 64, 66, 77, 89, 160 – Invective contra medicum 166 – Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie 75 – Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini Iesu Christi 28 – 29 – Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 6, 8, 17, 23, 25 – 28, 39, 44 – 45 – 81, 168 – Secretum meum 23, 28, 38, 47, 50, 63, 71, 73, 78 – Seniles 30, 53, 73, 77 – Trionfi 31, 43, 64. Plato 53, 56, 59, 61, 71, 74, 115, 152, 158. Plotinus 55, 61. Shakespeare, William (works) – All’s Well that Ends Well 89 – 90, 130 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream 96, 128, 143, 152 – Antony and Cleopatra 83, 94, 109, 137, 142 – 143 – As You Like It 96, 128, 162 – Cymbeline 150, 154 – Hamlet 83 – 84, 90 – 91, 95 – 96, 109, 111, 113, 117 – 118, 125 – 128, 130, 136, 143, 151, 162 – Julius Caesar 107, 162, 168 – King Henry IV 95, 101, 136, 144, 151 – King Henry V 91, 153 – King Henry VI 90, 142

Index

– King Lear 82 – 84, 94, 103, 108, 113, 146, 162 – Love’s Labour’s Lost 108, 153 – Macbeth 83, 109, 113, 130, 132 – 135, 162 – The Merchant of Venice 83, 119 – Much Ado About Nothing 100, 137, 140, 151 – Othello 111 – 113, 162 – The Phoenix and the Turtle 109 – The Rape of Lucrece 135 – Richard II 84, 109, 128, 131, 140 – Richard III 103, 111 – 112 – Romeo and Juliet 103, 142 – 143, 147 – The Sonnets 97 – 98, 143 – The Tempest 101, 117, 151, 154, 162, 164

185

– Timon of Athens 119, 141 – 142, 162 – Titus Andronicus 147 – Troilus and Cressida 81, 85, 96, 106, 110, 119, 136, 138, 162, 168 – Twelfth Night 91, 97, 108 – 109 – The Two Gentlemen of Verona 82, 90, 97, 100, 108 – The Winter’s Tale 148 – 149, 151. Sidney, Philip 5, 13, 106, 138, 152, 166. Spenser, Edmund 117, 145, 167. Stierle, Karlheinz 5, 21 – 22, 31, 33 – 34, 38. Sturm-Maddox, Sara 46, 49, 54. Thomas Aquinas 4, 35, 69, 73, 87, 121, 158 – 159. William of Ockham 1, 4 – 5, 21, 88 – 89.