Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture 9781526137142

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture Edited by Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 3713 5  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Young Man and Woman in an Inn (Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart) Frans Hals, 1623, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

Notes on contributors page vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction—Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

1

I  Rewriting discourses of pleasure 1 Happy Hamlet—Richard Strier 2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy—Cassie M. Miura 3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne—Ian Frederick Moulton 4 Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’—Ullrich Langer

21 44 60 74

II  Imagining happy communities 5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare— Timothy Hampton 6 ‘My crown is called content’: positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy—Paul Joseph Zajac 7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex circle—Bradley J. Irish 8 Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor—Cora Fox

91 107 121 136

III  Forms, attachment, and ambivalence 9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry—Leila Watkins

153

vi Contents 10 Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—Lalita Pandit Hogan 11 ‘My heart is satisfied’: revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy—Eonjoo Park 12 All’s Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre—Patrick Colm Hogan

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword—Michael C. Schoenfeldt

168 184 199 215

Index 222

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes on contributors

Cora Fox is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where alongside her research in early modern culture she has developed interdisciplinary programming and curricular initiatives in the health humanities. She is the author of Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave, 2009) and co-edited (with Barbara Weiden Boyd) Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (MLA, 2010). She is completing a monograph on fantasies of happiness, well-being, and healthy communities in early modern English literature. Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2010) and Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2019). A new study, Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History, is forthcoming from Zone Books in 2021. Lalita Pandit Hogan is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Affiliate faculty of the South Asia Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her more recent research has focused on emotion studies and cognitive neuroscience, and she has published articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Goethe, south Asian authors, Hindi cinema (some of these adaptations of Shakespeare), and comparative aesthetics. She is co-editor and contributing author of four books published by university presses, and three special issues of journals, one of which is the award-winning Shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Neuroscience (College Literature 33.1, 2006). She is the author of A Country Without Borders: Stories and Poems of Kashmir (2Leaf Press, 2017, distributed by University of Chicago Press). She edits (with three others) a special series on Cognitive Approaches to Culture at Ohio State University Press.

viii

Notes on contributors

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Patrick Colm Hogan is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the English Department, the Program in Cognitive Science, and the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, several of which treat Shakespeare, including What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His recent work includes Personal Identity and Literature (Routledge, 2019) and Style in Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2021). Bradley J. Irish is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he specializes in sixteenth-century English literature and culture. His first monograph was Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Northwestern University Press, 2018); his second, Shakespeare and Disgust: A Study in Dramatic Language, will be published by The Arden Shakespeare in 2022. His articles have appeared in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Modern Philology. Ullrich Langer is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent publications include Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Les Remontrances (XVIe –XVIIIe siècles): Textes et commentaires, co-edited with Paul-Alexis Mellet (Garnier, 2021). His current research concerns the ethics and rhetoric of disagreement in the Ancien Régime, and poetic confrontations with the finite, from Virgil to Baudelaire. Cassie M. Miura is Assistant Teaching Professor in the division of Culture, Arts, and Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is currently working on a monograph titled The Humor of Skepticism: Therapeutic Laughter from Montaigne to Milton. She has published in Early Modern Culture and has essays appearing in Shakespeare and Montaigne (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance (Penn State University Press, 2020). Ian Frederick Moulton is President’s Professor of English and Cultural History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. He has published widely on the representation of gender and sexuality in early modern European literature. His books include Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (Palgrave, 2014).



Notes on contributors

ix

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eonjoo Park is Assistant Professor of English at Jeonbuk National University in South Korea. She has published on topics ranging from gerontological discourses and fellow-feeling in King Lear, anger and revenge in Titus Andronicus, wonder and sympathy in Oroonoko, as well as violence and commitment in the work of Edward Bond. Currently, she is working on two projects: the first on old age in Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and the second on re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam as a revenge play. Michael C. Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006) and John Donne in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is currently writing a book entitled Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry and researching pain and pleasure in early modern England. Richard Strier, Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English, Divinity, and the College of the University of Chicago, is the author of The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1995); and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983). He has co-edited a number of interdisciplinary collections including Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Recent and forthcoming essays are on Donne’s erotic lyrics, New Historicism and formalism, and King Lear. Leila Watkins received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in 2014. Her research explores why early modern English readers and writers believed verse to be a uniquely effective form of emotional management, or consolation, and how they understood it to work. She is broadly interested in the history of emotion, poetry and poetics, religion, and community formation in early modern England. She currently works in development and communications at CollegeSpring, a San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit that promotes equitable college access for students who are historically underrepresented in higher education.

x

Notes on contributors

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Paul Joseph Zajac is an Assistant Professor of English at McDaniel College. His articles on early modern literature have appeared in Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, Studies in English Literature, and English Literary Renaissance. He is currently writing a book-length study of Reformation concepts of contentment in English Renaissance literature.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our editors, our anonymous reviewers, and the staff at MUP for ushering this book into print during a pandemic. We know that it cannot have been easy to focus on this project in the middle of it all and we are grateful. We would also like to thank our contributors for their good humor and patience along what turned out to be a fairly long road to publication. We are proud and honored to have our names associated with yours. The idea for this volume arose, as so many do, from a terrific seminar at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) in 2015, although only a few of those seminarians ended up as contributors to the volume. We, the editors, also collaborated for the first time at the SAA, so it is important to offer that community and the people who hold it together our thanks. Some of the work on emotion carried out by Bradley Irish and Cora Fox was also supported through the Fellows program of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. Finally, we owe gratitude to our families and friends—those who gave us time and space, and who cultivated our own positive emotions through the struggles inherent in extended scholarly work.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

At the center of the Garden of Adonis, in the Book of Chastity and at the heart of Spenser’s great encyclopedic poem of Renaissance culture The Faerie Queene, Pleasure is born. The child spends her days playing in this locus amoenus ‘fraught / With pleasures manifold’, along with Amoret, the allegorical figure for the female beloved in traditions of courtly love and romance: ‘Pleasure, that doth both gods and men aggrate, / Pleasure, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche late’ (3.6.Summary and 50.8–9).1 In Spenser’s allegory, pleasure is represented as foundational to creation. The garden is the privileged home of Genius and the nursery of souls after they have been harvested by Time and before they are reborn into their new forms. Pleasure is the child—allegorically and intertextually—of Cupid and Psyche’s marriage in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and in referencing that tale, Spenser places his poem in dialogue with a long tradition of Platonic commentary that sought to reconcile human suffering with the pleasurable aspects of divine creation. Pleasure, in fact, and particularly the positive emotions connected to romantic love and marriage, is insistently at stake in Spenser’s allegorical exploration of his own cultural moment.2 And yet, until recently, positive emotions have received less attention in studies of Spenser and other early modern writers, even though, as the Garden of Adonis emblematizes, they are essential to this culture’s ethical and theological discursive contexts.3 This volume addresses such neglect of the ‘positive’ in literary studies of the early modern period, bringing together scholarship on various kinds of pleasurable feelings and their representations in European literary texts from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries. While the methods of the essays collected vary widely, and many of them productively undercut an easy distinction between categories of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, they share a commitment to exploring the significances and contours of pleasurable feeling in early modern Europe.

2

Positive emotions in early modern literature

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Positive emotions, historical texts In drawing attention to positive emotions, this collection participates in two larger intellectual projects and interdisciplinary scholarly movements. The first is what Sara Ahmed has termed a ‘happiness turn’ in contemporary affect theory, reflecting a developing popular cultural interest in happiness and well-being.4 The ‘happiness turn’ is an expansion and intensification of the much larger ‘affective turn’ in the sciences and humanities, in which scholars from diverse disciplines have fixed their attention on matters of emotion, affect, and feeling. The volume also participates in a nascent movement to recalibrate historical studies of emotions, which have suffered from what Darrin McMahon has called a ‘negative bias’.5 McMahon suggests a number of broad contributing causes for this bias, including what psychologists have argued is the human propensity to be more affected by and remember negative stimuli, but most of his causes are rooted more in disciplinary history than in innate or existential human suffering and despair.6 In the broadest sense, negative emotions may also have been an initial focus in literary studies of feeling because rhetorics of emotion inherited from classical sources and bolstered by the Reformation coalesce around moments of ritual mourning or anger: the set piece of the melancholic courtier or the rageful revenger, rather than steady states of well-being or joy. While it would be foolish to attempt to suggest that an empirical account of European literature would find more negative than positive emotions represented (and such an endeavor would immediately confront the ambiguity of this binary distinction), it is not a stretch to note that the most canonized literature taught in secondary and university courses tends to explore more explicitly the contours of human suffering than the experiences of joy. But happiness is there in even these cultural products, in fact, as Ahmed’s work reveals, as the object of every quest, the structuring force that defines the embodied self in these narratives of unhappiness. Scholars only need to see it more clearly.7 Bringing together the insights of affect theory and historical studies of emotion, and accepting their challenges to the methods of literary criticism and history as well as to the archive itself, this volume represents work that seeks to reconsider which emotions matter and how they work in early modern culture. A more particular explanation for the relative critical indifference to ‘positive’ emotional experience in literary studies of the early modern period, however, is the profound influence of New Historicism. In their authoritative volume Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson rightly identify the ‘suffering body’ as well as the ‘discursive privilege of melancholy’ as constitutive features of early modern culture.8 Paster’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 3 Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage and Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England both account for the ways the humoral body is embedded in an ecology that demands the management of disruptive humors.9 Paster focuses on the threats and excesses of the ‘wriggling’ passions of the soul, while Schoenfeldt emphasizes the inherent power of an ethics of containing those unruly passions that is central to Renaissance humanism. Such representations of the body reflect the widespread influence of Galenic humoral theory and Christian neo-Stoicism on early modern conceptions of emotion, and they have generated a rich picture of how these traditional ideas about the body defined subjectivity and embodiment in the early modern period. Richard Strier, however, in The Unrepentant Renaissance, and a number of scholars embracing methods and theories other than those that grounded New Historicism, have begun to recuperate the positive, and they have advocated for a critical expansion beyond humoral theory as the dominant cultural model of early modern emotions.10 Critiquing what he calls the ‘new humoralism’, Strier argues, with reference to Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal work on Renaissance culture, that scholarship working within the critical modes of the New Historicism needlessly ‘presents the period in dark and dour terms’.11 In addition, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis argue that a focus on the humors—the potential determinism of innate humoral dispositions, the involuntary nature of humoral flux, and a tendency to view all emotions as perturbations that must be disciplined, regulated, or treated—is aligned in many of these accounts with a version of the early modern subject that is characterized by not only its materiality, but also its lack of autonomy. They point out that ‘within this picture, human agency has almost been removed in the search for a pathologized self’.12 The focus on humoralism has at least limited and sometimes obscured cultural sites and discourses where positive feelings are generated and maintained—such as the comedies or Epicurean philosophy—and renewed attention to positive emotions promises to open new avenues and archives in the field. Even in work that has de-emphasized early medical discourse and the role of Galenic humoral theory, however, there is a clear prioritization of negative emotions or feelings. Scholars such as Steven Mullaney, for instance, have drawn on Raymond Williams’s conception of ‘structures of feeling’ in order to better describe the affective dimensions of the Reformation and its aftermath.13 Here, the impulse has been to approach the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as sites of crisis and historical trauma. Mullaney, for example, highlights feelings of anxiety and alienation when he argues that Shakespeare’s generation had a ‘profoundly dissociated sense of its world’ and that individuals experienced ‘a deep and daily ambivalence at the affective core of the self’.14 While there is little doubt that the early modern period

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Positive emotions in early modern literature

witnessed intense social and political upheaval, perhaps more than other ages, there is also evidence—documented in many of the essays in this volume—to suggest that the very same historical conditions that induced fear and doubt also gave rise to a broad cultural interest in new and newly recovered approaches to therapy, consolation, and well-being. In the field of classical studies, Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster have made a similar observation regarding scholarship on the history of emotions in ancient Greece and Rome, that ‘though the number of studies is plentiful, its range gives a lopsided impression, as if the ancients were interested in only negative emotions’.15 Their collection of essays, Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World, brings together leading scholars—including Michael C.J. Putman, Margaret Graver, and Martha C. Nussbaum—to investigate the role of positive emotions in a wide range of discursive forms. The insights of that volume are especially valuable to the present work since so many early modern thinkers turned to classical antiquity in order to theorize positive emotions that are experienced in this life, as opposed to those predicted by Christian doctrine in the next. While there is a long-standing tradition of scholarship on concepts such as eudaimonia (flourishing), tranquillitas (tranquility) and constantia (constancy) which various schools of ancient philosophy aim to cultivate, Caston and Kaster are also deliberate in centering literary genres such as Roman comedy and the Greek novel as essential archives for understanding a history of positive emotions. Their project is similar to the one pursued by a number of authors in this volume, widening the intellectual history of emotions, as well as engaging a richer core of texts in the literary archive. Although there is currently no work dedicated exclusively to positive affect and emotion in early modern Europe, scholars like Bridget Escolme have expressed ‘a desire to give pleasure equal weight with anxiety’, and The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, contains several essays working toward this end.16 David Bragchi writes on the biblical emotions of quietness and tranquility, Sara Coodin analyzes Christian and Jewish eudaimonism, while Mary Ann Lund and Richard Chamberlain offer, respectively, treatments of happiness in Robert Burton and Hamlet. Meek and Sullivan bring to light a fuller range of emotional and affective experience by looking not only to Galenic humoral theory but also to other forms of medical, philosophical, religious, and political discourses of the period. Alongside these varied and variously historical readings of early modern affect and emotion broadly conceived, Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi offer theoretical analyses of the convergences of the many areas of affect theory and studies of early modern literature in Affect Theory and Early

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 5 Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form.17 As they note in their introduction, Brian Massumi, who is widely regarded as offering the definitional account of affect for modern critical theory, develops his theory from the writings of the late seventeenth-century scholar, Baruch Spinoza. As Massumi points out, Spinoza famously defined affectus as ‘modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided, or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications’; Spinoza’s work has been elaborated by Gilles Deleuze, who argued that ‘a certain capacity for being affected corresponds to [the] degree of power’ of individual bodies.18 For Massumi, affect reflects the body’s capacity to inhabit indeterminate and transitory states; this is in sharp contrast to emotion, which he sees as the individual body’s qualified, temporary, and inevitably incomplete ‘capture’ of affective intensity, the ‘subjective … sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’.19 A number of philosophers have engaged with Massumi’s personal definition of affects, amplifying, rejecting, and re-orienting work on affect in the social field. In particular, scholars including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Kathleen Woodward, Ann Cvetkovich, Martha Nussbaum, and Sianne Ngai have developed alternative approaches to theorizing affect that explore the politics of bodies in contemporary shared life.20 As Bailey and DiGangi elaborate, there is great potential in pursuing work at the intersections of early modern literary studies and the critical theory that comes out of this tradition, and a few contributors to this volume, in particular Leila Watkins and Cora Fox, offer approaches that engage directly with scholarship in this field. Bailey and DiGangi have offered an initial charge into this kind of work and this present volume further allows early modern texts to speak back to the central paradigms of the ‘positive’ in contemporary theories of affect. Another and newer approach to reading early modern emotion that appears in some essays in this volume—particularly those by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit Hogan—draws directly from the modern affective sciences. Like historicists, scholars working in this mode acknowledge that emotions are in large part socially constructed—that their specific meanings are functions of time and place. Yet, at the same time, these scholars also engage the wealth of modern scientific research, from fields like neuroscience and experimental psychology, that suggests evidence of transhistorical and transcultural similarity in human emotional experience. This approach risks potential controversy—and indeed, has been called into question for anachronism—but scholars utilizing this method argue that the modern affective sciences can nonetheless help elucidate the emotional experiences of centuries ago by drawing our attention to features of early modern emotionality that we might otherwise miss with a purely historicist approach.21

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Positive emotions in early modern literature

Situated within and speaking back to this exciting interdisciplinary scholarship on the biocultural history of emotion, this volume implicitly assesses early modern cultural movements in relation to modern developments in critical theory and the cognitive sciences, and while much of the scholarship on early modern affect and emotion has focused on England and English literature, the editors of this volume have tried to include also continental and classical sources and to expand the literary genres that are privileged in this work. In order to understand why tragedy has generally taken precedence over comedy or why funeral rites and mourning rituals are more frequently documented in the historical record of early civilizations, a fuller expansion, including more global literature, should be the ultimate goal for the field, and we hope this volume represents at least a small step in that direction. In addition, while some of the essays engage directly with questions of embodiment, it is clear that a next step for the field will be a more fully intersectional engagement with questions of race, ethnicity, and gender, working alongside the exciting disciplinary developments occurring in studies of Shakespeare and early modern culture more generally.22 Indeed, the realignment of scholarly focus accomplished in this volume often highlights the biopolitics of emotions and affects, and it offers a new vantage point from which to interrogate both historical and contemporary conceptions of what constitutes pleasure and who is afforded well-being and happiness.

Positive emotions in the cognitive and social sciences As is suggested by the rich interdisciplinary work arising in Emotions History and Affect Studies, positive emotions have been the focus of important scholarly developments in the cognitive and social sciences. Psychology and the neurosciences, in particular, have been influenced by the new field of ‘positive psychology’.23 The authors of the recent Handbook of Positive Emotions, for instance, argue that after ‘decades of neglect, psychological research on positive emotions has burgeoned within the past 20 years’.24 Positive emotions have, however, for many years played a significant role in every major modern psychological theory of affect. Theories of basic emotions, for example, posit some number of discrete positive emotions, inevitably anchored by happiness/joy, but sometimes including categorizations like interest, hope, or trust.25 Appraisal theories of emotion view positive affect as emerging from the series of assessments through which individuals subjectively evaluate stimuli in their environment.26 And Constructivist theories, though denying the existence of ‘hard-wired’ positive emotional states, still grant a vital role in the emotion-construction process to the positive or negative valence of core affect, ‘the neurophysiological state

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 7 consciously accessible as the simplest raw (nonreflective) feelings evident in moods and emotions’.27 While a focus on positive emotions is indeed newer in most of these fields—developing in scholarship of the last thirty years or so—these areas of research have now developed well beyond simple distinctions between happiness and the various negative emotions that dominated this research before the present era. There has also been increased attention to the varieties of human experience that have been characterized as ‘positive’ within psychology and the affective social sciences. In general, the experience of positive emotion used to be seen as ‘relatively undifferentiated, primarily represented by various forms of happiness, and serving fairly nonspecific adaptational functions’.28 Darwin, for example, in his pioneering The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), ‘devoted separate chapters to suffering, grief, reflection/ill temper, anger, disgust/contempt, fear/surprise, and shame, but only one to unequivocally positive emotions (joy/high spirits, love, tender feelings, and devotion)’.29 But scholars in the affective sciences are now exploring the unique features of many positive emotions, and a recent chapter differentiates the motivational properties and appraisal components of such feelings as happiness, pride, gratitude, interest, hope, challenge/determination, affection, compassion, awe, and tranquility.30 In this sense, the modern sciences are reflecting classical and early modern practices, in which positive emotions are often disaggregated, with treatises dedicated to such specific categories as gaudium, laetitia, felicitas, or hilaritas. Overall, and particularly in the modern evolutionary studies of emotion, ‘positive emotions signal safety, cueing an individual that it is fine to roam and explore one’s environment or sit quietly still without the threat of harm’; indeed, distinctive positive affective states have been thought to ‘serve a variety of adaptive functions, including rewarding success, encouraging perseverance, sustaining engagement, promoting pair-bonding, promoting social responsibility, and more’.31 (For example: enthusiasm is theorized to be associated with the acquisition of material resources, sexual desire with the attraction of mates, and pride with the increase of status among peer groups.)32 In addition, research suggests that positive affect is crucial to flourishing, at both the social and personal levels.33 Sentiments like gratitude and love, ‘at their core, are critical elements in initiating, building, and maintaining our interpersonal bonds’, while positive emotion has also been linked to numerous health and well-being benefits.34 While this research has provided new ways of measuring the flourishing of individuals, communities, and nations—indicated by the growth of wellbeing indices, for example—there has also been a response from cultural critics and philosophers that points out the limitations of these concepts and their potentially harmful, aggressive, or politically quietist effects. Lauren

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Positive emotions in early modern literature

Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness both account for the ways twenty-first-century experiences of happiness or other positive states can be exclusionary, offering social attachments for particular selves that are not available or not constituted for others.35 Berlant traces the cruel ways contemporary neoliberal structures generate false optimism, holding out the promise of a deterministic ‘good life’ that leaves some persons profoundly disaffected and alienated. Ahmed focuses on the ways happiness operates as a promised reward for living a particular way, a narrow definition that excludes and stigmatizes ‘affect aliens’ and other unhappy outsiders. Positive emotions in these accounts are used to justify and perpetuate oppression, and these works have offered new vocabularies to Cultural Studies for reading how these processes work in both contemporary and historical texts and media. As Berlant and Sianne Ngai point out in their recent issue of Critical Inquiry focused on comedy, ‘Comedy [and by this they mean both the aesthetic form and the positively valenced experience of everyday life] helps us test or figure out what it means to say “us.” Always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear.’ 36 They make the argument that comedy as a mode and a pleasure creates particularly unpredictable and political affective attachments, that comedy both mobilizes and elucidates strong and aggressive social responses, responses that can be unethical or un-empathetic. Their work, in fact, brings to the present a paradigm quite similar to Renaissance notions of festivity, the carnivalesque, and misrule that were made central to critical discussions in the field by Mikhail Bakhtin and scholars of early modern England like Leah Marcus, who elucidated the politics of festivity and ‘positive’ modes of literature in The Politics of Mirth.37 Both the work of these scholars of early modern festivity and this recent work on the contemporary politics of comedy reveal the ways positive emotions tend to be entangled in highly complex negotiations of power, both in individual bonds and smaller social groups, and particularly in human ties facilitated or generated by state institutions, discourses, and public rituals. Scholarship in the contemporary affective sciences has also pointed to the problematics of the binary between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and in this collection there is regular attention to how positive emotions interact with their non-positive counterparts—via discussion of ambivalence, mixed emotions, and how positive emotions may be experienced in negative contexts (and vice versa). This is not to dilute the focus on positive emotions, but rather to highlight one of their crucial features. In general, in psychological research positive emotions are ones ‘that subjectively feel good and often serve more appetitive [and approach] motivational functions’, whereas negative emotions are those ‘that subjectively feel bad and often serve selfprotective [and withdrawal] motivational functions’.38 But, as both general experience and laboratory findings reveal, there are vital exceptions to these

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 9 hedonic valence and motivational alignments. Depending on context, for example, contemporary emotion scientists point out that sadness, fear, and anger can all feel subjectively good—they become, in the moment, a kind of positive emotion. Similarly, there is ample evidence that the generally negative emotion anger is associated with approach motivation, whereas the positive emotion tranquility seems to have little approach component.39 Indeed, empirical research has begun to pay more attention to what are called atypical emotions—that is, ‘categories of negative emotion, such as fear, which feel pleasant’, or ‘categories of positive emotion, such as happiness, which feel unpleasant’.40 As with the current focus on the politics of pleasurable feelings, this attention to mixed emotions also reintroduces within another disciplinary context questions that have been approached in previous movements in critical theory and literary studies. In this case, the questions of how pleasure and pain are often intermixed or renegotiated, both cognitively and in the literature that presumably reflects those cognitive states, returns the field to questions addressed by Freud and the hugely elucidating power of psychoanalytic criticism. The early modern archive, it should be pointed out, includes many self-conscious acknowledgments of the breakdown between positive and negative emotions, as well as pleasure and pain. Burton’s refrain ‘none so sweet as melancholy’, and Montaigne’s essay ‘How We Laugh and Cry at the Same Thing’, offer windows onto the philosophical and cultural engagements with precisely these questions of mixed or contradictory feelings.41 This collection honors the messy interplay of positive and negative emotions—one which, it will become clear, was no less vital to early modern culture than it is to our own.

Shaping early modern positivity The volume is divided into three parts that grew organically from the interests of our contributors.42 While the following sections capture many of the unifying and cross-cutting themes that arise in these essays, and we hope they offer useful directions for engagements with positive emotions in future research, other notable connections also arise between essays in different sections that might begin to shape new courses for early modern emotions research.

Rewriting discourses of pleasure Part I groups together essays that revisit dominant cultural narratives surrounding melancholy in order to locate positive emotions and the active pursuit of pleasure at their center. Drawing from literary, medical, and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Positive emotions in early modern literature

humanistic writing of the period, the essays offer recuperative readings of happier representations of laughing, reading, and inhabiting nature, while inviting us to consider why such moments have been overlooked and undertheorized in recent scholarship. In ‘Happy Hamlet’, Richard Strier argues that one of the things that makes Hamlet such a profoundly sad play is how utterly unnecessary are its tragic events. Unlike Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, Hamlet does nothing to create the bad situation in which he finds himself, one that corrupts what otherwise appears to be a very happy life. Strier reimagines this ‘happy’ version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, and in doing so calls attention to the critical biases that have prevented critics from capturing the full significance of the play. Cassie M. Miura’s ‘Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy’ considers the unexpected role of positive emotions in Burton’s encyclopedic discourse on melancholy. For Burton, she argues that laughter serves not only as a means to purge melancholy humors from the body but also to attain tranquility of mind, an affective state that many ancient philosophers posited as the end of philosophy. Although the Anatomy fails in many respects as a conventional medical treatise, Burton never abandons the melancholy reader, whom he ultimately diverts away from a futile quest for absolute knowledge toward lesser but happier goals such as recreation and mirth. Focusing on early modern France, Ian Frederick Moulton explores the notion that happiness and peace of mind can be found above all in the act of reading. His essay, ‘The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne’, investigates definitions of happiness and the question of whether happiness can be found beyond the contemplative life of mind and spirit. It also juxtaposes the notion of a happy reader with the early modern stereotype of the melancholy scholar who suffers from an excess of study. Finally, in ‘Pleasure and the “rustic life”’, Ullrich Langer contests modern conceptions of pleasure as a receptive, passive feeling. In its highest form, he argues, early modern pleasure was felt to be a sovereign activity that connects to the crucial discourses of early modern virtue theory. Exploring the role of pleasure in classical, Italian, and French texts, Langer especially considers the rhetorical feature of variety in the composition of literary representation, and the pleasure that the early modern period derives from it.

Imagining happy communities The essays in this central section focus more directly on questions of social groups and sociality as produced through positive emotions and their representations in texts. Together, they point to the ways the quotidian

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 11 experiences of positive feelings play a central role in social life. Timothy Hampton’s work on ‘The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare’ traces the dual nature of cheer as it is used in humanist writings as both a physiological designation of the face and an emotive. He argues that the bodily nature of cheer links practices of the Church and religious belonging to secular practices of sociability and hospitality, and he traces how these circulations of cheer in theological writings become the representational matter of drama. In plays like Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, Shakespeare plays upon cheer and its lack to flirt with the destruction of community that is at the heart of tragedy. In ‘“My crown is called content”: positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy’, Paul Joseph Zajac traces the ways these political plays explore the vitality and limitations of a practiced contentment as a mode of leadership and political survival. While this subtle emotion might not be fully captured by humoral accounts of emotions in the period, it was indeed central to political philosophy and ethics, and as Zajac argues, operated to build communities through its unique characteristics of containment. Bradley J. Irish also focuses on the affective ties that constitute communities and build subjects, and in his focus on courtly factionalism in the Essex circle, he flips the script on previous critical evaluations of these famously unhappy political rivalries. Focusing instead on the sociological effects of solidarity, a positive emotional experience, in ‘Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex circle’, Irish argues that participation in social groups and their everyday rituals of court life operated to solidify solidarity and, with it, factionalism in the late Elizabethan court, revealing how a ‘positive’ emotion can have extreme and deleterious historical consequences. Finally, Cora Fox traces the ways the gendered governing emotion of merriness negotiates and solidifies communities in ‘Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor’. Her essay points to how recent work on positive emotions in contemporary affect theory can be placed in dialogue with literary accounts of emotion as framed and imagined in aesthetic forms. The central fantasy of merriness that the play constructs offers unique insights into everyday early modern sociality.

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence In the final section, contributors engage more directly with issues of genre and form, and how such literary structures, by marshaling positive emotions, invite readers to create certain affective attachments. In ‘Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry’, Leila Watkins

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Positive emotions in early modern literature

explores pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s late seventeenth-century devotional lyrics, which display a near obsession with the process of finding present happiness in the material world. The essay addresses Traherne’s poetry’s surprising affective resonances by way of Sara Ahmed’s definition of positive affects as ‘orientations’ toward objects we believe are likely to cause happiness; Watkins thus argues that Traherne views poetry as a tool that can help readers obtain happiness by modifying their inherited cultural orientations toward specific objects. In ‘Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, Lalita Pandit Hogan argues that Webster’s tragedy is underpinned by the interaction of trust and disgust—an affective relationship that demonstrates both the potency and the precariousness of positive emotions. Hogan focuses particularly on how the so-called ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, a central concept of Trust Theory, can be seen at play in the complex attachment formed by Bosola and the play’s titular Duchess. In ‘“My heart is satisfied”: revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy’, Eonjoo Park reveals how the notion of emotional satisfaction has been an overlooked generic feature of revenge tragedy—a feature that crucially defines how plays like The Spanish Tragedy understand the relationship between revenge and justice. Indeed, Park argues, with his infamously bloody ‘play within a play’, Kyd’s protagonist realizes a close link between the artistic manifestation of vengeance and emotional satisfaction; this attachment gives rise to a particular type of justice, not adequately captured by the conventional language of retributive justice, which may be called ‘aesthetic’. Finally, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre’, Patrick Colm Hogan investigates the narrative and generic workings of ambivalence in Shakespeare’s so-called ‘problem comedies’: works infamous for containing sequences of both comic mirth and complex psychological darkness. The features of All’s Well That Ends Well, Hogan argues, suggest that our view of some emotions as purely positive may be overly optimistic, and that even feelings of attachment are not wholly or necessarily positive— hedonically, prudentially, or morally. As the variety of these contributions indicates, the focus on positive emotions opens new ways of engaging some of the central questions surrounding embodiment and identity, as well as aesthetic and social practices in early modern Europe. The volume can also speak particularly to the contemporary Euro-American cultural obsession with happiness, well-being, and pleasure, and offer some historicized accounts of these complex emotions and states. In elucidating the past, the editors of this volume note that this historical scholarship has the potential to shed light on and provide context for the contemporary directions and choices being made in the interests of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 13 often under-examined notions of ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’. As occurred in the early modern period, contemporary Europe and America are also reconsidering pleasure and the elements of what make a good life at a time of enormous upheaval and fear, and most essentially the essays collected here point to the ways experiences of the positive are never essentially ‘natural’, neutral, or autonomously willed. They are generated by complex and entangled histories and discourses that reflect both particular and shared political and cultural attachments that are traceable within—and in fact generated by—literature and other cultural products. They also, of course, reflect entrenched political and ethical investments that are decidedly current and respond to what feel like the increasingly precarious conditions of life in the twenty-first century. We hope that in a small way these essays will speak to present-day biocultural questions of justice and the common weal, its challenges and potentials.

Notes 1 The Faerie Queene, 2nd edn, ed. A.C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2 It is set in contrast to the excessive erotic desire that unmans knights in the poem’s other important locus amoenus, the Bower of Bliss, and also to the violent eroticism of the House of Busirane. Spenser’s poem insistently explores—and sometimes recuperates—positive emotions, in figures such as Caelia and her daughters, or Cambina, linking their significance to classical, exegetic, and romance intellectual and artistic traditions. 3 The 2019 Shakespeare Association of America conference did include a double seminar on ‘Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser’, organized by Joe Moshenska and Leah J. Whittington, which invited participants to consider alternatives to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and to focus on ‘affect, emotion, pleasure and sensation’. 4 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2. 5 Darrin McMahon, ‘Finding Joy in the History of Emotions’, in Susan Matt and Peter Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), pp. 103–4. 6 McMahon points, for instance, to the origins of psychology as a medical science geared toward addressing pathologies and alleviating suffering, as well as the turn in History in the 1960s and 1970s toward the study of social injustices as other disciplinary causes for a focus on unhappiness in individuals and groups. In the humanities, he observes the long-standing cultural associations of negative emotions with seriousness, intellect, and artistry. Finally, he argues that humanities scholars themselves are an unhappy group, observing that ‘“the ‘emotional community,” to borrow Rosenwein’s term, of humanists themselves

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Positive emotions in early modern literature

has a propensity to be fault-finding, querulous, and rather pessimistic at times, and in our current climate even more so’ (ibid., p. 107). 7 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, p. 6. 8 Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 12–13. 9 Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10 Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (eds), Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013); Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (eds), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 11 Strier, Unrepentant Renaissance, p. 17. 12 Cummings and Sierhuis, Passions and Subjectivity, p. 5. 13 Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14 Ibid., p. 13. 15 Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster (eds), Hope, Joy and Affection in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 1. 16 Bridget Escolme, Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. xxv; Meek and Sullivan, The Renaissance of Emotion. 17 Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi (eds), Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form (New York: Palgrave, 2017). 18 ‘corporis affectiones, quibus ipsius corporis agendi potentia augetur vel minuitur, iuvatur vel coercetur, et simul harum affectionum ideas Spinoza’, Benedicti de Spinoza Opera quae Supersunt Omnia, 3 vols, ed. Karl Hermann Bruder (Leipzig, 1843–1846), 1.271 (translation from The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, 2 vols, ed. R.H.M. Elwes, (London, 1887), 2.130); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari mutually discuss Spinozan affect in their A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For the importance of Spinoza to Deleuze, see, for example, Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Susan Ruddick, ‘The politics of affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze’, Theory, Culture & Society 27. 4 (2010): 21–45. For the importance of affect to Spinoza, see Steve D. Brown and Paul Stenner, Psychology Without Foundations (New York: SAGE, 2009), Chap. 6. 19 Massumi, Parables, 3; Massumi, ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments’ to Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, xvi.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 15 20 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness; Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions (Duke University Press, 2008); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 21 For a defense of this approach, see Bradley J. Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), Introduction. See also Patrick Colm Hogan, Literature and Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2018). This emerging methodology has some affinity with cognitive approaches to the early modern period; see, for example, Amy Cook, ‘Interplay: the method and potential of a cognitive scientific approach to theatre’, Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007), 579–94; Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology’, in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 103–14; Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 2004); Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 2006); Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave, 2011); and Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (eds), Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (New York: Routledge, 2014). 22 Questions of embodiment are being reframed at the events convening BIPOC scholars around a focus on ‘RaceB4Race’ supported by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and taking place at institutions across the United States. In particular, there is exciting work emerging at the intersection of early modern critical race studies and affect theory, which will be highlighted in a forthcoming volume generated by the 2019 Shakespeare Association of America session on ‘Race and/as Affect’ edited by Carol Mejia-LaPerle. 23 Positive psychology emerged as a movement in the behavioral sciences at the end of the twentieth century. Founded initially by Martin Seligman during his term as president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, it addresses the limitations of a focus on diagnosing mental illness and negative emotional states, rather than promoting ‘the good life’, human well-being and flourishing. 24 Craig A. Smith, Eddie M.W. Tong, and Phoebe C. Ellsworth, ‘The Differentiation of Positive Emotional Experience as Viewed Through the Lens of Appraisal

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Positive emotions in early modern literature

Theory’, in Michele M. Tugade, Michelle N. Shiota, and Leslie D. Kirby (eds), Handbook of Positive Emotions (New York: Guilford, 2014), pp. 11–27 (p. 11; Michele M. Tugade, Michelle N. Shiota, and Leslie D. Kirby, ‘Introduction’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 1–7 (p. 1). See also Jane Gruber (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Emotion and Psychopathology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 25 Smith, Tong, and Ellsworth, ‘Differentiation of Positive Emotional Experience’, p. 11. 26 Ibid., pp. 12–15. 27 James A. Russell, ‘Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion’, Psychological Review 110, no. 1 (2003), 145–72 (p. 148). 28 Smith, Tong, and Ellsworth, ‘Differentiation of Positive Emotional Experience’, p. 11. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. The authors note that ‘although positive emotional experience may be less differentiated than negative emotional experience, there is still a fair bit of differentiation to be found’ (p. 12). 31 Michaele M. Tugade, Hillary C. Devlin, and Barbara L. Frederickson, ‘Infusing Positive Emotions into Life: The Broaden-and-Build Theory and a DualProcess Model’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 28–43 (p. 28); Smith, Tong, and Ellsworth, ‘Differentiation of Positive Emotional Experience’, p. 24. 32 Michelle N. Shiota, ‘The Evolutionary Perspective in Positive Emotion Research’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 44–59 (p. 49). 33 For example, over the past two decades, Barbara L. Frederickson and colleagues have developed the broaden and build model of positive emotions, which suggests that positive emotions broaden our thoughts and action—‘by expanding our attention [and] facilitating flexible thinking, decision making, and creativity’—and subsequently help build a variety of ‘cognitive, social, intellectual, and coping resources’. See Tugade, Devlin, and Frederickson, ‘Infusing Positive Emotions into Life’, p. 29. See also Barbara L. Frederickson, ‘What good are positive emotions?’ Review of General Psychology 2, no. 3 (1998), 300–19; and Barbara L. Frederickson, ‘The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions’, American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001), 218–26. 34 Claire I. Yee, Gian C. Gonzaga, and Shelly L. Gable, ‘Positive Emotions in Close Relationships’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 215–28 (p. 220); Judith Tedlie Moskowitz and Laura R. Saslow, ‘Health and Psychology: The Importance of Positive Affect’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 413–31. 35 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. 36 Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, ‘Comedy has issues: an introduction’, Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (2017), 223–49 (p. 235).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction 17 37 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968); Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 38 Smith, Tong, and Ellsworth, ‘Differentiation of Positive Emotional Experience’, p. 16. 39 Ibid.; Eddie Harmon-Jones, Tom F. Price, Philip A. Gable, and Carly K. Peterson, ‘Approach Motivation and Its Relationship to Positive and Negative Emotions’, in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 103–18. 40 Paul Condon, Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘What is a Positive Emotion?’ in Tugade, Shiota, and Kirby, Handbook of Positive Emotions, pp. 60–81 (p. 61). 41 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), p. 11; Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 172–4. 42 Although most of these essays were solicited independently for this volume, we would like to thank the members of the 2015 SAA seminar on ‘Positive Affect in Renaissance Literature’, whose rich contributions and discussion helped to shape some of the arguments made by a number of our contributors.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

I

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1 Happy Hamlet

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Richard Strier

Hamlet is, of course, ‘the melancholy Dane’, and his play is, of course, one of the world’s great tragedies. But there is a way in which emphasis on the first of these (supposed) facts can be seen to diminish some of the force of the second. Hamlet is certainly not the most painful of the ‘great’ or ‘mature’ Shakespearean tragedies—Othello and King Lear compete for that honor—but Hamlet can and, I think, should be seen as the saddest of them. Part of this sadness springs from the fact that, unlike Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, Hamlet did nothing at all to initiate the tragic situation in which he finds himself. But what intensifies this sadness, I will argue, is the sense the play gives us that there was an alternative life for Hamlet. King Lear might have had a few years of contentment (‘rest’) with Cordelia after his abdication and (initial) apportionment of the kingdom, but this was to be, at best, a muted crawling toward death.1 Othello might, as Iago thinks, have had a happy marriage if Iago had not intervened, but modern criticism is highly doubtful of this.2 It is hard to imagine the Macbeths living happily, even with children. I will argue that, by contrast, Hamlet is not melancholic by nature (or humoral unbalance); that he was happy in the period before the events that form the plot begin; and that there is every reason to suppose that such happiness would have continued, since we see the components of it. I will even try to show that some of what Yeats called the ‘gaiety’ of Hamlet continues after the ‘perfect storm’ that defines the plot of the play: the death (as it turns out, murder) of King Hamlet and the accession to the place, political and nuptial, of his brother, Hamlet’s uncle.3

‘As you were when we were at Wittenberg’ To see the play in this way requires that we take Hamlet himself as capable of participating in and enjoying key aspects of both the contemplative and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

the active life.4 It means basically agreeing with Ophelia that Hamlet, before his ‘transformation’, truly possessed and happily manifested the ‘courtier’s, soldier’s, [and] scholar’s’ best qualities.5 This is controversial enough in the world of criticism today—a large book on the play recently espoused exactly the opposite view6—but my view also entails seeing the people that Hamlet was involved with, especially those in his own generation, in a basically positive light as well, so that his implied past interactions with them (along with some of his present ones) seem positive, and the destruction of all of them profoundly sad. ‘Golden lads and girls’—or something like that—is what we must see lost.7 This is even more controversial. Almost no one these days has a good word for Laertes or even for Ophelia (except when she is mad), let alone for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But I will see what can be said for all of these components of Hamlet’s pre-crisis world, all of whom should have continued in the ways they were then. My focus will be on what Julia Lupton calls the play’s ‘horizontal strands’ rather than its ‘awful longitudinals’.8 However, for reasons that are nowhere given, Lupton also speaks of the ‘grim Elsinore childhoods’ of Hamlet and Ophelia.9 Yet Elsinore in the late Elizabethan period was anything but grim. Shakespeare was, as far as we know, the first teller of the Hamlet story to shift its locale to Elsinore in particular, and he is insistent on the location (Elsinore is mentioned four times in the text).10 What this means is that the locale of the story was the castle of Kronborg, which, from its reconstruction in the 1570s on, was one of the grandest, newest, and most heavily armed (with cannon) of Renaissance palaces—all of which, as Gunnar Sjögren puts it, was ‘well known’ to the Elizabethans.11 So Hamlet, and perhaps Ophelia, grew up in a grand and contemporary structure. We are told very little about Hamlet’s early life, but we do know that he idealized his father—as either a model human or a model male (‘A was a man … I shall not see his like again’ (1.2.186–7))—and had a devoted mother (in the present, we are told that she ‘lives almost by his looks’ (4.7.12), and there is no reason to think that this was not the case in the past). The one early memory strand of Hamlet’s that is reconstructed is riotously joyous. His father’s court jester ‘bore [Hamlet] on his back a thousand times’, and Hamlet loved him (having kissed his lips ‘I know not how oft’), and, even as a child, appreciated his performances— his gibes, gambols, songs—and was part of a festive community in this appreciation; the jester’s ‘flashes of merriment’ were wont ‘to set the table on a roar’ (5.1.179–85). The other thing that we know about Hamlet’s early life is that he had two friends who were ‘of so young days brought up with him’ and were close to him not only in age but in spirit and activity (‘neighbour’d to his youth and haviour’ (2.2.11–12)). In naming these characters, Shakespeare

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

23

is, again, being absolutely historically correct and contemporary. At the coronation of Christian IV in 1596, there were no fewer than nine Guildensterns and seven Rosencrantzes among the attendant Danish aristocrats12— so their ethnicity and their class status is assured. And we know that Hamlet was genuinely fond of them. It is his uncle who mentions the affinities in youth and ‘haviour’, and his mother reports to the two young aristocrats that Hamlet enjoys telling stories about their shared youthful exploits—‘he hath much talk’d of you’, and she believes that there are not two men living ‘To whom he more adheres’ (2.2.19–21). Hamlet’s mother and uncle appeal to the ‘gentry’ of the two youths and expect them, given their past relationship to Hamlet, to ‘draw him on to pleasures’ (2.2.22; 15). I realize that this reading requires that we take the words of Claudius and Gertrude here at face value, but I cannot see any reason not to do so. Their whole plan depends on what they say being true. Their confidence seems justified. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find Hamlet, they address him quite formally as a social superior. Rosencrantz says, ‘God save you, sir’; Guildenstern addresses him both more intimately and more formally as ‘My most dear lord’. In what we now recognize as a typical gesture of (using Lupton’s terms again) establishing horizontal rather than vertical social relations, Hamlet changes the register and addresses them as ‘My excellent good friends’ (2.2.221–3). Michael Neill has called attention to the complexity and problematic nature of such a gesture, as has Christopher Warley, but it seems to be something that Hamlet quite spontaneously does, and is quite committed to doing.13 He does the same thing when he first meets Horatio, who addresses Hamlet even more formally than Guildenstern does, with ‘Hail to your lordship’, and whose ‘your poor servant’, Hamlet changes to ‘my good friend’ (1.2.159–63). Hamlet insists, at the end of the encounter with ‘the thing’ on the battlements, that precedence be ignored—the ‘Nay’ in ‘Nay, let’s go together’ only makes sense as a gesture of this sort. Hamlet seems genuinely to enjoy setting friendship above hierarchy. This can, again, be seen as a hierarchical prerogative, but even so it is significant that Hamlet chooses to exercise the prerogative in this way, and so regularly. When Hamlet asks his ‘excellent good friends’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern how they are doing, he playfully urges them to extend the metaphor about their location on Fortune’s body, and himself turns the metaphor in a bawdy direction, which the friends are happy to adopt (2.2.225–36). It is all quite light-hearted. Hamlet makes it clear that (as we already know) the two have not, recently, been living in Denmark. In the Folio text, he turns bitter, puzzling the two by calling Denmark a prison; he banters with them about the subjectivity of feelings and about the (supposed) insubstantiality of ambition and invites them, in a gesture that is now familiar, to ‘go

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

together’ with him (‘Shall we to th’ court’?).14 They insist on his taking precedence (‘We’ll wait upon you’), and he tells them that he will not ‘sort them’ with ‘the rest of his servants’ because he is ‘most dreadfully attended’.15 I do not think that this implies that Hamlet thinks of them as truly among his servants (as Warley does). At this point in both Q2 and the Folio, Hamlet turns to them and asks, with obvious sincerity, and announcing that he is momentarily giving up being witty, ‘but in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore’ (2.2.270). It is tempting to see this as a turning point. At the equivalent moment in relation to Horatio, Horatio makes the joke about ‘a truant disposition’ and then answers directly (‘I came to see your father’s funeral’ (1.2.176)). Rosencrantz, on the other hand, tells what we know to be a bald-faced lie. Hamlet does not believe that the two turned up just to visit him, for ‘no other occasion’. But he seems willing to give them a chance to admit what he guesses, correctly, to be the true situation (‘Were you not sent for?’ (2.2.274)). I think that he really wants them to ‘deal justly’ with him. He pressures them by reference to their history, which he presents very positively: ‘by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved love’ (2.2.284–6). Again, I think that he really wants them to come through. With some hesitancy, and after another appeal to love (‘if you love me’), they finally do. He then gives them his set humanist and anti-humanist speech about ‘the paragon of animals’ who is also ‘the quintessence of dust’ (2.2.303–8). He is playing with them— pretending, for instance, that he does not know why he has ‘lost all [his] mirth’—but it does not yet seem to be cruel play. He does not dismiss them and is extremely interested to hear their report about the actors who are coming to the castle. When the actors are about to appear, Hamlet is careful to be (or seem) worried lest Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be offended that he will greet the players more warmly than he did them (2.2.367–71). I do not see why he should even raise this issue if he were not actually concerned about it. It seems like a moment of exquisite social tact. He calls it ‘th’ appurtenance of welcome’. And then he trusts them with the knowledge, phrased obliquely but still unmistakably, that he is not really mad (‘but mad north-north-west’). It is no part of any strategy to tell them this. His final words to them in the scene are ‘My good friends, I’ll leave you till night. You are welcome to Elsinore’ (2.2.540–1). This may be read as ironic, but perhaps need not be. There is no doubt that in Hamlet’s next significant encounter with the two, after the apparent success of ‘The Mousetrap’, Hamlet treats them harshly and with contempt, using the recorder to show his sense of them as merely instruments of the king’s for getting at him, and directly calling them liars. He has come—perhaps through the experience of seeing Ophelia

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

25

as a willing pawn, perhaps through his new-found assurance that Claudius is his father’s murderer (and the assumption of Gertrude’s connivance)—to see his old friends now only in relation to the king and queen, from the latter of whom they are bearing a message.16 Now being frank about the issue of being ‘sent for’, Guildenstern says, ‘The Queen your mother … hath sent me to you’ (3.2.303–4). When, at this point, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attempt to mobilize the language of friendship, Hamlet fiercely resists. Guildenstern says that it is love that leads him to press Hamlet on the cause of his ‘distemper’, and appeals to the idea that love and duty can, at times, lead to unmannerly boldness; there is no doubt that, as a general maxim, this is true (think of Kent in the first scene of Lear). Hamlet pretends not to understand (3.2.339–41). Yet there might be real feeling and real pathos in Rosencrantz’s reaction to Hamlet’s newly caustic treatment of them: ‘My lord, you once did love me’ (3.2.326). This has something of the ring of Sir Andrew’s ‘I was adored once’ in Twelfth Night, and it echoes Ophelia’s ‘I was the more deceived’ when Hamlet tells her ‘I loved you not’ (3.1.119–20).17 After all, what do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern think that they are doing? Like everyone else, they do not know that Claudius is a murderer. They have been sent for by a concerned stepfather, who is also their monarch, together with a concerned mother, to try to help the two get some insight into why their son and stepson has indeed apparently lost all the mirth (and the good manners) that he previously had. They have no reason to think that there is any other motive for their being sent for. But what of their willingness to be used by the reigning monarchs, their giving up themselves ‘in the full bent’ (2.2.30) to be used by them? It is easy for us to see this as sleazy or worse, as Hamlet comes to do. We tend to see them, in an analogy that is almost impossible for us not to use, as ‘good Germans’.18 But would Shakespeare and most of his audience have seen them in this way? The characters have a very high view of kingship and its importance to the body politic, but wouldn’t virtually all Elizabethans agree that on the monarch’s ‘weal depends and rests / The lives of many’ (3.3.14–15)? When Hamlet tells them that he will simply give them the insight that they have been sent to acquire, so that their secrecy ‘to the King and Queen moult no feather’ (2.2.294–5), he may actually be respecting their situation. Frank Whigham reminds us that satiric depiction (and our own assumed high-mindedness) ‘can blind us to the probability that most young Elizabethan hopefuls’ were more like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern than they were like Sidney or Castiglione.19 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern certainly do not offer any resistance to the king and queen’s requests (which they rightly see as equivalent to commands (2.2.27–9)), but it is important to remember that they have not been asked to do anything obviously improper or immoral.20

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

They are about to be sent to accompany a depressed friend on a trip. As far as the play lets us see, they are neither fools like Osric nor willing executioners like Goneril’s Oswald.21 They are loyal servants to their monarchs, but it is not clear that they have knowingly betrayed their friendship to Hamlet.22 Let me now turn to the other members of Hamlet’s generation with whom he has long-standing relationships, beginning with Ophelia. Since the death of Hamlet Sr, young Hamlet seems to have intensified his wooing of Ophelia (‘he hath very oft of late / Given private time to’ her (2.2.91–2)), but there seems to be no doubt that he was courting her before. He apparently was in the habit of writing her letters (including at least one with a bad poem) and following them with words ‘of so sweet breath compos’d / As made the things more rich’ (3.1.98–9). Despite the (completely understandable) concerns of Ophelia’s father and brother, she and Hamlet seem to have comported themselves admirably—‘he hath importun’d me with love / In honorable fashion’ (1.3.110–11). But can we think that the cessation of this relationship is really a loss? There has been a good deal of focus recently on the cultural significance of Ophelia’s madness, but this is clearly a matter of ‘after’.23 I am interested in ‘before’. With regard to that, she is normally thought of as another moral weakling, willing to be manipulated by an authority figure. Again, I think that this is an anachronistic perspective. Just as I believe most Elizabethans would have applauded the care for Ophelia’s honor shown by her father and her brother, I think that they would have understood, if not applauded, daughterly obedience to a father.24 There is more to be said about her. Shakespeare’s compliant women, like Ophelia and Desdemona, are often judged harshly. But Ophelia, like Desdemona, is a person of wit and spirit. Ophelia is skeptical about Laertes’ initial characterization of Hamlet’s behavior as ‘trifling’—I think her ‘No more but so?’ (1.3.9) manifests this. After the much longer speech in which her brother concedes that Hamlet might be sincere but introduces class, political, and other considerations, Ophelia answers Laertes with surprising shrewdness and humor.25 After assuring him that she will indeed remember what he has told her, she turns the table on him and says, ‘But, good my brother, / Do not as some ungracious pastors do / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven / Whiles like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads’ (1.3.45–8). This is intellectually and morally sharp and very wittily phrased (‘a puff’d and reckless libertine’).26 She gives an extraordinarily powerful narrative of Hamlet’s intrusion into her closet in a state of surprising dishabille and inarticulateness (2.1.77–100)—a narrative powerful enough to change Polonius’s estimation of the relationship— and she stands up to Hamlet’s barking at her about female dishonesty with lovely ingenuousness and directness (3.1.109–20).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

27

She reacts more in sorrow than in anger to Hamlet’s unintelligible advice for her to go to a nunnery (in Protestant Denmark), and to his general misogyny.27 She focuses on what has apparently happened to him rather than on her own hurt feelings. What is most striking about her reaction is that she shares Hamlet’s Renaissance humanism. She cannot have heard him musing on what is ‘nobler in the mind’ between voluntarily enduring and voluntarily ending suffering and indignity, but her first line after his noisy exit is ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’ (3.1.153; emphasis mine). She comments on his new disregard for fashion (is he dishabille again?), but keeps her focus on ‘that noble and most sovereign reason’ (3.1.159)—again falling in line with the many assertions of the crucial, ethically significant, and distinctively human status of reason that we have already heard from Horatio (1.4.28) and especially from Hamlet himself (1.2.150; 1.4.28; 2.2.304; and continuing at length at 4.4.33–9).28 Finally, let me add that Ophelia, like Desdemona, is no prude. Like any intelligent aristocratic lady of the period, she is used to off-color jokes. When Hamlet makes a crude joke to her about ‘country matters’, she does not manifest shock or displeasure, merely noting ‘You are merry, my lord’ (3.2.120). Laertes receives, if anything, even worse treatment in most critical accounts. His role in the play is to be a ‘foil’ for Hamlet. One might say that this is explicit in the text. Hamlet calls Laertes this—but only with regard to their fencing skills, their skills with literal foils (5.2.250–3). The normal critical conception of Laertes as a ‘foil’ for Hamlet is with regard to the supposed contrast between them as revengers. Hamlet is thought to be the scrupulous avenger, where Laertes is the unscrupulous and savage one.29 The supposed contrast has three bases: Laertes’ arousing of a popular rebellion and bursting into Claudius’s palace at the head of one (4.5.110ff.); his lack of hesitation in embracing revenge; and, supposedly in most pointed contrast with Hamlet, his willingness, with regard to the murderer of his father, ‘To cut his throat i’th’ church’ (4.7.125). To take the question of lack of hesitation first, it must be recognized that Laertes’ situation, from an epistemological point of view, is entirely different from Hamlet’s. Laertes is given, in short order, a perfectly clear picture of his father’s death. There is no doubt in his mind, or anyone else’s, how it happened. Hamlet, on the other hand, is given an account of his father’s death by something which is certainly, in the modern sense, a ‘questionable shape’ (1.4.43); doubts about the status of this ‘thing’ (as it is repeatedly called) and therefore about the status of its claims, are inevitable, especially given the play’s Protestant context, with Hamlet having been a student at Wittenberg.30 With regard to the popular rebellion, the major thing to say is that little is made of it. The fact that the rebellion seems to happen very easily may suggest that there is some general discontent with Claudius’s reign, but this

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

is not developed.31 The rebels, insofar as they are represented at all, seem focused on Laertes becoming king—in which Laertes manifests no interest whatever. All he cares about is being, as he says, ‘reveng’d / Most thoroughly’ for the death of his father (4.5.135–6). He leads the rebellion against Claudius only because he thinks Claudius responsible for this. Hamlet, on the other hand, is the designated successor to the throne (1.2.109) and does not need to tap into whatever popular discontent exists to get at Claudius. But the major supposed difference remains: Laertes’ willingness ‘To cut his throat i’th’ church’. The obvious contrast here is with Hamlet’s unwillingness to do this when he has exactly that opportunity. As Margreta de Grazia has shown, there is a long tradition, from the eighteenth century on, of refusing to take at face value Hamlet’s explicitly given reason for not cutting Claudius’s throat when he might do it ‘pat, now a is a-praying’ (3.3.73). Hamlet cannot seriously have wanted to send Claudius’s soul to hell; he cannot have had such a ‘diabolic’ idea.32 Only a crude soul like Laertes could have wanted this. Hamlet cannot stand the idea of killing an unarmed man who is kneeling in prayer—perhaps cannot stand the idea of revenge at all—and so he finds a fierce-sounding excuse for not seizing the moment (to disguise ‘a delicate disposition’ he pretends to ‘a savage enormity’).33 But Hamlet has made it clear right from the beginning of the play that he wants to see the souls of his enemies in hell. One of the worst things that he can think of—almost as bad, he says, as his mother’s marriage to his uncle so soon after his father’s death—is to meet his ‘dearest foe in heaven’ (1.2.182). For some reason, this line has gained remarkably little attention (de Grazia does not mention it). Hamlet is appalled at the idea of an enemy of his going to heaven; he wants his foes to go to hell. He tells Claudius, in a sort of joke, to go there (4.3.34–5). Although part of what is presented as ‘most horrible’ about the murder of Hamlet Sr is not only what happened to his body but that he was not given any opportunity to prepare spiritually for his death (1.5.76–9), Hamlet has no compunction about specifying that exactly the same thing happen to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The letter that he wrote to the English king as a substitute for the one that Claudius composed insists that the bearers be put ‘to sudden death’, which is specified to mean ‘no shriving-time allow’d’ (5.2.46–7). So, Laertes’ stance with regard to this issue is no more crude or unconstrained than Hamlet’s. Hamlet is in fact more cold-blooded about wanting his enemy to go to hell than Laertes is. If there is a moral difference here, the balance is in Laertes’ favor. I have already suggested that Laertes’ concern for his sister’s honor can be seen as admirable. And, as far as I have been able to determine, there is no commentary on the glorious lyric language that Shakespeare gives to Laertes when Laertes shifts from considering Hamlet’s special status as

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

29

(essentially) crown-prince to considerations of the fragility of virginity and honor. After making the general observation that ‘Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes’, Laertes says: ‘The canker galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, / And in the morn and liquid dew of youth / Contagious blastments are most imminent’ (1.3.38–42). This is the language of some of Shakespeare’s most lyrical sonnets (for instance, numbers 5, 12, 15, 54, 65, et alia), and this language is given to Laertes. His is hardly a coarse sensibility. We do not know whether, in France, Laertes is putting into practice any of the precepts about behavior in the social world that Polonius bestows on him or whether, on the other hand, Laertes is indulging in any of the ‘wanton, wild, and usual slips’ that Polonius enumerates (2.1.25–6).34 But we do know that Polonius, by his own account, tends to be overly suspicious (2.2.113–15), and in any case the audience would almost certainly agree with Polonius in seeing ‘gaming’, and so on as merely ‘slight sullies’ on the reputation of a young aristocrat. It is as an aristocrat that Laertes is constantly and sympathetically presented. He is consistently concerned with the behavior-regulating principles that Hamlet calls ‘honour and dignity’ (2.2.526).35 In the course of the play, Laertes has to deal with the deaths of what we know of as his entire nuclear family (his mother seems to be long deceased; she is never mentioned or even referred to). Laertes’ love for his intimate family is demonstrated—he is not being ironic in appreciating ‘A double blessing’ from his father (1.3.53)—and with regard to both father and sister, his concern for how they are treated post-mortem would have been seen as entirely and admirably class appropriate. He is, and would have been recognized as being, completely right in protesting his father’s ‘obscure funeral’, with ‘no trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones, / No noble rite, nor formal ostentation’ (4.6.210–12).36 He is admirable in desiring further ceremony for his sister— even if ‘her death was doubtful’ in the sense of being a possible suicide (5.1.220).37 Roland M. Frye is certain that the officiating figure is wrong in denying her a musical ‘requiem’—‘a great deal of music would have been expected, even if the funeral had been that of a commoner, and much more of course for the burial of a prominent court lady’.38 Frye even claims that Laertes was doing something proper and familiar in taking the improperly exposed shrouded body into his arms.39 Hamlet, who is now willing to acknowledge his love for Ophelia, simply wants to get in on the pious and loving act. Hamlet does not see Laertes as a contrast to himself, but, on the contrary, as a kind of double. He says this explicitly with regard to their situations; they have both lost their fathers unexpectedly, and Hamlet can easily, by reflection, project himself into Laertes: ‘By the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his’ (5.2.76–7). But there is more to the doubling of these

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

characters than this. Hamlet consistently views Laertes, and treats him, as ‘a very noble youth’ (5.1.217). Just as I think that we should take seriously Ophelia’s sense of Hamlet before the crisis as a model Renaissance aristocrat (courtier, soldier, scholar), I think that we should also recognize the substance behind Osric’s fluffy rhetoric about Laertes as ‘an absolute gentleman’, the ‘card or calendar of gentry’ (5.2.107–10). It is worth recalling that Polonius’s last instruction to Reynaldo about what Reynaldo should do in France with regard to Laertes is ‘And let him ply his music’ (2.1.73).40 It is also worth saying that with regard to matters of ‘formal ostentation’, Hamlet—despite his apparent disdain for externals (to which we will return)—is just as concerned with ‘honour and dignity’ as Laertes is. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy, where he expresses his revulsion at his mother’s remarriage, Hamlet takes note of Claudius’s comparative lack of physical attractiveness and martial prowess, and closes with a reference to incest, but the main focus of Hamlet’s disgust is the speed of the marriage: ‘But two months … ere these shoes were old … a beast … would have mourned longer … O most wicked speed’ (1.2.138–57). The issue here is not just personal revulsion but shame and impropriety. Frye makes clear how utterly shocking this speed would have been to an Elizabethan audience, who would have expected a period of public mourning for an aristocratic or royal death of a least many months.41 Here too, Hamlet’s case is the portraiture of Laertes’. Unless we see Hamlet and Laertes as figures who were both, under normal circumstances, model Renaissance aristocrats, and who should have been, under normal circumstances, friends and perhaps happy brothers (in-law), much of the poignance of the final movement of the play is lost. This movement starts by giving us a glimpse of what the normal relation between these two aristocratic youths should have been. One of the small mysteries in the play is why it includes the elaborate account of the ‘bewitching’ horsemanship of the Norman, Lamord (4.7.80–9). Horsemanship was one of the great aristocratic skills—think of the opening of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—and the point of the passage is to bring us into that world.42 But the feature of that world that is the focus of the discussion here, and the reason for Claudius bringing up Lamord, is not horsemanship but fencing, another prized gentlemanly pursuit (despite Polonius listing it as one of the ‘wild’ activities in which Laertes may be engaged (2.1.25)).43 Lamord brought to the Danish court (it is unclear under which king) a ‘report’ of Laertes’ extraordinary skill for ‘art and exercise’ in his defense, especially with that very fashionable weapon, the rapier. Laertes was extolled for many virtues (4.7.72), but this one galvanized Hamlet with aristocratic emulation—it, in an odd phrase (especially from Claudius), did ‘envenom’ Hamlet with envy of Laertes (4.7.102, and see also 72–4).44 Laertes, though he is determined to revenge his father’s death on Hamlet and wishes to be ‘the organ’ of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

31

Hamlet’s death (4.7.69), can see nothing at all unusual or significant in this aristocratic rivalry—‘What out of this, my lord’? (4.7.105). He sees it as utterly normal and unsurprising. It exists in the world of happy aristocratic exercise and friendly competition. As Claudius says, Hamlet is eager ‘to play with’ Laertes (5.2.195). This is what their world should be.45 Laertes does not put two and two together—until Claudius spells it out for him—because, as I have suggested, the fencing match seems so normal and so innocuous to him. Hamlet, until he is forced by word and by circumstance to see it otherwise, sees the fencing match in this way. He imagines, somehow, that he and Laertes are still in the world that they should have been in, the world in which the duel, with the betting on it, would be a ‘brother’s wager’. Hamlet has been looking forward to it ever since he heard Lamord’s report (5.2.206–7). Despite the foreboding that Hamlet feels, which he decides, on a combination of religious and philosophical grounds to ignore, it does seem that it is indeed his pleasure ‘to play with Laertes’ (5.2.195). The power of this vision of friendly and courtly aristocratic emulation gives rise to one of the most complex moments in the play.46 Hamlet willingly takes Laertes’ hand, and he issues an apology to him, straightforwardly beginning, ‘Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong’ (5.2.222). He asks Laertes to pardon the wrong—killing Laertes’ father—on the basis of a class or status solidarity that he takes to have an ethical dimension: ‘Pardon’t as you are a gentleman’ (5.2.223, emphasis mine). What this seems to mean here is that Laertes understands the importance of intention in determining the nature and culpability of an action. Hamlet argues that he was not in his right mind when killing Polonius; he knows that Laertes understands the legal importance of this, since the claim to insanity had to lie behind Laertes’ demand for more extended funeral rites for Ophelia.47 Hamlet argues that he was ‘not himself’ when he killed Polonius, and therefore Hamlet did not do it. After this bit of reasoning— which seems factually inaccurate as well as tortuous—Hamlet returns to a direct plea: ‘Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil / Free me so far in your most generous thoughts / That I have shot my arrow o’er the house / And hurt my brother’ (5.2.236–40). He returns to the matter of intention, and again (I think) to the matter of what it means, in the deepest sense, to be ‘a gentleman’. It means to have ‘generous thoughts’—which seems to mean being the sort of person who is capable of forgiving a wrong done to him by someone who is genuinely penitent for it and also professes continuing good will (of the sort ‘a brother’ would have).48 Laertes responds to this speech in an extraordinary way. Instead of rejecting its arguments as specious, or its contrition as unconvincing, he professes to accept its good will. He claims, from a human point of view, to be satisfied by Hamlet’s speech, saying, ‘I am satisfied by nature’, but insisting that in

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

terms of ‘honor’, he cannot forgive Hamlet until he has been assured by ‘some elder masters of known honour’ that he (Laertes) will not be thought to have done something dishonorable in doing so (5.2.246). Meanwhile, he concludes, ‘I do receive your offer’d love like love / And will not wrong it’ (5.2.247–8). What is unexpected about this is that Hamlet has nowhere used the word ‘love’. But Laertes sees, in what is certainly expressed as a ‘most generous’ thought, that that is what lies behind Hamlet’s words. The question naturally arises as to whether Laertes is simply being hypocritical here. He is, after all, about to carefully select the ‘unbated and envenom’d’ rapier (after having mistakenly initially chosen another (5.2.261)). Yet it is hard to feel Laertes’ words as simple hypocrisy, just as it is hard to take Hamlet’s apology as merely disingenuous.49 Laertes responds too deeply not just to the words of Hamlet’s speech but to the emotion and the bond Laertes sees as being implied in them. Laertes is, in the sense required, ‘a gentleman’. Further proof that Hamlet’s words have genuinely moved Laertes comes in Laertes’ comment (to himself) after he has reassured Claudius that in the third ‘pass’ he will indeed wound Hamlet that it is ‘almost against [his] conscience’ to do so (5.2.300). Only Hamlet’s words could have made this difference. (Whether Laertes’ failure to wound Hamlet in the first two passes reflects some ambivalence is completely undecidable; Hamlet may simply be better.) The two noble youths end up exchanging forgiveness (5.2.334–6); in Q1, Leartes (sic.) adds love.50 They both die in what really should have been—had life in Elsinore proceeded as it should have—a ‘brother’s’ wager’.

Mirth in funeral The first part of this essay attempted to demonstrate that Hamlet led a happy life, among attractive people, before his world was thrown ‘out of joint’. His experience was filled with ‘meditation or the thoughts of love’ (1.5.30), and his consciousness was filled with ‘saws of books’ and such images as ‘youth and observation copied there’ (1.5.100–1)—books and life; what Bradley called ‘his joy in thought and observation’.51 I want to argue now that there are many continuities between Hamlet’s life before and after. He retains many of his qualities, characteristics, and, I would add, pleasures. To describe him simply as ‘melancholy’ captures very little of what we actually see of him. Ophelia saw Hamlet as a sharp dresser, ‘The glass of fashion’ (3.1.155). One might think that this was something that he gave up, but that is less clear than it might be. His first extended speech (1.2.76–86) is usually read as a rejection of externals, of all ‘trappings’ in favor of a deep interiority

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

33

that (supposedly) cannot be adequately manifested. But that is not exactly what the speech is saying—or rather, it is not all that the speech is saying. The word in the speech that seems to me rarely to be given its proper weight is ‘alone’—‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother’. The claim is not that the garment does not ‘denote’ the state of mind of the wearer, but that it does not fully do so. The claim is not that it does not contribute to such ‘denoting’—rather the claim is that it does do so.52 The fact that any piece of ‘haviour’ can be played—which is undeniable—does not mean that it cannot also be sincere. One can ‘know not’ seeming and still employ such. That one can feel that even sincere ‘haviour’ does not fully express one’s interior state is merely another fact. And it is important to give full weight to something that is unmistakable on stage—that Hamlet is wearing a customary suit of solemn black. He is, under the circumstances—a grand court scene where, presumably, everyone is quite colorfully dressed—making a point, a point about appropriate ‘haviour’ and costume. If he actually thought such matters were trivial or worse, he would not be exemplifying them. There is, moreover, one other thing to say about this, and here, again, I am indebted to the work of Roland Frye. He calls attention to the actual garment that Hamlet is wearing. An ‘inky cloak’ was a spectacular piece of mourning clothing, covering the wearer from head to foot (it included a hood).53 It was often expensive; in Q1, Hamlet refers to his ‘sable suit’, a notoriously expensive material that Hamlet later refers to as such (in bantering with Ophelia before ‘The Mousetrap’ he jokes that he will get ‘a suit of sables’ to signify his mourning (3.2.127)).54 Finally, it should be said, that, in the Renaissance as now, black was the most fashionable color. As Frye says, Hamlet’s garb ‘would associate him with such young Renaissance nobles and princes as so often appear painted by Moroni, Titian, Bronzino, Veronese, and others’.55 In The Book of the Courtier, Federico of Montefeltro, one of the most authoritative speakers, expresses the opinion that ‘black is more pleasing in clothing than any other color’, and points to the practice of the Spanish, who are, as another speaker has already stated, ‘the masters in Courtiership’.56 Hamlet would seem to be exactly following Polonius’ advice with regard to clothing (‘rich, not gaudy’—though Polonius sees the aristocrats of France, rather than Spain, as especially ‘select and generous’ in this (1.3.70–4)). Hamlet can be seen, in some other moments, as maintaining his participation or leadership in fashion. His shocking dishabille in Ophelia’s closet certainly reflects his unhappy inner state and felt need, after the encounter with ‘the thing’, to banish ‘fond records’ from his consciousness (1.5.99). But it also, as he must know, corresponds almost perfectly to the standard dress of the melancholy lover. Rosalind, in As You like It, gives the formula: ‘your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation’.57 Hamlet follows this almost to the letter (though he has no hat). The famous Lothian portrait of young John Donne is another example.58 Continuous with this is Hamlet’s famous dialogue with the skull in the graveyard scene. This seems to have been an innovation on the stage, but Frye points out that the young aristocrat with a skull was a wellestablished motif in the visual arts from 1519 on.59 The gorgeous Franz Hals painting of a Young Man with a Skull, though of a later generation (1641), strikingly illustrates the fashionableness of the motif. None of this is meant to cast doubt on Hamlet’s sincerity at any of these moments. The point is just to suggest that Hamlet’s concern with elegance of attire and ‘haviour’, and enjoyment of them, can be seen to continue after his much-noted transformation. He both is and is consciously enacting being the melancholy prince—as elegant mourner, lover, and intellectual (black was also the color of the academic gown).60 Another continuity from before to after is more explicit in the play and more central to it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, as we have seen, instructed to draw Hamlet on ‘to pleasures’, and their major success at this, in relation to which ‘there did seem in him a kind of joy’ (3.1.18), is to tap into his love of theater. They knew about this from long experience, from the way Hamlet was ‘when we were at Wittenberg’.61 The continuity here is explicit in the play. The company that has traveled to Elsinore happen to be ‘even those’ that Hamlet was ‘wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of the city’ (2.2.326–7).62 He is extremely interested in their situation, asking ‘How chances it they travel?’ (2.2.328); in Q2, he gets a detailed account of their rivalry with the children’s theater and is utterly fascinated by it (2.2.335–58), even (and very oddly) linking the ‘strangeness’ of the theatrical success of ‘the boys’ with the success of Claudius as king and with the general problem of understanding the irrational (2.2.359–64). Shakespeare cleverly links Hamlet’s love of theater to his humanistic attitudes and knowledge of the classics. With regard to the first, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately see the contemptus mundi that Hamlet is pretending as antithetical to the enjoyment of theater (‘If you delight not in man, what Lenten entertainment the players shall receive’ (2.2.314–15)). With regard to the second, Hamlet is a kind of aristocratic purist. His taste is not for the kinds of plays that succeeded in the public theater, but for highly rhetorical adaptations of classical material. He enjoys describing in detail, with regard both to plot-construction and diction, the kind of plays that he likes, and in an astonishing moment, decides to show off his love of such plays by reciting, from memory, with only a tiny false start, eighteen lines of a play about the fall of Troy, one which he, presumably, heard a number of years ago (before the face of the boy actor in the company was

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

35

‘valanced’ (2.2.419)). I am sure that we are meant to think that Polonius was right in evaluating this performance as ‘well-spoken, with good accent and good discretion’ (2.2.462–3). Hamlet’s plan for testing the veracity (and, as he thinks, nature) of ‘the thing’ is one that only a dyed-in-the-wool humanist and theater-lover could seriously propose. After indulging in some hyperbolic self-reproach—which itself might be seen as a sort of perverse rhetorical and psychological pleasure—Hamlet recalls something that he claims to have ‘heard’ about the theater and the special power of theatrical art: ‘That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaim’d their malefactions’ (2.2.584–9). Wherever we are to imagine that Hamlet ‘heard’ this fantasy about the power of theater (perhaps in Wittenberg), it is easy to locate where Shakespeare got it. In praising ‘high and excellent tragedy’, Sidney’s Apology for Poetry makes reference to a story in Plutarch of ‘the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, from whose eyes a tragedy well made and represented, drew abundance of tears, who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood’.63 Sidney takes the story with a grain of salt, but Hamlet seems actually to believe it.64 He is delighted with the plan, and is in high spirits from the preparation of the performance (lecturing the players on acting), through the performance itself (commenting from the sidelines), and, of course, after its apparent success.65 It may be something of an overstatement to see ‘theatre and diplomacy’ as the ‘respective areas of expertise’ of Hamlet and Claudius, but András Kiséry’s formulation has something to it.66 The larger point is that Hamlet enjoys using his education and enjoys exercising his intellectual powers (‘About, my brains’, he says when coming up with the Mousetrap idea (2.2.584)).67 The clearest case of post-crisis enjoyment is his decision to see the relation between Claudius and himself as a contest in military ingenuity. Hamlet is utterly delighted at this conception of their situation: ‘’tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar … O, ’tis most sweet’ (3.4.208–11). This is as enthusiastic as Hamlet gets about anything. But he has taken pleasure in using his intellect all along. And his intellect primarily manifests itself in verbal ability. He loves to talk and is the greatest talker in Shakespeare. He is a wit and consistently exercises a rather mordant sense of humor. As Bernard McElroy (following Bradley) says, ‘Hamlet’s sense of humor is ubiquitous’; it ‘never deserts him even at the nadir of his fortunes’.68 He loves all literary and rhetorical modes: satire (re old folks (citing a ‘satirical rogue’ at 2.2.196), re lawyers (5.1.1.96–110), and re Osric (5.2.183–91)); lecture (on natural and acquired vices (in Q2, 3.2.23–38), on acting technique); homily (this mainly to women, Ophelia (3.1.121–51) and his mother in the closet scene); and, of course, meditation (the reflective

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

soliloquies). He insists—and demonstrates—that he can even rant ‘as well as’ anyone (5.1.270–8). Like his creator, he cannot resist a pun. His first words are a snide one (on ‘kind’) and his last words a profound one (on ‘rest’, sending us back to his central soliloquy). The sadness of the play is encapsulated in that final sentence, since the last thing that we want to hear from Hamlet, that wonderful talker, is silence. Finally, a few words about the play’s last lines. They strike the note of lost potentiality that, I have argued, is meant to be a large component of the play’s final affect: Fortinbras says that Hamlet was likely ‘had he been put on / To have prov’d most royal’ (5.2.402–3). Most critics, however, take this to be ironic, or worse. They are said by Fortinbras—Fortinbras! And Hamlet as a soldier! Lupton calls Fortinbras a ‘thug’, and she speaks for the majority of critics.69 The odd thing about this is that, like the normal critical treatment of Laertes, it completely ignores what Hamlet says about the character. Hamlet describes Fortinbras (in Q2) as ‘a delicate and tender prince’ (4.5.48), a remarkable phrase—another beautiful and educated young man. Fortinbras’s ‘unimproved mettle’ and ‘sharked up’ band of ‘lawless resolutes’ are in the context of characterizing an enemy (invaders from the north), and even there the enterprise is recognized as having ‘some stomach to it’ (1.1.99–103). The evaluation that Hamlet gives of Fortinbras’s substitute military endeavor is admiring, not deflating. He recognizes that everything changes ‘when honour’s at the stake’ (4.5.56). Unless one thinks that Hamlet having the scholar’s tongue disqualifies him from employing and appreciating the soldier’s sword, one has to accept that Hamlet fully endorses this central aristocratic value.70 He has done so since the beginning of the play. He was concerned not only with national honor—regarding the ‘custom / More honour’d in the breach’ (1.4.15–16)—but also with the honor of his friends. Horatio’s joke about having a ‘truant disposition’ elicited from Hamlet a surprisingly fierce (and not obviously jocular) response: ‘I would not hear your enemy say so’ (1.2.170). As with Hamlet’s horror at the idea of meeting his ‘dearest foe in heaven’, Hamlet lives in a world of friends, enemies, and honor. As he lies dying, Hamlet is concerned not only with the succession but with the status of his ‘name’. He does not wish to leave ‘a wounded name’ behind (5.2.349–50). And young Fortinbras knows about young Hamlet. I think that we are meant to take Fortinbras seriously when he says that Hamlet, had he been put on, would have proved ‘most royal’—bringing together his father’s military prowess and his uncle’s diplomatic skills and intelligence. ‘Had he been put on’—the sense of a wonderful lost future is real. But Hamlet would have appreciated being given grand (and appropriate) obsequies. There is no irony here.



Happy Hamlet

37

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 On Lear’s ‘initial apportionment’, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 178–80. 2 For Iago’s belief that Othello, left to himself, would ‘prove to Desdemona / A most dear husband’, see Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on Thames: Nelson and Sons, 1997), 2.1.288–9. For the view that the marriage was internally doomed, see (inter alia) Edward A. Snow, ‘Sexual anxiety and the male order of things in Othello’, English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), 384–412. 3 ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread’, W.B. Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, lines 16–17, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 291. 4 I should say at the outset that my essay has little in common with Richard Chamberlain, ‘What’s Happiness in Hamlet?’ in Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (eds), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 153–74. Chamberlain’s essay is an Adornian attempt at discerning the (possible) dialectical positivity of unhappiness in the play. 5 See Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 2.2.5 for Hamlet’s ‘transformation’; for Ophelia’s characterization, 3.1.153. I will cite the play from this edition (hereafter Jenkins), and unless otherwise stated, the references in parentheses are from this edition, but, since the Jenkins edition is a conflated one, I will note when a passage appears only in the second quarto (Q2) or the Folio (F). For Q2, I have used Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). For F (and the first quarto (Q1)), I have used the companion volume of Thompson and Taylor, Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 (London: Thomson Learning, 2007). 6 See Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 7 Ellen MacKay has suggested to me that to see Hamlet in this way links it to one of Shakespeare’s few earlier tragedies, Romeo and Juliet (1595?). 8 Julia Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 69–96 (p. 81). 9 Ibid., p. 86. 10 András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 90. 11 Gunnar Sjögren, ‘The Danish background in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968), 221–30 (p. 223). See also Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, pp. 96–106. Belleforest set the story in Denmark, but not in Elsinore. 12 Sjögren, ‘The Danish background’, 224, and see Jenkins, pp. 422–3. 13 Michael Neill, ‘“He that Thou Knowest Thine”: Friendship and Service in Hamlet’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Tragedies (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 319–38 (pp. 321–2);

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Christopher Warley, Reading Class Through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 47–72 (pp. 55–60). 14 I do not have a theory about why this passage (in Jenkins, 2.2.239–69a) does not appear in Q2. Jenkins mentions the possibility that the lines about Denmark being ‘a prison’ might have been thought to be offensive to Queen Anne (of Denmark), but he then rejects this theory (pp. 45, 467). Joshua Held has suggested to me that this passage of (relatively) light-hearted repartee shows Hamlet being even friendlier to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the Folio than he is in Q2. That may well be true, though I do not think that the absence of the passage in Q2 seriously affects the quality of the interaction. 15 I do not understand Hamlet’s comment about being ‘dreadfully attended’, and have not found a satisfactory gloss on it. Jenkins too seems puzzled (p. 251). 16 With regard to Hamlet seeing Ophelia as a ‘willing pawn’, I accept the suggestion, rejected by Jenkins (pp. 496–7) that Hamlet glimpses Polonius’s presence when he suddenly asks Ophelia, ‘Where’s your father?’ (3.3.130–1). With regard to Hamlet’s belief, at this point, in Gertrude’s complicity, see his statement, early in the ‘closet’ scene with her, that his killing of Polonius is ‘Almost as bad … As kill a king’ (3.4.28–9). 17 For Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s claim, see Twelfth Night, ed. J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), 2.3.181. Part of the tragedy of Hamlet is that he did in fact love many of the people around him. Harold Bloom seems to me exactly wrong in asserting of Hamlet, ‘we have every reason to doubt his capacity to love anyone’, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), p. 43. 18 I am afraid that I fell into this analogy myself in an earlier treatment of the two. See ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 104–33, which begins with a reference to a comment by Sartre on moral life in occupied France. 19 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 21. Empson was eloquent on the dangers of critical ‘high-mindedness’: see, for instance his review (‘Mine Eyes Dazzle’) of Clifford Leech’s 1963 book on The Duchess of Malfi, reprinted in William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, 2 vols, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2.110–14. It should be noted that ‘Neo-Christianity’ is not the only form that such ‘highmindedness’ can take. 20 Joshua Scodel presents a fierce critique of the ‘sycophantic rhetoric’ of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but has to note that, ‘despite their sycophancy’, they ‘do not seem especially ambitious or avaricious’. See Joshua Scodel, ‘Finding freedom in Hamlet’, Modern Language Quarterly 72 (2011), 163–200 (pp. 177, 178). 21 As Jenkins somewhat unhappily acknowledges (p. 397), there is no evidence in the text that—despite what Hamlet seems to believe—they knew what the ‘grand commission’ they were carrying contained. The document, as Hamlet

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

39

makes clear, was very carefully folded and sealed, and we know from Claudius’s first speech that Claudius does not expect bearers of official messages to have any ‘personal power’ with regard to them (1.2.36–8). 22 Ted Leinwand has reminded me that this is just one of many important things that the play leaves unclear, and that such unclarity is one of the deep features of the play (personal communication). 23 On Ophelia’s madness, see, inter alia, Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 77–94; Leslie C. Dunn, ‘Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine’, in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds), Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 50–64; and Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 50–6. 24 James J. Marino brushes aside historical Elizabethan assumptions in favor of purely theatrical ones, in which Ophelia’s obedience to her father would have been seen (and should be seen) as a shocking breach of theatrical conventions. See James J. Marino, ‘Ophelia’s desire’, ELH 84 (2017), 817–39 (especially pp. 822–4). 25 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, p. 87, takes some note of this. 26 Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, notes that Ophelia ‘has wit and learning enough to adapt a story about Hercules’ decision-making’, but goes on to criticize her for lack of ‘spirit’ (p. 123). 27 Almost every editor now asserts (with John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (1935), 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 134) that ‘nunnery’ also means a brothel here. If this is present, it is a very Protestant joke, appropriate to a Wittenberg student, but that cannot be the primary meaning of the word in context, where a nunnery is an alternative to being a ‘breeder’ and getting married (3.1.122, 136–8). Jenkins (pp. 493–6) struggles with the issue, and warns that we must not ‘depose’ the literal meaning. Hamlet does seem to treat Ophelia as erotically corrupt insofar as she is included in his general condemnation of female erotic arts, but the ‘your’ in ‘your paintings … your wantonness’ (3.1.144–8) is generic, not particular (compare ‘your philosophy’ at 1.5.175), and Hamlet ends the episode with another reference to a nunnery as an alternative to marriage. 28 In the equivalent speech in Q1, Ofelia speaks of Hamlet’s intellect as ‘the jewel that adorned his feature most’, Q1, scene 6, lines 40–1. 29 On the other hand, as Eleanor Prosser points out, if revenge on the killer of a father is taken as unproblematic, then Laertes is a positive contrast. See Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), p. 214. 30 See Jenkins’s notes on 1.5.10–13 (pp. 453–4) and on 2.2.595–6 (p. 483) on the possibility of the ‘thing’ being a demon. Jenkins, as he acknowledges, is drawing on the scholarship of Prosser and others. That the thing encourages

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

belief that it comes from purgatory would, from a Protestant point of view, simply confirm its demonic status, since belief in Purgatory is itself ‘a wicked device of the devil’ (quoted from Bullinger’s Decades by Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, p. 102). The thing’s reference to the importance of Catholic last rites (‘Unhousel’d … unanel’d’) would be similarly viewed. What exactly Hamlet believes the thing to be immediately after his confrontation with it is unclear. His mention of St Patrick (1.5.142), supposedly the keeper of Purgatory, may be a joke. In any case, when he calms down, he is very (and very properly) worried that ‘The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil’ (2.2.594–5). Stephen Greenblatt mocks the idea that the play could be theologically coherent—that is, Protestant, in Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 239–40). He wants Shakespeare to be, while conforming to the Church of England, ‘haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father’ (ibid., p. 249). 31 Oddly, the moment of popular rebellion in the play is not treated in Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Corruption of Hamlet’, in David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 139–56, or in Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 6. 32 Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 159–65. 33 William Richardson (1783), quoted in de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet, p. 161. 34 On some of the classical and Renaissance sources and analogues to Polonius’s precepts, see Jenkins’s note on the precepts (pp. 441–3), together with his warning that ‘it is a mistake to suppose they are meant to make him [Polonius] seem ridiculous’ (p. 443). 35 Hamlet’s lines here help make sense of Polonius’s famous and famously opaque final precept concerning the relationship of ‘truth’ to oneself and to others. 36 On aristocratic funerals, see, inter alia, David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 19, and Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 5. 37 On the suicide issue, see Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 297–309, and Michael MacDonald, ‘Ophelia’s maimèd rites’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 309–17. MacDonald makes it clear that court records suggest, as the play itself does, that we should not be as confident as Frye is in asserting that an Elizabethan audience would have seen Ophelia’s abbreviated rites as clearly improper. On the designation of the officiating figure, the early texts differ. He is ‘Priest’ in F and Q1, but ‘Doct.’ (Doctor) in Q2. This may or may not be significant (‘Doct.’ would perhaps make the figure more strongly Protestant). In any case, Laertes addresses him as a ‘churlish priest’ (5.1.233). For that reason, Jenkins, who mainly follows Q2 (p. 75), follows F here, and uses ‘Priest’. For

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

41

a defense of the Q2 reading, and the argument that this means the figure is Protestant, see Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, p. 69. 38 Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, p. 309. 39 Ibid., pp. 245–9. 40 In the equivalent scene in Q1, Corambis also adds to Montano, ‘And bid him ply his learning’ (scene 6, line 3). 41 Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, pp. 82–7, and see note 36 above. 42 De Grazia’s attempt to use this passage to date the setting of the play to the eleventh century (Hamlet without Hamlet, p. 64) is unconvincing, especially when it is recognized that what she sees as the major proof of this dating, the mention of the tribute that England owes the Danes (3.1.172), has a late Elizabethan relevance, which is made clear by Jenkins in his note on this line, and in the text to which Jenkins refers. See Russia at the Close of the 16th Century. Comprising the treatise of ‘Of the Russe Commonwealth,’ by Dr. Giles Fletcher; and the travels of Sir Jerome Horsey, Knt, now for the first time printed entire from his own ms, ed. Edward Bond, Hakluyt Society no. 20 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1856), pp. 239–42. This document also contains reference to Normandy. 43 Jenkins’s note on the line makes the somewhat ambiguous status of fencing clear (p. 460). Claudius claims, perhaps sincerely, to consider Laertes’ skill at fencing one of the ‘unworthiest’ of his fine ‘parts’ (4.7.75). On the fashionableness and complexity of the rapier in the period of Hamlet, see Sheldon Zitner, ‘Hamlet, duellist’, University of Toronto Quarterly 39 (1969), 1–18. 44 The only explanation that I can see for ‘envenom’ is that it represents Claudius’s inability to see aristocratic emulation as something positive. 45 Hamlet’s deep interest in dueling, and apparent skill at it, can be seen as some justification for Ophelia thinking of him, in the past, as a ‘soldier’ as well as a courtier and scholar. It also suggests, to get ahead of myself, that Fortinbras might be right about how Hamlet would have done ‘had he been put on’. In this context, Paul A. Cantor speaks of Hamlet’s ‘spiritedness’, in Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 38–9. 46 I have treated this moment, in a more strictly philosophical context, in ‘Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being: Shakespearean Puzzles about Agency’, in Michael D. Bristol (ed.), Shakespeare and Moral Agency (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 55–68 (pp. 55–8). 47 See the difference between felo de se and non compos mentis explained by MacDonald, ‘Ophelia’s maimèd rites’. 48 Nicholas Bellinson has suggested to me that I have shown that Hamlet was always looking for ‘brothers’. This leads me to take note of his status as an only child. 49 Many, perhaps most, editors do take Hamlet as disingenuous and Laertes as hypocritical (see the Thompson and Taylor Q2, for instance (p. 450)). Jenkins (p. 568) suggests a more complex view. Scodel sees Hamlet as ‘recalling the New Testament treatment of fellow Christians as “brother”,’ while seeing Laertes’ response as mere ‘pretense’ (Scodel, ‘Finding freedom’, 196, 197).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

50 Scene 17, line 100. The name is spelled Leartes throughout Q1. That text also, interestingly, has Hamlet dissuade Horatio from joining him in death not on the basis of generalized human feeling—‘As th’ art a man’ (5.2.347)—but on the basis of love: ‘Upon my love, I charge thee let it go’ (Q1, scene 17, line 105). 51 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, with a Foreword by John Bayley (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 377. 52 The word ‘trappings’ might itself need further exploring. The Oxford English Dictionary only lists derogatory meanings, but I wonder whether a more neutral meaning was also available in the period. When Feste, in Twelfth Night, describes himself and Fabian and other members of the household as some of Olivia’s ‘trappings’, he is suggesting that despite their minor status, they are connected to her in a genuine way, not that they are unnecessary or worthless (5.1.8). 53 Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, pp. 97–100. 54 The speech here is quite opaque, but I believe that I have captured part of its meaning. 55 Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, p. 94. 56 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City: Anchor, 1959), pp. 122, 115. 57 As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975), 3.1.367–71. 58 This is widely reproduced, often on the cover of editions of Donne’s poetry. For commentary, see John Donne, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 266–70, and Nick Davis, ‘Melancholic individuality and the Lothian portrait of Donne’, ANQ 26 (2013), 5–12. 59 Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, pp. 214–20. 60 See Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 18. 61 Q1, scene 7, line 239. I think the fact that the two were at Wittenberg with Hamlet does not imply that they only met him there. They were certainly ‘schoolfellows’ there (3.4.204), but they might have been such before university and, in any case, they are identified as having known Hamlet from very ‘young days’. Horatio, on the other hand, seems to have truly been a friend made at the university, a friend entirely by ‘election’ (3.2.64) rather than partly by circumstance. For reflection on this term in the play, see Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, p. 81, and throughout her chapter on the play (‘The Hamlet Elections’). 62 On English actors performing at Elsinore in the 1580s and 1590s, see Sjögren, ‘The Danish background’, 227–8. 63 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965), p. 118. John Leonard has pointed out to me that Sidney’s tyrant weeps but does not proclaim his malefactions. The proclaiming is Hamlet’s addition, putting the element of public acknowledgment into the fantasy. 64 Right after telling the story of the tyrant being moved to tears by a well-made tragedy (‘the very cunning of the scene’), Sidney immediately notes that it had no further effect on the tyrant’s behavior. Sidney professes to believe that this is because Alexander did not sit through the whole play, but the claim is very lightly made.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy Hamlet

43

65 I say ‘apparent success’ because, as many critics have noted, when Hamlet substitutes ‘nephew’ for ‘brother’ in introducing the murderer of ‘Gonzago’ (3.2.239), Claudius may well have taken this as Hamlet (his nephew) threatening him (see Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, pp. 168–73). It turns out, however, that, in an important sense, the ‘Mousetrap’ did work. Although Claudius neither wept nor (publicly) proclaimed his malefactions, the king’s conscience was ‘caught’ by the play. The problem is that Hamlet could not know this (for a recent meditation on this problem, see Amir Khan, ‘My kingdom for a ghost: counterfactual thinking and Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 66 (2015), 29–46)). Hamlet leaps to a conclusion that happens to be true, so, in Platonic terms, he only has a true belief where he thinks he has knowledge. And the status of ‘the thing’ remains unclear. While I agree with Ellen MacKay that there is a problem with Hamlet’s reasoning here, I do not agree that the whole episode is a deconstruction of the idea of theater affecting the conscience of a murderer (or that Hamlet himself shed tears for Hecuba). See Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 53–61. 66 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, p. 93. 67 I cannot explain the contradiction between the dramatization of Hamlet getting the idea here and the fact that he has already had the idea and explained it to the players before the soliloquy begins (2.2.531–6). 68 Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare’s Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 42; Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 146–7. See also Everett, Young Hamlet, pp. 24–5, and Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 409. Bloom’s insistence on a significant relation between Hamlet and the Falstaff of 1 Henry IV seems to me worth pondering. 69 Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, p. 94. 70 For a recent essay that does see Hamlet’s scholarly attributes as disqualifying him from a life of action and government, see Aysha Pollnitz, ‘Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal’, in Armitage, Condren, and Fitzmaurice, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, pp. 119–38.

2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cassie M. Miura

Samuel Johnson once praised The Anatomy of Melancholy as ‘the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise’.1 By his own admission, Johnson had ‘inherited a vile melancholy’, but it seems that sheer delight much more than a desire for antiquated medical advice drove him in the early mornings to reach for Robert Burton’s three-part tome.2 In our own time, admirers of the Anatomy have included writers like the American novelist William H. Gass, who dubbed the work ‘a great celebrational comedy’, and Jorge Luis Borges, who found in Burton both a precedent and an epigraph for his absurdist short story ‘The Library of Babel’.3 This brief look at Burton’s modern reception highlights what early modern scholars have often overlooked: namely, the Anatomy’s capacity to provoke mirth and merriment despite its sober subject and dry academic trappings. Over the past two decades, New Historicist work on the emotions has contributed to a renewed interest in Burton since the Anatomy serves as a vast repository of medical learning, especially neo-Galenic humoral theory.4 Ways in which the text also critiques and satirizes this learning, however, have not been fully explored. This essay focuses on the unexpected role of laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to demonstrate the extent to which the early modern medical treatise is also in dialogue with ancient philosophical works that offer competing approaches to emotional management. By laughter, I mean to invoke both the physiological phenomenon—mouth open, head back, sound reverberating from the belly—and a vast range of attending emotions, usually but not always positive in nature. Despite Burton’s skepticism regarding the efficacy of medical interventions, laughter enables him to advance a therapeutic program for the melancholy reader that his text performs as much as it describes. The cultural significance of melancholy has been well documented, but Burton’s Anatomy participates in an emerging early modern discourse on laughter that offers a fuller picture of affective experience and therapeutic practice during the period.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

45

Although Burton had a documented obsession with melancholy—the Anatomy was printed in five ever-expanding editions during his lifetime—he appears to have put great stock in mirth. Having spent the majority of his life at Oxford, Burton dabbled in academic satire prior to publishing the Anatomy, and he produced a Latin comedy called Philosophaster which was performed at Christ Church in 1618. Much like the Anatomy, this play mocks scholars who pretend to knowledge for the sake of prestige and monetary reward while commenting on the attenuated state of learning at universities across Europe. Burton also amassed with his modest salary a substantial collection of jest books and other ephemera which were bequeathed to the Bodleian Library upon his death in 1640. It is perhaps ironic but also fitting that only the subset of Burton’s books classified as ridicularia were retained by the library and still bear his name today. Many jest books of the period with titles like A Pil to Purge Melancholie (1599) reflect a popular tradition that links laughter to the purgation of melancholy humors.5 The effect of these widely accessible works on Renaissance prose fiction and dramatic comedy has been studied by Anne Lake Prescott, Ian Munro, and others, but they also constitute a valuable and under-utilized archive for the study of early modern affect and emotion.6 While intended for entertainment, jest books engage with an erudite discourse on the physiology and philosophy of laughter that flourished during the Renaissance. Not only do jest books serve as testament to the literalism with which early modern readers approached the adage that laughter is the ‘best medicine’, but they also document the pervasiveness of neo-Galenic understandings of the mind and body. Prior to Burton’s Anatomy, works such as Timothy Bright’s A Treatise on Melancholie (1586) introduced English lay readers to the dominant medical theories of continental Europe. The work implicates laughter in a larger conversation about the ambiguity of positive and negative emotions. In a chapter titled ‘Why and howe one weepeth for joy, and laugheth for griefe why tears and weeping indure not all the time of the cause and why the finger is put in the eye’, Bright defers to a prose tract by the French physician Laurent Joubert, whose Traité du ris or Treatise on Laughter (1579) provides a detailed physiological explanation of how laughter works to mitigate the harmful effects of melancholy humors in the body while also aiding the mind in attaining the philosophical end of tranquility. Since Burton was well acquainted with this work on laughter, I argue that it needs to inform an evaluation of both his choice to write under the pseudonym of Democritus Jr and the lengthy ‘Satyricall Preface’ that opens the Anatomy. The genre designation of Burton’s work has long been debated, but New Historicist approaches have treated the Anatomy mainly as a medical treatise and source text for neo-Galenic theory.7 This marks a departure from the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

genre criticism and reader-response theory that prevailed in Burton studies a generation ago. Northrop Frye, for instance, famously read the Anatomy as an exemplar of Menippean satire, while Stanley Fish hailed it as one of his self-consuming artifacts.8 While more recent work on the Anatomy, including two single-author studies by Angus Gowland and Mary Ann Lund, has enriched our understanding of how Burton engages with the political and especially the religious controversies of his day, it too has prioritized historical context above rhetorical and literary concerns.9 By emphasizing the role of laughter in Burton’s Anatomy, I suggest neither a return to New Critical preoccupations with paradox and parody, nor a departure from historical/New Historicist concerns, but rather a synthesis of both. Since laughter pertains not only to the work’s generic designation but also to Burton’s fundamental conception of melancholy madness, it illuminates one way that early modern people sought to cope with physical pain and emotional suffering. Like many essays in this volume, my focus on therapeutic laughter inherently challenges more austere representations of the period by suggesting that Burton theorizes pleasure in an affirmative sense, as more than the absence of pain, as an ethical and embodied experience that need not reserve its ultimate fulfillment for the afterlife. Invoking jest books such as Samuel Rowlands’s Democritus, or Doctor Merry-Man his Medicines, against Melancholy Humors (1607), Burton’s curious decision to pattern himself after the ancient philosopher best known during the Renaissance as ‘the laughing philosopher’ pits Democritus Jr against conventional tropes of the melancholy genius.10 Just as Burton’s identity in the Anatomy is two-fold, so too is the larger discourse on melancholy, with works on laughter emerging almost shadow-like near the end of the sixteenth century. Alongside authoritative tracts like André Du Laurens’s Discours de la conservation de la veuë: des maladies melancoliques (1594) or Jacques Ferrand’s Traicte de l’essence et guerison de l’amour ou de la melancholie erotique (1610), we also see Girolamo Fracastoro’s De sympathia et antipathia rerum (1546), the aforementioned Traité du ris (1579) by Laurent Joubert, and Celso Macini’s De risu, ac ridiculis (1598).11 As Quentin Skinner has argued, the move to regard laughter in a positive light marks a significant and decisive break with the past: ‘a number of Renaissance writers began to express doubts about the governing assumption of the classical theory, the assumption that laughter is invariably an expression of contempt for vice. They began to ask themselves whether this argument, if not entirely mistaken, may not be considerably exaggerated.’ 12 To the extent that he centers laughter in his larger treatment of melancholy, Burton joins thinkers like Joubert who viewed pleasurable emotions as relatively uncharted territory. He also enables us to interrogate and better understand

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

47

a broader tendency to regard physical pain and mental anguish as more meaningful or intrinsically valuable than their counterparts. While I argue that Burton theorizes laughter as a cure for melancholy and links it specifically to the therapeutic ends of Hellenistic philosophy, he too must work to overturn a greater cultural disposition toward pain. Since laughter was often ascribed to those who scoff at God or fail to show Christian compassion, Burton must circumvent charges of atheism and sensual indulgence. Even laughter’s association with sanguine humors and emotions like joy, mirth, or cheerfulness could appear suspect in a culture that venerates pain and in which the very conception of ‘passion’ denotes suffering, specifically the suffering of a crucified deity.13 By foregrounding therapeutic laughter in Burton’s Anatomy, I am charting an opposite if not equal cultural investment in pleasure, one that reveals the limitations of both Galenic and neo-Stoic approaches to emotional management. Richard Strier has argued that New Historicist work on neo-Galenic theory has perpetuated a vision of the Renaissance that is unnecessarily ‘dour’, bidding us ask and answer the question, ‘whence the gloom?’ 14 Building on Strier’s critique of the ‘new humoralism’, Stephanie Shirilan challenges what she calls a pervasive ‘anxious view of the Anatomy’, one largely informed by psychoanalytic and poststructuralist readings, and privileges instead the ‘positively transformative powers’ of both author and text.15 Both Strier and Shirilan argue persuasively that a critical turn toward positive emotions requires a self-conscious evaluation of past methodologies. We are equipped, I maintain, perhaps now more than ever, to view Burton as a figure whose laughter is not merely symptomatic of his melancholy madness but integral to a larger critique of asceticism as well as Puritan conceptions of temperance and self-control. At first glance the Anatomy, with its detailed textual apparatus and neat tripartite structure, appears to be a practical guide to various species of melancholy, perhaps even an early modern counterpart to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Burton’s title and frontispiece likewise suggest the surgical precision with which he will present the ‘causes, symptomes, and severall cures’ of the disease.16 That said, Burton was not regarded as a medical authority in his own day and his claim to medical knowledge is tenuous at best. Though he calls himself a physician ‘by my inclination’, he is a divine ‘by my profession’, and scholars have long noted Burton’s failure to engage with many significant scientific discoveries of the period (Preface 37). He references, for example, Vesalius’s groundbreaking work on human anatomy only in passing and seems to be wholly unaware of Harvey’s theory of blood circulation. Furthermore, as Patricia Vicari states, ‘after 1621 he did not add substantially to the medical information in his book, although

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

he expanded hugely on other topics’.17 If the Anatomy contributes little to scientific learning, especially to the extent that such learning had already been consolidated by the continental Latin sources Burton cites most frequently, then why did it enjoy such a vast readership? Burton himself lays little claim to originality, exclaiming, ‘How many excellent physicians have written just volumes and elaborate tracts of this subject! No news here; that which I have is stolen from others’ (Preface 22). As suggested by Samuel Johnson’s remarks, the work’s literary form and humorous style engaged early modern readers more than its medical content. Gowland specifically identifies ‘a type of parodia in the Anatomy, insofar as what looked from the structural “outside” like a medical treatise turned out to be an adaptation of a medical treatise’.18 As I turn now to Burton’s satirical preface, I too wish to focus on the Anatomy’s ‘inside’ but shall insist much more than Gowland on the work’s subversive and humorous nature. Burton’s role as a physiciandivine has been treated at length, but his identification with the figure of Democritus evinces a deeper engagement with ancient moral philosophy than has previously been recognized and enables his imagining of laughter as a therapeutic. Much of the Anatomy’s 125-page preface provides justification for why Burton has chosen to compose a work on melancholy and to publish it under the pseudonym of Democritus Jr. However, it also serves as a jarring introduction to the strange persona and belabored prose that so mark the reader’s experience of the text. Burton begins, ‘Gentle Reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know what antic or personate actor this is, that so insolently intrudes upon this common theatre to the world’s view, arrogating another man’s name; whence he is, why he doth it and what he hath to say’ (Preface 15). It soon becomes apparent, as Burton attempts to dismiss certain associations with the name of Democritus, ‘lest any man by reason of it should be deceived, expecting a pasquil, a satire, some ridiculous treatise (as I myself should have done), some prodigious tenent, or a paradox of the earth’s motion, of infinite worlds’, that the problem of conflicting authorities is intimately tied to the problems of authorship and authorial identity. While the suffix Jr leads one to expect a clear filial relationship between Burton and the Democritus of antiquity, the absence of a single Democritus or a stable source renders such traditional forms of imitation untenable. Burton proceeds to ‘set down a brief character of this our Democritus’ but ultimately fails to reconcile the disparate biographical accounts offered by Hippocrates, Diogenes Laertius, and Columella, among others, as well as to differentiate between historical fact and fiction. Although we first learn that Democritus was ‘a little wearish old man, very melancholy by nature … wholly addicted to his studies at the last, and to a private life’, all details

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

49

that correspond to Burton’s own life at Oxford, the reader is ultimately left unable to determine Democritus’s profession or even his area of expertise (Preface 2). Burton lists everything from ‘famous philosopher’ to ‘politician’, ‘expert physician’ to ‘excellent mathematician’ (Preface 16). Fish rightly notes that ‘in the end, even the pretense of accuracy and objectivity is abandoned. After a wandering life, Democritus settled at Abdera where he was “sent for to be their law-maker.” Or was it their “recorder”? … Clearly Burton’s “ors” are to be translated “it doesn’t matter which.”’ 19 While Fish grows increasingly frustrated with Burton’s rhetorical style, suggesting that, ‘given the number of available Democrituses and the spectacular lack of verifiable information about any one of them, this is less a conclusion than a joke’, the composite figure of Democritus Jr clearly demonstrates the way in which Burton approaches traditions of past learning.20 His authorities are not meant to authorize in the conventional sense but to provide the basis for creative license and free play. Confronting a ‘vast chaos and confusion of books’, Burton not only employs Democritean laughter as a mode of critique, as in traditional verse satire, but as a means to celebrate the incomplete and contradictory nature of existing medical literature on the subject of melancholy (Preface 24). While I argue that laughter contributes to the Anatomy’s most salient therapeutic and moral objectives, some critics have expressed concern that giving too much heed to Burton’s satirical impulses undermines the sincerity of his efforts to administer to the reader. Lund, for example, states early in her work that ‘at a broader level, the Anatomy is not (as a few have claimed) a vast academic joke’.21 She later claims, ‘the Democritean role represents only one “passion” among many present in the text, and hence laughter only offers a narrow perspective … not only is laughter a limited reaction, but also an unsustainable one’.22 Lund’s objections, perhaps warranted in the face of readings as overtly pessimistic as Fish’s, suggest that the corrosive effects of Democritus’s laughter cannot be contained. Likewise, Lund assumes that Burton’s relationship to the figure of the laughing philosopher is superficial at best, a mask that does not correspond to the author’s true identity and that can be removed at will. While Burton fashions Democritus Jr as a fictional persona, he shows little interest in lifting the veil. No edition of the Anatomy published during Burton’s lifetime bears his real name and his epitaph reads: ‘Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia’ (Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave both life and death).23 Even in death, Burton affirms the inseparability of the melancholy scholar and laughing philosopher and the serious and ludic dimensions of the Anatomy are likewise inseparable. While the Democritus of antiquity laughs at events taking shape in a cosmic void, making light of things both

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

great and small, Democritus Jr demonstrates his constant care for his readers by teaching them to do the same. About midway through the preface, Burton expands on the philosophical dimensions of laughter by turning his attention to a short apocryphal work called the Epistle to Damagetus, which details an encounter between Democritus and Hippocrates, the most renowned of ancient physicians. The letter, which ‘because it is not impertinent to this discourse’, Burton inserts ‘verbatim almost’ into the preface, is the single most important source accounting for why Democritus became known as ‘the laughing philosopher’ during the Renaissance when he had no such reputation in antiquity (Preface 47). Furthermore, it sheds light on the historical relationship between laughter and melancholy, specifically showing how laughter became assimilated into the Hippocratic corpus and furnished Burton with inspiration for his own project. One of a series of apocryphal letters, the Epistle to Damagetus was recovered during the second half of the fifteenth century by the Italian humanist and papal secretary Rinuccio Aretino. Although the letters were initially attributed to Hippocrates, scholars today date them to the first century CE, more than 400 years after Hippocrates actually lived. Due to its inclusion in Fabio Calvo’s 1525 Latin edition of the Corpus Hippocraticum, the Epistle to Damagetus was widely disseminated across Europe and contributed to what Claudia Zatta has called ‘a flourishing revival’.24 Democritus’s laughter, which consequently became a common trope for Renaissance humanists like Ficino, Montaigne, and Erasmus, was also depicted in paintings by Velasquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The depth of Burton’s engagement with the Hippocratic source material and its moral-philosophical contents, however, is unparalleled. The pseudepigrapha, from which the Epistle to Damagetus is taken, tell the story of how the citizens of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure Democritus, their foremost philosopher, who had supposedly gone mad. W.D. Smith suggests in his translator’s preface that the letters are ‘largely based on airy fancies’, while Stephen Halliwell calls them ‘a far-reaching existential drama’.25 Nevertheless, those who edited, translated, and circulated these letters during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries believed them to be authentic works by Hippocrates. Nancy Siraisi stresses that, during the Renaissance, the Hippocratic corpus was ‘received as totally authentic documentation of the career and personality of Hippocrates, including not only episodes from his biography but his personal correspondence’.26 The Abderites initially posit ‘great learning’ as the cause of Democritus’s illness, the symptoms of which include insomnia, social withdrawal, and profuse laughter.27 Here, laughter is framed explicitly in humoral terms and tied to the type of melancholy that Aristotle associates with genius. When Hippocrates

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

51

finally meets Democritus, however, in the Epistle to Damagetus, he determines that the laughing philosopher is of perfectly sound mind and body. Burton concludes his own retelling of the story with the corrective statement that ‘the world had not a wiser, a more learned, a more honest man, and they were much deceived to say that he was mad’ (Preface 52). While many have read Burton’s satirical preface as symptomatic of his melancholy, the ravings of a mad man who fails to exert stylistic control over his text, this is precisely the misreading of Democritean laughter that the letter cautions against. Within the context of the Anatomy, the Epistle to Damagetus is especially striking because it places laughter at the crux of a larger conflict between medicine and philosophy. In the end, the philosopher proves the physician wrong and his wisdom regarding the emotions is ultimately legitimated. After relating a long diatribe against vanity and folly, Burton describes how Democritus ‘laughed, again aloud’ at Hippocrates, who ‘did not well understand what he had said concerning perturbations and tranquillity of mind’ (Preface 49). In the original text, Democritus twice employs the key term ataraxia, which Burton renders here as tranquillity, in order to justify his contempt for the Abderites.28 Although Democritus actually predates Pyrrho of Ellis and Epicurus, who first developed the concept of ataraxia, the pseudepigrapha eclectically assimilate Democritean laughter to the therapeutic ends of Hellenistic philosophy. By publishing the Epistle to Damagetus in the vernacular, Burton makes the philosophical dimensions of Democritean laughter accessible to English lay readers while also equipping them with the context necessary to grasp his own appropriation of it. Burton’s translation describes how Democritus laughs at those who bring about their own misery by disregarding: the mutability of this world, and how it wheels about, nothing being firm and sure. He that is now above, to-morrow is beneath; he that sate on this side to-day, to-morrow is hurled on the other; and not considering these matters, they fall into many inconveniences and troubles coveting things of no profit and thirsting after them, tumbling headlong into many calamities. So that if men would attempt no more than what they can bear, they should lead contented lives, and learning to know themselves, would limit their ambition; they would perceive then that nature hath enough without seeking such superfluities and unprofitable things, which bring nothing with them but grief and molestation. (Preface 50)

Although Hippocrates initially came to Abdera to treat Democritus’s melancholy with hellebore, he leaves taking Democritus’s laughter as a cure that he will administer both to himself and to others. Hippocrates closes the narrative by affirming Democritus’s claim: ‘Taking from you the therapy [θεραπείην] for my intellect’, he says, ‘I shall go away … for I have seen

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Democritus, wisest of men, alone most capable of teaching mankind virtue’.29 Burton does not include these passages, which come from the end of the epistle, in his preface, but in refusing to represent Democritean laughter as pathological, he similarly affirms its restorative properties while also exposing the limitations of medical learning. In place of a medicinal cure like hellebore, the Anatomy also offers therapeutic laughter as a treatment for melancholy madness and demands that readers recognize the philosophical wisdom of Democritus. While others have commented on the Anatomy’s therapeutic qualities, scholars have not generally considered laughter to be among these qualities or recognized the influence of Epicurean and Skeptical philosophy on Burton’s method.30 By featuring the Epistle to Damagetus in the preface to his work, Burton positions the Anatomy as an English counterpart not only to continental works on melancholy, but also to those on laughter. Like Burton, Laurent Joubert appended to his work a vernacular (Greek–French) translation of the very same Hippocratic letter which he had received from his friend and fellow court physician, Jean Guichard. In a brief explanatory note, Guichard explains that ‘Je m’asseure que plusiers prandront bien plaisir de lire celà, pour sçavoir à la verité, que le Ris Democritique n’estoit pas de folie ou resverie, ains d’extreme sagesse et parfaite philosophie’ (I assure you that many will take great pleasure in reading this, to arrive at the truth that the laughter of Democritus is not madness or folly but the height of wisdom and perfect philosophy).31 In the context of The Treatise on Laughter, the Epistle to Damagetus supports Joubert’s larger thesis that laughter is essential to the regulation of the humoral body and preservation of good overall health. Although Joubert’s treatise is largely descriptive, focusing on physiology more than philosophy, his investment in the idea of ‘true’ laughter, as opposed to ‘bastard’ laughter, aims to ascribe new value to an entire constellation of positive emotions like joy, wonder, surprise, and delight.32 Although some may argue that Burton was completely unaware of the letter’s inauthenticity, I would contend that, like the actual author or authors of the pseudepigrapha, Burton responds to the fragmented nature of Democritus’s extant works and lack of factual information about him by fabricating new stories.33 Both the first-century epistolary novella and the seventeenth-century character Democritus Jr evince a readiness to supplement or invent what cannot be recovered. Democritean laughter, despite its ‘classical’ sources, is an imaginary construct in much the same way that Democritus Jr is an imaginary construct, born not of ignorance but of curiosity and desire. Whereas the cultural history of melancholy asserts a continuity between classical antiquity and the early modern period, laughter emphasizes a narrative of rupture that contributes to a larger re-evaluation of both sensual and ethical pleasure.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

53

Democritean laughter allows Burton to theorize in new ways the role of positive emotions in everyday life and, by playing the part of Democritus Jr, he casts himself at the center of this mythology. Throughout the Anatomy, Burton often confounds the expectations of readers in ways that delight and frustrate in equal measure. Although the text purports to offer a comprehensive guide to the many causes, symptoms, and cures of melancholy, it becomes nearly impossible to reconcile and apply the contradictory recommendations of the authorities whom Burton cites. Such confusion, however, is a sure sign that Burton’s therapeutic program is working because it shatters the illusion of mastery and requires that readers humbly assess their own motives and intellectual capacities. Adopting a skeptical approach to the rational objectives of his own text, Burton cautions readers against idle speculation, arguing that ‘through our foolish curiosity do we macerate ourselves, tire our souls, and run headlong … into many needless cares and troubles, vain expenses, tedious journeys, painful hours’ (1.368). While melancholy readers might reasonably look to the Anatomy to satiate what Burton deems an immoderate desire for knowledge, they learn the more valuable lesson of when to give up a futile quest for the sake of their own health and happiness. In order to disabuse readers of the notion that more learning will remedy a condition exacerbated and often induced by too much study, Burton uses laughter to undercut an increasingly rigid discourse on temperance and self-denial. Where the reader anticipates strict prohibitions against sensual pleasures like sex or the consumption of fine foods, Burton instead prescribes moderate indulgence and recreation. In the final section of this essay, I turn to Burton’s treatment of diet to illustrate how therapeutic laughter enables Burton to confront the epistemological limitations of humoral theory while still administering to the needs of the melancholy reader. Burton’s subtle wit is on display in this satirical catalog of dietary restrictions, which reveals both the absurdity and the futility of his aim to offer the reader practical medical advice. Yet the work of the joke succeeds in transforming negation into plenitude, moral prohibition into rhetorical excess, and finally melancholy into mirth. As one of the six Galenic non-naturals, diet ought to be one of the least controversial and most straightforward elements of the body to regulate, and Burton does an admirable job of synthesizing relevant information about the substance, quantity, and quality of meat and drink for melancholics. Nevertheless, by the end of an elaborate two-part discourse on the causes and cures of a bad diet, the reader has gleaned very little in terms of practical advice. We do, however, gain insight into Burton’s sense of humor, his comic suspension of judgment, and his easy reliance on custom. Burton opens the subsection on melancholy meats by making fun of the hair-splitting jargon

54

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

associated with the Galenic theory of causation.34 As if with a sigh of resignation, he begins: According to my proposed method, having opened hitherto these secondary causes, which are inbred with us, I must now proceed to the outward and adventitious, which happen unto us after we are born. And those are either evident, remote, or inward, antecedent, and the nearest: continent causes some call them. These outward, remote, precedent causes are subdivided again into necessary and not necessary. Necessary (because we cannot avoid them, but they will alter us, as they are used or abused) are those six non-natural things, so much spoken of amongst physicians, which are principal causes of this disease. (1.216)

Despite the pedantic register of his prose and attempts to parody common practices of taxonomic division as in the passage above, Burton soon begins to take true pleasure in constructing a catalog of offensive foods and recording the dissenting opinions among the ‘many physicians’ who, he says, ‘I confess, have written copious volumes of this one subject alone’ (1.217). In her work on rhetorical plenitude in the Anatomy, Shirilan argues that contemporary scholars who reduce Burton’s copia to ‘transgressive excess’ have failed to ‘capture the affective qualities of wonder and delight attached to the patterns of association and accretion that one finds in Burton’s prose’.35 While I maintain that absence and negation are still at the heart of Burton’s merry catalog of melancholy meats, I agree that affect enables us to look beyond the apparent failure of linguistic signification or logical causation toward the therapeutic effect of the passage. Although the ostensible purpose of Burton’s catalog is to identify all the foods from which the melancholy reader should abstain, the text ironically participates in the very indulgence that it aims to proscribe. Thus, we learn that while beef, especially ‘Portugal beef’, is good for ‘labouring men’, it generally ‘breed[s] gross melancholy’ (1.218). Similarly to be avoided are the following: pork, being ‘too moist, full of humours’; goat’s flesh; hart and deer; all venison; hare; conies; ‘milk and all that comes of milk’; peacocks and pigeons; fenny fowl—ducks, geese, swans, herons, cranes, coots, didapers, waterhends, teals, currs, sheldrakes, peckled fowls; all fish, or perhaps only ‘eel, tench, lamprey, crawfish … and such as are bred in muddy and standing waters’ (1.220–1). The only meat Burton recommends without reservation are ‘young rabbits’, which ‘by all men are approved to be good’ (1.218). Lest the earnest reader think that a vegetarian diet is to be preferred, he or she will find similar contraindications for many herbs, most legumes, roots, ‘all manner of fruits’, spices, bread, and sauce. English delicacies such as ‘pudding stuffed with blood, or otherwise composed; baked meats, soused indurate meats, fried and broiled, buttered meats, conduit, powdered, and over-dried; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels, and those several sauces, sharp, or over-sweet’ are likewise proscribed (1.225). While Lund argues,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

55

rightly to my mind, that ‘Burton deliberately presents cures which are literally unachievable, but which reveal instead the therapeutic pleasures of reading’, I would suggest that reading alone does not account for what makes this comic passage pleasurable.36 Even as Burton warns, for example, that venison ‘begets bad blood’, he brings to mind the enjoyment of consuming it by remarking that venison is ‘a pleasant meat: in great esteem with us (for we have more parks in England than there are in all Europe besides)’ (1.218). Moreover, the inverse relationship that persists between culinary and textual excess suggests an affinity between the Anatomy and other cornucopian texts of the period, Rabelais’s Quart livre above all. Like the French physician and satirist, Burton regards list-making as a form of linguistic play, and his extensive account of melancholy meats is second only to Rabelais’s catalog of fishes and fowl that the belly worshippers sacrifice to their god Gaster, on lenten and feast days, respectively.37 While some scholars have interpreted Rabelais’s gastronomic compendium as a moral critique of gluttony or a subversive parody of the Catholic Mass, others have read it as an exuberant celebration of both language and French cuisine.38 Burton’s catalog of melancholy meat and drink, I want to suggest, is likewise driven by pleasure since readers are treated to a sort of negation of a banquet where the plurality of interdicted foods is matched only by the learned opinions about them. Had Burton really been interested in providing readers with a practical guide to diet, he could have listed only those few wholesome foods upon which his authorities unanimously agree; apart from young rabbits, they are lettuce and pure water. The therapeutic quality of Burton’s laughter becomes all the more apparent when he returns to the subject of bad diet in the cures section of Partition II. On the one hand, Burton adopts a skeptical attitude toward the authorities he cites and generally finds it impossible to reconcile the conflicting opinions found in medical works on diet and hygiene: ‘Arabians commend brains, but Laurentius, cap 8, excepts against them’ (2.23). One humorous exception to this rule concerns the carp, which Burton first calls ‘a fish of which I know not what to determine’ but later defends, stating that ‘Hippolytus Salvianus takes exception at carp; but I dare boldly say with Dubravius, it is an excellent meat, if it come not from muddy pools’ (1.220; 2.25). On the other hand, Burton doubts the applicability of general principles, to the extent that he is able to generate any, to particular cases. The final page of his section on ‘diet rectified’ effectively undermines all the advice given above, even Burton’s spirited defense of carp. ‘I conclude’, says Burton, our own experience is the best physician; that diet which is most propitious to one is often pernicious to another; such is the variety of palates, humours, and temperatures, let every man observe, and be a law unto himself. Tiberius, in Tacitus, did laugh at all such, that after thirty years of age would ask counsel of others concerning matters of diet; I say the same. (2.29)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Having taken pains himself to offer counsel on dietary matters, Burton now laughs with Tiberius at the very notion of dietary counsel and at those readers who have presumably turned to the Anatomy to seek it out. Still, Burton’s laughter, insofar as it coincides with his skepticism, retains a surprisingly convivial tone and the reader’s mood may already be improved after having consumed Burton’s lengthy discourse on diet. Rather than despairing at the fact that his immediate scholarly objectives have failed, Burton seems to revel in the relativism that undoes his alimentary guide and concludes by supplanting the medical authority of the physician with the cultural authority of custom. Thus, what began as a conventional exercise in the discrete classification of wholesome and unwholesome foods devolves, or perhaps evolves, into an ethnographic survey of dietary habits in regions as diverse as ‘some shires in England’, Normandy, ‘Guipuscoa in Spain’, Greece, Ethiopia, Iceland, and America (1.232). Although recounting from various Jesuit travel narratives how ‘the Tartars eat raw meat, and most commonly horse-flesh, drink milk and blood’ or how, to the wealthiest Chinese, ‘the horse, ass, dog’s, cat-flesh, is as delightsome as the rest’, may seem to detract from the practical ends of Burton’s discourse, such curious diversions further advance his therapeutic objectives (1.231). By excerpting those details that an English reader would find most shocking and strange, like the discovery that ‘in divers places they eat man’s flesh raw and roasted’, Burton aims both to amuse readers and to distract them from melancholy (1.231). To the extent that this sense of amusement encourages readers to adopt a less rigorous attitude toward dietary regimen, it also helps to restore and maintain overall physical health. Much more than gluttony, Burton warns against the dangers of ‘over-fasting’, and his discourse on diet, which relates the pleasures of reading and writing to the pleasures of eating, suggests a general disdain for asceticism (1.230). Quoting Hippocrates, Burton notes that ‘they often more offend in too sparing diet, and are worse damnified, than they that feed liberally and are ready to surfeit’ (1.230). The language of damnation here invokes the religious and moral dimensions of early modern diet, especially given the eternal conflict between Lent and Carnival, but instead of condemning excessive feasting, Burton points to the real danger of excessive fasting. Since the variability of custom allows for a wide range of dietary preferences and since Burton deems the mental labor of discerning the most salubrious diet more harmful than the consumption of ordinary food and drink, he concludes by permitting the reader small indulgences for the sake of pleasure. ‘Many reasons I could give’, he writes, ‘but when all is said pro and con, Cardan’s rule is best, to keep that we are accustomed unto, though it be naught; and to follow our disposition and appetite in some things amiss; to eat sometimes a dish which is hurtful, if we have an extraordinary liking

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

57

to it’ (2.29). The ‘extraordinary liking’ that Burton here accommodates is ultimately still in the service of moderation but, as in the case of Democritean laughter, he is willing to treat excess with excess. Counterbalancing much melancholy with much mirth, Burton employs Democritean laughter, what the Epistle to Damagetus calls ‘therapy for my intellect’, to bring about a tranquil state of mind and bids the reader do the same. Although the Anatomy fails as a conventional medical treatise, Burton never abandons the melancholy reader, whom he ultimately diverts from the futile search for absolute knowledge toward lesser and happier goals.

Notes 1 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2 (Oxford: Talboys and Wheeler, 1826), p. 99. 2 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 6, Addenda, Index, Dicta, &c (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), p. 135. 3 William H. Gass, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), pp. vii–xvi. 4 See especially Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5 For more on jest books and melancholy, see Angus Gowland, ‘The problem of early modern melancholy,’ Past and Present 191, no. 1 (2006), 77–120 (pp. 85–6). 6 A useful overview can be found in Ian Munro and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Jest Books’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 343–59. 7 Concerning the ludic nature of the cento, Stephanie Shirilan suggests that the availability of searchable electronic texts has contributed to a ‘consultative style of reading that is ill-equipped to detect such subtleties of tone or context’, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), p. 5. 8 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 9 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 10 Douglas Trevor considers Burton’s self-presentation as a melancholy scholar and argues that Galenic theory serves as an interpretive lens through which Burton understands both himself and England’s larger societal ills in ‘Robert

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Burton’s Melancholic England’, in Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 116–49. 11 On Renaissance laughter, see especially Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). 12 Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, in T. Sorell and L. Foisneau (eds), Leviathan After 350 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 150. 13 On pain in religious discourse, see especially Jan Fran van Dijkuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Boston: Brill, 2009) and Judith Perkins’s The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995). 14 Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch, to Shakespeare, to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 6–7. 15 Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy, pp. 9–10. 16 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 9. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations of this text will be given parenthetically by book and page number. 17 Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 5. 18 Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 133. 19 Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 308. 20 Ibid. 21 Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, p. 32. 22 Ibid., pp. 158–9. 23 English translation is my own. 24 Claudia Zatta, ‘Democritus and folly: the two wise fools’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 63, no. 3 (2002), 533–49 (p. 536). For more on the textual history and reception of this letter, see also Wesley Smith, Pseudepigraphic Writings (Boston: Brill, 1990); Jean Salem, La Légende de Démocrite (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1996); and Jean Jehasse, ‘Démocrite et la renaissance de la critique’, in Verdun L. Saulnier (ed.), Études seiziémistes (Geneva: Droz, 1980), pp. 43–63. 25 Smith, Pseudepigraphic Writings, p. 1. Stephen Halliwell, ‘Greek laughter and the problem of the absurd’, Arion 13, no. 2 (Fall 2005), 121–46 (p. 132). 26 Nancy Siraisi, ‘Anatomizing the past: physicians and history in Renaissance culture’, Renaissance Quarterly (2000), 1–30 (p. 9). 27 Smith, Pseudepigraphic Writings, p. 57. 28 Cf. ibid., pp. 63 and 85. 29 Ibid., p. 93. 30 On Burton’s approach to therapy, see Jeremy Schmidt, ‘Melancholy and the therapeutic language of moral philosophy in seventeenth century thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 65, no. 4 (October 2004), 583–601. See also

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Laughter in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

59

Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, pp. 6–7; Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy, p. 102; and Angus Gowland, ‘Consolations for melancholy in Renaissance humanism’, Society and Politics 6, no. 11 (2012), 10–38 (pp. 25–8). Lund and Shirilan both highlight reading and writing as a therapeutic act, while Schmidt and Gowland locate Burton’s therapy in the traditions of Hellenistic philosophy and consolation literature. My own approach differs because it ties Burton’s therapeutic objectives specifically to laughter and Epicurean or Skeptical ataraxia. 31 English translation is my own. Laurent Joubert, Traité du ris, contenant son essance, ses causes, et mervelheus effais (Paris: Chez Nicholas Chesneau, 1579), p. 354. 32 Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory de Rocher (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), pp. 76–7. 33 For more on Democritus’s competing legacies, see Christoph Lüthy, ‘The fourfold Democritus on the stage of early modern science’, Isis 91, no. 3 (September 2000), 443–79. 34 Both ‘method’ and ‘cause’ are polemical subjects in Galen’s writing since the Empiricists and the Methodists alike reject the relevance of causal explanation. Philip J. Van Der Eijk, Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health, and Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 288–91. 35 Shirilan, Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy, p. 34. 36 Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, p. 105. 37 Although it is not likely that Burton would have been intimately familiar with Rabelais’s work since it was not translated into English until 1653, and then only partially, he does mention Rabelais by name on a number of occasions, calling him ‘that French Lucian’ and referring to his reputation as a physician, satirist, and atheist: 1.119, 1.229, 1.339, 3.384. 38 See especially, Timothy Tomasik, ‘Fishes, Fowl, and La fleur de toute cuysine: Gaster and Gastronomy in Rabelais’s Quart livre’, in Joan Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 25–51, Also: Michel Jeanneret, ‘Diet’, and ‘Medicine v. Cookery’, in Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquet and Table Talk in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 73–89, Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’écriture (Paris: Librarie A.-G. Nizet, 1974), François Rigolot, Les Langages de Rabelais (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996), Edwin Duval, The Design of the Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1998).

3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ian Frederick Moulton

The melancholy scholar whose spirits are oppressed by excessive study is a common figure in early modern discourse. There were many causes of melancholy, but authorities all agreed that too much reading would make you sad. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1628) explores the connection in elaborate detail. He cites many authorities, including Ficino and Machiavelli, who agree that excessive study weakens the body and leads the mind to folly and despair.1 Reading causes melancholy for multiple reasons: it is a sedentary occupation, which leaves the body without exercise. It is a solitary activity that cuts people off from society. And although study increases knowledge, it often brings no financial reward. So a person who devotes themselves to reading is likely to be frail, lonely, and impoverished. It is no wonder that their health and mental state begin to deteriorate. To make matters worse, Burton continues, reading is often a waste of time, because much that is written is vain nonsense: ‘Amongst so many thousand authors you shall scarce find one, by reading of whom you shall be any whit better, but rather much worse … A great book is a great mischief.’ 2 The proliferation of books produced by the new technology of printing only makes the situation worse: ‘we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning’.3 Indeed, books feature prominently in the early modern iconography of melancholy. In Dürer’s master engraving of 1514, Melancholia has a book in her lap and is surrounded by the apparatus of study: scales, charts, a compass. Books also feature prominently in visual representations of melancholy by Domenico Fetti (1620), Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1640), and others. Given this consensus on the association between reading and melancholy throughout the early modern period, it may seem surprising that two influential sixteenth-century French writers, Rabelais and Montaigne, repeatedly contend that happiness is to be found above all in the act of reading. In the prologue

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

61

to Pantagruel, for example, Rabelais enthusiastically praises the virtues of his book, claiming that it is the key to health and well-being. And in his essay ‘On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse’, Montaigne compares reading favorably to male friendship on the one hand and to sexual relations with women on the other. Traditional philosophical discourses often implied that true happiness or human fulfillment was only available to an educated elite.4 What does it mean to claim that happiness can be found in reading? If reading is indeed the key to happiness, does that mean that there are essential aspects of happiness that only the literate can experience? Just as Pantagruel begins with the promise that invalids’ ‘only hope of happiness [consolation] was to have a page or two of this same book read to them’,5 so Rabelais’s Gargantua opens with a short poem addressed to the volume’s readers that promises the book will make them laugh. Rabelais ends the verse by writing ‘It is better to write of laughter than tears / Because laughter is unique and fitting to mankind’.6 Burton Raffel’s 1990 English translation of this prefatory verse ends with the resounding command (in all caps!): BE HAPPY!7 This exhortation is not in Rabelais’s French text, but it is a logical enough summation of the poem, especially for a modern reader for whom laughter is implicitly a sign of happiness. If it is the ability to laugh that defines humanity, it would make sense that writing comic texts would be superior—more humanizing—than any other form of writing. But what do laughing and happiness have to do with reading? Reading Rabelais’s book might make us laugh. Can it make us happy? First we need to specify what is meant by ‘happiness’. As the essays in this volume attest, sixteenth-century authors like Rabelais and Montaigne inherited a philosophical and ethical discourse about happiness that is often at odds with modern notions of what it means to be ‘happy’.8 Indeed, in early modern discourse happiness was a complex notion involving at least three different concepts. Two of these concepts, ataraxia (freedom from care) and eudaimonia (blessedness), originated in Greek philosophy. The third, what one might call ‘pleasurable contentment’, was more recent.9 Ataraxia, which in Greek means ‘freedom from trouble or confusion’, is the condition of not being subject to care and woe. Ataraxia in various forms played a prominent role in both Epicurean and Stoic thought as well as in classical skepticism. In the second century CE, the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus defined ataraxia as ‘freedom from disturbance or calmness of soul’.10 Sextus was primarily concerned with mental and spiritual tranquility, but ataraxia can also refer to material conditions: when one is ill, impoverished, or hungry, it is hard to be tranquil in mind.11 Since ataraxia is dependent in part on external factors such as food, housing, and political stability, it can presumably be measured and quantified. But although ataraxia might be a precondition for ‘happiness’ in a broader sense, it is quite possible

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

to be tranquil in mind, free from want, illness, danger, and discomfort and still feel sad or bored or unsatisfied. The second notion of happiness, which the Greeks called eudaimonia, is the state of being blessed or fortunate. In a story Montaigne used as the basis of an early essay, Herodotus tells how Croesus, the fabulously wealthy ruler of Lydia, bragged to the Athenian sage Solon that he was more eudaimon than anyone else on earth.12 Solon disagreed, saying that he thought the person who was the most eudaimon was Tellus of Athens, an ordinary Athenian citizen who lived prosperously and had five children, all with families of their own. All Tellus’ children and grandchildren grew to adulthood, and he died heroically in battle, honored by his fellow citizens for saving Athens through his personal bravery.13 Thus, in Solon’s view, eudaimonia is not measured by wealth or power or even longevity, but by basic comfort, familial status, and communal honor. Perhaps most important in Solon’s conception of eudaimonia is the importance of a ‘good death’. No matter how fortunate, all lives end. It is the quality of death that matters, not the quantity of life. Tellus would not have been more eudaimon if he had lived into a prosperous old age and died in his sleep. Seen this way, eudaimonia, like ataraxia, is an objective, rather than a subjective quality. Indeed, eudaimonia can only be adequately assessed retrospectively, by an external observer. A life only reveals its full significance after it has ended. Both Plato and Aristotle held that eudaimonia was the goal of all virtuous human action. They differed, however, on what precisely it was. Plato never explicitly defined eudaimonia, but suggested that it was primarily spiritual.14 Aristotle agreed that ‘eudaimonia must be some form of contemplation’.15 But unlike Plato, he felt that a basic level of physical comfort and security is necessary for eudaimonia: ‘being a man, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body must be healthy and must have food and attention’.16 Christian philosophers such as Aquinas largely retained Aristotle’s notion that material well-being was a necessary component of eudaimonia, with the caveat that true blessedness was only attainable in the afterlife.17 Whereas both ataraxia and eudaimonia are arguably material states of being that can be objectively evaluated, the modern notion of happiness is primarily emotional and consists in a subjective contentment with one’s situation and accomplishments. In modern discourse, happiness is more a feeling than a state of being. We are not happy unless we feel happy. As a subjective feeling, happiness need not be dependent on external conditions. One could feel ‘happy’ while unemployed and soaked to the skin. This is in fact the situation in one of the most iconic modern representations of happiness: Gene Kelly’s ecstatic dance in the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain. Kelly’s character’s career is in ruins and the weather is cold and rainy, but

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

63

he is in love, he has good friends, and he embraces the uncertainty of his future as an opportunity for innovation and creativity. This kind of happiness can be profoundly felt but tends to be evanescent. Unlike Tellus’ eudaimonia, or the ataraxia of Sextus Empiricus, it does not last long. It is clear that ataraxia, eudaimonia, and Gene Kelly’s burst of joyful optimism are not just different notions of happiness—they are in many ways contradictory. Happiness in modern times is rooted in a subjective joy in engagement with life, not an objective and retroactive evaluation of good fortune after a life has ended. The objective nature of eudaimonia directly contradicts modern ideas about what it means to be happy. Eudaimonia is only certain after death, and corpses do not feel joy. Similarly, Ataraxia’s focus on mere sufficiency and its connotations of detachment are at odds with the emotional nature of ‘happiness’ in modern discourse. Absence of trouble is not the same as joy. So when Rabelais encourages his readers to laugh at his book, what kind of happiness is he promoting? In the prologues to both Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais plays on the notion that because books contain useful information they are analogous to medicine: they will improve your life; they are good for you. Burton may be right that most books are worthless, but Rabelais wants you to know that his books are the best ever. The prologue to Gargantua in particular explores the contrast between the unimpressive external appearance of the book and the wonders contained within: You have to actually open a book and carefully weigh what’s written there. Then you’ll understand that the medicine inside is worth more than the whole box seemed to be worth … Have you ever seen a dog find a marrowbone? … If you have, you saw with what devotion he guards it, with what passion he holds it, with what care and judiciousness he takes the first bite, with what love he cracks it open, and with what care he sucks it dry. What impels him? What does he expect from such zeal? What benefit does he expect? Just a bit of marrow, that’s all … Just like the dog, you ought to be running with your educated nose to the wind, sniffing out and appreciating such magnificent volumes [beaulx livres de haulte gresse]—you should be light on your feet, swift in the chase, bold in the hunt.18

Rabelais’s praise of his book’s intellectual virtues is paradoxically expressed in the most earthy and material terms possible. The spiritual quest for enlightenment is analogous to the animal desire for tasty food. Good books are ‘livres de haulte gresse’—literally books rich in fat, like a prize pig. This turns the cliché of the melancholy starving scholar on its head. The ideal reader is not feeble, solitary, and impoverished; he (or even she?) is a lusty guest at a crowded and abundant feast: ‘To be a jolly man, a good friend, a good boozer—to me that spells honor and glory’.19

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Whereas Burton is oppressed by the multitude of books ground out by printers day after day, Rabelais celebrates the abundance and plenitude of discourse. His cup overflows. The catalog of the Library of St Victor in chapter 7 of Pantagruel delights in the enormous variety of ridiculous titles, from Peas in Lard (with commentary) to Pleasures of the Monastic Life and How Virgins Shit, to say nothing of ‘sixty-nine handsome, greasy, and well-thumbed prayer books’ (‘bréviaires de haulte gresse’).20 And Gargantua’s letter to his son Pantagruel celebrates the enormous dissemination of knowledge made possible by printing: In my time we have learned to produce wonderfully elegant and accurate printed books … the world is full of scholars, of learned teachers, of well-stocked libraries, so that in my opinion study has never been easier, not in Plato’s time, or Cicero’s, or Papinian’s … Thieves and highwaymen, hangmen and executioners, common foot soldiers, grooms and stableboys, are now more learned than the scholars and preachers of my day … Even women and girls have come to aspire to this marvelous, this heavenly manna of solid learning.21

The image of learning as ‘manna’ repeats the trope of knowledge as nourishing food. Besides being rooted in the material aspects of ataraxia (all bodily needs well met!), Rabelais’s celebration of reading is clearly connected with the idea of happiness as a joyful emotion, and that emotion is tied closely to physical pleasures such as eating and drinking. Nourishing the mind feels good—in the same way that nourishing the body does. As Rabelais says in the prologue to Gargantua, ‘Now have fun, my lovely friends, and read all the rest of this gaily, because it’s good for your body (and not bad for your kidneys, either)’.22 But in Gargantua’s famous letter to his son Pantagruel, reading is also a necessary step to eudaimonia—the living of a full and fulfilling life. Gargantua tells his son that he writes his letter ‘not so much to ensure that you follow the pathways of virtue, but rather that you rejoice in thus living and having lived, and find new joys and fresh courage for the future’.23 Montaigne not only read Rabelais, he agreed that Gargantua and Pantagruel were valuable precisely because they were pleasurable. He cites the works of Rabelais along with Boccaccio’s Decameron as worthwhile ‘books that afford plain delight’.24 Montaigne’s whole project of writing the Essais began as an attempt to comment on his reading of favorite authors, especially Plutarch, whose Moralia had a huge influence on his philosophic thought, literary style, and intellectual interests.25 The purpose of the Essais, as Montaigne says on several occasions, is to provide a fully detailed and accurate portrait of their author.26 But writing such a portrait of a person’s life, character, and opinions necessarily entails questions about the purpose of living—the quest for eudaimonia, or the fulfilled life. While this larger

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

65

question looms over the entire project, Montaigne is also concerned to provide a record and analysis of his feelings and emotions. This means that he frequently focuses on the question of pleasure: what kinds of pleasure life provides, and what in particular brings him joy. So, like Rabelais, Montaigne is concerned throughout not just with eudaimonia as a goal for life, but also with happiness in the modern sense—an emotion of joy and satisfaction with one’s earthly experience and condition. Overall, Montaigne is pessimistic about the possibility of achieving eudaimonia in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense; that is, achieving fulfillment through reasoned contemplation. Montaigne’s longest essay, the Apology for Raymond Sebond, argues in great detail that human reason is fallible, and that human beings know nothing with any certainty. From this perspective, Montaigne’s Apology is extremely skeptical about the prospects of human happiness. The best that a human being can hope for is a form of ataraxia—the absence of pain and trouble. Analyzing Montaigne’s attitude toward eudaimonia in the Apology, Bruce Silver concludes that for Montaigne ‘one cannot be happy and human’.27 But although in the Apology Montaigne rejects the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia based on god-like contemplation of the truth of things, elsewhere he fully embraces the sort of eudaimonia described by Solon in Herodotus: the notion that a happy life is one that is lived fully and ended well. Indeed, in his short early essay ‘That we Should Not be Deemed Happy till After our Death’,28 Montaigne begins with Herodotus’ story of Solon and Croesus, and concludes, ‘When judging another’s life I always look to see how its end was borne; and one of my main concerns for my own is that it be borne well—that is, in a quiet and muted manner’.29 In the immediately following essay, ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die’, Montaigne develops the idea that learning is primarily important because it can help us live and die naturally and peacefully. As Erich Auerbach noted: ‘The full consciousness of one’s own life implies for Montaigne also full consciousness of one’s own death’.30 Like Solon in Herodotus, Montaigne measures a life’s success by how it ends. Montaigne addresses the role of reading throughout the Essais, but especially in Essai 2.10, ‘On Books’, and Essai 3.3, ‘On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse’. When Montaigne reads he does not seek knowledge, or even facts, but rather advice on how best to live and how best to die. Though his reading is broad, he returns most often to Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius and Plutarch’s Moralia—texts of moral philosophy that directly address questions of how life is best lived.31 Directed in this manner, Montaigne’s reading becomes a source of emotional joy and pleasure: ‘From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

which teaches me to live and die well.’ 32 In the original French, Montaigne characteristically puts dying before living: he seeks knowledge that will teach him ‘à bien mourir et à bien vivre’. For Montaigne, living well involves thinking; just because human reason is fallible is no reason not to think. Indeed, critical analysis is necessary precisely because certain knowledge is impossible. The Essais are a monument to the notion that it is important to examine one’s life, even if the ultimate truth of it is beyond our comprehension. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle contends that contemplation must be at the core of eudaimonia because contemplation is the characteristic activity of the gods.33 Montaigne echoes this passage as he reaffirms the importance of reading for the contemplative life: There is nothing we can do longer than think, no activity to which we can devote ourselves more regularly nor more easily: Nature has granted the soul that prerogative. It is the work of the gods, says Aristotle, from which springs their beatitude and our own. Reading by its various subjects, particularly serves to arouse my discursive reason: it sets not my memory to work but my judgment.34

Montaigne reads primarily to make better ethical judgments—to work through significant issues and problems. But reading should also be pleasurable. Montaigne values pleasure as part of the experience of life, and does not make a distinction between useful work and pleasant leisure. When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided for us that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us toward them not by reason, but by desire.35

Montaigne spends time browsing and thinking in his library in the same way he wanders through his orchard.36 He defends literature (as Horace did) for its mixture of pleasure and moral value: ‘If anyone says to me that to use the Muses as mere playthings and pastimes is to debase them, then he does not know as I do the value of pleasure, plaything, or pastime.’ 37 Because of the pleasure and wisdom reading offers, in Essay 3.3 Montaigne argues at length that it is superior to both social interaction with men and to amorous relations with women. Although both friendship and romance are valuable, true friendship is ‘distressingly rare’ and romantic passion ‘withers with age’. Both depend ‘on chance and other people’.38 Although Montaigne famously idealized intimate and powerful friendships, like the kind he shared in his youth with Etienne de la Boëtie, he feels that

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

67

‘commonplace’ friendships are ‘barren and cold’; the burden of keeping up polite appearances is tiresome. Montaigne finds romantic relationships with women gratifying, but too passionate and unstable. Reading, on the other hand, provides reliable pleasures. It is self-directed and remains available to the old as well as the young. It can even be used to avoid ‘boring company’.39 In a passage that sincerely echoes Rabelais’s ironic praise of books as medicine, Montaigne says reading gives him relief from the pain of his kidney stones: it ‘blunts the stabs of pain whenever the pain is not too masterful and extreme’. In direct contradiction to the notion that reading causes melancholy, Montaigne attests that spending time with his books reliably cheers him up: ‘To distract me from morose thought I simply need to have recourse to books’.40 But reading does have its drawbacks, primarily because it is an exclusively mental activity: Books have plenty of pleasant qualities for those who know how to select them. But there is no good without ill. The pleasure we take in them is no purer or untarnished than any other. Reading has its disadvantages—and they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time my body (my care for which I have not forgotten) remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad. I know of no excess more harmful to me in my declining years, nor more to be avoided.41

Indeed, Montaigne admits that although he loves to read, he reads relatively seldom: ‘days and even months on end may pass without my using [books]’.42 Montaigne goes on to specify the conditions that allow him to spend time reading, famously describing his library on the third floor of a tower on his estate. He especially prizes the solitude the library provides him: ‘Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away’!43 He pities courtiers who are always attended by servants and monastics whose rule forbids solitude. This description is as much rhetorical construct as reality: in the early years, at least, Montaigne worked on the Essais with the help of secretaries, and during all the years he wrote he was also intensely involved with politics and the management of his estates.44 But, solitary or not, his reading and writing practices are those of a wealthy, well-educated nobleman. When Montaigne thinks of the ideal conditions for reading, he has little to say of the vast majority of the population who do not have the resources to create a physical space devoted to reading and contemplation. It is clear from Montaigne’s description of his reading habits that only a small elite can use reading as a way to happiness. Not only is such happiness impossible for the illiterate, it is also denied to those lacking the leisure and the space to read. Montaigne both identifies reading as essential for human

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

happiness and acknowledges that access to it is limited, even for those who have the intellectual potential to enjoy it: ‘[Owning and reading books] is the best protection which I have found for our human journey and I deeply pity men of intelligence who lack it’.45 He is aware that his books are a luxury: ‘I enjoy [my books] as misers do riches: because I know I can always enjoy them whenever I please. My soul is satisfied and contented by this right of possession.’ 46 Books are a treasure that only some will be able to possess. For Montaigne, proud of his family’s recently attained nobility, reading is part of his birthright and patrimony. It is what he was born to do. Throughout the Essais, Montaigne cheerfully admits that his sense of self-worth is rooted in the pride he takes in his noble lineage.47 He recognizes that reading is a privilege, and is grateful for it, but he is not especially troubled that most people are denied its pleasures. He has no particular concern for encouraging literacy among the common people. Indeed, when he praises common people, it is often precisely because they are not learned— they have native common sense, not book learning.48 And although he dedicates Essay 1.26, ‘On Educating Children’, to his friend Diane de Foix, and despite the crucial work of Marie de Gournay in the editing of the Essais, Montaigne is oddly dismissive of the importance of reading in women’s lives.49 His decision to write in the vernacular is primarily related to his desire not to appear scholarly or pedantic, and his text is filled with untranslated quotations in Latin and Greek which he assumes his readers will both understand and recognize.50 He says he prefers French over Latin because it is less durable—he is writing ‘for a few men and for a few years’, not for a wide audience or for all time.51 Moreover, Montaigne never addresses the extent to which his happiness in reading is dependent on the labor (and possible misery) of others—his tenants, his servants.52 Unlike Burton’s melancholy scholars, Montaigne’s stable income allows him to spend time reading without worrying about poverty. In a similar vein, Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, for all its celebration of the dissemination of knowledge and the revolution of print, remains a nobleman’s letter to his son, and it begins by stressing the importance of producing male heirs to perpetuate one’s lineage. Reading can be a great source of pleasure, and can teach the reader how to live and die well, but only if they have the resources to support a life of comfortable contemplation. Whatever pleasures these gentlemen find in life, it seems Aristotle was right: one needs external prosperity to have a chance at eudaimonia.

Notes 1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 1.300–30 (references to this text are by book and page number).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

69

On Burton’s conception of happiness, see Mary Ann Lund, ‘Robert Burton, Perfect Happiness, and the Visio Dei’ in Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (eds), The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 86–105. 2 Burton, Anatomy, 1.23–4. 3 Ibid., 1.24. 4 See, for example, the importance of education for the formation of the governing class of Plato’s Republic (especially Book 3), as well as Aristotle’s notion that true happiness (eudaimonia) consists in contemplation of ‘things noble and divine’ (Nicomachean Ethics 10.7; 1177a). 5 ‘Tout leur consolation n’estoit que de ouyr lire quelque page dudict livre’, François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Guy Demerson (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), p. 215. English translation from François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 134. All English translations are from this edition unless otherwise indicated. 6 ‘Mieux est de ris que de larmes escripre, / Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme’ (my translation). 7 Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 3. 8 For a concise distinction between classical and modern notions of happiness, see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 43–8. On the history of various concepts of happiness, see Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) and Nicholas P. White, A Brief History of Happiness (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). 9 ‘happiness’, OED Online, December 2020 (accessed 16 December 2020), definition 2a: ‘the state of pleasurable contentment of mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one’s circumstances’. This meaning is first attested around 1500. 10 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5 (Book 1.4). 11 In Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus, for example, it is specified that pleasure consists of ‘freedom from pain in the body’ as well as from ‘turmoil in the soul’, (μητε αλγειν κατα σωμα μητε ταραττεσθαι κατα ψυχην) (lines 131–2); and while luxury is condemned, a ‘simple and inexpensive diet’ is said to be necessary for ‘perfect health’. The clear implication is that one cannot be happy if the basic and necessary requirements of material life are not met. See Norman Wentworth DeWitt, St. Paul and Epicurus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), pp. 187–93. Annas, Morality of Happiness, p. 85, refers to this passage from Epicurus as providing her fundamental definition of ataraxia, ‘the state of being untroubled, unhindered in one’s activities’. 12 Essay 1.19, Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), pp. 80–2; The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M.A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 85–8. All English translations from Montaigne are from this edition. 13 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. and trans. Robert Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Book 1.30–3, pp. 13–16.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

14 Plato, Apology, 30b; Symposium, 204e; Laws, 743a. 15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.8.1178b. 16 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.8.1179a. 17 Aquinas addresses questions of human happiness (beatitudo, or ‘blessedness’) in the Summa Theologica, Part 1a, section 2ae, questions 2–5. See in particular 1a2ae.3.6: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), pp. 79–81. For a brief overview of Aquinas’s adaptation of Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia, see Kevin Laam, ‘Shakespeare and happiness’, Literature Compass 7, no. 6 (2010), 439–51 (pp. 444–5). 18 ‘C’est pourquoi fault ouvrir le liver et soigneusement peser ce que y est déduict. Lors congnoistrez que la drogue dedans contenue est bien d’aultre valeur que ne promettoit la boite … Mais veistes-vous oncques chien rencontrant quelque os médulaire? … Sié veu l’avez, vous avez peu noter de quelle dévotion il le guette, de quel soing il le guarde, de quel ferveur il le tient, de quelle prudence il l’entomme, de quelle affection il le brise et de quelle diligence il le sugce. Qui l’induit à ce faire? Quel est l’espoir de son estude? Quel bien prétend-il? Rien plus qu’un peu de mouelle … A l’exemple d’icelluy vous convient estre saiges pour fleurer, sentier et estimer ces beaulx livres de haulte gresse, legiers au prochaz et hardiz à la rencontre’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, p. 39; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 8. 19 ‘A moy n’est que honneur et gloire d’estre dict et réputé bon gaultier et bon compaignon’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, p. 40; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 9. 20 ‘Des Pois au lart, cum Commento; Les Aisez de Vie monachale; Le Chiabrena des Pucelles; Soixante et neuf Bréviaires de haulte gresse’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, pp. 238–44; Gargantua and Pantagruel, pp. 150–5. 21 ‘Les impressions tant élégantes et correctes en usance, qui ont esté inventées de mon eage par inspiration divine … Tout le monde est plein de gens savans, de précepteurs très doctes, de librairies très amples, et m’est advis que, ny au temps de Platon, ny de Cicéron, ny de Papinian, n’estoit telle commodité d’estude qu’on y veoit maintenant … Je voy les brigans, les boureaulx, les avanturiers, les palefreniers de maintenant, plus doctes que les docteurs et prescheurs de mon temps… Les femmes et les filles ont aspiré à ceste louange et manne céleste de bonne doctrine’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, pp. 246–7; Gargantua and Pantagruel, pp. 157–8. 22 ‘Or esbaudissez-vous, mes amours, et guayement lisez le reste, tout à l’aise du corps et au profit des reins!’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, p. 41; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 9. 23 ‘Et ce que présentement te escriz n’est tant affin qu’en ce train vertueux tu vives, que de ainsi vivre et avoir vescu tu te resjouisses et te refraischisses en courage pareil pour l’avenir’, Rabelais, Oeuvres, p. 245; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 157. 24 ‘Livres simplement plaisans … dignes qu’on s’y amuse’, Essay 2.10, Montaigne, Essais, p. 430; Complete Essays, p. 460. 25 Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne (1949), ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 72–5. Pierre Villey, Les Sources et

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The pleasure of the text

71

l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 101–26. 26 See for example, the epistle To the Reader, Montaigne, Essais, p. 27; Complete Essays, p. lix. 27 Bruce Silver, ‘Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond: happiness and the poverty of reason’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 94–110. 28 ‘Qu’il ne faut juger de nostre heur, qu’après la mort’, Essay 1.19, Montaigne, Essais, pp. 80–2; Complete Essays, pp. 85–8. 29 ‘Au jugement de la vie d’autruy, je regarde tousjours comment s’en est porté le bout, et des principaux estudes de la mienne, c’est qu’il se porte bien, c’est à dire quietement et sourdement’, Essay 1.19, Montaigne, Essais, p. 82; Complete Essays, p. 88. 30 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p 300. See also M.A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 4–6. 31 Friedrich, Montaigne,, pp. 60–6, 70–5. 32 ‘Je ne cherche aux livres qu’à m’y donner du plaisir par un honneste amusement: ou si j’estudie, je n’y cherche que la science, qui traite de la connoisance de moy-mesmes, et qui m’instruise à bien mourir et à bien vivre’, Essay 2.10, Montaigne, Essais, p. 429; Complete Essays, p. 459. 33 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.8.1178b. 34 ‘Aussi l’a nature favorisée de ce privilege, qu’il n’y a rien, que nous puissions faire si long temps: ny action à laquelle nous nous addonnions plus ordinairement et facilement. C’est la besogne des Dieux, dit Aristote, de laquelle naist et leur beatitude et la nostre. La lecture me sert specialement à esveiller par divers objects mon discours: à embesogner mon jugement, non ma memoyre’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 860; Complete Essays, p. 923. 35 ‘Quand je dance, je dance: quand je dors, je dors. Voire, et quand je me promeine solitairement en un beau verger, si mes pensées se sont entretenues des occurences estrangeres quelque partie du temps: quelque autre partie, je les rameine à la promenade, au verger, à la douceur de cette solitude, et à moy. Nature a maternellement observé cela, que les actions qu’elle nous a enjointes pour nostre besoign, nous fussent aussi voluptueuses. Et nous convie, non seulement par la raison, mais aussi par l’appetit’, Essay 3.13, Montaigne, Essais, pp. 1157–8; Complete Essays, p. 1258. 36 ‘If one book wearies me I take up another, applying myself to it only during those hours when I begin to be gripped by boredom at doing nothing’ (Si ce livre me fasche, j’en prens un autre, et ne m’y adonne qu’aux heures, où l’ennuy de rien faire commence à me saisir), Essay 2.10, Montaigne, Essais, p. 430; Complete Essays, p. 459. 37 ‘Si quelqu’un me dit, que c’est avillir les muses, de s’en servir seulement de jouet, et de passetemps, il ne sçait pas comme moy, combien vaut le plaisir, le jeu et le passetemps’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 871; Complete Essays, p. 934.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

38 ‘Ces deux commerces sont fortuites, et despendans d’autruy: l’un est ennuyeux par sa rareté, l’autre se flestrit avec l’aage’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 868; Complete Essays, p. 932. 39 ‘compagnies qui me faschent’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 868; Complete Essays, p. 932. 40 ‘Il emousse les pointures de la douleur, si elle n’est, du tout extreme et maistresse: Pour me distraire d’une imagination importune, il n’est que de recourir aux livres’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, pp. 868–69; Complete Essays, p. 932. 41 ‘Les livres ont beaucoup de qualitez aggreables à ceux qui les sçavent choisir: Mais aucun bien sans peine: C’est un plaisir qui n’est pas net et pur, non plus que les autres: il a ses incommoditez, et bien poisantes: L’ame s’y excerce, mais le corps, duquel je n’ay non plus oublié le soing, demeure ce pendant sans action, s’atterre et s’attriste. Je ne sçache excez plus dommageable pour moy, ny plus à eviter, en cette declinaison d’aage’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 871; Complete Essays, p. 934. 42 ‘Il se passera plusieurs jours, et des mois, sans que je les employe’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 869; Complete Essays, p. 932. 43 ‘Miserable à mon gré, qui n’a chez soy, où à soy: où se faire particulairement la cour: où se cacher’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 870; Complete Essays, p. 933. 44 On the socially engaged nature of Montaigne’s working and reading life, see George Hoffman, Montaigne’s Career (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 8–38, 48–55, and Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 246–53. On the physical and intellectual space of Montaigne’s library, see William N. West, ‘Architecture and agency in the houses of Michel de Montaigne and Nicholas Bacon’, Comparative Literature 56, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 111–29. 45 ‘C’est la meillure munition que j’aye trouvé à cet humain voyage: et plains extrement les hommes d’entendement, qui l’ont à dire’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 869; Complete Essays, p. 932. 46 ‘J’en jouys, comme les avaritieux de tresors, pour sçavoir que j’en jouyray quand it me plaira: mon ame se rassasie et contente de ce droict de possession’, Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 869; Complete Essays, p. 932. 47 Montaigne’s family was relatively recently ennobled, but he often pretended otherwise. See Friedrich, Montaigne, pp. 7–11. 48 See, for example, Montaigne’s remarks on how his page boy knows how to court his mistress without reading Leone Ebreo and Ficino. Essay 3.5, Montaigne, Essais, p. 917; Complete Essays, p. 988. 49 Overall, Montaigne is dismissive of women’s reading, though he concedes that poetry, history, and philosophy might be suitable. Essay 3.3, Montaigne, Essais, p. 864; Complete Essays, p. 927. On the editorial work of Montaigne’s devoted admirer and adopted daughter Marie de Gournay, see Desan, Montaigne: A Life, pp. 530–2.



The pleasure of the text

73

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50 On the reasons for and significance of Montaigne’s choice to write in French, see Friedrich, Montaigne, pp. 23–4. 51 ‘J’ecris mon livre à peu d’hommes, et a peu d’années’, Essay 3.9, ‘Montaigne, Essais, p. 1028; Complete Essays, p. 1111. 52 On the notion that the happiness of the elite is often dependent on the misery of others, see Richard Chamberlain, ‘What’s Happiness in Hamlet?’, in Meek and Sullivan, Renaissance of Emotion, pp. 153–74.

4 Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Ullrich Langer

For Bernard Hardy For the early modern period, pleasure was not really that difficult to define. Indeed, the absence of a language of neural stimulation, of secretion of endorphins and of the chemistry of euphoria did not hamper philosophers and moralists who drew on a wide range of classical authors, including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus (through Diogenes Laertius), Lucretius, and Cicero, and were able to discuss pleasure in terms of movement, stasis, and activity, to develop a hierarchy of pleasures, and integrate pleasure into the good life. It took diverse names, sometimes carefully distinguished, sometimes not, starting with the Latin terms voluptas, gaudium, delectatio, oblectatio, and less relevantly, placitum, as the main points of reference. I will look more closely at the type of pleasure that is a certain activity, that is considered in the Aristotelian tradition to be the highest form of pleasure, and that is rendered palpable in its relation to the perception and representation of variety. Variety in nature is an occasion for human beings to manifest their virtues and it is the most immediate representation of the pleasure that the exercise of virtues affords or is accompanied by. Rustic life, in this tradition, is not the life of the peasant suffering to glean means of survival from an unpredictable and resistant nature: it is a step above agriculture, an ordering of nature to another end. It does not exclude agriculture and the effort it entails. Instead, rustic life integrates agriculture (and animal husbandry) into a supreme enjoyment of nature as a garden. The pleasure that an ordered, garden-like nature permits is not a passive stimulation of the senses but an activity, or something added to activity. This pleasure is, or seems inseparable from, doing freely what you do best as a human being. In closing in on this connection between the rustic life and pleasure as activity, I will take as a point of departure not a set of philosophical

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

75

definitions, but a famous letter by Flavio Alberto Lollio (1508–1569) to Ercole Perinato, published by its author in 1544 in Venice under the title Lettera di M. Alberto Lollio nella quale rispondendo ad una di M. Hercole Perinato, egli celebra la villa, e lauda molto l’agricultura. Cosa non meno dotta che dilettevole. Lollio intends to praise the ‘villa’, the country house or estate, and the farming that was associated with it. His letter is but an example of a subset in an abundant literature that we vaguely name ‘pastoral’, celebrating the life of the country (in opposition to the commerce and worries of the city, or to the agitation of life at the court), and that, despite its vow of simplicity and naturalness, is one of the most heavily erudite and literary of the early modern period. I will be discussing the text not in the original Italian edition, but instead through a French translation published in 1588 in a manual for letter-writing, Le Secrettaire, by the translator and compiler Gabriel Chappuys. This choice of indirect text stems from my sense that the inclusion of Lollio’s letter in the manual is testimony to the widespread appeal of this sort of theme and of its treatment by Lollio in particular. Indeed, the unusual length of the letter and its copious references and allusions seem to render it less useful for a secretary in need of a standard circumstantial missive; its inclusion in Chappuys’s book is all the more notable. Instead of rehearsing the tradition of agronomical and horticultural writing inherited from antiquity (Virgil, Columella, Varro, Cato, Cicero), recalling its renewal in Italy (Giuseppe Falcone, Agostino Gallo, Lollio, Bartolomeo Taegio, Pietro de’ Crescenzi, Michelangelo Tanaglia), distinguishing forms of the farm, the country estate, and the garden, and detailing their ideology, representation, and literary significance,1 I will focus on the pleasure that a certain type of description of nature—and a certain type of nature—affords. My sense is that indeed this type of description and ordering of nature does not simply provoke pleasure but is a representation of pleasure itself; it is a way of rendering, transmitting pleasure, making it available through a representation. Of course, this is not any kind of pleasure, and is no doubt historically bound, and somewhat variable according to the writers and their intentions. But there is a distinct, common thread to all these representations, and it is not so far removed from our sensibilities that it is impossible for us to reenact. Lollio’s letter begins by pointing out that our ancestors ‘non seulement se delectoient fort de demourer et vivre aux champs, mais aussi se travailloient avec tout soing et diligence à eux possible de labourer et cultiver la terre’ (not only took great pleasure in staying and living in the countryside, but also took all possible care and diligence to labor and cultivate the earth).2 Our ancestors did not merely work the earth to survive: the earth was not merely useful to them. They ‘se delectoient fort’, took true pleasure in living

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

on the land. The rustic life from the outset is an activity in which pleasure and usefulness are combined. So the point of departure, which I will need to complicate further, is the classic dichotomy of pleasure and utility, delectabile–utile, deriving from Horace, and it is one of the most frequently repeated clichés in early modern culture. Far from being distinct from each other, pleasure and utility are inextricably combined as an element of living well of which our wise ancestors are constant examples. There is no such thing as the entirely separate and distant pleasure of beholding nature; cultivating nature is always an element of any pleasure derived from being surrounded by it.3 Another feature of this binomial definition of the pleasant country life is the active status of (this type of) pleasure: for the early modern period, pleasure is normally not an emotion or, more accurately, a passion. One does not experience pleasure as one does love, anger, and so forth. That is, the person experiencing pleasure is not the passive object of an emotion or an affect acting upon him or her; instead, pleasure is an element of the active person; it is, as one might say, a potential element of agency. Cultivating the earth is always a part of taking pleasure in it; the benefits and sources of pleasure that nature provides are a result of human activity within it. For Lollio, cultivated fields and a garden that seems—for us, at least—to exist for the sake of pure, disinterested enjoyment, are part of a continuum of human industriousness (and its pleasure). He recounts an anecdote found in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (4.20–2) and Cicero’s De Senectute (17.59), and widely circulated in the early modern period, about the Persian king Cyrus the Younger who receives a visitor from Sparta and shows him his garden: [U]n jour par recreation il luy fit voir un sien jardin, lequel estoit clos excellemment de tous costez, planté et disposé d’un merveilleux artifice. Or, après que Lisandre, tout estonné et esmerveillé d’un tant bel ouvrage, fut bonne piece demouré pensif, considerant particulierement la hauteur et droiture des arbres, l’ordre et la proportion qui se trouvoit entre eux d’egale distance, la terre nette et bien cultivée, la beauté des fruicts et le souef des odeurs, desquelles on sentoit la douce et gracieuse haleine par l’abondance des diverses fleurs, il dist à ceste heure là que, non seulement il louoit fort la diligence, mais beaucoup plus aussi la grande prudence de celuy lequel avoit tant industrieusement ordonné et disposé ces choses là. Et Cirus se glorifiant fort de cela, respondit: J’ay moymesme, par mon industrie, conservé et faict toutes ces choses, et ay planté de ma propre main les arbres, desquels le beau et divers ordre te fait esbahir. (571) (One day, as recreation, he had him see his garden, which was finely closed from all sides and planted and arranged with marvelous artfulness. After Lysander, all astonished and wondrous in front of such a beautiful work,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

77

stayed pensive for a long time, considering particularly the height and the straightness of the trees, the order and the proportion which was between them at equal distance, the clean and well-cultivated earth, the beauty of the fruits and the sweetness of the odors, whose sweet and graceful breath one smelled, through the abundance of various flowers, he said then that not only did he praise the diligence but also, much more, the great prudence of the person who had so industriously ordered and arranged these things. And Cyrus, taking pride in what he had said, responded: I by myself, through my own industriousness, preserved and made all these things, and with my own hands planted the trees whose beautiful and diverse order astonishes you.)

Lysander’s wonderment is provoked by various elements of the garden: its excellent enclosure, recalling Epicurus’ garden in which variety flourished within a limited space, the orderly disposition of the trees, provided by straight lines and equal distances between objects, and the visual beauty of fruits and sweetness of odor of flowers, provided by their variety and abundance. The garden is a space rendered permeable to the gaze and whose artful order allows a sensorial copiousness (varietas and copia).4 Variety and copiousness are not sufficient by themselves, but are made effective through evident ordering by a human, rational hand. We are able to see through the garden, which becomes an instance of perspicuitas, the transparence of speech and phenomena, admired by classical and early modern culture. Indeed Lysander’s praise does not stop there, but continues naturally to the attributes of the person whose design the garden enacts: his diligence and above all his ‘grande prudence’. In this Lollio and Chappuys are following the Ciceronian version rather than the original Xenophon: ‘non modo diligentiam sed etiam sollertiam eius’ (not only the industriousness but also the skill).5 Human activity permeates this garden as the orderliness of the trees allows the traversal and understanding of the space by a human eye, encouraged by the sense of smell and the distinct differences of colors and shapes. This human activity is above all ‘prudence’, the intellectual virtue enabling self-mastery and mastery of future contingents. Prudence combines memory, perception of the present, and above all foresight of future events that do or do not take place,6 for which nature is a stand-in. Prudence, in fact, is the supreme virtue of a good sovereign (hence the praise of the gardener, who turns out to be Cyrus, is quite appropriate). It is also a virtue shared by all (Lysander does not assume that the designer of the garden is Cyrus himself), and a virtue that provides a link between the other virtues. The well-ordered and variously copious garden is a correlate of virtue, allowing the spectator to move from the product to its producer. And most of all this ‘artifice’ provokes wonderment, a kind of sublime pleasure. The garden is an incarnation of the pleasure of prudence, and of the oblectatio

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

sollertiae, the enjoyment of industriousness, know-how, skill, that is a hallmark of the wise.7 Despite the intense pleasure it provokes, the description of Cyrus’s garden is relatively abstract. That is, Lollio, following Cicero, who is following Xenophon, does not say: the deep redness of the roses, the light green of the foliage, the heady perfume of the violet lilacs, the humid freshness of the shade of the oak trees, etc. Instead, the descriptive vocabulary is located either at the level of a sketch or outline, or at the level of a more general category: height, straightness, order, proportion, cleanliness, cultivation, softness and sweetness, gracefulness (of the ‘breath’ of flowers), abundance, and variety. This is a ‘generic’ garden, but not in a pejorative sense. It is generic first of all because the particulars can be subsumed into the categories of the perceiving mind, any prudent mind; the great Cyrus’s garden is general enough to make it accessible to any reader with the diligentia et sollertia of the virtuous. It also provides the ‘gardener’ with a finality: the telos of the garden is not to fill it with roses, lilacs, and oak trees but to give it order, abundance, and variety. The particulars are in service to a larger design which is a product of the prudence of the gardener. It is also a ‘generic’ garden because Lollio’s letter is a piece of epideictic rhetoric, distinct from an agronomic treatise or a technical manual on horticulture which are submerged in particulars. With the aid of Xenophon and Cicero, he extracts from the dense matter of working with nature, the sense of praiseworthy pleasure and purpose that accompanies such work, on the part of the owner of a country estate. Indeed, in his long praise of rustic life, turning from the garden to an arguably more use-oriented villa, Lollio seeks to define the ‘ends’ of agriculture, elaborating on the initial Horatian utile–dulce dichotomy: Après, l’Agriculture, si je ne me trompe, regarde justement deux fins, l’une est l’utilité qui se tire continuellement d’icelle, l’autre est le plaisir que l’homme prend du reverdir de la terre, de la beauté et souefve halaine des fleurs, du germer des plantes, de la naissance des fruicts et de la multiplication des troupeaux du bestail, lequel nous voyons volontiers et avec un tres-grand plaisir croistre de jour à autre. Et n’estimeray jamais qu’aucun soit tant indiscret ou tant arrogant de me nier que ce ne soit un tres-grand et inestimable plaisir de voir une vostre metairie de jour en jour plus belle, plus ornée et plus fructueuse, laquelle soit abondante de toute bonne et utile maniere d’arbres, où soient les boscages espais, fontaines tres-vives, ruisseaux tresclairs, colines plaisantes, valées ombreuses, prés agreables, et semblables choses qui recréent les esprits et delectent merveilleusement nos yeux. (582) (Then, agriculture, if I am not mistaken, concerns indeed two goals, one is the usefulness that one derives continually from it, the other is the pleasure that man receives from the greening of the earth, the beauty and the sweet

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

79

breath of the flowers, the germinating of the plants, the birth of flowers, and the multiplication of the cattle, which we see willingly and with a great pleasure grow from day to day. And I will never consider that anyone would be so lacking in discernment or so arrogant as to deny to me that it is a very great and inestimable pleasure to see your lands become from one day to the next more beautiful, more ornamented, and more fruitful, and abundant with all good and useful types of trees, and where there are thick woods, animated fountains, clear streams, pleasing hills, shaded valleys, pleasing meadows, and similar things that refresh the minds and marvelously please the eyes.)

The pleasure of agriculture is here largely visual: seeing your land flourish is an ‘inestimable pleasure’. This flourishing is of a slightly different nature from the order, abundance and variety of Cyrus’s garden. It involves time, that is the accounting or perception of cattle and other features of the rustic landscape at one point, one day, and the following, and no doubt several following ones. One does not ‘see’ the multiplication of cattle or the germinating of the plants in one gaze, the way one can see the arrangement of a garden. The perception of a process of growth involves memory and probably projection into the future. As the land that flourishes is ‘your’ land, presumably the process of growth is attributable to your husbandry of it. Once again, then, the pleasure of the rustic life is expressed in terms of classical prudence: memory of past states, perception of the present, and intending and foreseeing a future. It is the good functioning of prudence that provides this ‘inestimable’ pleasure. The visual nature of this pleasure is consonant with the visual metaphors associated with prudence (especially the ‘perception’ of the present and the ‘seeing’ of future events).8 And once again, the beautiful and the useful are both integrated into the pleasing: the sweet breath of the flowers is continuous with the multiplication of the cattle. The rustic life is an example of the pleasure of prudence transcending, as it were, what can be felt to be an opposition between what is pretty and what we can use. Pleasure accompanies an activity that makes all the goods of nature available to us. The modern reader will object, cogently enough, that the perspective taken here excludes the humble peasant struggling to survive by laboring his recalcitrant earth. Manual labor by the owner of the country estate is assumed to be unnecessary, although not explicitly prohibited. The sort of labor an owner is expected to perform involves more his prudence than his hands. Clearly, the rustic life as evoked by the classical and early modern authors is an aristocratic vision. But so is the elaboration of virtue theory, of which prudence is the capstone: virtues are an ‘excellence’ of the human. The virtuous man has the means necessary to live well, not in the sense that the virtuous man is ambitious and interested in accumulating more and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

more wealth, but in the sense that some material goods and physical health are necessary for the virtues to be exercised to the fullest extent. Also, the classical moral virtues in the Aristotelian tradition—and Cyrus as the prudent gardener is a good example—are usually felt to be at one with political virtues;9 to manage oneself well is contiguous with managing a household and a state. The rustic life is not political life, but what has worked well in political life may also work well in the management of a villa.10 Indeed, the rustic life in ‘retirement’ from the ambitions of the court and the state can be seen not as a step down, but as a step up from the toils of political leadership. After evoking the extreme pleasure of seeing one’s lands’ beauty and production grow, Lollio introduces examples of statesmen who retired to the country: Manius Curius Dentatus, the victor over Pyrrhus, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, King Attalus III of Pergamon, the Emperor Diocletian, and many others either abdicated or preferred the cultivation of their land to the glory of political power and military victories (583–7).11 Abdication and retirement to the land are not a sacrifice of oneself, but instead the exercise of one’s prudence in a way that offers a supreme pleasure and makes way for the excellent life of contemplation.12 For after the variety offered by the land comes the variety of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, allowing the mind to move from the particulars of one’s garden or field to contemplation of the first cause of them all.13 The active life is no longer in opposition to the contemplative life; no need to choose between them. There is a continuum between active cultivation/enjoyment of the land and the pleasures of the contemplative life, and this continuum is provided by variety in all its small and great forms. What sort of pleasure is this? It is not the pleasure of mere sensory stimulation, of which sex is the most obvious example. Neither is it the return of the troubled organism to a calm, natural state. Nor is it a sense of filling or repletion. All of these definitions of pleasure were available in the philosophical tradition.14 Instead, the pleasure of the rustic life as Lollio and many others evoke it, is an activity, and more precisely doing freely what you do best as a human being. To put this in more technical terms, but ones with which the early modern period would have been familiar, I need to have recourse to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In the seventh book, the philosopher treats the subject of pleasure, and after rehearsing the opinions of others, he comes to his own definition of pleasure: For pleasures are not really processes, nor are they incidental to a process [γένεσίς]: they are activities [ἐνέργεια], and therefore an end; nor do they result from the process of acquiring our faculties, but from their exercise; nor have they all of them some end other than themselves: this is only true of the pleasures of progress towards the perfection of our nature. Hence it is not



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

81

correct to define pleasure as a ‘conscious process’; the term should rather be ‘activity of our natural state,’ and for ‘conscious’ we must substitute ‘unimpeded’ [ἀνεμπόδιστος].15

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A bit later, Aristotle comes back to pleasure as an ‘unimpeded activity’: [S]ince every faculty [ἕξις] has its unimpeded activity, the activity of all the faculties, or of one of them (whichever constitutes Happiness), when unimpeded, must probably be the most desirable thing there is; but an unimpeded activity is a pleasure; so that on this showing the Supreme Good will be a particular kind of pleasure.16

In this account, pleasure is not a process or production of something different; for example, learning how to cultivate the earth well—the process that ends in being able to make the land more fertile or the crops more bountiful—is not a pleasure, since there are still constraints and lacks for the one learning how to do so. However, the exercise of the activity of cultivating the earth is a pleasure, once the ability has been acquired and one exercises this activity freely. The term ‘faculty’ translates ἕξις, a possession, and in the context of the Nicomachean Ethics, the disposition of virtue that one acquires deliberately and through repeated exercise over time. Just as a virtue, once acquired, is practiced freely and almost semi-rationally, the pleasure of gardening or farming is not the acquisition of its corresponding activity, but its sovereign exercise. Hence the emphasis by Lollio on ‘seeing’ the multiplication of cattle, the flowering of the fields, etc. Similarly, the ordered variety of a garden is a correlate of the semi-rational, habitual activity that is the virtue of prudence (and the other virtues). Order and clarity also convey the sense of end, or purpose, that inheres in the activity of (this sort of) rustic life. In defining the free activity that is the highest form of pleasure, Aristotle uses the adjective ἀνεμπόδιστος, ‘unimpeded’. The term is derived from ποδίζειν, ‘to tie the feet’, and from πούς, ‘foot’. Pleasure is exercising the ability to walk freely. On this account, it is intimately tied to movement, to the body’s free traversal of geography. The garden affords its prudent owner and cultivator the ability to move through it, and the ordered variety it contains does not hinder movement but encourages it, gives it spatial contours and stimulation. In representations of the garden and its pleasures, this movement is often rendered as visual perception, usually from a superior vantage point. Sight is the noblest of the senses and closely connected to the metaphorical representation of prudence, as containing foresight, providentia. In addition, the freedom of activity that is pleasure is expressed not by the wanderer dwarfed by the large enclosed forest all around him, but by a sort of magisterial gaze that passes through space and that can choose various objects and avenues and perspectives.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

The wealth of the garden or the land, providing its owner with all he needs, is one of the conditions of happiness (εὐδαιμονία). Aristotle notes that everyone agrees that the happy life must be a pleasant life, and that the lack of material and other goods to ensure some well-being is an impediment, hence inimical to a pleasant life: ‘[T]he happy man requires in addition the goods of the body, external goods and the gifts of fortune, in order that his activity may not be impeded through lack of them’.17 Abundance of products of nature is an ‘external’ good, from outside (ἐκτός); the villa provides at least this essential element of happiness. As I have emphasized, this is an aristocratic pleasure, in the sense that it is a vision of human excellence: the garden or the lands of a villa are an expression of the possibility of doing freely what human beings do best, and these human beings require some means to do freely what they do best. It is not an ascetic vision, it does not ‘transcend’ the material, but affirms a conjunction between moral activity or virtue and the pleasures derived from our condition as physical beings in a physical environment. I will turn next to a treatise that seems far removed from the aestheticizing tendencies of the Italian villa, the Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (first edition 1600) by Olivier de Serres. As its predecessor, Bernard Palissy’s Recepte veritable (1563), this compendious volume is meant as a practical guide to successful agriculture, and its composer is similarly a Protestant for whom nature’s gifts and man’s ability to solicit them are tied to God’s providence and, implicitly, to God’s providential role lent to the true Church.18 This practical orientation, the high degree of specificity that the descriptions and instructions contain, and the underlying Protestant ethic, do not prevent the text from evoking the pleasures of the rustic life, and particularly those of the garden. Olivier de Serres devotes the sixth ‘place’ (‘lieu’) of his Théâtre to the garden, of which there are four varieties: the ‘potager’ (for vegetables, roots, fruits, etc. for fresh or cooked consumption), the ‘bouquetier’ (for flowers, brushes, and herbs), the ‘médecinal’ (for plants used for medicinal purposes), and the ‘fruictier’ (an orchard, for fruit used for eating and for drinking). It is the second type that is devoted primarily to pleasure. Olivier de Serres points out that gardens should be closed off. Spatial enclosure reflects the deliberate choice the proprietor makes, since the number of roots, herbs, flowers, and fruits that God has given to man is immeasurable; hence the need to limit. The enclosed space also facilitates the internal disposition of the garden into walkways.19 Being able to delimit means being able to arrange, dispose, and to move through, all of which help to compose the particular pleasure that a garden entails. He also maintains that gardens should be located close to the house of their proprietor, possibly lower than the house itself, so that they are protected

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

83

by the house and can provide the owner with the pleasure of seeing them from a window from a superior vantage point.20 The garden’s location allows the seigneur to oversee and gaze over the garden, and the garden itself must allow a physical prolongation of this visual movement, as its components should be ordered in such a way as to permit ‘l’aisance, et beauté du pourmenoir’ (the ease and the beauty of strolling [through the garden]) (2.219). Free movement through a space designed by a diligent proprietor seems essential to the pleasure afforded by a garden. Visual language captures this sense of magisterial movement.21 Olivier de Serres devotes some time to gardens arranged as designs guided by ‘fantasie’, such as the decorative gardens evoking heraldic motifs or letters or numbers next to the royal châteaux of Fontainebleau, Saint-Germainen-Laye, Blois, etc., for which he provides illustrations. Their minutely distinct design requires certain types of plants and soil or rock and strict delineation of borders and compartments to avoid the confusion that the plants’ natural state normally permits. This type of garden expresses most fully the finality of pleasure, but here too, human activity, indeed work, is part of its enjoyment: Ce sont les ornemens du jardin de plaisir, destinés au contentement de la veue. Recréent aussi l’esprit, les précieuses et douces senteurs, procédantes d’une infinité d’herbes et de fleurs qu’on y eslève. Auquel delectable labeur, l’homme d’entendement s’employe de grande affection, pour soulagement en ses sérieuses affaires. Et comme la bonne musique ne saoule l’aureille de ceux qui l’aiment, ains, cessant, la laisse affamée: aussi le plaisir qu’on prend à voir et odorer les herbes et fleurs de belle representation et de bonne senteur, n’est jamais parfaict. Dont avient, que c’est tous-jours à recommencer, que le jardin à fleurs, où à toute heure l’on treuve de la besongne, soit ou pour y ajouster de nouvelles plantes, soit ou à ageancer et entretenir les vieilles. (2.301–2) (These are the ornaments of the pleasure garden, intended for the satisfaction of sight. They also entertain the mind, the precious and sweet odors, coming from an infinity of herbs and flowers that one grows there. To this pleasant labor the man of discernment devotes himself with great affection, as a relief from his serious business. And just as good music does not satiate the ear of those that love it, rather, when it ceases, it leaves the ear hungry, just so the pleasure one takes in seeing and smelling the herbs and flowers of beautiful presentation and with good odors is never complete. Hence one must always begin again with the flower garden, where at every hour one finds work to do, either in order to add new plants or arrange and maintain the old ones.)

We have all the well-known elements of the pleasures of gardening: the various, indeed innumerable joys of sight and smell, assimilated to the enjoyment of music. This pleasure is never ‘parfaict’, completed, in the sense that it is an activity, not a completed production (in Aristotle’s sense). While

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

entirely compatible with the senses, this activity is distinct from mere sensual stimulation: Olivier de Serres insists on the participation of the mind, and on the fact that it offers relaxation from the serious affairs of state. This activity engages the mind as it relaxes it, as a continuous project, a directed form of work but without an absolute terminus ad quem. It provides pleasure as it goes along. And the writer does not shy away from the vocabulary of physical effort: ‘labeur’ and ‘besongne’ denote work, not repose. In addition, one can pick up the work whenever one pleases, since there is always work to do, but without the constraints that serious affairs of state would impose. The ‘homme d’entendement’, the man of discernment, understanding, is the prudens, the prudent manager of himself, of his household (‘mesnage’) and of the state. Gardening is this ‘delectable labeur’, this pleasing work, that represents what human beings do best. More generally, all cultivation of the earth can be the occasion of the highest pleasure, when done in the knowledge of what is done (by the ‘homme d’entendement’). In his conclusion Olivier de Serres refers to Cicero, who praised agriculture in these terms: ‘Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius’ (But of all the activities, from which something is acquired, none is better than agriculture, none more abundant, none sweeter, none worthier of a free man).22 The French writer amplifies the last clause: ‘et qui mieux convienne à l’homme vivant noblement et en liberté’ (and that is more fitting to the man living nobly and in liberty) (2.773). This ‘vivre noblement’ is explicitly an aristocratic value,23 and Olivier de Serres’s book is meant to distinguish the gentleman from the mere farm laborer who does not know what he is doing. From this aristocratic, magisterial point of view, the features of the landscape are offered as a variety of pleasures: La sérénité du ciel, la santé de l’air, le plaisant aspect de la contrée, montaignes, plaines, vallons, coustaux, bois, vignobles, prairies, jardins, terres à blés, rivières, fontaines, ruisseaux, estangs; les beaux pourmenoirs ès jardins, prairies, et ailleurs; la contemplation des belles tapisseries de fleurs, les beaux ombrages des arbres, la joyeuse musique des oiseaux, les divers chants et langages du bestail, gros et menu, louans le Créateur, en [du ‘plaisir des champs’] sont les principales causes: y en ayant d’autres infinies, qui ne se peuvent réciter, pour le vivre, vesture, port, et plaisir de l’homme, dont Dieu a rempli la terre. (2.773–4) (The serenity of the sky, the healthiness of the air, the pleasing appearance of the countryside, mountains, plains, valleys, ridges, woods, vineyards, prairies, gardens, grain fields, rivers, sources, streams, ponds; the beautiful walkways in the gardens, prairies and elsewhere; the contemplation of the pretty tapestries of flowers, the pretty shade provided by the trees, the joyous music of the



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

85

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

birds, the various songs and languages of the domestic animals, large and small, praising the Creator, are the principal causes [of the pleasures of the country]: there being innumerable other causes that cannot be enumerated, for the life, the clothing, the doings and the pleasure of man, of which God has filled the earth.)

This list of pleasures instantiates the ‘abundance’ (Cicero’s ubertas) and the limitless variety of rustic life: the list proceeds largely through asyndetons, emphasizing the endlessly surging elements or phenomena of the landscape. On the other hand the list pulls back regularly and offers reminders of the vantage point: the countryside has a ‘plaisant aspect’ (to its observer); it contains ‘beaux pourmenoirs’ (to the person gazing or walking through it); the flowers are arranged in beautiful ‘tapisseries’ as objects of ‘contemplation’ (by a serene observer), and the sounds of the birds and other animals are understood to be praises of their Creator (by the Christian gentleman). God has arranged the countryside to be fitting to his human creature, who surveys the pleasures displayed. And he can do this freely. Olivier de Serres emphasizes the ‘franche liberté’ (open freedom) and the ‘façon de vivre … libre’ (free way of life) (2.775) of the country gentleman, as opposed to the constraints of life in cities that are so often ‘théâtre et … spectacle à nos misères et calamités’ (theater and spectacle of our miseries and calamities) (2.775). The infinite features of the countryside are there for (some of) us to exercise freely this virtuous activity that is the rustic life, and in doing so we participate in a chorus of praise offered by all creatures—animals and human beings—to the Creator. Again, the explicitly Christian framework recuperates the pleasure that is ‘doing freely what man does best’, this aristocratic, Aristotelian unimpeded activity of our highest faculties. Prudence, knowledge, and effort are all solicited, and so is ‘contemplation’. If the joy of salvation and closeness to God is the highest pleasure, gardening is certainly close.

Notes 1 On the more specific topic of the villa, its architectural variations and social setting, see James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially pp. 108–23 on sixteenth-century ‘villa books’; on the (Italian) Renaissance garden, Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); on the connection between the garden and conceptions of Paradise, Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978); and on this connection specifically in epic literature, A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (New Haven:

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

Yale University Press, 1966); see also Danièle Duport, Le Jardin et la nature: ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 2 Gabriel Chappuys, Le Secrettaire (1588), ed. Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie (Geneva: Droz, 2014), p. 569. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations of this text will be given parenthetically by page number. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3 It is true that the particularly aesthetic aspect of the garden is emphasized increasingly during the Renaissance; in some of the literature it is called a terza natura, a third nature, which is a human-induced combination of art and nature, by which gardens and their fruits achieve a quality superior to mere agriculture (the second nature). Human effort and artfulness are necessary, however. See the synthesis by Thomas E. Beck in the introduction to his edition of Bartolomeo Taegio’s La Villa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 58–69. 4 On variety as a classical cultural concept and its meanings beyond antiquity, including its relation to abundance, distinction, and association of elements, see William Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 5 The original Greek contains present participle verbal expressions (καταμετρήσαντός … διατάξαντος) instead of the nouns diligentia and sollertia. 6 In Ciceronian terms, memoria, intellegentia, providentia (De Inventione, 2.53.160). 7 See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ed. and trans. J.E. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), 5.23.66. 8 In Cicero: ‘[I]intellegentia [est] per quam ea perspicit quae sunt; providentia, per quam futurum aliquid videtur ante quam factum est’ (De Inventione, 2.53.160, my italics). At the same time, this ‘seeing’ of past, present, and future is a feature of God’s providential order, enriching the mastery given to man over all other creatures. Classical virtue theory confirms Biblical tropes. On the connection between a varied nature and theodicy, see Fitzgerald, Variety, pp. 39–46. 9 Although there are some virtues more relevant to the prince, notably liberality, magnanimity, and magnificence. The classical Christian virtues of clemency and gentleness are also a frequent feature of praise of the sovereign. 10 And the reverse: in an example well known in the early modern period, Cyrus rewarded governors whose territories were well-cultivated and stocked with trees and crops, and punished and replaced those whose territories were poorly cultivated (Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 4.8). In his Propos rustiques, Noël Du Fail emphasizes that not only did emperors leave their station to cultivate the land, but, inversely, that good farmers make good statesmen: ‘combien de Païsans bons laboureurs ont esté appelés de leur charrue pour prendre l’administration de Republiques fortes et puissantes, toutesfois sans eux ruïnées, mal ordonnées et (ce que l’on dit) à l’anchre!’, Noël Du Fail, Propos rustiques, ed. Gabriel-André Pérouse and Roger Dubuis (Geneva: Droz, 1994), p. 46. 11 A similar move from the inestimable pleasure of rustic life to the attraction this holds for those having held great positions of power is found in Bartolomeo Taegio’s dialogue La Villa (Milan: Francesco Moscheni, 1559), Ciiiv: ‘circa il

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Pleasure and the ‘rustic life’

87

diletto, non sente l’agricoltore piacere inestimabile dal verdeggiar della terra, dal nascer de frutti, dal moltiplicar de gli armenti, dal germogliare delle gemme, & innestati rampolli, che quasi sue creature crescer vede di man in mano? Onde molti honorati personaggi tirati dal diletto di questa degnissima arte, lasciarono le degnità, i governi, i regni, & i trionfi, per darsi al coltivar de campi.’ Taegio includes long lists of important personages delighting in the rustic life of the villa. On interpretations of abdication that emphasize, contrary to Lollio and Taegio, the ‘melancholy’ nature of the sovereign in the early modern period, see Jacques Le Brun, Le Pouvoir d’abdiquer: essai sur la déchéance volontaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 12 Montaigne argues that we should not praise kings so much for abdicating or retiring (the emperor Charles V’s abdication is a subject of great wonderment in the sixteenth century), since their responsibilities as kings are a great burden, and to be relieved of them a great satisfaction (Essais, 3.7, ‘De l’incommodité de la grandeur’). 13 Typically, Lollio presents this earthly and celestial variety in a vertiginous list of asyndetons: ‘[Using his intellect] il considere l’insatiable appetit de la premiere matiere, la fermeté et solidité de la terre, la rarité de l’air, le flux des eaux, le transparoir du feu, la splendeur cometes, la blancheur du Ciel, les productions des neiges, le tomber des pluyes, le congeler des gresles …, le verd des herbes, le renouveller des plantes, la varieté des fruicts, les sentimens des animaux, la nature des poissons …, le tourner des planettes et la disposition des Estoilles’ (588). All of this allows him to ascend up to the first cause, where the being and conservation of all things are contained. Natural theology and neo-Platonism hover in the background, although variety is not presented here in a ladder-like or hierarchical fashion. On the garden as a representation of the ordered cosmos, see Beck, La Villa, pp. 22–6. 14 See my Penser les formes du plaisir littéraire à la Renaissance (Paris: Garnier, 2009), for a summary overview of definitions of pleasure, pp. 9–18 and 46–53; on variety and pleasure, pp. 59–152; also my ‘Pleasure as unconstrained movement in Renaissance literary aesthetics’, French Studies, 64, no. 1 (2010), 13–25, where I focus on the pleasure of perceiving variety in neo-classical painting and in descriptive poetry. 15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 7.12.3.1153a8–15. 16 Ibid., 7.13.2.1153b12–14. 17 Ibid., 7.13.2.1153b17–19. 18 Olivier de Serres’s method proposes a ‘Science plus utile que difficile, pourveu qu’elle soit entendue par ses principes, appliquée avec raison, conduicte par expérience, & pratiquée par diligence. Car c’est la sommaire description de son usage, SCIENCE, EXPÉRIENCE, DILIGENCE, dont le fondement est la bénédiction de Dieu, laquelle nous devons croire estre, comme la quintessence et l’ame de nostre mesnage; et prendre pour la principale devise de nostre maison ceste belle maxime: SANS DIEU RIEN NE PEUT PROFITER. Là dessus nous bastirons nostre Agriculture…’ (Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Rewriting discourses of pleasure

champs, 2 vols (Paris: Huzard, 1804–1805), based on the 1603 edn, Preface, pp. clxxxvi–clxxxvii; the text of this edition was reproduced, with some defects by Actes Sud, (Arles, 2001). Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations of this text are from the 2001 edition and will be given parenthetically by volume and page number). Serres elaborates, then, on Cicero’s diligentia et sollertia. 19 ‘Tous lesquels jardins, contigus et unis ensemble, seront enfermés dans un clos, entr’eux divisés par allées descouvertes ou couvertes en treillages, plats ou voutoyés, ou autrement, ainsi qu’on voudra les disposer’ (2.219). 20 ‘Au dessous de la maison tendant au midi, est la droicte situation des jardins, tant par estre en abri de ce costé-là par le bastiment, que pour le plaisir d’estre veu des principales fenestres de la maison’ (2.218). Gardens in warm climates should be located just north of the house. The country estate itself can be situated on high ground, or, alternatively, nestled within surrounding hills or mountains; for the importance of the view from the classical and Italian villa, see Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 26–8. 21 A similar organization of the experience of the garden is found in Palissy’s text, where the narrator, in extolling the virtues of country life, walks through a landscape in which he sees various animals jumping and running, and this perception gives him great pleasure. The joys of visual perception are reinforced by the pleasures of sound (gurgling brooks, birds singing in trees). This pleasure is confirmed by memories of the Psalms (notably Psalm 104). See his Recepte veritable, ed. Keith Cameron (Geneva: Droz, 1988), pp. 164–70. Admittedly, one of the features of the garden can also be the labyrinth, in which the lines of sight are impeded and in which the spectator can play with the experience of being lost. However, I would argue that the labyrinth is premised on the spectator’s choice to become ‘lost’, and one of the pleasures of the labyrinth is the knowledge that, unlike a vast forest, one is bound to find the exit and no harm will be done. 22 Cicero, De Officiis, 1.42.151; see also De Senectute, 16.56. 23 As it is in Cicero. For the social resonances of the expression ‘vivre noblement’ in early modern France, see George Huppert, The Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

II

Imagining happy communities

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Timothy Hampton

We had a drink and he talked. His boots were smoothly polished dull leather. They were beautiful boots. He said it was all balls. They only thought in divisions and man-power. The Italians were cooked. Everybody knew they were cooked. We were all cooked. I had to go, I said. I had to get back to the hospital. ‘Good-by,’ he said. Then cheerily, ‘Every sort of luck!’ There was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness. (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms)1

Hospitality and moral action Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary opens its entry on ‘cheer’ by offering two definitions. From the French ‘chere’, we are told, the word means ‘entertainment’. From the Spanish ‘cara’, he adds, it means ‘the countenance’. ‘It seems to have, in English’, concludes Johnson, ‘some relation to both these senses’. Johnson’s modest acknowledgment of the confusion and ambiguity that surround the term is emblematic of its larger history.2 ‘Cheer’ could indeed be linked to the Spanish word cara. But it certainly comes into English from the Old French word chère, which does not initially mean ‘entertainment’, as Johnson says, but simply ‘face’. Both terms might possibly be derived from the Greek kara, which means ‘head’. The process through which ‘face’ comes to mean ‘entertainment’ is itself part of the entertaining story of cheer.3 In what follows I will study the semantic nuances that attach themselves to the notions of ‘cheer’ and ‘cheerfulness’ across the early modern period. Cheerfulness is an affect of the self that sits uneasily within the humoral physiology of the pre-modern period. Medical writing mentions it, occasionally, as a technique for combating melancholy.4 Yet at the same time it is a form of power, a kind of rhetorical force that, unlike conventional passions,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Imagining happy communities

remains partly within the control of the subject. You can ‘make yourself’ cheerful in a way that you cannot, for example, ‘make yourself’ happy. At one level, this involves the disposition of the face and the body. However, I will suggest that cheerfulness is also deeply theological and social. I will show that it emerges as a central concept for thinking about community, body, and morality in the middle years of the sixteenth century, chiefly through the way it is deployed in translations and commentaries on the New Testament. Through its theological rooting, ‘cheerfulness’ begins to take on some of the psychological connotations that will be associated with it in the modern period. And yet even as that theological underpinning begins to erode, the concept will live on, as part of the vocabulary of the self. It will persist, almost as a reflex or vestige of a communitarian ideal that, as we will see by looking at the plays of Shakespeare, is soon placed in crisis. Thus, the history of cheer is the history of affect, but it raises the question as well of how affects—here a particularly powerful affect—are appropriated by other discourses. In this case, a study of cheer can help us track the changing relationship between theology and literature. The link between facial expression and cheer is particularly strong in medieval culture, where ‘cheer’ is simply one word in English for face. Thus, Chaucer’s Man of Law begins his tale with a ‘sobre cheere’.5 In the ‘Knight’s Tale’ Emelye speaks to Diana ‘with pitous cheere’, as Palamon the knight kneels ‘with humble chere’, before riding forth later ‘with banner white, and hardy cheare and face’.6 These examples could be multiplied a hundredfold across Chaucer’s work. Only in very rare instances does the noun ‘cheere’ appear without an adjective to modify it. It lacks the connotations that, as we will see, come to it a bit later. For Chaucer, its psychological and emotional reach must be indicated through modifiers. Yet cheer is also connected to hospitality. And in this regard, when it is trained upon others, set into a codified social context, the word begins to assume certain implications. Here again Chaucer is useful: the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ introduces us to the Sultan of Surrye, who would courteously welcome a merchant from abroad, ‘make him good chiere, and bisily espye / Tidings of sontry regnes’.7 Good cheer involves welcome. The connection may come from French, for the French had been showing their ‘cheer’ for a good while by the time Chaucer’s character shows his hospitality. In his romance about Lancelot, Le Chevalier de la charrette, written in the 1170s, the poet Chrétien de Troyes recounts how Lancelot is welcomed into the home of a couple on his way to an ordeal that will test his courage and free his people. As he and his men ride up, the lady of the house welcomes them with a ‘chère molt joyant et liee’ (joyful and happy face).8 This link between hospitality and the ‘joyful face’ seems to be proverbial in medieval literature. It is later recalled in Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

93

where Lucrece unsuspectingly welcomes her rapist Tarquin to her home: ‘So guiltless she securely gives good cheer / And reverend welcome to her princely guest, / Whose inward ill no outward harm expressed.’ 9 With characteristic nuance and complexity Shakespeare unpacks the relationship between hospitality, ‘cheer’ and self-presentation hinted at in Chrétien’s welcoming couple. If there were any doubt that ‘cheer’ is a form of hospitality, his Lucrece helpfully presents both ‘good cheer’ and ‘reverend welcome’, even as Tarquin’s duplicity undoes the connection between inner self and sociability that Lucrece performs. The act of putting on a ‘good face’, or a bonne chère, then, bundles physical self-presentation with the rituals of hospitality. It involves the constitution of the self in its relationship to others. One can understand the social dimension of ‘good cheer’ by placing it in the context of feudal culture, where aristocrats lived in isolated castles, surrounded by potentially hostile ‘neighbors’. The prudent response to an incursion from any stranger would be to kill him. Instead, ‘to put on a good face’ offers a less violent response; it becomes a sign of courtesy—we might say, of civilization itself. And it is this link between hospitality and corporeal expression that accounts for what is probably the most widely used post-medieval use of the word chère in French. This is the expression that Johnson has in mind, whereby faire bonne chère, or ‘make a good face’, quickly, by the sixteenth century, becomes a synonym for celebrating or throwing a feast. From this point on, in French, chère begins to lose its strictly corporeal connotation and become a synonym for the social habits of festival or abundance. However, in the English tradition the relationship between hospitality and cheer emerges less proverbially and more gradually. It is developed through the body of lay religious writing produced in the fifteenth century. This work, which is instrumental in expanding reflection on religion and piety beyond the confines of the priesthood, casts the experience of beatitude and lay piety through a vocabulary of cheer. Perhaps the most intense and nuanced writer in this tradition, the mystic Julian of Norwich, insists, in her ‘showings’ or accounts of her visions of God, on the importance of God’s beautiful face. ‘Then I saw him ryally reigne in hys howse and all fulfyllyth it with joy and myrth hym selfe’, she writes in the sixth revelation, ‘with mervelous melody in endelesse love in hys awne feyer, blessydfulle chere, which glorious chere of the Godhede fulfyllyth alle hevyn of joy and blysse.’ 10 Julian’s account operates through a logic of metonymy to explain God’s simultaneous capacity to fill the universe and appear to the single believer. In the experience of the mystical vision the thing glimpsed, the face of God, his glowing ‘blessydfulle chere’, is described with the same term that denotes the happiness or ‘glorious chere’ that he spreads through the universe. God’s face and the joy that fills the world are extensions of one

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Imagining happy communities

another. And this extension can only be expressed, it would seem, through a capacious extension of the term that paradoxically posits a distinction between subject and object, self and God, and links them. Cheer, for Julian, can thus have an ‘external’ dimension—it can be ‘shown’, as it would be on a body—as well as an ‘internal’ or purely spiritual dimension. And this duality seems to be part and parcel of God’s presence, the ‘doubyl chere’ through which God contemplates the fallen world. As God looks upon the fall of Adam he expresses his pity through an ‘outward’ cheer and his ‘endlesse love and ryght’ through his inward cheer. The outward cheer, in turn, has two dimensions, one involved the ‘rufull fallyng of man’—Adam’s sin—and the other God’s reparation for that fall. At the same time, the ‘other chere’, the inward cheer, is not divided into fall and redemption. It simply offers a vision of completeness, ‘all one’.11 Thus for Julian the most inward experience of spiritual bliss is figured with a language of the face, and vice versa. Yet this complex metaphysics is not unrelated to the theme of hospitality, which I mentioned earlier. Julian’s intense experience of the presence of God relies on a language of exile and return. We are alienated from God’s presence and must return to it. And that return involves the assurance that our sins have been forgiven. It is figured as a homecoming: Then hope we that God has forgevyn us oure synne. And it is true. And than shewyth our curtesse Lorde hym selfe to the soule mereley and of full glad chere, with frendfully welcomyng as if it had been in payne and in preson, seyeng thus, ‘my dere darlyng, I am glad thou arte come to me in alle thy woe’.12

Thus for Julian ‘cheer’ does the work of linking the manifestation of the presence of God to the narrative of loss and return that is the experience of humans in the sinful world. It originates in a specific place, the face of God, in such a way that we must ‘come here’ to glimpse that face. Yet it is also understood to permeate the universe and make creation blessed.13 Julian’s exploration of the semantic elasticity of ‘cheer’ helps define the philosophical and theological context that the notion will take in the century after her work. For one thing, ‘cheer’ takes on an abstract coloration. ‘Cheerfulness’ is the noun that turns specific instances of ‘cheer’ into a general, decontextualized form of behavior. It seems to have come to the English some time in the 1530s. This is not to say that there were not cheerful people—even cheerful English people—before the 1530s. However, the word itself, with its conceptualizing and substance-conferring suffix ‘-ness’, makes its first appearance about that time. In Myles Coverdale’s translation of sections of the Bible, we read in the First Book of Maccabees that the Maccabees fought ‘with cheerfulness for Israel’.14 This rendering of the Vulgate Bible’s phrase ‘cum laetitia’—‘with happiness’—is picked up

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

95

again in the King James Bible. Thereby these cheerful fighters become canonical and ‘cheerfulness’ enters the conceptual vocabulary of English selfhood. According to the Oxford English Dictonary the English would only embrace ‘cheerliness’ in 1571 and ‘cheeriness’ much later, in 1864.15 Yet as we move from the late medieval world into the early modern sixteenth century, the filiations that produce the emergence of ‘cheerfulness’ as both a corporeal quality and a moral virtue become entwined with the great socio-religious questions dominating culture and politics. Central to the notions of charity and community put forth by St Paul in his Epistles— those notions that came to the fore in the debates around the Reformation—is the admonition that Christians must engage with each other gladly, just as, we might surmise, the Maccabees did their duty by fighting ‘cheerfully’ with Israel in Coverdale’s version of the Bible. Paul’s letters give us two influential formulations of this type of relationship. First, in Romans, chapter 12, Paul sets forth the famous doctrine of the Christian community as a body with ‘many members’. And he stresses that participation in that community must be done according to the different ‘gift’ given to each of us by ‘grace’. Let the one who gives give with simplicity; let the one who rules rule with diligence; and ‘he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness’, says the Geneva Bible’s verse 8—a formulation later repeated in the King James translation. The English term here renders Paul’s Greek word, hilaróteti, which means ‘in a happy fashion’. More important, for the overwhelmingly Latin culture of the English Renaissance, it renders the Latin of the Vulgate Bible’s, hilariter, which is derived from the Greek term. Hilariter evokes the Roman goddess of happiness Hilaritas, who was often depicted on coins. To give hilariter in Latin is to give happily. But in English translation it is to give ‘cheerfully’. Paul repeats the same language two books later, in an even more famous and, indeed, foundational, passage. This in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, where he sets forth the doctrines of sociability and ministry for the new Christian community. What is central to that community is charity, or caritas, says Paul. And to participate fully in it, say the Geneva and King James versions, ‘Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.’ ‘Hilarem enim datorem diligit Deus’, says the Vulgate at 9.7.16 These linguistic connections between cheerfulness and charity resonate across the emerging Christian humanist culture of early modern Europe, where, predictably, they take on different colorations according to context. The dynamic of cheerful community is firmed up and given authority in the writings of Desiderius Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the period, and the most famous European intellectual of the sixteenth century. In addition to translating the New Testament from Greek into Latin (thereby placing himself in competition with the authorized Vulgate version of St

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Imagining happy communities

Jerome on which Catholic doctrine was based), Erasmus penned lengthy commentaries and paraphrases on the Gospels and the major Pauline epistles. These texts secured his position as, with Luther, the major Biblical interpreter of the age. In his Paraphrases of Paul’s letters, Erasmus elaborates on Paul’s urging to practice charity ‘with happiness’. He adds that one must not give in such a way that the person receiving the gift feels unhappy about it. The ‘happy’ giver erases the difference between himself and the receiver. He does this by presenting the gift as if what were being given, given as it is with ‘happiness’ (repeating the Vulgate’s term hilariter), already belonged to the other: ‘hilaritate gratiam officii conduplicet, ut quicquid facitis, velut ex alieno et ex animo facere videamini’ (a task done with happiness is doubly gracious, since whatever is done appears to come both from within and from outside you).17 What we give others must both come from ‘inside’ us (‘ex animo’) and yet be given as if it did not belong to us at all, as if it came from someone else (‘ex alieno’). This blurring of self and other is important, for it is what distinguishes a Christian gift from a pagan gift. It sets New Testament charity apart from the classical pagan tradition of beneficentia or ‘benefits’, which is built upon an economy of favors and debt. To be sure, Erasmus’s comments on the grudging giver echo one of his famous Adagia, ‘He who gives quickly gives twice’, in which he collects various classical iterations of this notion.18 However in the New Testament paraphrases a visual nuance now emerges that links cheerfulness to the disposition of the body and the face. The social aspect of cheerfulness evoked by Erasmus begins to take on a body. This connection is expressed throughout mid-sixteenth-century spiritual writing, both Protestant and Catholic. Erasmus’s commentaries on the New Testament were quickly translated into English by Miles Coverdale, whom we met a moment ago. He renders Erasmus’s retelling of Paul’s commandment in Romans to give willingly in this way: ‘but let thy thankeful gyfte be encreased and doubled with a mery looke and cherefulness, so that whatsoever ye gyve, seme to gyve it even as it were an other mannes, and with all youre heartes’. 19 Coverdale doubles the reference to the visual appearance of the giver, stressing that he must have both ‘cherefulness’ and a ‘mery looke’. Indeed, the phrasing here is built from an inflation of good will. The gift itself is already ‘thankeful’, but cheerful giving doubles it. Cheerfulness thus becomes a kind of supplement that simultaneously completes the gift and makes it more than it already is. Charity is now no longer an affair of the heart. It binds body to community. The link is then projected onto an historical axis in the King James version of Christ’s words to his disciples about the last days, when he speaks, shortly before the Crucifixion, in the Gospel of John. ‘Do you now believe?

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

97

The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, every man to his home’, says Christ in verse 32 of chapter 16. But he goes on to reassure them, ‘I have overcome the world.’ ‘Confidite’, he says in the Latin version, using a verb that contains the root for ‘faith’. Thus, ‘have faith together’ or ‘have confidence’. ‘Be of good comforte’, says Coverdale. ‘Be of good cheer’, says the King James version. Christ’s words project through time the moral basis of Christian community that will be codified in Paul’s letters. Cheerfulness is what will sustain the Christian community in the space between the Crucifixion and the end of time. We should note here the specifically visual element that has emerged to define cheerfulness. It is about the look. The sense of ‘overkill’ or seemingly excessive gloss, in which Coverdale gives us two terms in lieu of one—‘cheere’ and the ‘mery looke’—is a common Renaissance rhetorical technique, known as the practice of copia, or a copious style.20 Coverdale’s copia shifts the focus of cheerfulness away from a more conventional notion of charity or generosity onto the face, bringing the body into community, even as community is understood as a body.

The rule of cheer Coverdale’s Englishing of Erasmus is a key text for tracing the cultural implications of ‘cheer’. Paul’s Biblical admonitions to charity are rendered consistently by Erasmus in his paraphrases with the language of the Vulgate to describe the happy disposition of the giver—chiefly, again, the Latin adverb hilariter. However, the Englishing of both Paul’s text and Erasmus’s influential glosses relies on the notion of ‘cheer’ or, in Coverdale’s Bible, ‘cheerfulness’. The semantic range of hilaritas is vast and, like many terms denoting positive emotions, it risks turning into a parody of itself, into sarcasm or derision. By contrast, ‘cheerfulness’ is more limited. Thus, at one level the translation of hilariter as ‘cheerfully’ is also a gesture of linguistic control, a way of policing the connotations of Paul’s formulation. Whereas hilaritas can flip from being a positive term to a negative term, becoming laughter or excessive exuberance, ‘cheer’ steadies the emotional intensity that marks the potentially awkward gestures of giving and receiving. It links the power relations of giver and receiver (implicit in the classical practice of beneficentia) to the establishment of a community of equals, all parts of the spiritual body of Christ. It does so, in part, as Coverdale’s renderings suggest, by adding a visual component, the ‘mery looke’ that harks back to the medieval notion of the ‘face’ or chere. Just as Shakespeare amplifies the hospitality of Lucrece by noting that it includes both ‘cheer’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Imagining happy communities

and ‘welcome’, so do these English versions of Paul’s great pronouncements about charity and community introduce the importance of appearance and the ‘looke’ that is semantically related to the ‘good cheer’ of a happy face. Whereas for Chaucer cheer was somatic and for Julian it was theological, it is now, in the evangelical context of Christian Humanism, at once somatic, theological and social. Indeed, it is the hinge that turns theological vision into social practice. Community, charity, and hospitality are linked to the status of the face. We can see here how ‘cheer’ is thickening from a term used to denote a body part to a larger notion that gathers and blends diverse aspects of human experience. And it follows from this larger context that once cheerfulness mediates the relationship of body to social context, it becomes, by a reversal, a resource, a marker, a visual index of the inner self, through which the social or theological engagement of believers might be measured. That is, it henceforth becomes possible to distinguish who is in the community and who is not, according to the disposition of the face and the ‘cheerfulness’ of the giver. Cheerfulness can now become a sign of a particular identity—and of a participation in a particular community. The changing link between community and face is clearest if we turn to Erasmus’s contemporary, Jean Calvin. For Erasmus, cheerful giving was the manifestation of a link between self and other that already existed. It meant that you and I are already parts of a larger whole, members of the body of Christ. By contrast, for Calvin, this expressive sign of communal identity becomes the test of one’s participation in community. Thus, in his commentary on I Corinthians 9.7 he notes that, When [Paul] says that God loves the one who gives cheerfully, he means … that God rejects those who give grudgingly and with stinginess: for He does not want to dominate us like a tyrant; but just as he shows himself to be our Father, so does he require from us filial obedience—prompt and honest.21

Calvin’s texts circulated in both French and Latin. In the French version he asserts that God loves ‘celuy qui donne joyeusement’ and regrets those who give grudgingly (‘ceux qui donnent à regret et en chichete’).22 For Calvin cheerfulness is not only the manifestation of a pre-existing spiritual and moral relationship to one’s fellows, as it is for Erasmus. It is also the mark of one’s duty to God, a sign of the inner climate of the heart, which must be in order if one is to be a full member of the community. ‘Prompt and frank’ obedience (‘prompte et franche’) means membership. If there were any doubt as to whom Calvin believes is terrifying believers ‘like a tyrant’, as he puts it in the passage just cited, he makes the reference clear in his comments on Romans 9.1. There he points out that the communal relationship among the cheerful is what distinguishes Protestants from



The theology of cheer

99

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Catholics. He comments on Paul’s exhortation that we turn away from the world and give ourselves wholly to God: This exhortation teaches us, that until men really apprehend how much they owe to the mercy of God, they will never with a right feeling worship him, nor be effectually stimulated to fear and obey him. It is enough for the Papists if they can extort by terror some sort of forced obedience, I know not what [Papistis satis est si coactum nescio quod obsequium terrendo extorqueant]. But Paul, that he might bind us to God, not by servile fear, but by the voluntary and cheerful love of righteousness [voluntario hilarique iustitiae amore], allures us by the sweetness of that favour, by which our salvation is effected; and at the same time he reproaches us with ingratitude, except we, after having found a Father so kind and bountiful, do strive in our turn to dedicate ourselves wholly to him.23

Here the exercise of cheerful giving is the mark of election, a free gesture. That freedom marks the difference between Protestants and Catholics. Whereas Catholics (‘Papists’) terrorize believers into obedience, the freedom of the Protestant believer resides in the fact that she freely and cheerfully turns to God, attracted by the ‘sweetness’ of God’s favor. And yet it is not just any freedom. It is a freedom that must be exercised with a particular attitude. In its own way, it is a freedom that is haunted by coercion. For as the believer turns voluntarily to God, her cheerfulness becomes, not merely the result of an appreciation of God’s favor, but the visual manifestation of obedience and dedication. Thus, at one level, it may presuppose election, even as it suggests that without the external manifestation of election, we have no way of knowing who is elected to begin with. It turns from being the consequence of belief into the very ground on which proper belief is exercised. The manifestation of cheerfulness, which was seen by Erasmus as the by-product of the believer’s dedication, now becomes, in the economy of the believing self, the guarantor of proper spiritual practice. We must not merely pray, which is essential to the Christian’s communication with God, but we must pursue our prayer without complaint, gladly, cheerfully. The point is made again in the commentary on the famous passage about charity in I Corinthians 12.8, where Calvin notes that Paul required the services of the charitable ‘to be rendered with cheerfulness, fearing that they might banish all grace from their service by their disdainful face—as often happens’ (il veut que le service qu’ils feront selon leur charge, soit avec liesse et alaigreté, de peur que s’ils y procedent avec chagrin ou quelque contenance desdaigneuse, cela ne face perdre toute grace a leur service, comme souvent il en advient’).24 In this formulation Calvin has expanded the role of cheerfulness to include social behavior. It is the opposite of ‘disdain’. It stands as

100

Imagining happy communities

the necessary glue that binds social relations and fixes our relationship to God. Not to be cheerful is to undermine community.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Tragic cheer Shakespeare’s investment in the themes of cheerfulness and community begins with Richard III, the gloomy conclusion to his first quartet of historical dramas. Richard III is itself a great meditation on the meaning of community and on the fragile bonds that link people to each other. If charity is the quality of Christian community, Shakespeare’s play sets up Richard as a figure of anti-charity. The first act of the play unfolds, in almost systematic manner, through a series of scenes in which charity and community are undermined in such a way as to place England at risk. This is thematized at 1.2.32–3, when Richard calls for the dead king Henry’s corpse to be set down by his bearers, Lady Anne says, ‘What black magician conjures up this fiend, / To stop devoted charitable deeds?’ 25 He turns her language back against her fifteen lines later by enjoining her not to reject caritas by cursing him, ‘Sweet saint, for charity be not so curst.’ And a moment after that, as he begins his seduction, he repeats the same language, ‘Lady, you know no rules of charity, / Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses’ (l.2.66). Richard exploits her expression of charity as a collective Christian virtue, nudging the meaning of ‘charity’ into the realm of amorous favor. When she threatens to destroy her own beauty rather than entertain his suit, he turns to a conventional natural metaphor of flattery, ‘As all the world is cheered by the sun, / So I by that; it is my day, my life’ (l.2.127). The breakdown of charity as a glue of community is then expanded in the very next scene, where Margaret, the widow of the dead king Henry, upbraids Richard and his minions. ‘Have done for shame if not for charity’ (1.3.273), she begs him. ‘Uncharitably with me have you dealt, / and shamefully by you my hopes are butchered. / My charity is outrage, life my shame; /And in my shame still live my sorrow’s rage’ (1.3.275–7). As Richard turns the language of charity against itself, appropriating it for his own advantage, Margaret then recasts the language of community altogether. What binds me to you is not my love for you, but my rage against you. This is an anti-charity, and anti-cheerfulness, where hatred is exchanged for hatred. Anti-charity binds people together by their hatred of a common enemy, not through their love of God. The play thus unfolds through language of anti-charity, as community is shredded by the violence of the arch-villain Richard. Yet if Christian charity and cheerfulness are linked for St Paul, Erasmus, and Calvin, this play locates cheer on the side of the destroyer of charity. The climax to this

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

101

process of dismantling the relationship between cheerfulness and charity comes on the eve of Richard’s battle with the Earl of Richmond. Before bedding down, he checks on the situation of his men. ‘Saw’st thou the melancholy Lord Northumberland?’ he asks Ratcliffe. Northumberland and Surrey, he learns, have gone off through the army, ‘cheering up the soldiers’ (5.3.72).26 Elizabethan medical writers conventionally set cheerfulness as an alternative to melancholy. Shakespeare here ironically takes on that language. He assigns the job of cheering the soldiers to the figure of melancholy. This has the effect of prying cheerfulness away from the sphere of theological community. It turns cheer into a detachable quality, an exchangeable form of social interaction that has nothing to do with the disposition of the self or collective. Shakespeare goes on to expand the implications of this gesture a second later. ‘So I am satisfied’, says Richard in the same speech. Then, taking a bowl of wine, he reflects on his situation: ‘I have not that alacrity of spirit / Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have. / Set it down. Is ink and paper ready?’ (5.3.74–6). The juxtaposition of Northumberland’s rhetoric with Richard’s self-analysis splits the notion of cheer from the ideals of community and social cohesion favored by Erasmus and Calvin. Richard’s self-conscious description of his state of mind now reveals retrospectively that his power and success have been linked to his cheerfulness—to that quality that he now names only when it is gone. In this gesture Richard anticipates later chroniclers and biographers such as Holinshed, Thomas More, and Shakespeare himself, who will retrospectively define him as a cheerful type. Richard’s actions throughout the play have, in fact, been inflected with a ‘cheer’ that offered some alternative version of selfhood to the struggles of his victims to reconstitute community. This is the cheer of a self that is cut loose from God, cheer as an idiosyncratic attribute rather than a spiritual bond. The delamination of cheer from community is underscored by the reference to Northumberland ‘cheering’ the troops. Cheer has degenerated into a kind of rhetoric. It emerges as the trick of the powerful to control their minions. The ‘cheer’ that binds the members of Richard’s army counterbalances and outweighs the charitable cheer that should bind members of the Christian community. Perhaps what is most striking about Richard’s acknowledgment of the loss of his cheer is its implications for thinking about literary genre. For it signals the onset of tragedy. It is almost as if Shakespeare were telegraphing to his audience that we are transitioning from history to tragedy, to the moment when the career arc of the ambitious king begins to bend toward his fall. The loss of cheer thus offers the psychological and humoral parallel to Richard’s upcoming defeat in battle. It prepares the way, at the level of character, for what is about to ensue in the plot. It resonates both backward

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Imagining happy communities

and forward, telling us that up to now Richard has been a cheerful fellow, but hinting that cheer and tragedy may somehow be incompatible. Richard is not alone, among Shakespeare’s villains, in his failure to generate ‘cheer’ at the moment he is tested. In Macbeth, just before Banquo’s ghost appears to disturb the banquet, Lady Macbeth chastises her husband for his inability to mix with the guests: ‘My royal Lord, / You do not give the cheer’, she scolds (3.4.32).27 She goes on to note that cheer is what turns a normal meal into a banquet: ‘Meeting were bare without it’ (3.4.36). Macbeth’s cheer may well include food and drink. But it also involves sociability—that quality that distinguishes the mere collecting of bodies in the same space from the establishment of an actual community. And as in the case of Richard, it is that thing that, at a crucial moment in his development, the villain Macbeth cannot express. The social climber and seducer Richard defines himself—indeed, describes himself—in terms of his cheer: ‘Set it down.’ He is the ambitious man who has appropriated sociability in order to ‘pass’, to invent a royal personality for his most unroyal self. Macbeth, by contrast, never descends to Richard’s level, and from his failure to join the party come both his isolation and, in part, his tragic power. The relationship of cheer and literary genre in Shakespeare’s world is made patent in Romeo and Juliet, a play that toys constantly with the generic boundaries between comedy and tragedy. And, sure enough, we are given two scenes of cheerfulness which showcase the generic tensions in the play: the first comes in Act 2, Scene 3, where the sanguine counselor Friar Laurence makes his first appearance praising the beauty of the new day and the sun’s capacity ‘to cheer, and night’s dank dew to dry’ (2.3.2).28 Ever the master of the cliché, the good friar sets forth the default relationship between the universe and the self. His optimism is echoed at the outset of Act 5, when Romeo, now living in exile in Mantua and involved in a scheme hatched by Friar Laurence to redeem his love for Juliet, wakes to recount his dream. The scene reprises the dawn love scene in which the lovers had earlier consummated their attachment, as well as Mercutio’s famous ‘Queen Mab’ speech, in which the power of illusion is explored. Romeo, however, believes ‘the flattering truth of sleep’. ‘My dreams’, he continues, ‘presage some joyful news at hand’ (5.1.1–2). He echoes Friar Laurence when he links cheer to the fabric of the day: ‘And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit / Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts’ (5.1.4–5). And he goes on to tell us that he dreamed himself dead but revived by Juliet. But such cheer is a false hope. A mere two lines later Balthasar enters to reveal that he has seen Juliet ‘dead’, which sparks Romeo to return to Verona and set in motion the misunderstanding that leads to his premature death and tragedy for the entire city. With uncanny precision cheer precedes the onset of disaster.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

103

As Shakespeare’s work unfolds, ironic representations of ‘cheer’ in the ambit of villains—and the subsequent loss of cheer—proliferate. This motif structures some of the most interesting moments of self-presentation in Hamlet. The play is extremely suspicious of ‘cheer’ or cheerful activity. Claudius’s early expression that Hamlet needs to stay put in Elsinore is articulated through a language of the face: ‘We beseech you, bend you to remain / Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, / Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son’ (1.2.115–17).29 Claudius’s formulation suggests the extent to which cheer has become, in Shakespeare’s tragedies, a problematic quality. Shakespeare is interested in the ways that cheer may turn against itself. Here, cheer defines the ‘eye’, yet the eye is the tool of surveillance. It is that thing which Claudius wants to keep trained on Hamlet, while pretending to bond with him. All of the problematic overlapping of individual bond and political or psychic manipulation that the play explores resides in the multiple senses generated by the juxtaposition of ‘cheer’ and ‘eye’—without even requiring us to pursue the unspoken but pertinent pun on ‘eye’/I. Claudius’s ambiguous manipulation of cheer, as both an overly jolly evocation of his courtly coterie and the face that will assure surveillance over Hamlet, is contrasted with yet another scene of loss. In the midst of the play within the play the Player Queen almost seems to be channeling Lady Macbeth when she laments the melancholy of the doomed Player King: ‘But woe is me, you are so sick of late, / So far from cheer and from your former state / That I distrust you’ (3.2.157–9). She sounds like Calvin, who registers ‘cheerful giving’ as the mark of the true Christian. Here the loss of cheer is the visible indicator of a breakdown of the self, of an alienation resulting in the dissolution of the bond between mates. And as in Richard III, the recognition of lost cheer both points back to an earlier image of self-assurance and adumbrates tragedy. Within the unfolding of Hamlet itself, what is striking is the epistemological certainty and moral clarity of this moment. In contrast to Claudius’s earlier ambiguous manipulation of the language of cheer, the Player Queen says unequivocally what she knows. Faces are notoriously difficult to read in Hamlet, but the Player Queen is a certain and steady reader. Moreover, she knows what she is talking about. There is bad business afoot. It is characteristic of the complex semiotic universe of Hamlet that this moment of certain and accurate interpretation of another’s face can only come inside the play within the play. It is only there, at the second order of a fiction inside another fiction that faces can be read in ways that they cannot in Elsinore more generally. Shakespeare thus explores and expands on the different connotations of cheer and cheerfulness that we saw earlier set forth in the writings of his near contemporaries such as Erasmus and Calvin. His plays narrate

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

104

Imagining happy communities

the severing of attitudes of cheerfulness from the ideals of community that would ground Christian renewal. He shows the ways in which cheer can become a rhetorical gambit, a distortion of the values of community in the manipulation, for example, of a doomed army. The complement to these moments, the flip side of the coin, as it were, is the self-conscious loss of cheer as the harbinger of tragedy, as the moment at which the onset of disaster is telegraphed to reader and spectator. As Richard says, ‘Set it down.’ Scholars of the history of emotion have tended to associate the positive power of cheerfulness and its cognates with the rise of the self-regulating Enlightenment subject and the birth of modern ‘emotion’ out of the earlier reign of the ‘passions’.30 My discussion has indicated, however, that cheer and its variants are centrally important in the emergence of discourses about the Christian community in the early modern period. By locating the question of community and theological identity in the body of the believer, ‘cheer’ binds themes of religious belonging to practices of sociability and hospitality. At the same time, it makes available a nexus of concerns that the emerging discourse of secular literature (in the person, here, of Shakespeare) will explore and explode. In the process, with characteristic self-consciousness, Shakespeare makes the appearance and disappearance of cheerfulness into a marker of literature itself, as a kind of affective gearbox that signals the onset of tragedy. It may thus not be by accident, in the opening lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that when Theseus and his Amazon queen Hippolyta witness the humiliation and potential banishment from society of Hermia (under the pretext of ‘Athenian Law’), Theseus turns to his alien beloved with the question, ‘What cheer, my love?’ 31 Hippolyta must be wondering what she has got herself into. Whether her dismay is culture shock at the strange customs of the Athenians, or the suspicion that the play she has stumbled into seems already to be flirting with tragedy, remains unclear.

Notes 1 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), p. 134. 2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar (W. Strahan, for J. and P. Knaptor, 1755), p. 380. 3 Joan Corominas’s Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana acknowledges the uncertainty that hovers around the origins of the word ‘cara’,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



The theology of cheer

105

which first appears in the Poem of the Cid in the eleventh century. Presumably there is a ‘low Latin’ term whereby the Greek ‘kara’ turns into a Latin ‘cara’, though he provides no examples. I have consulted the Gredos edition (Madrid, 1954), vol. 2, p. 661. Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992) simply lists the Greek ‘ka’ as the origin of the word, bypassing the putative Latin mediation. Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française (Paris: Robert, 1985), lists the first French use of ‘chiere’ from 1080. 4 See, for example, Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy. Contayning the causes thereof, the reasons of the straunge effects it worketh in our minds and bodies (London: John Windet, 1586), p. 38ff. 5 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) p. 88, v. 97. 6 Ibid., p. 56, v. 2295; p. 60, v. 2586. 7 Ibid., p. 89, v. 180. 8 Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, ed. Michel Zink (Paris: Livre de Poche, Pochothèque, 1994), p. 572, v. 2516. Unattributed translations are my own. 9 William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and Narrative Poems, ed. William Burto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 1992), p. 136, vv. 89–91. 10 Julian of Norwich, The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise N. Baker (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2005), p. 55. 11 Ibid., p. 81. 12 Ibid., p. 55. 13 Underpinning this movement of exile and return we might identify the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. However, that story nowhere features the emphasis on the face that Julian’s language slips into her account. 14 Miles Coverdale, Biblia: The Bible, that is, the Holy Scripture (London: 1535), I Maccabees 3.2. I have consulted the online version at www.archive.org. 15 ‘cheeriness’, OED Online, December 2020 (accessed 16 December 2020). 16 The Geneva and King James versions differ here only in that the Geneva version says ‘as every man wisheth in his heart’, whereas King James has ‘purposeth’. I have consulted studybible.info/Geneva. The King James is from The Reader’s Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1951). 17 This is the paraphrase of Romans 12.8, cited from Erasmus, Opera Omnia (Amsterdam, 1706), vol. 7, p. 818. Erasmus’s works are slowly being re-edited by a team working with the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam. These passages, however, have not yet appeared in modern versions. 18 Erasmus, Adagia, 1.3.91. First published in 1508, Erasmus’s Adagia was the scholarly bestseller of the age. I have consulted the edition published in Paris in 2010 by Les Belles Lettres. 19 The seconde tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testament, trans. Miles Coverdale (London, 1548). The same vocabulary appears in Erasmus’s recasting of the canonical passage from I Corinthians that I quoted earlier. Erasmus renders notion of God’s love for a ‘happy giver’ as ‘atqui hilarem datorem amat deus’, and Coverdale faithfully provides ‘God loveth a cherefull

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Imagining happy communities

gever’, a phrase that will be picked up verbatim in the King James Version. Erasmus adds the reflection that in God’s eyes the one who complies with his duty grudgingly does not comply at all. For Calvin, that God’s-eye projection will become a human discrimination. Erasmus points out in his annotations to the passage that though he uses the accepted term ‘hilariter’ in his own Bible translation, some better term might be found to render Paul’s text more cheerful (so to speak) and clearer (‘iucundior ac dilucidior’). See Epistolam ad Corinthios Secundam Annotations, 6.8, of Erasmus’s Opera Omnia, ed. M.L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2003), p. 426. 20 In his manual about good literary style, De Copia, Erasmus himself had stressed the value of ‘copia’ or ‘plenitude’, of the ability to expand an idea through linguistic variety. Linguists call this particular translation feature ‘binominalism’: the technique of translating a key term in the original language by two terms in the target language, as if one word were not enough. 21 The English versions of Calvin will come from John Owen’s translations (Edinburgh: 1849), available online at the Library of Liberty. The Latin will come from the Opera Exegetica, 16 vols, ed. Helmut Feld (Geneva: Droz, 1994). French passages will be from the Commentaires de M. Jehan Calvin sur toutes les Epistres de l’Apostre S. Paul (Geneva: Badius, 1557). This text may be found online through the www.e-rara.ch initiative of the Library of Geneva. 22 Calvin, Opera Exegetica, 15.153. 23 Ibid., 13.255. 24 Calvin, Commentaires, p. 135. 25 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (London: Routledge, Arden Shakespeare, 1994). 26 On Shakespeare’s engagement with Evangelical ideas of community see Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially ch. 4. 27 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, Arden Shakespeare, 1980). 28 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen, Arden Shakespeare, 1980). 29 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, Arden Shakespeare, 1982). 30 See, for example, Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), ch. 8; Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 101ff.; and William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Conclusion. 31 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, Arden Shakespeare), 1.1.122. My thanks to Kathryn Crim for research assistance and feedback as I began working on this essay.

6

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘My crown is called content’: positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy Paul Joseph Zajac

In the opening lines of Richard III, the titular character famously states, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’, which introduces a string of comparisons calling attention to the new-found prosperity of his house (1.1.1–2).1 Excluded from the spoils or otherwise incapable of enjoying them, Richard waxes almost nostalgic for the violence and chaos of wartime, to which he was personally well-suited. Richard claims that he ‘cannot prove a lover’ and describes his physical deformities as a source of isolation from family, friendship, and the opposite sex (1.1.28). Yet his ‘our’ in the first line is productively ambiguous, not only referring to the house of York or England as a whole, but also establishing an alternative affective community between ‘villain’ and audience through soliloquy (1.1.30). Indeed, by the speech’s end, the ‘winter of our discontent’ seems far from straightforward. Is Richard’s own winter of discontent over, ongoing, or just beginning? Had he been experiencing discontent before, or was he contented then? Can Richard be content? Is he content with discontent, and what would such a paradox even mean? And if Richard’s ‘our’ really does implicate the audience, how does the contentment of the one relate to the discontent of the other, or vice versa? The two affective states, as well as the affective exchanges between character/actor and audience, become difficult to parse.2 The complications only increase when we recognize that Richard’s ‘winter of our discontent’ invokes a discourse of contentment and discontent that ran through the preceding plays in the tetralogy and through Renaissance and Reformation discourse more broadly. As Steven Mullaney has recently argued, the Protestant Reformation had an enormous impact on the understanding, valuation, and experience of emotions in the early modern period.3 Of these reformed emotions, contentment may be in especial need of reassessment today. Seemingly less interesting than melancholy, less productive than anger, and less sexy than joy, contentment has not yet found its place in our accounts of Renaissance affect.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Imagining happy communities

However, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, authors detailed the nature and benefits of contentment across all manner of theological, philosophical, political, and literary texts.4 The word ‘content’ derives from the Latin continēre, meaning ‘to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain’, and the past participle contentus, meaning ‘contained, limited, restrained, whence self-restrained, satisfied’.5 Indeed, the noun ‘content’ was used in the early modern period, as today, to signify either ‘That which is contained in anything’ or ‘satisfaction, pleasure; a contented condition’.6 The shared etymological underpinnings of ‘content’ and ‘content’ was not just a source of wordplay (as in Shakespeare’s puns in Sonnet 1.11 and As You Like It 5.4.121), but also led to a more fundamental intertwining of the two ideas. By ‘[h]aving one’s desires bounded by what one has’ and ‘not [being] disturbed by the desire of anything more, or of anything different’, as the earliest definition for the adjective ‘content’ reads, the contented subject works to define and defend the boundaries of the self.7 Contentment is satisfaction and delight, but it is also a habit of self-containment that moderates the perturbations of the passions. In other words, it is both a positive affect and a positively inflected response to affect, or regulation of affective transmission. This dual status of contentment as ethic and emotion distinguishes it from related classical concepts like constancy and tranquility. Even as Reformation writers drew upon Stoic philosophy to describe Christian contentment, they insisted on a more prominent position for positive affect. Authors represented contentment as an emotional effort which holds the individual together—an affective principle that allows the subject to form proper relationships with and protect itself from the other. Although Renaissance theories of the passions precluded concepts of the emotions as purely individual or internalized, contentment, in its most idealized form, was represented as independent of external circumstances. Preaching on 1 Timothy 6, Henry Smith explains, ‘contentation … is in the mind, for Godlines is in the mind, and the gaine of Godlines is contentation’.8 In his translation of Jean de L’Espine’s Very Excellent and Learned Discourse, Touching the Tranquilitie and Contentation of the Minde (1592), Edward Smyth describes content as a defense ‘against the fierce assaultes of frowarde fortune’ and ‘the desired haven, wherein everie one shoulde harbour him selfe from the tempestuous rage of his owne distempered humours, and … all the violent passions wherewith we are tossed’.9 Thomas Taylor says that ‘godliness fenceth the heart with contentment’ and portrays the contented individual as ‘selfe-sufficient’.10 Jeremiah Burroughs’s The Rare Jewell of Christian Contentment (1648) elaborates on this connection between selfsufficiency and contentment. According to the publisher’s preface, the late Burroughs sought ‘Such a skill as did not onely poyse and compose his spirit in the present enjoyment of all; but might fortifie and furnish him

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My crown is called content’

109

with provision for the future against the loss of all, in times wherein no man knoweth what evil will be in the earth.’ More than just a passive satisfaction or diluted pleasure, contentment is a skill and a ‘Soul businesse’ that can preserve the self in times of crisis.11 By contrast, discontent, according to Thomas Gataker, is a form of selfdivision caused by ‘carking care[s], as euen diuideth the minde in twaine, and cutteth the very soule as it were asunder’.12 Robert Burton frequently pairs discontent with melancholy, but he aligns content with ‘true peace, tranquility … and happinesse’: ‘How happy might we be, and end our time with blessed dayes, and sweet content, if we could containe our selues, and as we ought to do, put vp iniuries, learne humility, meeknesse, patience, forget and forgiue, as in Gods word we are inioyned.’ 13 Even so, it is important for us as readers of early modern texts not to make the seductively intuitive leap that content and discontent are strict opposites in all contexts. As a positive emotion, contentment can, of course, differ quite radically from the ‘mixture of anger, and of grief; both which are wont to raise up fearfull tempests in the Soule’, which Joseph Hall identifies as discontent.14 However, as a positive habit of self-containment, contentment might be said to be the opposite of emotional instability or even affective change more broadly, rather than discontent exclusively. At other times, contentment can be paired with negative affects in surprising ways, or one state can seemingly slide into the other and defy a sense of stability altogether. Finally, as many of these authors suggest, contentment becomes most visible when circumstances are at their worst. Contentment is most important when happiness is most elusive. While a distinction between positive and negative affects might be conceptually useful—and appropriate, given the privileging of negative affect in decades of literary criticism—an attention to content and discontent in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy cautions us from enforcing our own binaries too rigidly and helps us to further understand the political import of affect, both positive and negative, in the English Renaissance. Admittedly, there may seem something perverse in charting contentment in the first tetralogy, for at least two reasons. First, insofar as contentment aligns with positive affect, it can be difficult to locate in plays that, overall, appear anything but positive. Obviously, these plays depict a deeply troubled period of English history, and they often stray from the historical records to produce even more shocking theatrical spectacles and even more scathing social critiques. Ronald Berman likens the tetralogy to the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, all of which reveal that ‘history is a painful process’.15 When John Crowne adapted The First Part of the Contention for the Restoration stage, he gave it the telling new title The Misery of Civil War.16 Even when the final scenes of Richard III end the tetralogy on a

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Imagining happy communities

more promising note, Laurie Ellinghausen insists that the sequence of plays ‘offers a view of history that troubles the heroic narrative it purports to offer: history captures the inscrutable yet inescapable way that subjects and realms participate in one another’s trauma’.17 What place could contentment have in these contentious, traumatic, tragic histories? The second issue pertains more specifically to contentment, rather than positive emotion in general. I have described contentment in relation to containment and boundedness, yet scholars since at least Stephen Greenblatt have understood the tetralogy plays as interrogating all manner of boundaries.18 The uncertainty of personal, social, and political borders no doubt contributes to the painful experiences described above, and Lisa Dickson suggests that in 1 Henry VI ‘epistemological uncertainty is forcibly stabilized through violence’ within the ‘struggle to reestablish and police these threatened boundaries’ between ‘the self and the Other’.19 The implications of Dickson’s argument extend beyond the first play, but Shakespeare also interweaves throughout all four plays a vocabulary of contentment which articulates an alternative means of attaining stability amidst uncertainty and navigating the boundaries between selves. Shakespeare does not accept unquestioningly a principle of pious contentment, but the pervasiveness of the cultural conversation would have made it, at worst, an unavoidable topic and, at best, an object of serious artistic and intellectual interest. In the first tetralogy, a shrewd treatment of positive emotion exists alongside grim representations of historical hardships. Shakespeare transforms the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses into a testing ground for contentment under siege. More broadly, he exposes the political arena as one in which all manner of affect come into contact and conflict, while subjects and sovereigns fortify themselves as best they can. Before the familiar contention between York and Lancaster arises anew, much of the discourse of content in 1 Henry VI centers on Margaret. When the king’s counselors initially urge him to marry, he laments, ‘my years are young, / And fitter is my study and my books / Than wanton dalliance with a paramour’, but nevertheless concedes, ‘I shall be well content with any choice / Tends to God’s glory and my country’s weal’ (5.1.21–7). In characteristically pious tones, Henry submits to the prospect of marriage, and the Earl of Suffolk adapts the king’s language of contentment from there. Courting Margaret on Henry’s behalf, Suffolk states, ‘I unworthy am / To woo so fair a dame to be his wife— / [aside] And have no portion in the choice myself. / How say you, madam? Are ye so content?’ (5.4.79–82). Margaret consents, saying, ‘An if my father please, I am content’ (5.4.83). Suffolk expresses his gratitude to her father, Reignier of France, with ‘kingly thanks / Because this is in traffic of a king’, but adds, ‘methinks, I could be well content / To be mine own attorney in this case’ (5.4.119–22). Shakespeare

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My crown is called content’

111

uses the word ‘content’ three times in forty lines here, but its function has subtly slipped over the course of the scene. Suffolk and Margaret both initially apply the word ‘content’ in deference—or at least seeming deference— to the will and desires of another, but by the end of the exchange Suffolk has completely co-opted the king’s own contentment. Instead of having his desires bounded by what he has, Suffolk overreaches, romantically and politically. To complete the match, Suffolk weaves a tale of Margaret’s beauty and virtue to entice the king, until he concludes, ‘with as humble lowliness of mind / She is content to be at your command— / Command, I mean, of virtuous chaste intents / To love and honor Henry as her lord’ (5.6.17–21). Despite all this talk of contentment, Suffolk seeks to ‘bereave him of his wits with wonder’ (5.4.151), and, by Henry’s account, he succeeds: Your wondrous rare description, noble earl, Of beauteous Margaret hath astonished me. Her virtues, gracèd with external gifts, Do breed love’s settled passions in my heart, And like as rigor of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love. (5.6.1–9)

David Bevington describes Margaret’s beauty (whether seen directly by Suffolk or appreciated vicariously by Henry) as ‘producing … an inability to move, to speak, to exercise self-control’, and he brands her as ‘the symbol of inverted passions leading to universal disorder’.20 In addition to Margaret’s beauty, though, the suggestion of her content helps provoke Henry’s ironically excessive response, which reflects anything but a steady, stable contentment. Indeed, he yields to the very kind of passionate upheaval that contentment was meant to resist. In his final speech of the play, Henry states, ‘I feel such sharp dissension in my breast, / Such fierce alarums both of hope and fear, / As I am sick with working of my thoughts’ (5.6.84–6). Exhibiting ‘all the diseased Petrarchan symptoms’, Henry rejects both the counsel of Gloucester and the content of emotional containment, as he surrenders to rapturous passions and pleasures.21 The first usage of ‘content’ in 2 Henry VI reflects the romantic context of Margaret’s courtship and exists uneasily alongside ravishment once more. In the opening scene, Henry states, ‘Her sight did ravish, but her grace in speech, / Her words y-clad with wisdom’s majesty, / Makes me from wond’ring fall to weeping joys, / Such is the fullness of my heart’s content’ (1.1.32–5).22 Henry’s ravishment at Margaret’s beauty mirrors his response at the end of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

Imagining happy communities

1 Henry VI, and even though the sentence ends in ‘content’, the ‘but’ signals more of an elaboration than a juxtaposition. While Henry conventionally describes his ‘heart’s content’ as a ‘fullness’, it actually takes the form of an overflowing with his ‘weeping joys’—an uncharacteristic display of contentment in the period discourse, though not an unfamiliar physiological expression of joy. Henry’s content, then, is an accumulation of his powerful feelings, which he does not at present seem fully capable of containing. For his part, Suffolk continues his relationship with Margaret while also counseling her in contentment: ‘Madam, be patient. As I was cause / Your highness came to England, so will I / In England work your grace’s full content’ (1.3.64–6).23 These lessons in patience and contentment allow them to scheme effectually for a time, but after Suffolk goes too far and has Gloucester murdered, the Lieutenant will execute him for his ambitions, ‘For daring to affy a mighty lord / Unto the daughter of a worthless king’ (4.1.80–1). Across these plays, courtship is intertwined with contentment, the prospect and promise of love, even as unruly passions resist containment and precipitate personal and political problems. While contentment’s place in the vocabulary of wooing and wedding is, at times, at odds with its significance as a form of emotional containment, its relationship with politics is even more complex. The language of contentment often registers a transaction of power or an acknowledgment of submission (as in Suffolk’s description of Margaret in 1 Henry VI 5.6). That is, contentment recognizes a hierarchy.24 When Henry learns that the Duke of Burgundy has switched his allegiances, he says, ‘Lord Talbot there shall talk with him / And give him chastisement for this abuse. / —How say you, my lord? Are you not content?’ to which he responds, ‘Content, my liege? Yes. But that I am prevented, / I should have begged I might have been employed’ (1 Henry VI 4.1.68–72). While Talbot affirms his contentment as a gesture of obedience to his king, both the rebel Jack Cade and Richard, Duke of York, use the term as they attempt to assert their own, alternative hierarchies. Leading a mob toward London, Cade says, ‘Tell the King from me, that for his father’s sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign; but I’ll be Protector over him’ (2 Henry VI 4.2.143–6). Cade’s offer is darkly comical in light of the contentious tenure of Gloucester as the Lord Protector, and his use of the word ‘content’ contrasts sharply with the social discontent driving his pseudo-populist movement. And when Richard Plantagenet in 3 Henry VI confronts Henry in the Parliament House and sits in the chair of state, York proclaims, ‘It must and shall be so. Content thyself’ (1.1.85). Within a hundred lines, the king has resolved, ‘I am content. Richard Plantagenet, / Enjoy the kingdom after my decease’ (1.1.174–5). At times, contentment takes on the force of a command, and those with power can constrain the



‘My crown is called content’

113

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

desires of others and impose their model of contentment, benevolent or otherwise.25 However, Henry also juxtaposes a monarch’s pursuit of personal contentment with his public responsibilities: Was ever king that joyed an earthly throne, And could command no more content than I? No sooner was I crept out of my cradle But I was made a king at nine months old. Was never subject longed to be a king As I do long and wish to be a subject. (2 Henry VI 4.9.1–6)

Henry laments that he could never develop an identity or fulfill desires distinct from his political position. He can command his subjects—or some of them, for the time being—but he cannot command his own contentment. Indeed, the scene proves an emotional roller coaster for Henry: after this speech, he swiftly delights at the news of Cade’s flight, only to become distraught once again when he hears of York’s army. He claims, ‘Thus stands my state, ’twixt Cade and York distressed, / Like to a ship that, having scaped a tempest, / Is straightway calm and boarded with a pirate’ (4.9.31–3). Henry’s simile both parallels the Petrarchan imagery of his passionate effusion at the end of 1 Henry VI (5.6.5–9) and recalls the capture and death of Suffolk. In this way, Henry’s political turmoil resembles both the onset and outcome of over-powerful erotic passion. Furthermore, Henry’s account reaffirms his self-description in the previous act: ‘my heart is drown’d with grief, / Whose flood begins to flow within mine eyes, / My body round engirt with misery, / For what’s more miserable than discontent?’ (2 Henry VI 3.1.198–201). While the closing line risks sounding a bit like ‘what’s sadder than sadness?’ the account as a whole effectively manipulates the cultural discourse on contentment to define Henry’s discontent. Instead of experiencing fullness, Henry overflows with a tear-flood of grief; instead of an affective containment that protects him from fickle fortune and violent passions, Henry’s discontent constrains his body with the very same. Henry’s remarks in 4.9 also contrast sharply with those of Alexander Iden in his Kentish garden in the very next scene: Lord, who would live turmoilèd in the court, And may enjoy such quiet walks as these? This small inheritance my father left me Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy. I seek not to wax great by others’ waning, Or gather wealth I care not with what envy; Sufficeth that I have maintains my state, And sends the poor well pleasèd from my gate. (4.10.14–21)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Imagining happy communities

Coming so soon after Henry’s remarks, Iden’s preference of his own contented state to monarchy is conspicuous and telling. The passage echoes Elizabethan pastoral dialogues, though Iden experiences a cushier contentment than his shepherd equivalents.26 His gardens are sufficient for his own needs and for charitable giving to others, while the court is a place of turmoil, competition, and envy, the last of which was commonly identified as one of the primary passions opposed to contentedness.27 Up to this point, Iden has remained relatively free from the political and military squabbles that have embroiled England, but Cade forces his hand when he appears unexpectedly in the garden. After instigating the battle, however, Cade insists that famine, not the superior strength or skill of his foe, was responsible for his defeat. His ‘ambitions’ brought him to this point (4.10.1), and his temper keeps him from partaking of Iden’s food, quite unlike the poor folk that Iden sends satisfied from his gate. Cade refuses the contentment offered by the garden of Iden, with all that the Edenic pun suggests. Unlike the king and Cade, both of whom have found their political fortunes to be bound up with discontent, Iden exists in a contented closed system. This is not to deny that the garden is, as Thomas Cartelli argues, ‘intersected by mutually exclusive and competing class interests’, but the contentment experienced there has nevertheless prepared Iden to endure and engage his historical circumstances in the ways that early modern discourse would anticipate.28 Elyssa Cheng rightly observes that Cade ‘trespasses the border, the physical boundary of the garden, but also threatens the class and social boundary as symbolized by Iden’s garden state’; thus, Iden’s defeat of Cade reflects not just a reaffirmation of hierarchies, but the maintaining of one’s individual boundaries upon which contentment depends.29 In killing Cade, even without initially recognizing him, he is able to do what many others cannot and arguably performs one of the most significant political actions in the entire play. Paul Dean describes Iden’s emergence as a political player as evidence that the ‘monarchy of the mind is insufficient’,30 but I would counter that this contentment is a precondition, that the monarchy of the mind helps to defend the monarchy itself. Iden’s contentment walls him off from political chaos, but it does not detract from—and, perhaps, even makes possible—his political efficacy. For the monarch, though, personal contentment and political power are consistently at odds in 3 Henry VI. As Henry watches the Battle of Towton unfold from a distance, he muses, ‘methinks it were a happy life / To be no better than a homely swain, / To sit upon a hill, as I do now’ (2.5.21–3). Indulging his pastoral fantasy, he asks, ‘Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade / To shepherds looking on their silly sheep / Than doth a rich embroidered canopy / To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?’ (2.5.42–5). Faintly echoing Iden, Henry disparages the life of the prince in his palace,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My crown is called content’

115

‘His body couchèd in a curious bed, / When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him’ (2.5.53–4).31 As he concludes this escapist day-dream, two soldiers enter: a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son. The plights of these men might highlight the self-pity or even naiveté in the king’s speech, but they also confirm his account of the discontent brought about by political conflict. The interfamilial murders stand in synecdochally for England’s unnatural state of civil war and recall the king’s disinheritance of his son Edward, who will shortly usher him offstage. Catherine Sanok, however, observes that the characters of Father and Son, first and foremost, ‘are allegorical figures for affective relationships’: ‘the Son and Father in 3 Henry VI suggest a form of community that does not reduce its constituents to allegorical members of a body politic but leaves open a place for the affective lives of its citizens’. I find this ‘faint promise of an alternative form of community’ based on affect to be compelling, but Henry himself is unable, in this moment of tragedy, to perceive or experience emotion as something that can bring people together.32 Henry recalls his question from the previous play—‘Was ever king that joy’d an earthly throne, / And could command no more content than I?’—by asking now, ‘Was ever king so grieved for subjects’ woe?’ (4.9.111). He concludes unequivocally, ‘Much is your sorrow; mine, ten times so much’ and soon reiterates, ‘Sadhearted men, much overgone with care, / Here sits a king more woeful than you are’ (4.9.112; 4.9.123–4). Instead of just acknowledging the affective lives of his citizens, he incorporates them into his own emotional duress. Instead of commanding a contentment that might help hold together both himself and his country, Henry buckles under the collective woes of England. Neither of the king’s two bodies can contain itself. In light of Henry’s laments, it can be somewhat jarring when, two scenes later, Henry professes his own contentment as he is apprehended by gamekeepers loyal to Edward, yet his lines are consistent with contentment’s characterization elsewhere. When Humfrey and Sinklo question if he is the king, he responds, ‘My crown is in my heart, not on my head, / Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones, / Nor to be seen: my crown is called content, / A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy’ (3 Henry VI 3.1.62–5). Henry asserts the very affective autonomy that he denied in the preceding play, when he lamented that he could not command his own contentment. However, he still constructs contentment in opposition to kingship (it is neither evident in his royal trappings nor common for a king to possess). In fact, he can only claim this contentment after losing his political power, as Humfrey’s jibe, with its cutting repetition, makes clear: ‘Well, if you be a king crowned with content, / Your crown content and you must be contented / To go along with us’ (3.1.66–8). At the same time, though invisible, Henry’s contentment emerges just when Reformation writers agree that it is most

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Imagining happy communities

necessary: in a time of crisis, when everything else is stripped away. Henry’s contentation here may sound suspiciously like a consolation, but by deploying the discourse of contentment he is at least able to claim an authority that empowers him—emotionally, if not politically—in a moment of grave vulnerability. Nevertheless, in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, the ruler’s contentment conflicts with his status as a ruler; the existence of one seemingly precludes the other. While contentment may indeed be the ideal for subjects, it remains elusive, if still desirable, for the sitting monarch. Romantic and political contentment come into conflict once again in the final acts of 3 Henry VI and set the stage for the eventual downfall of the house of York (or, put differently, its integration into the Tudor dynasty). When Warwick hears of Edward’s marriage to Lady Grey, he is ‘full of sorrow and heart’s discontent’ (3.3.173), and he is not alone. Edward asks his brother George, ‘how like you our choice / That you stand pensive, as half malcontent?’ (4.1.9–10). Edward misunderstands the frustration of his brother and offers, ‘Alas, poor Clarence, is it for a wife / That thou art malcontent? I will provide thee’ (4.1.59–60). Warwick will lob such language in Edward’s face when he comes to capture him: Alas, how should you govern any kingdom, That know not how to use ambassadors, Nor how to be contented with one wife, Nor how to use your brothers brotherly, Nor how to study for the people’s welfare, Nor how to shroud yourself from enemies? (4.3.35–40)

Edward’s failure to be content is only one of Warwick’s roll-called transgressions, but it sticks out as the only one related to a king’s affect, and not just a king’s actions. Whatever his birthright, Edward’s discontented failure of self-rule disqualifies him from ruling England, at least according to Warwick. Of course, Edward IV emerges victorious, but the political problems stemming from his marriage choice will continue to haunt his family. As with Henry, the pursuit of romantic contentment in an imprudent marriage will ultimately interfere with his ability to contain the dissenting factions and dangerous passions that threaten the body politic. As the York family rises in power, Richard emerges as one of the greatest malcontents in all of Shakespearean drama. In a crucial speech from 3 Henry VI, Richard describes his duplicitous nature, saying, ‘Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, / And cry “Content!” to that which grieves my heart, / And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, / And frame my face to all occasions’ (3.2.182–5).33 For the constitutionally discontented Richard, content is not an affect, but an affectation, and it parodies contentment’s connotations of self-sameness and stability. Later, after murdering Henry

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My crown is called content’

117

in the Tower, Richard hauntingly claims, ‘I am myself alone’ (5.6.83). With these words, Richard perverts the kind of emotional independence bespoke by contentment and instead signifies a radical discontent of solipsism and sadism. Even so, as Richard puts his discontent to (horrifying) use throughout the final play, he attracts kindred spirits to his camp. When the Duke of Buckingham asks to get some air before agreeing to murder children, Richard looks for a man with still fewer scruples, and his page nominates James Tyrrel: ‘My lord, I know a discontented gentleman / Whose humble means match not his haughty mind. / Gold were as good as twenty orators / And will, no doubt, tempt him to anything’ (Richard III 4.2.35–8). Tyrrel’s discontent makes him morally and politically pliable, easily folded into Richard’s tyrannical agenda. As for Buckingham himself, he sees the poetic justice in his own demise, and he asks Richard’s victims, ‘If that your moody discontented souls / Do through the clouds behold this present hour, / Even for revenge mock my destruction’ (5.1.7–9). Buckingham reaps the discontented seeds he had sown, as does Richard very shortly after. It is only fitting that, on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, the ghosts of his victims deliver the refrain ‘despair and die’ as he sleeps (5.3). Contentment offered one culturally sanctioned alternative to religious despair. As the ultimate malcontent, Richard is sentenced to the logical conclusion of his emotional, ethical, and political comportment. Even in Richard III, though—which raises the specter of discontent in its opening line and features the most politically nefarious forms of negative affect in the tetralogy—four variants of the word ‘discontent’ are neatly balanced by four variants of ‘content’. As in the previous plays, Shakespeare makes it difficult for the audience to consider one state separate from the other. And while Chris Fitter has likened Shakespeare’s ‘political critique’ to a ‘public pessimism’ that is ‘equally radical’,34 discontent does not come off as more attractive or even more efficacious than contentment. Contentment is more fleeting in these plays than English Reformers theorized, but the successes of discontent are short-lived and the consequences are severe. Neither content nor discontent proves sufficient for averting political crisis, but discontent repeatedly precipitates disaster while contentment can offer strength and solace in time of need. The tetralogy shows that both positive and negative emotions may have negative political effects, and it teases out the tensions between different period concepts of contentment. Perhaps if contentment is to have a consistently positive political role, it must be as affective principle, rather than positive affect—as a response to emotion and bulwark against the most destructive of passions, rather than yet one more emotion in the mix. There may be no such thing as a happy history, only plays punctuated by passionate highs and lows which must be weathered. Through the unhappy reign of Henry and the tyranny of Richard, Shakespeare

118

Imagining happy communities

exposes the virtues, limitations, and affinities of content and discontent. In the process, he writes an affective political history of England, one in which contentment plays a significant, if seasonal, role.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 All references to Shakespeare’s plays come from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan (New York: Norton, 2016). 2 As Martine van Elk states, ‘The opening two lines … already teeter uneasily on the threshold between opposing views of selfhood.’ See ‘“Determined to prove a villain”: Criticism, Pedagogy, and Richard III’, College Literature 34, no. 4 (2007), 1–21. 3 Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 4 For further discussion of contentment in English Renaissance thought, see Paul Joseph Zajac, ‘The politics of contentment: passions, pastoral, and community in Shakespeare’s As You Like It’, Studies in Philology 113 (2016), 306–36. 5 ‘contain’ v. and ‘content’ adj. 2 and 4, OED Online, December 2020 (accessed 16 December 2020). 6 Ibid., ‘content’ n. 1.I and n. 2.1 a respectively. 7 Ibid., ‘content’ adj. 2.A.I.1.a. 8 Henry Smith, The Benefit of Contentation Taken by Characterie and Examined after (London, 1590), pp. C1v–2r. 9 Jean de L’Espine, A Very Excellent and Learned Discourse, Touching the Tranquilitie and Contentation of the Minde: Conteining Sundry Notable Instructions, and Firme Consolations, Most Necessarie for All Sortes of Afflicted Persons in These Latter Dayes, trans. Edward Smyth (London, 1592), pp. A2r, A4r. 10 Thomas Taylor, A Treatise of Contentment Leading a Christian with Much Patience through All Afflicted Conditions (London, 1641), pp. 70, 142. 11 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (London, 1648), pp. A2v, 9. Italics original. 12 Thomas Gataker, True Contentment in the Gaine of Godlines, with Its SelfSufficiencie A Meditation on 1. Timoth. 6. 6 (London, 1620), p. 74. Italics original. 13 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy What it is. With All the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Seuerall Cures of It (London, 1621), pp. 539, 140–1. 14 Joseph Hall, The Remedy of Discontentment. Or, a Treatise of Contentation in whatsoever Condition: Fit for these sad and troubled Times (London, 1645), p. 71. 15 Ronald S. Berman, ‘Fathers and sons in the Henry VI plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962), 487–97 (p. 487).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My crown is called content’

119

16 On Crowne’s two adaptations of the Henry VI plays, see Robert Shimko, ‘The miseries of history: Shakespearian extremity as cautionary tale on the Restoration stage’, Theatre History Studies 29 (2009), 81–94. Although ‘contention’ derives from the Latin contendere, rather than continēre, this hardly stopped authors like Sidney from teasing out wordplay on ‘contention’ and ‘contentation’. 17 Laurie Ellinghausen, ‘“Shame and eternal shame”: the dynamics of historical trauma in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy’, Exemplaria 20, no. 3 (2008), 264–82 (p. 279). 18 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Murdering peasants: status, genre, and the representation of rebellion’, Representations 1 (1983), 1–29 (pp. 23–5); Thomas Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI’, in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 48–67; Elyssa Y. Cheng, ‘Disputing boundaries: space and social boundary in 2 Henry VI’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, no. 1 (2008), 185–201; and Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 64. On 1 Henry VI specifically as ‘a play about crumbling structures of authority and stability’, see Brian Walsh, ‘“Unkind division”: the double absence of performing history in 1 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004), 119–47 (n. 21). 19 Lisa Dickson, ‘No rainbow without the sun: visibility and embodiment in 1 Henry VI’, Modern Language Studies 30, no. 1 (2000), 137–56. 20 David Bevington, ‘The domineering female in 1 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966), 51–8 (pp. 56–7). 21 Ibid., 56–7. On the relationship between Petrarchism and self-containment, see Paul Joseph Zajac, ‘Containing petrarch with pastoral: Spenser’s allegory of literary modes in Faerie Queene VI’, Philological Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2016), 201–26. 22 The Oxford English Dictionary lists Shakespeare as its earliest usage of ‘heart’s content’ (‘content’ n2.1.b). 23 Patience and contentment are very frequently paired in early modern texts, such as Richard Younge, The Victory of Patience and Benefit of Affliction (London, 1636), passim, and Thomas Watson, Autarkeia, or, The Art of Divine Contentment (London, 1653), p. 119. 24 Heather Hirschfeld notes that contentation was at times ‘championed by clergy and others committed to the doctrine of callings, the socially conservative application of predestinarian theology that reinforced vocational and class order’. However, this was only one way in which contentment was invoked, and not all were as conservative as this suggests. See Heather Hirschfeld, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 98. 25 Shakespeare’s most famous instance of the word ‘content’ from Shylock in The Merchant of Venice reflects a similar phenomenon. 26 Cartelli observes that ‘Iden’s version of pastoral operates as a deeply privileged ideological construction’ (Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the Garden’, p. 50).

120 27 28 29 30 31

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

33

34

Imagining happy communities

For example, see L’Espine, Very Excellent and Learned Discourse, pp. 67–79. Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the Garden’, p. 52. Cheng, ‘Disputing boundaries’, 198. Paul Dean, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy and Elizabethan “romance” histories: the origins of a genre’, Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), 34–48 (pp. 47–8). As Dean puts it, ‘the tone [of Iden’s speech] anticipates Henry’s famous soliloquy in Part III (II.v), in which he hankers after the pastoral life’ (ibid., 47). Catherine Sanok, ‘Good King Henry and the genealogy of Shakespeare’s first history plays’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010), 37–63 (p. 53). On the importance of this speech in the development of Richard as a character in the tetralogy, see E. Pearlman, ‘The invention of Richard of Gloucester’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 410–29. Chris Fitter, ‘Emergent Shakespeare and the politics of protest: 2 Henry VI in historical contexts’, English Literary History 72 (2005), 129–58 (p. 153).

7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex circle Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bradley J. Irish

For several decades now, historians of Tudor England have debated the role of factionalism in sixteenth-century politics—interrogating what the term means, how it operated, and just how extensive it was as a phenomenon of courtly life.1 But within these conversations, Simon Adams reminds us, ‘about one point there is no real controversy’: in the ‘1590s the Court was nearly torn apart by a factional struggle of major proportions that culminated in an attempted coup d’etat’.2 Adams refers to the infamous uprising of the (equally infamous) royal favorite Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex— who, in February 1601, led a band of armed followers through the streets of London, in a disastrous maneuver designed both to forestall an alleged attempt on his life and to purge his courtly enemies from Queen Elizabeth’s presence.3 Essex’s adherents—many of whom were subsequently fined and imprisoned, and some of whom lost their heads with the earl—were the quintessential courtly faction of the 1590s, and their experience, it has long been recognized, offers vital evidence for investigating the social mechanics of factionalism in the period. It is certainly true that men associated with Essex were accustomed to thinking about faction—both in general terms, and to frame their own particular struggles at court. Francis Bacon, for example, noted that ‘many haue an Opinion not wise; that for a Prince to Gouerne his Estate … according to the Respect of Factions, is a Principall Part of Policy’—but ‘when Factions are carried too high, and too violently’, he argued, ‘it is a Signe of Weaknesse in Princes, and much to the Preiudice, both of their Authoritie, and Businesse’.4 In the essay ‘Of Friendship & Factions’, Sir William Cornwallis gives the would-be courtier advice on how to best negotiate a factional battleground—observing, for instance, that ‘since Diuinations among men are vncertaine, if Factions be so equally [matched], as it is hard to determine which side wil be victorious, to remaine wooed by both partes before wonne by any, is wisdome’.5 And Samuel Daniel, in

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Imagining happy communities

his account of the English civil wars, noted that ‘too many kings breed factions in the court / The head too weake, the members grown too great’.6 More specifically, in 1597 an anonymous ‘true servant’ warned Essex that there was a ‘faction verie stronge against thee’—and indeed, as the decade continued, Essex and his adherents became increasingly convinced that they were being undone by the factional machinations of their enemies.7 In 1596, Francis Davison (a young Essex client) had similarly lamented the ‘mizerable estate of times, & more mizerable estate of men that liue in them, where great vertue is a mannes ruine … & a mannes noblest and most glorious actions nothing but weightes to thrust downe himselfe & his freindes & bring vpe his enemies in the ballance of his Princes favour’.8 And after the rebellion, the Essex circle’s actions were very much construed in terms of faction: Robert Cecil (Essex’s primary adversary) declared that the earl had intention to ‘remove such from the Queene as he misliked and could not bend to his traitorous faction’, while non-conspirators in Essex’s orbit (like the logician William Temple) vehemently denied allegiance with ‘that faction in Essex howse’.9 Thinking about Essex’s followers, then, is a good way to think about the operation of faction more broadly in the 1590s. In general, Adams explains, A faction was not the same thing as clientage; nor was it the exercise of patronage; nor was it the taking of sides on a major political issue: a faction was a personal following employed in direct opposition to another personal following. A faction struggle could involve disputes over patronage or debate over matters of state, but its essence was a personal rivalry that over-rode all other considerations.10

This assessment—in which political maneuverings are entwined with interpersonal considerations—was anticipated by Sir Henry Wotton, once a secretary of Essex: in the 1590s, he recalled several decades later, ‘there were in Court two names of Power, and almost of Affection, the Essexian and the Cecilian with their Adherents’.11 The emphasis on power comes as little surprise: scholars of faction have routinely illuminated how the power struggles of personal rivalry gave shape to the power struggles of politics more generally in the period. But it is Wotton’s qualifier that I want to think about in this essay. What, then, of ‘affection’? While researchers have explored the political and social dynamics of late Elizabethan factionalism for many years, there has been little specific attention to the affective underpinnings of such interpersonal affinities: the fact that factional participation entailed significant psychic activity, through the generation of emotion. Despite the obvious emphasis on the material motives of factional identification, there were undoubtedly certain spoils of factionalism that did not line the pocket,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

123

or sweeten the resumé, but instead contributed to internal well-being. For many members of courtly factions—whose loyalty, of course, was never repaid with fame and fortune—I think that this subjective enrichment was paramount, and to ignore it, despite its unquantifiable nature, would be to miss a crucial reward of factional identification. As part of a larger project in the history of courtly emotion, my goal is to think about how we might try to excavate the kinds of affective solidarity that underpinned the factionalism of the period, and thus the means through which courtiers (and by extension, their servants, clients, and associates) might be emotionally empowered by factional participation. This essay, then, is a companion to another work I have recently published on emotion in the Essex circle: the final portion of my book Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling.12 In that chapter, I examine Essex and his followers through the negative lens of dread—arguing that, in affective terms, the factional dynamics of the 1590s entailed competing social groups struggling to inflict existential terror on each other. Indeed, thinking about the Essex faction and negative emotion is quite natural; as we will see (and is well-recognized), Essex and his followers tended to have something of a gloomy disposition, especially in the period immediately before the rising. But the emotional dynamics of Essex and his followers were not exclusively negative—and a full account of them, it follows, cannot focus exclusively on negative sentiment. In the present essay I thus turn to the same general archive of Essex material, but this time examine late Elizabethan factionalism in terms of the opposite affective valence: the positive emotions that enabled factional bonds in the Essex circle.13 To get at this subjective element of Renaissance factionalism, I consider the positive emotional phenomenon of solidarity—the affective glue that helped bind faction members together in an intersubjective alliance. And our understanding of solidarity, I suggest in turn, can be valuably informed by thinking about what sociologists call ‘interaction rituals’: that is, certain categories of social encounters, both formal and informal, through which participants at both the center and periphery shore up their collective will and mutual sense of self. In what follows, I will try to outline the mechanics of such rituals, with the hope that a more nuanced account of the social stakes of factional identity might be integrated into our ever-evolving sense of how faction and affiliation shaped the dynamics of the Tudor court. My overall goal is to show how sociological thinking can help inform our understanding of early modern factional dynamics—and to show, more specifically, how positive emotion was central to even the notoriously dour Essex faction. One of the great virtues of emotion studies is its capacity for interdisciplinary engagement; the sociology of emotion, I hope to show, is

124

Imagining happy communities

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

one further resource that can be of great value to those of us situated in the humanities. In 2004, the noted and prolific sociologist Randall Collins published a book called Interaction Ritual Chains, an ambitious attempt to reverse-engineer the mechanics of human social life.14 Emerging broadly from the tradition of Émile Durkheim—especially as it was practiced in the mid-twentieth century by Erving Goffman—Collins stakes his theoretical claims in the ritualized behavior of human experience, arguing broadly that ‘culture is generated by … [ritualized] patterns of social interaction’.15 The rituals in question, however, are not merely the discrete, formalized occasions that immediately jump to mind—weddings, funerals, religious services, etc.—but are instead the social encounters of daily life, as explored so magically in the work of Goffman: standing in line to buy a cup of coffee, walking on a busy city street, or listening to someone present a paper. Such procedures are the nuts and bolts of social life, and they are (quietly) governed by an implicit battery of rules and conventions, with the same rigor as their more formalized counterparts. Collins’s methodological intervention is to stress how mutual participation in such rituals works cumulatively to secure group cohesion, through the activation of what he vitally calls emotional energy (38): this is what binds social solidarity, with a variety of implications for the subjective (and intersubjective) lives of those to whom it sticks. As his general definition of ritual suggests, Collins thus sees emotion as a guiding principle of social collectivity: ‘ritual is a mechanism of mutually focused emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality, which thereby generates solidarity and symbols of group membership’ (7). As even this brief description suggests, Collins’s theory has much to offer a treatment of Renaissance factionalism—that social condition in which units of similarly minded people are drawn together in the daily, uncertain struggle of negotiating early modern political life, some of whom are equally participating in the rigid, formalized rituals of attendance at court. These implicit and explicit rituals, I suggest, generated and sustained the affective bonds of faction, granting core participants an internal sense of factional legitimacy, while equally providing opportunity for all manner of peripheral figures to engage in the emotional experience of factional affiliation. Because ‘incidents shape their incumbents’ and ‘encounters make their encountees’, such rituals form the fabric of social life, radically constructing the individuals who participate in them (5). For Collins, a number of conditions fulfill the stereotypical social ritual: 1. Two or more people are physically assembled in the same place, so that they affect each other by their bodily presence, whether it is in the foreground of their conscious attention or not.



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

125

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2. There are boundaries to outsiders so that participants have a sense of who is taking part and who is excluded. 3. People focus their attention upon a common object or activity, and by communicating this focus to each other become mutually aware of each other’s focus of attention. 4. They share a common mood or emotional experience. (48) Though there are, of course, variations to this formula, these are the general ingredients upon which the social energy of mutual interaction is founded. It should be easy to see why this is also a recipe for factional cohesion: mutual presence, mutual attention, and mutual experience are some of the basic conditions that give rise to factionalism. But even more important than the definition of ritual is what these rituals do. As Collins explains, a successful ritual (big or small) gives rise to a set of subsequent phenomena: 1. Group solidarity, a feeling of membership. 2. Emotional energy (EE) in the individual: a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action. 3. Symbols that represent the group: emblems or other representations (visual icons, words, gestures) that members feel are associated with themselves collectively … Persons pumped up with feelings of group solidarity treat symbols with great respect and defend them against the disrespect of outsiders, and even more, of renegade insiders. 4. Feelings of morality: the sense of rightness in adhering to the group, respecting its symbols, and defending both against transgressors. Along with this goes the sense of moral evil or impropriety in violating the group’s solidarity and its symbolic representations. (49) It seems to me that this is the raw stuff of factionalism—and I will suggest below how some of this relates to the Essex circle. But for the moment, the salient point (given the focus of this collection) is that emotion is the currency of ritual. For Collins, ‘emotional energy … is carried across situations by symbols that have been charged up by emotional situations’; interaction ritual theory is a model of ‘emotional contagion’ in which the ‘successful buildup of emotional coordination within an interaction ritual [produces] feelings of solidarity’ (107; 108). Collins outlines how this works in some detail—power and status, for example, are ‘two major dimensions of stratification … that produce specific qualities of emotional energy’ (109)—and while his theory should be consulted in full, this brief description should be enough to suggest the centrality of emotion to the project, and the resulting centrality of emotion to factional cohesion. Just as solidarity is the glue of factionalism, emotion is ‘the ‘glue’ of solidarity’ (103), the vital force that ‘holds society together’ (102).

126

Imagining happy communities

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In summation, Collins crystallizes the fundamentals of his model in a passage worth quoting at length: The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment—through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation/arousal of participants’ nervous systems— result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. (42)

‘These moments of high degree of ritual intensity’, he continues, ‘are high points of experience’—and they indeed become, when amplified suitably, ‘the high points of collective experience, the key moments of history, the times when significant things happen’. Galvanized by ritual, collective emotion fueled such paradigm-shifting moments as ‘the French Revolution in the summer of 1789’, the ‘key events of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s’, and ‘the collapse of communist regimes in 1989 and 1991’ (42). And if things had turned out just a little differently, this catalog might have included the Essex Revolt of 1601—a failed uprising, but one very much fueled by the same ritual mechanics and emotional energy that drive more successful endeavors. In the remainder of this essay, I will briefly suggest how some of the ritual conditions outlined in Collins’s model are fulfilled by the factional dynamics of the Essex circle. My argument is simple: participating in a courtly faction is a kind of social ritual, which is itself underpinned by countless sub-rituals that help generate solidarity and contribute to group cohesion. The dynamics of Collins’s model account for this operation. I am thus concerned with the four ingredients of rituals outlined above: co-presence, boundaries to outsiders, mutual focus of attention, and common mood. Though space prevents me from going into significant detail, I will nonetheless try to show how these features of the interaction ritual model are salient to a discussion of late Elizabethan factionalism, and how factional activity can be fruitfully seen through a microsociological lens.

Co-presence As a social encounter, rituals are largely constituted by the space that contains them. Ritual participants are united in a shared space that shapes the conditions of their interactions; co-presence in a social moment provides the



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

127

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

conduit through which emotional energy and affinity are exchanged among members of the collective. This is, it seems, a native condition: Emotional contagion is a socio-physiological fact. Sociophysiology … shows how an individual’s physiological condition is affected by current and recent social experience. Face-to-face social interaction takes place among physiological systems, not merely among individuals as cognitive systems or bodily actors. From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising that human beings, like other animals, are neurologically wired to respond to each other; and that social situations that call forth these responses are experienced as highly rewarding. (78)

In successful settings, shared presence entails a harmonization of social behavior—a condition that can even be measured empirically, via the attunement of body posture, facial expression, eye contact, vocal patterning, and hormone levels. Collective experience manifests in both mind and body—and, taken together, this ‘rhythmic synchronization is correlated with solidarity’ (76). For good reason, factional bonds were very much fortified by such proximity. In the early modern political world, a primary site of social ritual—that is, the site of co-presence—was court. Royal attendance was an elaborately structured, regulated affair; indeed, in many ways it manifested most immediately as a formal ritual, governed by an ‘apparatus of ceremonial procedure’ (50). Formalized rituals have a general effect of ‘broadcasting and affirming a rigid sense of group boundaries’; the elaborate meaningstructure of the royal mythos was charged with this very task, as manifested in the cult of Queen Elizabeth (50). By participating in the rituals of court, courtiers reaffirmed and reinscribed their devotion, uniting themselves generally, even across factional lines, as a community of royal servants. Much of what may seem frivolous about courtly behavior nonetheless served this crucial function, by wrangling the countless competing interests of powerful subjects and rechanneling them to the harmonies of royal service. It is not surprising, then, that so many such rituals are based in a literally rhythmic component, whether in the steps of dance, the measures of song and verse, or the gallop of a horse. But if the formal rituals of court entailed the theater of power, then much of the real stuff of early modern politics happened behind the curtain, in the unending train of more ordinary encounters—informal, but no less ritualized—that marked the social experience of the Elizabethan courtier. This—the realm of quips and quarrels, secrets and slights, comradery and contestation—is where factional boundaries were affirmed; both harmonious engagement with one’s allies and oppositional engagement with one’s enemies served an identical function of demarcating

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

128

Imagining happy communities

solidarity. There is thus something of a concentric model of solidarity: formal rituals reified the courtier’s overriding allegiance to Elizabeth, while informal ones (perhaps even more importantly) reified their allegiance to each other—in ways that variously inflected the integrity of the first. Copresence is the vital condition that enables these processes. In terms of the Essex circle, the pertinence of co-presence is nakedly demonstrated in an episode that has become infamous among both historians and literary scholars. On the evening of Saturday, 7 February, the night before the rising, some of Essex’s closest advisors joined together to attend a play they had specially commissioned: ‘Kyng Harry the iiiith, and … the kyllyng of Kyng Richard the Second played by the Lord Chamberlens players’.16 For obvious reasons, it is quite suggestive that those associated with Essex actively sought a performance in which a popular nobleman (with whom Essex had been symbolically linked) deposed a weak monarch (with whom Elizabeth became associated, as she herself famously acknowledged).17 But it is also a textbook example of the emotional action that Collins describes: here, quite clearly, certain key members of the Essex party orchestrated (with some effort) a ritual to affirm and strengthen their collective factional identity, and to fill a reservoir of shared affective experience on which they might draw in the days to come. As Paul E.J. Hammer (the chief authority on Essex) notes, the particular conditions of this event facilitated a strong sense of factional inclusivity; the specially commissioned play, he argues, was ‘aimed at a very specific elite audience—constituting, in effect, a coterie performance on a public stage’, and he even speculates that the men ‘may well have staged this event at a public theater precisely because they wanted to be seen by the large audience at the Globe as being responsible for—or at least openly enjoying—this specially staged performance’.18 In this ritual, the co-presence of Essex’s followers enabled them to be announced as a collectivity, both to others and to themselves; as such, they were primed to experience a shared affective response to the events on the stage, which itself only served to unify them further. And indeed, those events could be profoundly affecting—thus Francis Bacon says that ‘so earnest [one of the attendants] was to satisfie his eyes with the sight of that Tragedie, which hee thought soone after his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State’.19

Boundaries to outsiders While group solidarity ‘generate[s] specific acts of altruism and love’, it also ‘makes individuals feel a desire to defend and honor the group’; this dynamic, as Collins describes it, constitutes the basic affective mechanics of factionalism (109). All of this is underwritten, of course, by a firm sense of who is and



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

129

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

who is not part of one’s group—a vital, obvious element of factional organization. As one courtier explains in a letter to a friend, Essex had, by the late 1590s, come to understand courtly favor as a zero-sum game: of late my Lord of Essix … hath forced mee to declare my self either his only, or frend to Mr. Secretary [Cecil] and his enimy, protesting that ther Could bee noe neutrality. I awnsweared that noe base dependency should euer fashion my loue, or hate to his Lordship’s passions: As for Mr. Secretary I had diuersly tasted of his fauour and would neuer bee dishonest or ungratefull. In conclusion hee hoaldeth mee for a loast child, and in plain terrms tould mee that though hee affected sum parts in mee hee looued not my person, neither should I bee wellcum to him, or expect aduancement vnder him.20

Though some, it is clear, attempted to avoid the intensity of this factionalism, in the political climate of the 1590s there broadly seemed an immeasurable gap between friend and foe—and in this gulf bred factional solidary, the social variable so centrally dependent on the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Such boundaries were amplified and intensified by the machinations of outsiders, which created lines of demarcation between the in-group and out. Essex received regular word that enemies had ‘layd secret plotts, and damnable deuices’ to destroy him, and was warned to be vigilant against those who plotted ‘to work some treson … agans your person’.21 (One such figure, the earl was told, had suggested that ‘it were a verie merritorious acte to stabb or kill the Earle of Essex if you can come att him’.)22 Such harrowing conditions enabled the Essex circle to draw upon what Collins calls righteous anger: ‘the emotional outburst, shared by a group (perhaps led by particular persons who act as its agents) against persons who violate its sacred symbols’ (127). Essex, we will see in the next section, was himself one such symbol—and in their fervent defense of him, his partisans are seen ‘evoking their feeling of membership in an enforcement coalition’ (128). It is not surprising, then, when Cecil bitterly complains of ‘how hard termes the erle of Essex standeth to me, and how apt divers of his followers are to throwe imputations vppon me’.23 The boundaries between insiders and outsiders are a vital element of ritual behavior—and the conflict-laden dynamics of factionalism made them especially obvious and pertinent.

Common attention In a successful ritual, participants focus on a common source of attention; this mutual focus underpins the intersubjectivity that generates solidarity. In the context of factionalism, each ritual has an immediate object of

130

Imagining happy communities

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

attention—such as, in the previous example, the performance of Richard II that Essex partisans actively watched—but there is also an overriding focus that ultimately anchors the individual factional action: the faction leader itself. As Collins explains, such dominant people are vital to the interaction ritual model: One could also say that the dominant person makes oneself the focus of the interaction. He or she becomes, in some sense, a Durkheimian sacred object. Microsociologically, that is just what a ‘sacred object’ means—it is the object upon which attention of the group is focused, and which becomes a symbolic repository of the group’s emotional energies. When someone feels oneself in this position, they have a store of emotional energy for their own use; it makes that person ‘charismatic.’ For others, the person who is a ‘sacred object’ compels attention. They become spectators to that person. (124)

It should be immediately clear how these insights align with factionalism: as Adams noted above, factions entail a personal following that attends to a dominant person. And indeed, the Earl of Essex was one such sacred object in the 1590s, with a social magnetism that made him a site of factional investment. This sacredness was achieved by a tireless regime of public identity management. According to Hammer, Essex ‘lived his life as self-consciously as if it were a work of art, and sought to make himself indisputably the leader of his generation by excelling all of his contemporaries in accomplishments and zeal’.24 It was this intense commitment to shaping himself as a cultural and political lightning rod that transformed Essex into a site of collective investment; a faction gravitated toward him because he had the charisma to manage it. And he had the courtly pedigree to realize such ambitions: Essex was the stepson of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—the premier courtier of Elizabeth’s reign—and close friends with Sir Philip Sidney—the famed shepherd knight whose premature death in 1586 was cause for national mourning. Essex capitalized upon this position with actions that increased his visibility and made him the center of widespread attention. For example, public spectacles—such as the annual Accession Day tilts, or the festivities celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada—provided Essex with ample opportunity to seize the popular eye; indeed, in the 1595 tilts, Essex displayed a ‘breathtaking arrogance’ in the starring role of a performance that he sponsored, which flagrantly ‘upstag[ed] Elizabeth on her own special day’.25 Other times, he sponsored the creation of written propaganda—as when, in the aftermath of England’s successful 1596 raid of the Spanish port Cadiz, he circulated texts designed to showcase himself (and not his co-commanders) as the action’s military hero.26 Of course, such actions had a social cost: one of the ‘chief accusations against Essex by his enemies was that his

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

131

aristocratic style of politics had a deliberately populist appeal, which he fostered by relentlessly seeking public endorsement for his actions’.27 Because this popularity ‘was regarded as a sign of the earl’s boundless ambition’, it took on particular resonance after the uprising—at which time his enemies loudly claimed that the earl’s ‘affabilitie and Curtosie manifested his desire to be populer’, and alleged that he ‘affected popularity and to be the Mynion of the people’.28 But the fact remains that Essex consciously engaged in attention-grabbing rituals that made him, as a sacred object, the subsequent focal point of other factional rituals—and it is this operation of a dominant person that is a key feature of factionalism.

Common mood Finally, rituals are dependent on participants sharing a common mood or emotional experience. In terms of factional participation, this occurs at multiple registers. We may imagine, for example, that many Essex partisans mutually felt pride and excitement when watching the earl participate in public pageantry—but we may also observe, at a degree further removed, that many men drawn to Essex shared aspects of a mutual disposition. This second fact is suggested by the earl’s propensity to surround himself with soldiers, many of whom he personally commanded. Essex readily admitted his ‘friendshippe to the chiefe men of action, and fauour generall to the men of warre’, and Hammer suggests that ‘a majority of his friends were men with whom he shared the special bond of going on campaign together’.29 Essex further secured personal loyalty by frequently bestowing knighthoods on his followers, often in flagrant violation of the queen’s explicit orders to the contrary—a fact later held against him in the time of his disgrace. Indeed, Essex’s personal charisma ensured that such loyalists flocked to his physical presence: in 1599, for example, after Essex abandoned his military command in Ireland, his return to London was said to ‘bringes all Sortes of Knights, Captens, Officers, and Soldiers away from thence … to the great Discontentment of her Majestie’.30 But it was not simply that Essex surrounded himself with men of war—it was that his followers often shared an affective disposition. Especially in the final years of his life, Essex became prone to bitterness, resentment, paranoia, and despair; at the time of his demise, notes one contemporary, he was a man who ‘shyftethe from sorrowe and repentaunce to rage and rebellion so suddenlie [that he seemed] devoide of goode reason or righte mynde’.31 And some of this, at least, was reflected in his followers: as Hammer notes, many of the men around the earl ‘were characterised not only by a profound attachment to Essex but also by a shared sense of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Imagining happy communities

bitterness about their failure to build the kind of careers which they believed their talents merited’.32 The Essex circle’s affective disposition may be seen in their famed enthusiasm for the work of Tacitus—whom Essex declared ‘simply the best’ of all historians, and whose emphasis on the ‘the miseries of a torne and declining state’ was especially appealing to a group that increasingly saw itself as a virtuous beacon in the otherwise corrupt and cutthroat world of the Elizabethan court.33 (Indeed, for the Essex faction, Tacitus functioned as what Collins calls a sacred object, which ‘the group assembles and focuses its attention around [and which] comes to embody their emotion’ (37).) The Essex circle, then, was united by negative affect. Here we may distinguish between the affective ingredients and the affective outcomes of ritual participation: the precipitating mood may have a negative valence, but the intersubjective effects of that mutual condition still generate the positive emotional experience of solidarity. The Essex circle, particularly in the final months, was overtaken by a gloomy mood—but this negative affect enhanced social bonds (just as, in contemporary politics, it is not uncommon to see social groups mobilized and energized by shared feelings of anger or despair). Not all members of a faction, of course, always felt the same way—but in general, the rituals of factional participation encourage a shared affective experience, and we can see this general principle at work in the actions of the Essex circle. Though necessarily brief, this essay has nonetheless attempted to outline how ritual interaction theory might prove useful for thinking about factional participation in the early modern period. It is also, however, an example of how methodologies from the humanities—in this case, work anchored in literary and historical studies—can be used to inform and substantiate theories of emotion from the social sciences. In the study of emotion, interdisciplinary borrowings have tended to be unidirectional, but there are still important ways in which researchers in the humanities can contribute to ongoing conversations in other disciplines.34 As the history of emotion continues to grow as a field, we must be open to further forging crossdisciplinary connections—a fact indicated by several chapters in this collection. The sociology of emotion, I suggest, is one such arena that offers largely untapped opportunity for fruitful conversations—and it is one that, at the very least, helps me make sense of how emotion works in the infamous factional battlegrounds of late Elizabethan England.

Notes 1 On early modern faction, see David Starkey, ‘From feud to faction: English politics circa 1450–1550’, History Today 32, no. 11 (1982), 16–22; Paul E.J. Hammer,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

133

‘Patronage at Court, Faction, and the Earl of Essex’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 65–86; Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘“Absolute and Sovereign Mistress of Her Grace”? Queen Elizabeth I and her favourites, 1581–1592’, in J.H. Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss (eds), The World of the Favourite (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 38–53; Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Natalie Mears, ‘Courts, courtiers, and culture in Tudor England’, Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003), 703–22; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Mary Partridge, ‘Images of the Courtier in Elizabethan England’, PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2008; Janet Dickinson, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex, 1589–1601 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Janet Dickinson, ‘Redefining Faction at the Tudor Court’, in Rubén González Cuerva and Alexander Koller (eds), A Europe of Courts, a Europe of Factions: Political Groups at Early Modern Centres of Power (1550–1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 20–40. 2 Adams, Leicester and the Court, p. 47. 3 For Essex’s life, see Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dickinson, Court Politics; Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins (eds), Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘The Earl of Essex’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 37–50; and Paul E.J. Hammer’s ODNB entry on Essex (www.oxforddnb.com). 4 Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall (London, 1625), pp. 296, 299. 5 William Cornwallis, Essayes (London, 1600), sig. E5v. 6 Samuel Daniel, The Poeticall Essayes of Sam. Danyel (London, 1599), sig. 6v. 7 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), SP 12/265, fol. 16v; 16. 8 Lambeth Palace Library MS 660, fol. 235. For discussion of this passage, see Dickinson, Court Politics, p. 76. 9 TNA, SP 12/278, fol. 91; Hatfield House, Cecil Papers (hereafter CP), 83/40. 10 Simon Adams, ‘Faction, clientage and party: English politics, 1550–1603’, History Today 32 (1982), 33–9 (p. 34). 11 Henry Wotton, A Parallell Betweene Robert Late Earle of Essex, and George Late Duke of Buckingham (London, 1641), p. 5, emphasis in original. 12 Bradley J. Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 13 In this sense, this chapter shares some affinity with Will Tosh’s Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), which importantly considers friendship within the Essex circle.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Imagining happy communities

14 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For discussion of Collins’s work, see Jonathan H. Turner and Jan E. Stets, The Sociology of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 3, and Erika Summers-Effler, ‘Ritual Theory’, in Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds), Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions (New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 135–54. For work building on Collins’s theory, see, for example, Erika Summers-Effler, ‘A theory of self, emotion, and culture’, Advances in Group Processes 21 (2004), 273–308, and Erika Summers-Effler, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes: Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). To my knowledge, Collins’s theory has not been seriously engaged by scholars of emotion in the humanities—though his work is cited briefly in Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay (eds), Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe, 1200–1920: Family, State and Church (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 18, 23, which should be consulted generally for work on ritual and emotion. 15 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, p. xi. Subsequent citations to this work appear parenthetically in the text. 16 TNA, SP 12/278, fol. 130. 17 See Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: the authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’, Review of English Studies 64 (2012), 208–30. 18 Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), 1–35 (p. 26). 19 Francis Bacon, A declaration of the practices & treasons … (London, 1601), sig. K3. 20 CP 62/71. 21 Folger MS, V.a.164, fol. 29v; CP 68/4. 22 CP 64/92. 23 CP 251/134. 24 Hammer, Polarisation, p. 400. 25 Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon, and the Accession Day Celebrations of 1595’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 41–66 (p. 58). 26 See Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Myth-making: politics, propaganda and the capture of Cadiz in 1596’, Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997), 621–42. 27 Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘The Smiling Crocodile: The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan ‘Popularity’’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 95–115 (p. 95). See also Gajda, Earl of Essex, ch. 5. 28 Hammer, ‘Smiling Crocodile’, p. 95; Folger MS, V.b.142, fol. 47; Folger MS, V.a.164, fol. 38v. 29 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, An Apologie of the Earle of Essex (London, 1600?), sig. B2v; Hammer, Polarisation, p. 216. 30 Arthur Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State, 2 vols (London, 1746), vol. 2, pp. 130–1.



Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court

135

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

31 John Harington, Nugae Antiquae, 3 vols (London, 1792), vol. 2, p. 225. 32 Hammer, Polarisation, p. 291. 33 Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (London, 1857–74), vol. 9, p. 25; Robert Johnson, Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers (London, 1601), sig. D2v.. For Tacitus and the Essex circle (including the copious scholarship on the subject), see Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court, pp. 154–8. 34 See, for example, Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

8 Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Cora Fox

The history of happiness can be thought of as a history of associations. In wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations. The very promise that happiness is what you get for having the right associations might be how we are directed toward certain things. (Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness)1

‘Wives may be merry and yet honest too’ (4.2.100).2 This aside to the audience, spoken by Mistress Page and leading up to the festive conclusion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, has been considered by most critics a summation of at least one of its core themes.3 It expresses a desire on the part of the wives that is put to the test (a ‘proof’, in the language of the play at 4.2.99) and—in a sense similar to the one used by Sara Ahmed above—a promise, offering the fantasy of the essential propriety of the wives who transgress social norms to manipulate interpersonal relations in the fictionalized community of Windsor.4 Unlike other plays by Shakespeare, this one announces the politics of emotion in its title, suggesting that the characters of the wives are types, and their positive emotion—merriness, or mirth—defines their condition as wives as well as their belonging to Windsor, their ‘Windsorness’. The play participates explicitly in the cultural histories of happiness, and it represents the ways positive affects can produce bodies and sociality through their performance on the Shakespearean stage. This shaping of bodily associations in Merry Wives is accomplished through the manipulation of a discursive network surrounding definitions of English community, and particularly the traffic in women that is both central to its functioning and most troublesome to its boundaries.5 As Walter Cohen notes in his introduction to the play in The Norton Shakespeare, Merry Wives seems to have as its goal the establishment of a middle-class citizen world that includes rather than excludes figures of higher social standing like Falstaff and foreigners like the Welsh Evans and the French Doctor Caius.6 In addition, as Harriet Phillips has shown, it is a play deeply invested

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Merriness, affect, and community

137

in the ambiguous traditions and inheritances of the concept of ‘merry England’ and what they mean for contemporary Elizabethan social life.7 Thematically, then, the play focuses on fantasies of affective community, and the emotion of merriness or mirth is highlighted both as essential to that community and as a product of textual and intertextual networks of association. Repeatedly, the play highlights the ways emotions operate politically to govern both sexual and civic bodies, and through these networks of association the play produces sociality and highlights the intertextuality of affect itself. Early in the play, the ‘will’ of Ford’s wife—that is, her desire, her agency, and/or her sexual pleasure (“will” is a complex term, but it should be considered at least an ambiguous affect)—is associated directly with her English identity.8 Falstaff says he believes he sees signs of sexual interest from Mistress Ford and ‘reads’ her behavior toward him: ‘she discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of invitation’ (1.3.41–2). Pistol jokes that Falstaff ‘hath studied her well, and translated her will—out of honesty into English’ (1.3.46–7). The joke here is that once it is English her will is not honest, although the play in fact curbs the potential that she might be more promiscuous, and hence more English, than her friend Mistress Page. Mistress Page and her husband, in fact, are ultimately held up as the social nucleus of this fictionalized English community, although their own desires to marry off their only daughter and heir are thwarted when the younger Page asserts a will of her own.9 The joke ends up emphasizing that emotions and ambiguous affects, such as one’s ‘will’, can be (mis)translated into language. Through this early wordplay focused on positive feelings and sexual pleasure, the play stresses its own highly politicized emotional community with the marriage economy at its heart, and within that community the word ‘merry’ operates explicitly as an emotive in the sense defined by William Reddy, in that it both evokes previous emotional scripts and narratives and at the same time constructs the lived experience of an unstable positive communal feeling.10 ‘Merry’ had a number of current meanings in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and they were mainly related to the experience of pleasure and joy, categorized by modern emotions researchers as ‘positive’ affective or emotional states. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary speculate that the word ‘merry’ is derived etymologically from words associated with brevity, and that it developed in Germanic languages from words associated with the sense that time passing pleasantly passes quickly.11 By the time Shakespeare writes this play, ‘merry’ was regularly applied to all kinds of objects that generate sensual pleasure—pleasing smells, joyful music, peacefully beautiful countrysides, and a variety of sensual touches. It is also beginning to be associated, as suggested above, with an emergent sense of England as ‘merry England’: a pleasure-inducing geographical space and then subsequently a nation of joyful people.12 But the word (and its associate, mirth) also attaches to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Imagining happy communities

practical jokes, excess, revelry, drunkenness, and misrule: all transgressive and often ‘negative’ social behaviors. In fact, when attached to an occupation and gendered as male, merriness was associated with the ‘merry men’, an outlaw band of followers, mainly within the folkloric tradition of Robin Hood, but extending out from that tradition to other outlaws and followers of charismatic leaders.13 So the term ‘merry’ itself connoted happiness, joy, sensual pleasures, and emergent nationalism, but also trickery and criminal or deviant behavior, and it was applied to those who flouted normative communal values in English villages. The merry wives of Shakespeare’s title could be both producers of pleasure and potentially disruptive forces to the communal norms they reinforce. In representing this emotion and the positive affects generated by its characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor is both descriptive and prescriptive of merriness as an affective force. It does not just reveal what a group of citizens might do in early modern Windsor. It constructs, creates contentions around, and negotiates the community and its sociality through the named emotion of merriness.14 What is most striking about merriness as it is constructed in the play, however, is that it is mostly generated by characters who are not joyful or even contented. As Pamela Brown points out in her analysis of the play’s implications in the traditions and discourses of early modern women’s jest literature, ‘Windsor is not a place that should make wives especially merry.’ 15 Assuming a more modern sense of mirth, Brown emphasizes how injustice, the potential for violence, and physical vulnerability characterize this representation of everyday life.16 Within this precarious social world, the merriness of the wives operates as a countering social force, generating cohesion and boundaries; it operates, in other words, primarily as an affect, rather than an emotion. The wives use their merry humor intentionally to discipline other characters, but in doing so, they also define the borders of the social groups that make up the town in which they live.17 Their merriness performs a positive affective politics through the gendered literary forms and tropes of the Renaissance stage.18 The plot of the play revolves around a series of interwoven narratives reflecting on the marriage market in which characters are repeatedly shamed through tricks and misdirections. Outside of the most memorable narrative arc involving Falstaff, most of these plots circulate around Mistress Anne Page, a wealthy and eligible young woman who is in a typical position within the marriage market as the object of the social manipulations effected by different subgroups of Windsor citizens. Mistress Quickly enables and lies at the center of these exchanges as she acts as go-between for a collection of suitors, creating a lucrative business for herself out of purporting to sell Anne’s favor. In fact, within the first hundred lines of dialogue, the play



Merriness, affect, and community

139

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

makes clear how much a mercantilist notion of marriage underlies the social scheming on the part of most of the male characters in the play: Evans: … There is Anne Page, which is daughter to Master George Page—which is pretty virginity. Slender: Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small like a woman? Evans: It is that ferry person for all the ’orld, as just as you will desire, and seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire upon his death’s-bed—Got deliver to a joyful resurrections!—give, when she is able to overtake seventeen years old. It were a goot motion, if we leave our pribbles and prabbles, and desire a marriage between Master Abraham and Mistress Anne Page. (1.1.40–52)

When Evans sets off this ‘motion’ in the group, it is only the first of many such social agreements made between characters to achieve desired goals, and here ‘motion’ might be read as a plan, a desire, or an emotion (a closely related term).19 Master Abraham Slender, the wooer in this first exchange, is aided by Anne’s father in his pursuit of marriage to her, while Anne’s mother favors and aids the French Doctor Caius. Anne herself and the Host of the Garter aid the young and witty Fenton—deemed an unsuitable suitor by Anne’s parents, but Anne’s preferred choice and the winner in the play’s ultimate endorsement of companionate marriage. In the final scene of the play, in which all three suitors and their supporters expect to succeed in achieving this advantageous marriage, the disappointments of the two losing ‘teams’ threaten momentarily to destabilize the merry community enabled by the wives themselves, and this social crisis is only averted by the Pages’ decision to dictate a joyful resolution through speech acts generating positive affects. Page says ‘God give thee joy’ (5.5.230) and Mistress Page ‘God give you many, many merry days!’ and they facilitate the ritual of the festive meal to which all have been invited when they leave the stage. While many of Shakespeare’s comedies conclude with the suggestion that the generic resolution of the comedy in marriage is a particularly fictitious and fragile imagined social construct, Merry Wives contains no such suggestion, even though both of the suitors who did not win Anne are also shamed because they have narrowly avoided marrying boys disguised as Anne. This final self-conscious gesture toward the boy actors behind all the female characters has the effect of diffusing the social tensions at the end of the play, evoking meta-theatrical laughter, as well as homoerotic pleasure, rather than pity for the losers in the marriage game. Within this constellation of plotlines surrounding the marriage of Anne Page are the social exchanges that bind smaller factions together, creating groups of allies who might threaten the social cohesion in Windsor if they were not overwritten with a kind of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Imagining happy communities

authoritative merriness reaffirmed by the Pages, an emotional regime that allows the play to end with all characters included in its ‘happy’ resolution. These conventional gendered narratives of the marriage market unfold on a stage dominated by Falstaff, whose character and misbehavior were of great interest for Renaissance audiences and whose body defines and is defined by merriness.20 The play was originally recorded in the Stationer’s Register twice in 1602 as ‘A most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie of Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Justice Shallow, and his wife Cousin M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of Auncient Pistoll, and Corporal Nym.’ Most scholars assume that Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives at least partly to satisfy a commercial demand for the reappearance of Falstaff from the Henriad, and as this full title suggests, it is both Falstaff and the wives who define the comedy and its pleasures.21 The plotting surrounding Falstaff is central to the play’s meaning as well as its cultural work in the formation and negotiation of community because Falstaff is a character of excessive bodily presence associated with revelry, festivity, and the potential for mirth: fat and sweaty and constantly represented on stage engaged in eating, drinking, and pursuing sexual pleasure. Falstaff is a figure out of the carnivalesque tradition of Rabelais: an excessive affective presence; his body leaky, permeable, and oversized; his humors ill-contained and unregulated.22 In Merry Wives, Falstaff’s body as a constituent element of his person is subject to the shaming social rituals arranged first by the merry wives themselves and then the wider Windsor community. Because Falstaff begins the play attempting to arrange adulterous liaisons with both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, those two wives that the play famously asserts can be both merry and honest, Falstaff’s body is punished even as he himself is admitted into Windsor company and invited to dine with the Pages in the last moments of the play. The play focuses not just on how merriness is defined in language, but also represents Falstaff’s body as a mediating social object. Falstaff’s transgression against the merry emotional regime of Windsor, which could have been a comfortable community for him had he not violated its rules surrounding women, is captured quite self-consciously in words, as he writes the same letter to both wives that is read aloud on stage: Ask me no reason why I love you, for though Love use Reason for his precisian, he admits him not for his counselor. You are not young, no more am I: go to, then, there’s sympathy; you are merry, so am I: ha, ha, then there’s more sympathy; you love sack, and so do I: would you desire better sympathy? Let it suffice thee, Mistress Page, at the least if the love of soldier can suffice, that I love thee. I will not say ‘pity me’—’tis not a soldier-like phrase—but I say ‘love me’.



Merriness, affect, and community

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

By me, thine own true knight, by day or night, Or any kind of light, with all his might, For thee to fight. John Falstaff. (2.1.4–15)

The humor of this letter lies partly in its duplication, as we know he has sent it also to Mistress Ford, but it is notably also mocked as a dishonest expression of sympathy. The love note’s physical presence on the stage draws attention to its role as a misappropriation of the wives’ merriness. It gives Falstaff’s misinterpretation and misbehavior material form. Falstaff’s main points in his persuasion to cuckoldry are that he shares old age, merriness, and a love of sack with the wives. Old age and a love of drinking may be comically negative qualities to publicly share in sympathy, but merriness here is therefore held up as another negative identity characteristic that Falstaff recognizes in both himself and the wives. That the wives immediately reject this offer of a sympathetic social and bodily exchange based on these qualities suggests that they also reject this more negative scripting of their merriness. Ultimately, the major cultural work that the play seems to advance regarding merriness is to redefine it away from its associations with transgressive bodily behavior and, as I have argued above, toward a more positive, socially acceptable, and ultimately stabilizing festivity. As the wives realize that they are both the targets of Falstaff’s mercenary courting, they participate in a social exchange that aims to punish Falstaff in primarily bodily ways for his misconstruing of their merriness. Famously, the wives conspire to have him covered in soiled linens in a buckbasket and dumped into the Thames, dressed in women’s clothing while being beaten by Master Ford, and in the play’s culminating shaming ritual, given stag’s horns, burned with tapers and beaten with sticks by children. The play explicitly rewrites merriness as not the sexual licentiousness that is Falstaff’s practical script of the emotion. In that statement of purpose for the play overall with which I began this essay, Mistress Page addresses the audience in a rhymed quatrain regarding the final punishment she and Mistress Ford have arranged for Falstaff: We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do, Wives may be merry and yet honest too. We do not act that often jest and laugh; ’Tis old but true: ‘Still swine eats all the draff.’ (4.2.99–102)

By engaging in this exchange with Mistress Ford that facilitates both the disciplining and inclusion of Falstaff into the fictional town of Windsor, Mistress Page creates a proof—a test or experience—that reveals how affect accomplishes this social exchange. She suggests that public laughter and joking in women, which are clearly considered ‘merry’ behaviors at the time this play was written, should be reinterpreted as signs of chastity rather

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Imagining happy communities

than promiscuity, or re-associated, in Ahmed’s terms, since the quiet behavior more traditionally associated with female chastity may hide excessive sexual appetites in women (the eating of the draff). Unmerry women, Mistress Page insists, like the still swine, are more dangerous to mainstream norms of female sexuality than these merry women, whose boisterous behavior might be misinterpreted as transgressing traditional emotion scripts for female social interactions. The wives are merry instead, the play asserts, in the sense that they are instrumental in generating the positive affective networks of the town that create communal well-being. Once entered into dramatic exchange with each other, even though Mistress Ford is mistrusted by her husband, their agency is allowed and their sexuality is at least provisionally trusted. Cristina Alfar notes this discursive work in her analysis of Merry Wives as a cuckold play: While the play fails to unhinge marriage, it reworks the terms under which marriages function. Ford disavows his obsession with his wife’s fidelity and lays claim to a union with his wife that acknowledges her right to merriment … [the wives] reject Falstaff’s equation of mirth with bodily openness. The play stages a larger issue than virtue, then, having to do with regulatory access to the female body that each wife wishes to retain for herself.23

It is the cultural work of the wives’ merriness itself—and its shaping of bodily borders at both the individual and communal level—that is represented and conditioned in this play.24 As this transgressive merriness leaves behind its associations with ungoverned female sexual behavior, the play showcases the ways the positive affect of the wives can generate bodies and social associations that define the town of Windsor. The wives as characters operate in the way Ahmed outlines in The Cultural Politics of Emotion: In my model of sociality of emotions, I suggest that emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place. So emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.25

Although the wives are fictional, they are embodied, and they perform this boundary-shaping function and govern social groups through their repeated evocations of their bodily autonomy, as well as the bodily vulnerability of others. The shape of Falstaff and the surface of his body, most notably, is repeatedly at stake in the play. When he is hidden in the buckbasket to avoid being found by Ford’s husband—the first of the three bodily humiliations he suffers at the hands of the wives—he compares the doubling over of his body to a flexible sword being confined in a small container. He says

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Merriness, affect, and community

143

he was ‘compassed like a good bilbo [sword] in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head’ (3.5.95–7). In his second humiliation, he again escapes being found in Ford’s house by being dressed in the clothes of ‘the fat woman of Brentford’ because ‘she’s as big as he is’ (4.2.61; 63–4). And finally, his various torments as Herne the Hunter in the final folk scapegoating festival that serves to reconfigure the social world of Windsor emphasize his body in pain. He is burned with tapers in a mock chastity test in which Mistress Quickly tells the children dressed as fairies: ‘If he be chaste, the flame will back descend, / And turn him to no pain; but if he start, / It is the flesh of a corrupted heart’ (5.5.83–5): Evans: Come, will this wood take fire? They [burn Falstaff with] tapers Falstaff: O, O, O! Mistress Quickly: Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire. About him fairies; sing a scornful rhyme; And as you trip, still pinch him to your time. They [dance around Falstaff,] pinch[ing] him and sing[ing] (5.5.85–9)

His final torments emphasize the ways the surfaces of his body define his sexuality and his associations with the wives and their chastity. The merry women are revealed through these shaming rituals to be constantly shaping the bio-social boundaries of Windsor society, defining the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of the affective community, limning the contours of Windsor society in a disciplinary inclusivity. Merriness in the play, therefore, is most definitively not just in the modern sense a joyful emotion, but instead performs the affective work suggested by Sara Ahmed, generating individuals and communities through networks of association. As Ahmed suggests, ‘we need to consider how emotions operate to “make” and “shape” bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations towards others’.26 Those orientations or associations are both embodied and highly textual—and therefore intertextual—and they draw on discursive and literary codes such as genre (in this case folktale and jests) and metaphor to accomplish their cultural work. Staged emotions, furthermore, operate through the discursive conventions of theater, and it is telling that Merry Wives has also been categorized by its Arden editor, Giorgio Melchiori (at least in its 1602 quarto text), as Shakespeare’s unique contribution to the genre of the ‘comedy of humors’, most associated in this period with Ben Jonson.27 At the same time, many critics, including Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin in their recent critical reassessment of the play, point to the ways the play appears to portray everyday village life naturalistically and realistically, in particular the domestic and social practices of women.28 This

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Imagining happy communities

discrepancy between critical reception of the characters as types (humoral or otherwise) and as representations of historical, non-fictional wives, is the result, I would argue, of the play’s inherent investment in emotion, how it works and what it does. Recent developments in the cognitive and social sciences have all revealed the ways ‘real’ emotions are in fact typological in many ways as well as ‘natural’. Emotions are constructed by narratives and codes, appraised and culturally conditioned as well as physically experienced as the effects of entangled biocultural causes. Because the play focuses on the merriness of its wives, they end up signifying both that emotion and the way it functions affectively in the everyday life of a realistic Windsor. Merriness, as the named governing emotion of the play, influences social groups and the politics of belonging much more powerfully than, for instance, female ‘honesty’ or promiscuity. The wives and Mistress Quickly— depicted in this play as at the center of the various comic plots and constructed intertextually through a variety of generic and discursive conventions—reveal what merriness is and what are its associations. The play is therefore a test not just of whether merry wives can also be honest—whether merriness can be associated with virtue instead of sexual and other kinds of promiscuous or ungovernable behavior—but also fundamentally an exploration of the ways positive emotions serve to define and shape communities. In the final scene of the play, that huge bodily presence that is the character of Falstaff succumbs to an overdetermined literary assault that further thematizes the instability and transformational potential of the emotive body itself. He is tricked into wearing the cuckold’s horns as Herne the Hunter in an elaborate hoax involving local spirits and fairies that takes its inspiration from various contemporary rituals of charivari, the skimmington, and the pageantry associated with Elizabeth’s rural progresses.29 The ritualized spectacle immerses Falstaff in the highly allusive contexts of the folkloric greenworld and the pagan, specifically Ovidian, intertextual network. Before he is beaten and burned by the children disguised as spirits, Falstaff enters, referencing Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Windsor bell hath struck twelve, the minute draws on. Now the hot-blooded gods assist me! Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa: love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast! You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda: O omnipotent love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! A fault done first in the form of a beast—O Jove, a beastly fault!—and then another fault in the semblance of a fowl: think on’t, Jove, a foul fault! When gods have hot backs, what shall poor men do? For me, I am here a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i’ the forest. (5.5.1–13)

Falstaff’s final punishment, therefore, is to have his person highly embedded in fictional narratives of bodily transformation while his material body is

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Merriness, affect, and community

145

punished and redefined as ‘at fault’. Hardly festive or joyful in this play, but subject instead to the emotional regime of merriness dominated by the wives, Falstaff as a character and the heavy thematic emphasis on his body suggest the ways merriness is a disciplinary and binding affect, operating through both contemporary cultural associations and their complex intertextual and discursive histories. Additionally, the final overdetermined moment of spectacle that ends this play is notable in its use of children, many of whom have been present onstage as pages throughout the play, and its elevation of Anne Page as the very young and ultimately triumphant guardian of access to her own body. In the midst of participating as one of the children dressed as fairies in the forest, Anne succeeds in running off with Fenton to be married, foiling the two other social agendas of her mother and father, each along with their favored suitors. Anne, who has very few lines in the play and who has been primarily the object and goal of social exchanges among the other characters, suddenly takes action even though her will is still voiced through the male character, Fenton, who calls her offense ‘holy’ and asserts that: … this deceit loses the name of craft, Of disobedience, and unduteous title, Since therein she doth evitate and shun A thousand irreligious cursed hours Which forced marriage would have brought upon her. (5.5.220–4)

Making the case for companionate marriage in relation to the higher authority of God and the piety implied by the terms ‘holy’ and ‘irreligious’, Fenton asks Anne’s parents (and Shakespeare asks playgoers) to imagine the unhappiness of a loveless marriage as an accumulation of unhappy time, which recalls the roots of the word ‘merry’ in the idea of life’s transience. Fenton, in fact, articulates another way that merriness—redefined here more closely than ever before in the play as a productive social transgression—can create cohesion and resolve civic conflicts, facilitating happy continuity. The power of his call for this kind of emotive imagining is felt in the comedic resolution of the play, as all the parties decide to good-naturedly accept the outcome. The almost silent Anne, who certainly could not be read as ‘joyful’, engages in the ‘outlaw’ or disruptive behavior of merriness through her exchange with Fenton, ensuring that this more transgressive sense of merriness is also acknowledged and strengthened in the service of promoting companionate marriage and the production of more children who can populate the community. Merriness is redefined and reinforced in each of these plots as the named emotion and the affect that generates community in Windsor and by extension England. In this sense, Merry Wives operates as a powerful cultural evaluation of an everyday positive affect associated with women, one which has been

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Imagining happy communities

obscured by a critical tradition in which the play was, until recently, underexamined.30 Merry Wives unravels the misogyny of discourses surrounding cuckoldry, but it does not actually prove the honesty of the wives. Instead, it produces a collective experience of social cohesion in its finale, as merriness attaches them to Mistress Quickly, the Host of the Garter, Falstaff, and ultimately the members of the audience who share the event.31 Even in the emotional ambiguity of their behavior (which both disciplines and unites), the merriness of the wives generates the cohesion that allows for generic closure as well as the inclusion of even the scapegoated character and target of revenge, Falstaff. The play’s fantasy of a merry community is tested and proved as part of the cultural practice of generating ‘Windsorness’ as the wives perform the everyday work of embodied social life.

Notes 1 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2. 2 All references to The Merry Wives of Windsor are to the Arden edition, third series, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Although there have been a number of critical examinations of the relations between the quarto and folio versions of this play (notably by Wendy Wall and Kathleen McLuskie), for the purposes of this essay—focused mainly on plotting rather than local language—I have chosen to use Melchiori’s edition, based substantially on the folio text of 1623. Kathleen McLuskie, ‘A Time for The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 593–610; Wendy Wall, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor: Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Vol. 3, The Comedies (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 376–92. 3 For a contextualization of this attention to female honesty in the play as part of Shakespeare’s sustained exploration of cuckoldry, as well as a summary of previous critical approaches to these issues, see Cristina León Alfar, Women in Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Female Betrayal (New York: Routledge, 2017). On the complexity of the desire expressed at this moment in the play when this aside occurs and more generally throughout, see Wendy Wall, ‘Finding Desire in Windsor: Gender, Consumption, and Animality in Merry Wives’, in Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin (eds), The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 133–43. 4 Alfar argues that ‘through the network or community [the wives] form, the play stages an altered discourse on female subjection that deconstructs the binary between virtue and mirth’, Alfar, Women in Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays, p. 90. My reading of how merriness functions to govern social relations and cohesion in the fictional world imagined by the play responds to a number of critical

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Merriness, affect, and community

147

evaluations of the positive emotions of the wives, including Jean E. Howard’s, which emphasizes how ‘the “humors” of women’ in this and the contemporary play, Henry Porter’s 1599 Two Angry Women of Abington, ‘whether they are imagined as merry or angry, are qualities that can disrupt social life or cement it’, Jean E. Howard, ‘Sharp-Tongued Women and Small-Town Social Relations in Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abington and Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Gajowski and Rackin, The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, pp. 73–83. Critics of the play, however, often equate merriness with the genre of comedy, as Kathleen McLuskie does when she argues that ‘the framework of “merriness” precariously contains the violence and sexual vulnerability of the folio text, threatening to compromise ‘the immediate comic pleasures of the moment of performance’, McLuskie, ‘A Time’, pp. 603–4. 5 I am referring to the analyses of these social conditions in Gayle Rubin’s seminal 1975 article defining the sex/gender system: ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes toward a “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210. 6 Walter Cohen, Introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), pp. 1225–31. 7 Harriet Phillips, ‘Late Falstaff, the merry world, and The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Shakespeare, 10 (2014), pp. 111–37. Although beyond the scope of this essay, because the play represents a series of collective actions to achieve social goals, social exchange theory, which is dependent upon affect, can also be mapped onto the plotting of the play. Social exchange theory describes the various ways dyadic exchanges between individuals and within small groups are either punished or rewarded by individual experiences of emotion. Exchanges that are successful promote and reinforce positive emotional experiences and bonds within the network, and the reverse is true of failed exchanges and the negative emotions they produce. Edward Lawler, ‘An affect theory of social exchange’, American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 2 (2001), 321–52. 8 All of these senses, and a few others, are suggested in the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘will’, and were circulating at the time, as evidenced by Shakespeare’s own use of the term in ironic ways throughout the sonnets to create puns with his own name. See ‘will, n.1’, OED Online, September 2019 (accessed 3 November 2019). 9 For another reading of this wordplay, which interprets ‘English’ as the superficial rhetoric of Falstaff being pointed out by Pistol, see Catherine Belsey, ‘Agonistic scenes of provincial life’, in Gajowski and Rackin, The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, pp. 27–37 (p. 32). Belsey reads the play as Shakespeare’s war with English and representation itself. 10 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 11 ‘merry, adj.’, OED Online, December 2014 (accessed 24 February 2015). 12 ‘merry England, n.’, OED Online, December 2014 (accessed 24 February 2015). Harriet Phillips, drawing on the defining work of Leah Marcus on the ‘politics

148

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

13

14

15

16 17

18

Imagining happy communities

of mirth’, analyzes the play in relation to the traditions of ‘merry England’ and the ‘merry world’. Phillips argues that the play rejects and ridicules Falstaff as a belated characterization of this particularly English idea of mirth. Phillips, ‘Late Falstaff’; Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). ‘merry man, n.’, OED Online, December 2014 (accessed 24 February 2015). Representations of Robin Hood’s merry men were directly connected in the periods leading up to the production of the play both to anti-authoritarian political behavior and the survival of a ‘merry England’ outside the structure of the state. They survived mainly in broadsides during this period and would have registered as a context for the behavior of the wives, with the possibility that they had usurped and re-gendered this communitarian ideal. For a more sustained analysis of the late medieval literary tradition of Robin Hood tales, see A.J. Pollard’s Imagining Robin Hood: The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2004). Wendy Wall convincingly reveals the unsound and unsavory critical tendency to make this play with such an unstable textual history into an idol representative of middle-class English village life authorized by Shakespeare; Wall, ‘Unhusbanding Desires’, p. 388. Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 44. Ibid., pp. 33–55. This affective reading of community in the play offers insights into early modern sociality more generally. Characterizing the tendencies of the diverse field that is now considered modern ‘affect theory’, Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi suggest that ‘an affective account of politics will tend to emphasize not the grand narrative but the everyday feeling; not the unidirectional operation of disciplinary authority but the mutually impactful bodily encounter; not the singular agency of an individual but the distributed agencies of a collective; not the conscious articulation of political policies, doctrines, or schemes, but the inarticulate stirrings of feeling or “affective cognition” that might move a subject toward unforeseen affiliations, alliances, and actions’, Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi, ‘Introduction’, in Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi (eds), Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism (New York: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 1–24 (p. 7). Peter Holland argues for the complexity and realism of Shakespeare’s representation of community and points to the ways most productions cannot fully capture this complexity. He writes, ‘the community that gathers together to treat Falstaff as its scapegoat has also to redefine some of its internal relationships. Much of the weight is carried by the word ‘merry’ itself which can, when linked to women, add to the meanings of laughter a suggestion of promiscuity.’ He asserts the essential conservatism of the play’s vision of community, but that stability is only barely maintained through the practices and affects of the wives themselves.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Merriness, affect, and community

149

Peter Holland, ‘The merry wives of Windsor: the performance of community’, Shakespeare Bulletin 23, no. 2 (2005), 5–18 (p. 13). 19 ‘motion, n.’, OED Online, December 2014 (accessed 15 December 2018). 20 For an overview and meta-critique of reading Falstaff’s career in the Henriad and Merry Wives as that of a kind of effeminized Machiavel see Ian Moulton, ‘Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff’, in Dutton and Howard, Companion: Vol. 3, Comedies, pp. 223–42. 21 There is also a tradition that Elizabeth commissioned the play to see Falstaff in love and Shakespeare wrote it in two weeks, although we have no textual evidence to verify the story, and in fact it is apparently unlikely. For a comprehensive discussion of these issues and the textual history of the play, see Melchiori’s Introduction to the Arden edition (p. 1). For a full discussion of the ‘fortnight anecdote’, see Wall, ‘Unhusbanding Desire’. 22 For an analysis of this carnivalesque tradition, see Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 23 Alfar, Women in Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays, p. 89. 24 As Lauren Berlant points out, aesthetic forms such as this play reveal the complex historical workings of affect: ‘[Affect’s] activity saturates the corporeal, intimate, and political performances of adjustment that make a shared atmosphere something palpable and, in its patterning, releases to view a poetics, a theory-in-practice of how a world works. Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions under which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a thing that is happening finds its genre, which is the same as finding its event. So in addition to the unlikely possibility of deriving the state of structural historical relations from patterns of affective response, I am claiming that the aesthetic or formal rendition of affective experience provides evidence of historical processes’, Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 16. 25 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 10. 26 Ibid., p. 4. 27 For a discussion of the significant differences between the 1602 quarto and 1623 folio versions of the play, see Leah Marcus, who argues that the quarto is closer to recording everyday life and takes the form more closely of ‘city’ or ‘citizen’ comedy. Leah Marcus, ‘Levelling Shakespeare: local customs and local texts’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 168–78. In the Arden Introduction, Melchiori points out about Merry Wives that ‘its uniqueness, i.e. the fact of being Shakespeare’s one and only “English comedy”—though large sections of the plot and action derive from obvious Italian models—as well as his only “comedy of humors”, is achieved through a subtle gradation of linguistic distinctions in a play where verse is used only in a very few scenes and individual nuances of social rank are established by the grammatical and syntactical usages of English by each speaker … the whole comedy insists on the interplay between the natural speech conditioned by each character’s social status and the verbal

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

28

29

30

31

Imagining happy communities

quirks that tend to transform them into’ humors’ (5). Northrop Frye, in his 1950 address titled ‘Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors’, argues that ‘Shakespeare [unlike Jonson] never wrote a pure comedy of manners’, which he defines as creating ‘a kind of realistic illusion’, but he singles out Merry Wives: ‘The strong element of folklore in the baiting of Falstaff seems to me to rule out even The Merry Wives, which would otherwise be Shakespeare’s closest approach to the Jonsonian formula’, Northrup Frye on Literature and Society 1936–1989: Vol. 10, ed. Robert Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 45. While a complete discussion of the ‘comedy of humors’ as a Renaissance genre uniquely situated to provide a resource in historical accounts of emotion is beyond the scope of this essay, this critical attention attests to the fact that at its core this is a play about the nature and cultural practices of emotion. Many of the essays in their collection are reassessments of how the play should be considered as a representation of everyday life, most notably those by Cristina Leon Alfar, Rachel Prusko, Jean E. Howard, and Wendy Wall. Gajowski and Rackin, The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays. See Elizabeth Kolkovich, ‘Pageantry, queens and housewives in the two texts of The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63 (2012), 328–54. Also see the discussion of this pageant as a form of skimmington in Brown, Better a Shrew, p. 55. Underexamined, except by feminist scholars. For a discussion of these cultural and critical trends, see Phyllis Rackin’s analysis of the play in relation to The Taming of the Shrew in her Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 3, pp. 48–71. This representation of Windsor also certainly supports Elizabeth’s gendered rule. As Jean E. Howard has argued, ‘although the wives of Windsor are bourgeois and not courtly, they are placed, in the fifth act, within the penumbra of the monarch, their homely domestic authority echoing her elevated monarchical authority. In my reading of the play, the play honors the Queen by honoring the merry wives and their honest housewifery’ (Howard, ‘Sharp-Tongued Women’, p. 80).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

III

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Leila Watkins

In the Western classical tradition, happiness, or eudaimonia, was typically viewed as an ‘objective condition of the mind or soul’, often linked to virtuous actions and qualities; today, happiness is usually understood as a subjective condition of positive feeling.1 Elaborating on this idea of happiness as a subjective feeling, contemporary affect theorist Sara Ahmed defines happiness as ‘an orientation toward the objects we come into contact with’, stressing the ways in which the external objects one desires—rather than one’s internal virtues—can shape a person’s sense of whether or not they are happy.2 While scholars do not agree on how we have arrived at our modern conception of happiness—or, indeed, exactly what that conception is—many critical narratives coalesce around the middle to late seventeenth century as a watershed moment in which modern understandings of happiness began to diverge from pre-modern definitions. Historians of emotion in seventeenthcentury England have variously cited the nation’s rapidly expanding economy, its trend toward secular thought, its elision of consumerism and civic duty, and its emerging republican politics.3 Literary scholars like Vivasvan Soni have stressed the importance of attending to the discursive forms that shape our conceptions of happiness, arguing that ‘literary texts and genres have provided the imaginative precondition and narrative logic for certain forms of political, ethical, and religious thought’.4 Soni himself does this by examining how the formal characteristics of the eighteenth-century novel ‘denarrativized’ happiness, casting it as a fleeting, private moment rather than as a public assessment of an individual’s entire life trajectory.5 But while the novel has long been associated with the rise of individualism and the pursuit of personal happiness, we might ask what pictures of happiness emerge when we examine different literary forms, such as devotional verse. This genre provides an interesting test case, both because lyric does not rely on narrative form and because one might expect religious literature to retain an older model of happiness in which believers seek fulfillment in the abstract

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

satisfactions of moral virtue, God’s love, and the hope of a heavenly afterlife. And indeed, many late seventeenth-century devotional poets do depict happiness in these terms. As I will argue, however, the genre also allows for fruitful negotiation between the conceptions of happiness that we have since come to understand as ‘pre-modern’ (stemming from one’s moral character and actions in the world) and ‘modern’ (stemming from one’s affective reactions to the world). In this essay, I discuss a mid-seventeenth-century English poet, Thomas Traherne, whose work displays a near-obsessive interest with happiness—what it is, where it can be found, and how people can maximize their chances of finding it. While Traherne’s interest in happiness aligns with traditional historical narratives about the mid-seventeenth century’s rising interest in the emotion, his methods of approaching happiness differ drastically from the narrative of an increasingly individualized, secular, and present happiness pitted against an older model of communal, religious, and otherworldly happiness. Traherne’s religiously informed commitment to obtaining immediate happiness on earth merges elements from both of these models, making him difficult to place either in a canon of early modern devotional lyric or in a tradition of empirical, Enlightenment thought.6 Furthermore, Traherne grounds his definition of happiness in humans’ relationships to material objects in the natural world—a phenomenon noted by scholars of contemporary affect theory, but not often discussed in early modern devotional poetry. Rather than reject all material objects as ‘worldly’ vanity, Traherne’s religious model of happiness depends upon humans’ ability to recognize and appreciate the objects that will best contribute to their happiness. Traherne’s poetry should be of especial interest to scholars of positive affect, first, because it complicates a dominant history of emotion that links personal happiness to the rise of secular political theory and consumerism and, second, because it demonstrates the importance of literary form in the cultural construction of positive emotion. Traherne was educated at Brasenose College in Oxford in the 1650s, served as a Puritan priest during the Interregnum, and became a member of the Anglican clergy after the Restoration. He wrote several theological treatises, which were published both during his life and shortly after his death. Most of his poetry, however, was discovered in manuscript form in the early twentieth century. At first glance, Traherne’s poetry looks very much like devotional poetry written by other English priests, such as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Yet to a greater degree than most of these poets, Traherne’s poetry ecstatically focuses on positive emotions, such as ‘happiness’, ‘bliss’, ‘joy’, and ‘felicity’, which prompted many mid-twentiethcentury critics to identify him as a religious ‘mystic’ rather than a mainstream Anglican.7 More recent scholarship, however, has shown that Traherne was



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

155

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

deeply engaged with the political, religious, and philosophical discourses of seventeenth-century England, including debates on the nature of happiness and the best methods for achieving it.8 While Traherne follows many of his peers in advocating divine pleasures over ‘false’ or ‘worldly’ pleasures, he insists that true happiness occurs on earth, not only in heaven. In a brief passage from his prose reflections, Centuries of Meditation, Traherne offers an explicit articulation of his theory of happiness: There are Christians, that place and desire all their Happiness in another Life, and there is another sort of Christians that desire Happiness in this. The one can defer their Enjoyment of Wisdom till the World to com. And dispence with the Increas and Perfection of knowledg for a little time: the other are instant and impatient of Delay; and would fain see that Happiness here, which they shall enjoy herafter. Not the vain Happiness of this World, falsly called Happiness, truly vain: but the real Joy and Glory of the Blessed: which Consisteth in the Enjoyment of the Whole World in Communion with God. … Whether the first sort be Christians indeed, look you to that. They hav much to say for themselvs. Yet certainly they that put of felicity with long delays, are to be much Suspected. for it is against the Nature of Lov and desire to defer.9

While Traherne distinguishes between ‘false’ and ‘true’ happiness, drawing on a long religious tradition of separating sacred and profane joys, he explains that happiness does not entail a rejection of the physical world, but rather an ‘Enjoyment of the Whole World in Communion with God’. He stresses the absolute necessity of seeking happiness in the present moment and even suggests that people who desire to delay happiness until a heavenly afterlife are religiously suspect—perhaps not even truly Christian. As I will argue below, Traherne’s poems theorize a model of happiness that distinguishes between ‘worldly’ and spiritual sources of pleasure, but they do so by identifying the ‘true’ value of objects and inviting readers to take pleasure in their use and possession of the right kind of objects. In their pursuit of happiness, Traherne’s poems discuss specific things in the world that cause ‘felicity’, or happiness. As I note above, historians of emotion often claim that the emerging consumer economy in late early modern Europe led people to form stronger links between material wealth and emotional well-being. Keith Thomas’s study of fulfillment in the period recounts how English people began to locate happiness in household objects, inscribing their names on pots and pans and forming ‘deep emotional attachment[s] to attractive fabrics, well-made furniture, and decorated china’.10 Yet Traherne’s poetry offers a different perspective on the happiness to be found in material goods. In an era that was becoming increasingly attached to manufactured goods as sources of happiness and personal expression, Traherne charts an alternative path to human happiness that stresses taking

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

enjoyment in one’s ‘possession’ of the world’s natural resources and one’s own physical body. In their focus on objects, Traherne’s poems track a seventeenth-century preoccupation with material possessions and emotional attachment, but they also display a surprising resonance with contemporary affect theory. As Ahmed claims, objects ‘become good, or acquire their value as goods’, when a significant number of people agree that they are likely to lead to happiness.11 As these objects circulate in society, they ‘accumulate positive affective value’, making us more likely to seek them and more likely to encounter them.12 Such objects might be material things such as owning a house or a car, but they also include conceptual goods such as physical fitness, career success, marriage, or political power. Ahmed argues that a cultural consensus to define certain objects as sources of happiness—such as wealth, children, or cultural assimilation—can have ‘unhappy effects’ for individuals who cannot or choose not to be made happy by such objects.13 Centuries earlier, Traherne’s poetry addresses both of these challenges by exploring the problem of seeking fulfillment in a world where socially defined ‘happy objects’ are dissatisfying, inaccessible, or in short supply. In order to identify alternative sources of happiness, Traherne must first explain the process of cultural construction that defines the scope and availability of ‘happy objects’. Traherne’s poems repeatedly describe this process as a narrowing of vision that correlates with age, a myopia that accompanies the shift from childhood to adulthood.14 In ‘Blisse’, for example, Traherne pens his own history of emotion, linking the demise of happiness not only to Adam’s Fall, but also to each individual child’s loss of innocence: I All Blisse   Consists in this, To do as Adam did: And not to know those Superficial Toys    Which in the Garden once were hid,    Those little new Invented Things.    Cups, Saddles Crowns are Childish Joys. So Ribbans are and Rings.    Which all our Happiness destroys. 2 Nor God    In His Abode Nor Saints nor little Boys Nor Angels made them, only foolish Men,    Grown mad with Custom on those Toys    Which more increas their Wants do dote.    And when they Older are do then



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

157

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  Those Bables chiefly note    With Greedier Eys, more Boys tho Men.15

In this poem, ‘little Boys’ are aligned with saints and angels while adults form ‘childish’ attachments to ‘Superficial Toys’. Not only do these manmade ‘Bables’, like cups, crowns, and ribbons, fail to offer true bliss, but they actually ‘destroy’ happiness. By their very existence and circulation in society, the ‘new Invented Things’ to which humans assign value impede people’s ability to comprehend ‘true’ systems of value. Traherne’s use of the rhyme ‘toys/joys’ calls attention to the gap between manmade objects of happiness and joys that already exist in nature as God created it. The words’ visual and aural similarity illustrates how easy it is for humans to mistake one for the other if their spiritual vision is impaired. Similarly, when Traherne claims that the proliferation of such toys ‘increas[es] … Wants’ rather than sating human thirst for possession, he both aligns himself with seventeenth-century critiques of consumerism and anticipates contemporary critiques of what we still call ‘consumer culture’ today.16 Traherne is not unique in using devotional lyric to critique ‘worldly’ systems of value, but his method of doing so is different from that of his contemporaries. His distrust of excessive consumption mirrors the social concerns of the post-Restoration Anglican establishment, yet rather than simply urge restraint or austerity, Traherne suggests natural objects as happy material alternatives to manufactured goods. That is, instead of encouraging readers to substitute abstract, heavenly joys for earthly goods, Traherne’s poetry invites them to locate happiness in the immediate, material pleasures of the natural world and their human bodies. By inhabiting a childlike mindset that takes pleasure in natural objects, rather than in adult ‘toys’, readers can unlearn systems of value that associate happiness with wealth measured by opulence, artifice, and scarcity. In the remainder of this essay, I will closely examine several poems in which Traherne explores such alternative sources of positive affect. Instead of finding happiness in traditional, manmade markers of wealth and physical comfort, Traherne’s poetry urges readers to seek happiness in natural objects with real use value. In order to do this, Traherne suggests, humans need to recover their original way of viewing the world. Many of Traherne’s poems attempt to do precisely that, by describing an imagined moment of vision before sin takes hold of a child. In the poem ‘Speed’, for example, Traherne’s speaker chronicles his perception of natural resources ‘as soon as I was Born’, before ‘filthy Sin … destroy[ed]’ his instinctive human ability to see the world in this way (6; 41). The poem opens with a description of water:    The Liquid Pearl in Springs,    The usefull and the Precious Things

158

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

   Are in a Moment Known. Their very Glory does reveal their Worth,   (And that doth set their Glory forth;) As soon as I was Born, they all were Shewn.    True Living Wealth did flow,    In Chrystall Streams below    My feet, and trilling down In Pure, Transparent, Soft, Sweet, Melting Pleasures,   Like Precious and Diffusive Treasures, At once my Body fed, and Soul did Crown. (1–12)

Traherne’s celebration of water compares the natural resource to pearl and crystal, materials humans often use in a decorative function. At first, Traherne’s metaphors simply draw attention to the aesthetic qualities of water. The third line, however, yokes together the adjectives ‘usefull’ and ‘precious’, setting up a tension between aesthetic and utilitarian systems of value. On one hand, Traherne implies that water should be considered ‘precious’ or valuable because of its usefulness. On the other hand, the poet plays on the alternative sense of the word ‘precious’, often used to describe something that is rare. Unlike pearls or ‘precious stones’, water (at least in Traherne’s England) is plentiful, a quality that assigns it a lower financial value (or exchange value) than jewels, pearls, or crystal.17 Yet in the second stanza, Traherne calls water ‘True Living Wealth’, shifting the definition of wealth from the possession of rare objects to the enjoyment of common phenomena in the natural world. Thus, while the metaphors comparing water to pearl and crystal initially serve to highlight the value of water as a natural resource, the poem gradually reveals the metaphor’s tenor to be far more valuable than its vehicles. Although other seventeenth-century devotional poets celebrate the natural world, many value nature primarily for its capacity to show forth God’s power, for its ability to function as a set of symbols that make immaterial spiritual truths legible. Henry Vaughan, for example—to whom Traherne’s poems were originally misattributed— repeatedly uses individual lyrics, such as ‘The Water-fall’, ‘The Star’, and ‘Cock-Crowing’ to read objects in the natural world as spiritually meaningful signs in a ‘book of nature’. But while Traherne certainly associates nature with a benevolent creator, he locates natural objects’ value in their material properties rather than in their symbolic potential to point to something beyond themselves. In addition to the physical pleasures produced by natural objects, Traherne also explores a secondary form of happiness that comes from the knowledge that one possesses such objects. While the speaker notes that the streams ‘fed’ his body, he also claims that they ‘crown[ed]’ his soul, a word more



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

159

closely linked with social status than physical pleasure (12). The next stanzas focus on the language of sovereignty and possession:

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

   I was as High and Great,    As Kings are in their Seat.    All other Things were mine. The World my House, the Creatures were my Goods,   Fields, Mountains, Valleys, Woods, Floods, Cities, Churches, Men for me did shine.    Great, Lofty, Endless, Stable,    Various and Innumerable,    Bright usefull fair Divine, Immovable and Sweet the Treasures were,   The Sacred Objects did appear Most rich and Beautifull, as well as mine. (13–24)

In these stanzas, the poet extensively catalogs his possessions and effusively lists their attributes. Critics have debated the significance of Traherne’s cataloging style at length, arguing that it evokes the language of empirical observation and dissection, sacramental excess, and divine unity, but it also simply sounds like a wealthy person itemizing his possessions.18 The speaker underscores this theme of possession by repeatedly describing natural objects as ‘mine’, ‘my Goods’, as shining ‘for me’. Yet even as the speaker lays claim to these natural objects, he maintains that they are still ‘Sacred Objects’, suggesting that his possession does not imply an absolute sense of dominion over the natural world but retains a sense of joint ownership with God.19 Rather than stress the exclusivity of traditional property ownership, the excessive listing in ‘Speed’ generates a sense of abundance, suggesting that nearly anyone can experience the pleasure of counting their possessions, once they are able to conceive of natural resources as ‘treasures’. Instead of encouraging readers to seek spiritual wealth before earthly wealth, Traherne’s devotional poetry advocates expanding one’s definition of material wealth to include the natural world. By assigning objects value according to their usefulness rather than their scarcity, Traherne also expands the number of people who can find happiness in the assurance that they do, in fact, possess valuable resources. While ‘Speed’ acknowledges that ‘other Toys’ have ‘Ecclypst’ the infant vision of nature, other poems suggest that it is both possible and desirable to recover this vision of the world (31–2). In the poem ‘Poverty’, Traherne illustrates how a proper perception of natural objects can initiate a movement from despair to happiness. The poem opens with the speaker sitting ‘alone and desolate’ in a sparsely furnished house, lamenting his poverty (2). Looking around the house, the speaker takes stock of his few worldly possessions,

160

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

noting ‘som few Cups and Dishes’, a table, wooden stools, and a cloth painted with a scene from an ancient story (8–14). The speaker is particularly distressed that his possessions can be confined to such a small space:   I wonder’d much to see   That all my Wealth should be   Confin’d in such a little Room, Yet hope for more I scarcely durst presume.   It griev’d me sore   That such a scanty Store   Should be my All: (15–21)

As Traherne suggests in another poem, ‘Misapprehension’, humans cannot be satisfied with finite spaces or objects because their natures are infinite. Even the world itself is too small for a human, Traherne claims; instead, ‘Eternity must be / The Object of his View / And his Possession too’ (18–22). Notably, ‘Poverty’ takes place indoors, a setting that prevents the speaker from observing the wonders of the natural world. Mid-stanza, the speaker abruptly shifts his point of view: For I forgat my Eas and Health, Nor did I think of Hands or Eys,   Nor Soul nor Body prize;   I neither thought the Sun, Nor Moon, nor Stars, nor Peeple, mine, Tho they did round about me shine; And therefore was I quite undon. (22–8)

Here Traherne suggests that the speaker is not miserable because he is truly destitute but rather because he has forgotten an entire sector of his property. While focusing on the physical furniture within his house, he has failed to count the riches of a healthy body, access to the natural world, or the presence of other people. The poem ends by connecting God’s works to the speaker’s wealth: ‘For till His Works my Wealth became, / No Lov, or Peace, did me enflame: / But now I have a DEITY’ (54–6). Of course, this model of seeking happiness presents several difficulties: one could argue that ‘Poverty’ simply reinforces a common pre-modern association of physical poverty with spiritual wealth—a platitude sometimes used as an excuse to ignore the suffering of the poor. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England saw a renewed discussion of this trope as the newly Protestant country strove to navigate a decentralized church, a more mobile economy, and thus changing institutional models for dispensing charity and dealing with the poor.20 Similarly, we might ask if Traherne considered whether this method of seeking happiness can work for the truly impoverished as well as it can for those of modest means. Nevertheless,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

161

‘Poverty’ offers an answer to ‘Blisse’, showing that even fallen adults can reconfigure their orientation toward objects, shifting their desire away from objects that reflect the ‘vain Happiness of this world’ and toward objects that promote true happiness. ‘Poverty’ identifies another alternative source of happiness when the speaker remembers his health, hands, and eyes as objects of wealth. In contradiction to much of the period’s devotional verse, Traherne’s poems often celebrate the physical body as both an object and instrument of happiness. ‘The Estate’, for example, claims: ‘Men’s Bodies were not made for Stripes, / Nor any thing but Joys’ (34–5). This is unusual in a culture of devotional poetry that often called for the body’s mortification in the service of the soul’s sanctification (see John Donne’s ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’) or at least lamented the frail body’s tendency to hinder the soul’s devotions (see George Herbert’s ‘Affliction’ (I)). In ‘The Person’, Traherne offers a detailed description of the happiness to be found in the human body. The poem opens with the lines: ‘Ye Sacred Lims, / A richer Blazon I will lay / On you, then first I found’, drawing on a trope from erotic poetry in which a lover describes his beloved’s body piece by piece (1–3). Yet as the poem continues, it declares its difference from a traditional blazon that compares each body part to another thing. Just as the poem ‘Speed’ valued water for its material properties rather than as a symbol in a ‘Book of Nature’, so ‘The Person’ applies a similar principle to the physical properties of the human body, rejecting a symbolic poetics in favor of a descriptive poetics:   The Naked Things Are most Sublime, and Brightest shew,   When they alone are seen:   Mens Hands then Angels Wings Are truer Wealth even here below:   For those but seem. Their Worth they then do best reveal, When we all Metaphores remove,   For Metaphores conceal,   And only Vapours prove. They best are Blazond when we see   The Anatomie, Survey the Skin, cut up the Flesh, the Veins Unfold: The Glory there remains. The Muscles, Fibres, Arteries, and Bones Are better far then Crowns and precious Stones. (19–34)

In this stanza, Traherne expresses a preference for talking about the human body as it truly exists rather than as a compilation of parts to be

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

compared to more palatable objects. As Carol Ann Johnston notes, Traherne’s distrust of metaphor engages in a common early modern discourse of antiPetrarchanism that sought to resist overly elaborate metaphors, instead favoring ‘metaphor with less distance between the subject of comparison and its analogy’.21 Yet Traherne, she argues, seeks to collapse this distance even further, often seeking a ‘non-metaphorical language’ in his poetry.22 While many early modern poets satirized the blazon, Traherne’s critique is unusual: rather than suggest that poets overpraise women with improbable metaphors, he claims that these metaphors’ vehicles will always fall short of their tenor—the real beauty of the human body. Not only does Traherne celebrate the ‘naked’ appearance of the body’s surface, but he also imagines the ‘glory’ to be seen in an anatomized body. While this enthusiasm for cutting things open to see their insides evokes the period’s interest in empirical scientific practice, the inclusion of such a sentiment in religious poetry is less common.23 Compare the celebration of the interior workings of the human body in ‘The Person’ with this sonnet by George Herbert, one of the century’s most widely read devotional poets, and one whom we know Traherne read: Sure Lord, there is enough in thee to dry   Oceans of Ink; for, as the Deluge did   Cover the earth, so doth thy Majesty: Each cloud distills thy praise, and doth forbid Poets to turn it to another use.   Roses and Lillies speak thee; and to make   A pair of Cheeks of them, is thy abuse. Why should I Womens eyes for Chrystal take? Such poor invention burns in their low mind   Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go   To praise and on thee Lord, some Ink bestow. Open the bones, and you shall nothing find   In the best face but filth, when Lord, in thee  The beauty lies, in the discovery.24

Herbert’s sonnet worries about poets using images from the natural world (‘Roses and Lillies’) to praise women’s faces instead of God himself. Attempting to counter the wrongheadedness of such an enterprise, Herbert’s sonnet asks readers to imagine the mess of bloody flesh that can be found just under the surface of any beautiful woman’s face. In contrast to God, whose discovery yields more and more beauty, women’s beauty is only skin deep. While Traherne’s poem ‘The Person’ is not exclusively about the female body, it does evoke women to illustrate what Gary Kuchar terms Traherne’s ‘aesthetic theory regarding the importance of disavowing metaphor’.25 Yet rather than indicate how easy it is to strip women of their beautiful



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

163

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

adornments, Traherne posits ornaments such as jewelry and flowers as distractions from the real beauty of the body:   The Rubies we behold,   The Diamonds that Deck The Hands of Queens, compard unto   The Hands we view; The Softer Lillies, and the Roses are Less Ornaments to those that Wear The same, then are the Hands, and Lips, and Eys Of those who those fals Ornaments so prize. (44–51)

Rather than argue, as Herbert does, that comparing women to lilies and roses degrades flowers’ capacity to point back to their creator, Traherne insists that these same two flowers pale in comparison to the hands, lips, and eyes of the women who wear them. At first, such a sentiment seems to echo a common tradition in erotic poetry where poets aestheticize the natural over the artificial. For example, in Ben Jonson’s lyric ‘Still to Be Neat’, the speaker expresses his preference for an aesthetics of ‘sweet neglect’, flowing robes, and loose hair over ‘the adulteries of art’.26 Yet Traherne’s desire to strip away artifice does not eroticize women’s bodies as objects of male pleasure in the way Jonson’s poem does—rather, it counters a trope in seventeenth-century religious poetry that insists on exposing the false beauty of women’s bodies in order to praise the true beauty of God. Traherne’s poem does not see poetic praise of the body as something that comes at God’s expense. On the contrary, it claims that to celebrate the naked human body is to subscribe to a divine system of value that promises deeper and truer happiness than the artificial ornaments that mask the natural properties of the body. The final stanza of ‘The Person’ employs a similar strategy to the previously discussed poems about the natural world: Traherne distinguishes between things that seem like wealth (golden bracelets) and things that are wealth (the body itself):   Let Veritie Be thy Delight: let me Esteem   True Wealth far more than Toys:   Let Sacred Riches be, While falser Treasures only seem   My real Joys. For Golden Chains and Bracelets are But Gilded Manicles, whereby   Old Satan doth ensnare,   Allure, Bewitch the Ey. Thy Gifts O God alone Ile prize,

164

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  My Tongue, my Eys, My cheeks, my Lips, my Ears, my Hands, my Feet, Their Harmony is far more Sweet; Their Beauty true. And these in all my Ways Shall Themes becom, and Organs of thy Praise. (53–68)

When Traherne distinguishes between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ in lines 56–7, he revises a common religious sentiment of the period that presents the world and its pleasures, including bodily pleasures, as illusions compared to the real joys of heaven. Instead, Traherne defines manufactured riches, such as golden chains and bracelets, as illusory sources of happiness that obscure the real pleasures to be found in the natural world and one’s own body. Just as Traherne desires readers to find happiness in the conviction that they possess many valuable natural resources, so he also encourages them to think of their bodies as their most prized, priceless possession. Yet while Traherne’s poetry often encourages readers to claim their ‘possession’ of natural objects like trees, water, and sunlight, it is important to note that this principle does not apply to human bodies in quite the same way. While Traherne’s speaker admires the beauty of the naked body, including women’s lips, hands, and eyes, he only talks about his own body as a source of wealth. As in the catalog of natural objects in ‘Speed’, the final stanza of ‘The Person’ erupts into ecstatic listing, emphasizing the abundance of wealth to be found in the body. But unlike ‘Speed’, ‘The Person’ prefaces each body part with a first-person pronoun: ‘My tongue, my Eys, / My cheeks, my Lips, my Ears, my Hands, my Feet’ (64–5). Again, this distinguishes Traherne both from religious poets of the era who distrust the body and from erotic poets of the era who describe it as something to be desired and possessed by another person. By identifying useful natural resources and one’s own body as ‘happy objects’, Traherne significantly departs from a budding conception of happiness in late seventeenth-century England that was linked to the acquisition of monetary wealth and the possession of manmade objects. Yet by locating happiness in earthly objects and physical pleasures, Traherne also defies the conventions of the devotional lyric genre with which we have come to associate his work. In her assessment of Traherne’s attitudes toward property, Lynne Greenberg notes Traherne’s ‘tendency to fluctuate between opposing systems’, such as communal and capitalist notions of ownership.27 I would argue that Traherne’s attitudes toward happiness stand at a similar crossroads between a religious model of happiness based on rejecting ‘worldly’ systems of value and an emerging secular model of happiness grounded in individual ownership and affective pleasure. Yet unlike Greenberg, I do not see Traherne as a writer torn between these two models of happiness. Rather, his work offers a blueprint for merging these two models into a



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

165

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

single theory of happiness that retains God as the source of human felicity but recognizes the earthly pleasures of enjoying, possessing, and using natural objects. This concept of happiness acknowledges the existence of sin and its potential to cloud humans’ perception of the objects that make one truly wealthy; yet it also expresses faith in humans’ ability to perceive a different system of value, re-orienting themselves toward the right kinds of happy objects.

Notes 1 Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Happiness is Overrated (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. xii. 2 Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 29–51 (p. 32). 3 See, for example, Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) and Paul Slack, ‘The politics of consumption and England’s happiness in the later seventeenth century’, English Historical Review 122 (2007), 609–31. 4 Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 10. See also Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Although he distinguishes between happiness and joy, Potkay, like Soni, regards narrative as a crucial literary form for understanding positive affect. 5 Soni, Mourning Happiness, p. 10. 6 James J. Balakier, for example, claims that ‘Traherne’s true importance lies in his endeavors to frame a modern science of cognition that complements and extends Hobbsian materialism’. Yet at the same time, Balakier suggests that there is a sharp tension between Traherne’s interests in cognitive science and his identity as an Anglican priest, claiming that ‘Traherne—along with the Anglican establishment at large—abhorred and sought to repudiate’ Hobbism, James J. Balakier, Thomas Traherne and the Felicities of the Mind (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2010), p. 28. 7 See K.W. Salter, Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965); A.L. Clements, The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); and Alison J. Sherington, Mystical Symbolism in the Poetry of Thomas Traherne (Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1970). Even T.S. Eliot termed Traherne ‘more mystic than poet’ in ‘Mystic and politician as poet: Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, Milton’, The Listener 3 (1930), 590–1. 8 See Kevin Laam, ‘Thomas Traherne, Richard Allestree, and the Ethics of Appropriation’, in Jacob Blevins (ed.), Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 37–63 and Ana Elena González-Treviño, ‘Thomas Traherne

166

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

18

19

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

and the Study of Happiness’, in Elizabeth S. Dodd and Cassandra Gorman (eds), Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 154–71. Centuries of Meditations, 4.9, in The Works of Thomas Traherne: Vol. V, ed. Jan Ross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 144–5. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 126. Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, p. 34. Ibid., pp. 29, 41. Ibid., p. 50. Lauren Berlant points to a different, but related, dynamic in her theory of ‘cruel optimism’, in which an ‘object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving’, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 2. A significant body of Traherne criticism is devoted to the unusual representation of childhood in his poetry. See, for example, Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978) and Edmund Newey, ‘“God made man greater when he made him less”: Traherne’s iconic child’, Literature & Theology 24 (2010), 227–41. This and all subsequent quotations of Traherne’s poetry are taken from Jan Ross (ed.), The Works of Thomas Traherne, Vol. VI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014). Parenthetical in-text line references are to this edition. When multiple versions of a poem appear in both the Dobell folio (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. c. 42) and the ‘Poems of Felicity’ manuscript (British Library, Burney MS 392), I have used the Dobell version because this manuscript is written in Traherne’s hand and is the closest version to his original writing. ‘Poems of Felicity’, by contrast, is written in his brother Philip’s hand and contains extensive edits and revisions made by Philip. For an extensive discussion of social debates about increasing consumerism, see Slack, ‘Politics of consumption’. For an extensive discussion of Traherne’s critique of ‘exchange value’, see David Hawkes, ‘Thomas Traherne: a critique of political economy’, Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (1999), 369–88. See, respectively, Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 264; Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), p. 206; and Carl M. Selkin, ‘The language of vision: Traherne’s cataloguing style’, English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976), 92–104 (p. 94). For more on Traherne’s views of property ownership, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972) and Lynne A. Greenberg, ‘“Cursd and Devised Properties”: Traherne and the Laws of Property’, in Blevins, Re-Reading Thomas Traherne, pp. 21–35.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happy objects and earthly pleasure

167

20 For more information on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’s religious and economic climate, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 26–9. For a longer discussion of pamphlet literature about England’s poor, see Kathleen Pories, ‘The Intersection of Poor Laws and Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Fictional and Factual Categories’, in Constance C. Relihan (ed.), Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996). 21 Carol Ann Johnston, ‘Heavenly perspectives, mirrors of eternity: Thomas Traherne’s yearning subject’, Criticism 43 (2001), 377–405 (p. 381). 22 Ibid., 379. 23 For two very different analyses of Traherne’s attitudes toward empirical science, see Jonathan Sawday and Gary Kuchar on Traherne’s treatment of the body. Sawday argues that Traherne appropriates the empirical language of dissection to create an ‘alternative to the frenetic creation of male myths of psycho-sexual scientific domination’, while Kuchar argues that Traherne sees the body less as an ‘object’ and more as a sacramental ‘medium of experience’, through which individuals may know God. See, respectively, Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 250 and Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 183. 24 Helen Wilcox (ed.), The English Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 6. 25 Kuchar, Divine Subjection, p. 208. 26 Ben Jonson, ‘Still to Be Neat’, 2.10–11, in Ben Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 291–2. 27 Greenberg, ‘Cursd and Devised Properties’, p. 35.

10

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi Lalita Pandit Hogan

The main storyline of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi revolves around a young duchess’s marriage to her steward, Antonio, against the wishes of her two brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal. Out of fear, the Duchess keeps her marriage a secret for several years, as the suspicious brothers grant Bosola, a former galley slave who has done dirty work (of murder) for them, an important office in their sister’s household: the ‘provisorship’ of her horse. Bosola spies on the Duchess and eventually reports when he has hard evidence of the marriage. Consequently, the Duchess is separated from her husband, Antonio, deposed, excommunicated, tortured, and killed in prison, along with her servant, Cariola, and her children.1 Harsh punishment of a woman who has exercised power over her sexual body, not uncommon in the seventeenth century, is sought out by the brothers, while its murky detail is executed by Bosola. My contention in the following discussion is that the interplay between disgust and trust shapes the affective and socio-cognitive pathologies the play unfolds. Further, this process of unfolding can be read as a comment on the potency as well as the precariousness of positive emotion. Bosola’s moral disgust at the brothers as rank and corrupt members of the nobility, expressed at the very beginning of the play in strong visceral terms, serves to create a boundary between him and them. In cognitive neuroscience moral disgust is specifically associated with removing oneself from untrustworthy people,2 illustrated here in the way Bosola uses this affect to remove himself psychologically, though he cannot remove himself socially. Conversely, his disgust at the Duchess’s sexual body and her pregnancy creates a boundary between Bosola and his mostly unsuspecting victim, even as the sharing of a typically male prejudice against the female body aligns him with the brothers. These are, no doubt, the starting propositions of Webster’s play. Ambiguities involving trust and disgust become hermeneutically thick and shape a significant portion of the play’s dramaturgical design.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Trust and disgust

169

Assuming continuities as well as discontinuities between early modern literary emotion and today’s emotion studies, I draw on various trust theorists who work on social cognition, and prominent neuro-cognitive theorists of emotion, such as Jaak Panksepp and Joseph LeDoux.3 As Inger Leemans reminds us, literary and non-literary texts from the early modern era promise rich data-mining that can advance current research in the history of emotion.4 It is in that spirit that I draw attention to Webster’s play, where humoral thought and affective life, to follow Gail Kern Paster’s seminal research, is an explicit model. 5 Humors, such as choler and melancholy of the two brothers, are mentioned explicitly in the play, but it is more the early modern idea of passion for what is considered right—what is conventional, what is expected—which justifies their extra-judicial use of pain to punish their sister once she is found out. This kind of pain in early modern culture was not necessarily thought of as torture.6 Bosola, in fact, does not think of inflicting pain as torture, but as chastisement that has moral sanction, though he feels ambivalent about it. His ambivalence, I contend, is inevitably tied to the nature of his service. In his valuable study of the moral economy of poverty, credit and trust in early modern Europe, Lawrence Fontaine dwells on the importance of material debt that bound those who had nothing to the aristocracy and was the foundation of trust. He defines this kind of trust as the ‘structure of vertical loyalties’, a cultural habit that made ‘the world of work’ a place ‘where authority and dependence were transmitted by debt’, including material debt and symbolic debt. 7 Despite his cynicism and bitterness, Bosola’s conception of a ‘stable world’ at the beginning and the middle of the play is based on vertical loyalties. When the tormented Duchess invokes this category for herself with her often-quoted ‘am I not your Duchess?’, Bosola avoids an answer by saying, ‘That makes thy sleep so broken’ (4.2.131–2), suggesting that his vertical loyalty is still toward Ferdinand, and his moral disgust simultaneously questions and sustains it. A broadly shared evolutionary account locates disgust primarily in relation to bad smells in connection to core disgust that prevented disease by keeping people from eating rotting food. It is associated with oral rejection of food, with emphasis on the mouth and stomach. In Darwin’s construal, disgust is a phylogenetic residue of a voluntary vomiting system.8 This suggests that the primary role of core disgust as it evolved as an emotion system was beneficial.9 Moving beyond to less visceral forms of disgust, connections between disgust and perceptions of immorality are so pervasive that sometimes ‘disgusting’, when applied to conduct, means ‘immoral’ and ‘moral offenses on the outer limits of disgust’s expansion show not just properties of offensiveness, but also the property of contamination’.10 Moral disgust too would be consistently beneficial if norms and conventions that defined what is immoral were absolute and the term was universal. That being far from

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

true, we see that rhetorical uses of moral disgust—that associate people and things with visceral disgust to stigmatize (and criminalize)—are common in journalism, media, and literature written through the ages. Dwelling on the origins of the word ‘disgust’, in Latin gustus, Bradley Irish draws attention to rhetorical deployment of disgust in early modern literary reaction to the controversial figure of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530), who, due to his failure to seek annulment of King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, fell out of favor and consequently out of power and office. Irish identifies various domains of disgust associated with the mouth and the digestive system in verse satire written on Wolsey, illustrating a ‘bio-social dynamics of disgust’.11 While Bosola’s trust relationship with the untrustworthy brothers is facilitated by moral disgust of this sort (as a satirist, he could easily write verses about them), his betrayal of the Duchess is enabled by projective disgust. In her search for a politics of compassion, Martha Nussbaum sees projective disgust as a discourse practice that justifies various forms of injustice, instantiated in anti-Semitic propaganda, caste taboos, race hatred, misogyny, and so forth.12 In early modern literature (and other writings), constitution of the female body, especially its reproductive system, as a salient object of projective disgust (and fear) is ubiquitous. For her theorizing today, Nussbaum relies on current scientific research as well as older literary and cultural texts to show how disgust is used to mark boundaries between self and other. In the evolutionary context of natural selection, disgust signaled dangers of contamination (to the body), while cultural discourses contradict the logic of natural selection by projecting disgust onto things and people that pose no threat to survival. Such projection is neither wholly, nor partially constituted by brain biology and emotion systems; it is an essentially social emotion that elicits, and recruits, contamination fears for social control. Some of these contamination fears in the early modern age are not only associated with animals and disease, but also women’s sexual organs.13 Thus, while as a core emotion disgust prevents one from ingesting rotting foods, at the level of social cognition it is used to associate certain individuals and groups with substances that are associated with contamination and disease. In The Duchess of Malfi, projective disgust is used to highlight stigmatization of a constellation of positive emotions, demonstrating how the mechanisms of social control can turn embodied positive emotion against itself. The first section of this chapter, then, deals with how projective disgust is not only used to stigmatize, but also to criminalize an array of positive emotions and relationships, including sexual desire, procreation, nurture, and safety of children. The second section takes up questions of the moralaffective economy of disgust to extend it to Bosola, who plays a central role in linking projective disgust to Webster’s version of the prisoner’s dilemma,



Trust and disgust

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a dilemma that involves cognitive decision-making about trust. This section draws on Trust Theory, especially the prisoner’s dilemma and trust as encapsulated interest to demonstrate how Bosola and the Duchess are caught in a hypothetical prisoner’s dilemma in an environment filled with threat for the Duchess and an uncertain hope (for a reward) for Bosola. In this way, Bosola’s hopes are configured in a predatory relation to the Duchess’s hopes (and plans): along the way various forms of disgust are calibrated to changing arcs and circumferences of trust, and/or distrust.

Not a holy relic, nor a figure cut in alabaster: embodied hope, trust and disgust At the beginning of the play, the recently widowed Duchess hopes to assert her right to remarriage and continued conjugal happiness, as Bosola seeks vocational rehabilitation. He has freshly returned from the galleys where he wore ‘two towels instead of a shirt’ (1.1.34–5). His hope is to find a place in the court and further employment with the brothers even though he considers them crooked ‘plum trees’ grown over ‘stagnant pools’, whose ‘abundant fruit’ is eaten by ‘none but crows, pies, and caterpillars’. The expression of moral disgust separates him from them, as the plum tree in stagnant water is separated from human beings and caters only to the lesser among the bird species. At the same time, the fruit of disgust is not wholly aversive, but attractive, because Bosola aims to be a ‘flattering pander’, and ‘hang on to their ears like horse-leech’ (1.1.48–55). Exploring the role of disgust in establishing emotion ontologies in classical literature and early modern habits of thought, Lateiner and Spatharas explain that moral disgust ‘revolves around immaterial elicitors such as ambivalent behavior and ideologies’.14 Plum trees in stagnant pools, representatively, materialize the immaterial elicitors of moral disgust. Likewise, hope, though a positive emotion like trust, is double-edged, because it is contingent on other people’s cooperation and the congeniality of the social world. Speaking of hope as part of the constellation of supposedly positive affects in classical literature, Douglas Cairns refers to its variant, elpis, suggesting ambivalence and uncertainty about future projection—exemplified by how the term is used in the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, and others. Cairns maintains that in some texts, elpis ‘figure[s] as a partner in a relationship of trust’, but the trust may be misplaced. It impacts decision-making of the characters, but it is unreliable as a predictor of outcomes.15 Continuous with the elpis trope in classical literature, Bosola’s trust, in this early modern play, is invested in persons who are unreliable, and the Duchess’s trust in her personal happiness is surrounded by threat. This compromises the positivity of hope in both cases.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Since the detection of the Duchess’s secret marriage and its exposure to the brothers is to be the bitter fruit of Bosola’s service, the central incident associated with visceral disgust is premature labor induced by her eating the apricots he gifts her. Not only is the gift and her consumption of it relayed through male disgust at a pregnant female, but the premature labor, due to the surrounding rhetoric of disgust, makes birth seem like vomit, as if it is poison that the female body ejects. The positivity of birth and its cultural importance is negated. In this case, since the marriage has, according to prevailing social norms, endangered family honor and contaminated the genetic bloodline, the premature labor and birth that almost reveal the Duchess’s supposed ‘crime’ (of having married her steward) are devoid of joy. What is interesting here from the precariousness-of-positive-emotions perspective is that the unconventionality of the Duchess’s marriage is from the start seen not just as an aberration, but as a crime that requires investigation, arrest, torture, and execution. Though she admits to Cariola that her marriage is a ‘dangerous venture’ (1.1.339), it is not clear if the Duchess is aware of the extent of the danger, or if her fear system has been shut off by hope and feminine daring. In his account of emotions and brain resources, Joseph LeDoux reminds us that sexual desire can ‘override many other brain systems’. While ‘arousal of an emotional state’ can bring many of the brain’s cognitive resources to bear on that state, it also shuts down other emotion systems’.16 This shutting down of other systems is evident in the Duchess’s simultaneous sense of social threat involved in pursuing domestic felicity with serious disregard to hierarchy and rank, and her determination to take the leap. In this mood of ambiguous hope, she confesses: ‘For I am going into a wilderness / Where I shall find nor path nor friendly clew / To be my guide’ (1.1.349–51). Prior to the apricot incident, textual details of which will be discussed below, in the courtship scene the Duchess says to Antonio that she is ‘flesh and blood’, not a ‘figure cut in alabaster’, postured forever to ‘kneel at [her] husband’s tomb’ (1.1.442–3). To her brother she says, ‘I have youth, / And a little beauty’ (3.2.139–40); why, she asks, should she be ‘cased up like a holy relic’ (1.1.137) and become an abstraction? While the Duchess speaks of blood, she refers to life and breath, but when her brothers speak of blood, they speak of the genetically superior bloodline of their aristocratic origins. For them blood is a biological property that we share with animals, and that must, by our disciplined, socially acceptable conduct, be denied. Here, Nussbaum might say that as members of higher rank, the ability of humans to draw a certifiable boundary between us and animals relies on a downward comparison with someone else—a group or an individual—who can plausibly be thought of as animal-human.17 Projective disgust, then, is an essential affective part of early modern gender and class ideology that sustains itself by denigrating expression of positive

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Trust and disgust

173

emotions that remind us of animals, such as eating, sex, and procreation. Humans must have honor and pride, some groups a greater portion of it than others, to facilitate an array of downward comparisons. A verbally visceral way of doing this is by equating misbehaving persons with substances that elicit disgust. In 3.2, when the Duchess tells her brother that he is ‘too strict’, he gaslights her with the fable of ‘Reputation, Love, and Death’, dishing out selective reifications and denigrations of death when it is found in ‘great battles’; and of love associated with ‘unambitious shepherds’, and reputation that, once lost, will ‘see’ the subject ‘nevermore’ (3.2.120–35). Early modern social norms regarding widow remarriage—clearly stated in source texts, such as The Palace of Pleasure—consider the Duchess of that story ‘a wolf or a lioness’, running after the male, though the narrative tone shifts from outright denigration to taking on the tone of a cautionary tale, interspersed with bouts of sympathy with the protagonist.18 This shows that sympathy with the Duchess is continuous with the social history of emotion embedded in the source and is mixed with denigration of her (animalistic) desire. D.C. Gunby’s reading of the play as theological allegory likewise captures the angle of sympathy for the Duchess’s pursuit of personal happiness, when he writes: For even if incestuous feelings are admitted as implicit in the Duke’s conduct, and if the choleric element in his nature is acknowledged; and, equally, if pride of lineage and a cold selfishness born of his phlegmatic temperament is put forward to explain the Cardinal’s behavior, it is none the less clear that Webster’s fundamental concern is with a conflict between good and evil, in which the two brothers are demonically impelled to destroy the good, in the person of the Duchess, through an unwilling Bosola.19

Gunby considers the brothers ‘diabolically driven’ in ‘persecuting their sister’.20 Indeed, Gunby is reading the play in the context of its own times, while it is also possible to see the diabolism as censorship of the body and its pleasures, not contingent on religion. One of the tropes used in the play for an affective pathology of censorship draws on weather, when the Duchess tells Antonio not to think of her brothers’ anger as she wards off all ‘discord’ from the ‘circumference’ of her family, saying ‘time will easily / Scatter the tempest’ (1.1.456–9). After they find out their sister’s secret and realize that she ‘has grown a notorious strumpet’ and is ‘loose i’th’hilts’ (2.5.3–4), baring their disgust at her sexual body, Ferdinand goes into a rage, vowing to make a ‘sponge’ out of ‘her bleeding heart / To wipe it out’, while his brother says: ‘Why do you make yourself / So wild a tempest’ (2.5.14–16). We realize that the tempest has not scattered, but has settled in Ferdinand’s body and mind, feeding on his anger and disgust. Unlike the figurative

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

tempest he is in this scene, when Ferdinand visits his sister’s home and is, at first, glumly quiet, the hopeful Antonio confides to Delio: ‘He is so quiet that he seems to sleep / The tempest out, as dormice do in winter’ (3.1.21–2). A fuller exposure to Ferdinand’s harmful presence terrifies Antonio and he refers to his brother-in-law as this ‘terrible thing’, this ‘apparition’ (2.5.141; 146). He is a scary monster. In the early stages of human evolution when the emotion systems developed, physical environment was a threat and emotions helped to deal with those threats. They alerted us to danger and showed where nutrition could be found. ‘A progressive aspect of civilization’, as Jaak Panksepp, a leading figure in cognitive neuroscience, points out, ‘has been the construction of safety nets’ against naked danger. He pauses here to comment on the discontents of civilization that have given rise to novel threats. These are, to use his words, ‘nonlethal cognitive predatory practices that rend the social fabric and erode the secure bases that support people’s lives’.21 The accumulation of the tempest (of violent anger) in Webster’s play captures this ‘nonlethal’ process where rage is masked by disgust. The play, situated in the moral economies of its own time where conformity to social roles can be demanded, and an exercise of personal freedom can be punished, reveals how emotional violence can, and will, turn lethal. In Ferdinand’s sermonizing fable in an earlier scene, the allegorical figure Reputation says to the Duchess, ‘I will never see you more’ (3.2.136), suggesting that honor and virtue have parted company. The rhetoric of the fable clarifies the public cost of her personal happiness. When Ferdinand, in his own voice, tells her ‘I will never see thee more’ (3.2.140), that utterance belatedly acknowledges the broken trust in family relations. A subsequent uncanny reiteration of these words, when Antonio hears ‘see you no more’ through the echo at the ‘ruins of an ancient abbey’ (5.3.1–5; 43), briefly redraws the ‘circumference’ of the Duchess’s domestic life because he thinks it is his wife’s voice, not knowing that she has been brutally murdered in prison. Ferdinand’s fable had not predicted it, because he could only envision his sister’s ‘shepherd like’ preference for love, but the Duchess did find death in a ‘great battle’ with her brothers and with the social order of the day, separating her natural body from her political body, and affirming her right to mate selection.22 Indeed, right before she is arrested at the orders of her other brother, the Cardinal, she wonders aloud: ‘The birds that live i’th’field / On the wild benefit of nature live / Happier than we; for they may choose their mates’ (3.5.16–18). Writing on the play’s dramaturgical style, Lee Bliss comments on how ‘two powerfully affecting scenes of domestic happiness in theater history’ are juxtaposed with a political world that ‘necessitates Bosola’s cynical watchfulness’.23 Praise like this for the play’s domestic scenes demonstrates what is most at stake in The Duchess of Malfi!

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Trust and disgust

175

The heavily discussed apricot incident staged by Bosola plays a significant role in linking the play to wider early modern discourses of disgust at pregnancy.24 Prior to this scene, disgust is used by the brothers as an emotive teaching moment for their sister. In the very beginning of the play, the ‘studied speech’ of the two brothers, which comes so ‘roundly off’ (1.1.319), warns that the court is a ‘rank pasture’, growing ‘honeydew that is deadly’, and refers to deceitful sexual bodies of women as ‘witches’ that ‘give the devil suck’ (1.1.298–301). Honeydew, a naturally produced sticky substance clinging to plants, sweet like honey, but a poisonous variety (toxic to bees and humans), has been known to exist and can be used as a figure of warning. Here it is used to trigger disgust and fear of contamination. And, in fact, cautioning sisters about the dangers of unregulated sexuality is a recurrent trope in early modern literature that draws upon a common understanding of emotions in Stoicism. Caution, eulabeia, is seen as a wise emotion and sexual pleasure, hedone, as a foolish emotion, though the emphasis in Stoicism is not on eliminating emotion, but on what we would today call emotion regulation.25 Clearly, the Duchess’s brothers use disgust to advise caution. The image of witches suckling the devil with a third nipple invokes unnatural birth, disgusting feeding and nurture. Bosola’s apricot gift is simpler than that, and natural. In Robert Palter’s construal, based on his encyclopedic work on literary fruits, the apricot gift is a ‘pregnancy test’, because unripe fruit can trigger labor.26 While the Duchess thinks the apricots ‘taste of musk’ (2.1.132) and are ‘restorative’ (2.1.141), Bosola explains, after she has already tasted them, that the gardener ripened them artificially ‘in horse dung’ (2.1.136–7). Mention of how the apricots were ripened does not elicit disgust in the Duchess. While others on stage refuse the apricots, she, in Bosola’s words, eats them ‘greedily’ (2.1.143). Her pregnant body, staged in various phases of late pregnancy, occasions Bosola’s spying, as well as his stigmatizing of pregnancy as disgusting. The usurpation of her political body by her natural body, from this perspective, is disgusting and interferes with mechanisms of trust that her people need to have in her as their ruler, while from her own perspective it is an affirmation that should inspire more trust. Bosola establishes an immediate context for his subversion of forms in an earlier dialogue which has generally been regarded as irrelevant for plot development. It is significant, however, as a reflection on projective disgust. In this transitional scene, Bosola is just killing time by conversing with an ‘unpainted’ Old Lady whose face he mocks for its profusion of wrinkles, comparing them to ‘deep ruts and foul sloughs’. Bosola wonders why she does not ‘loathe’ herself (2.1.25–55), as he tells her about a lady who would flay her skin to get rid of smallpox marks. As projective disgust is, in part, a marker of disturbed narcissism, the target for self-loathing is Bosola himself.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

And he has made that connection when he says: ‘Man stands amazed to see his deformity / In any other creature than himself’ (2.1.50–1), and wonders further why the names of many diseases that afflict humans are taken from beasts, such as the ‘ulcerous wolf’ (lupus) and ‘swinish measles’ (2.1.53–4). Bosola’s understanding of projective disgust cannot be mistaken here, as the Old Lady remains impervious to his ravings. As the tragedy unfolds, the play presents the richest, if one can call it that, moment of horror and projective disgust when Ferdinand shows up in the dark to show the Duchess a dead man’s hand, supposedly Antonio’s. She kisses it, and finds the hand cold, saying: ‘I fear you are not well after your travel’. When torches are brought in, she is terrified and wonders: ‘what witchcraft does he practice, that he hath left / A dead man’s hand here?’ (4.1.50–3). A limb cut off from the body is a more intense signifier of mortality and carrier of contamination and contagion fears than an unviolated corpse would be. When she is shown the wax figures, supposed to be corpses, she wishes simultaneously to be bound to ‘that lifeless trunk’ and ‘freeze to death’, as well as to ‘new-kindle Portia’s coals’ (4.1.65–70), remembering Portia, the noble wife who swallowed live coals after the defeat of her husband, Brutus, at Philippi. That Webster’s Duchess would do this to revive a ‘dead example’ of a ‘loving wife’ shows how desperately she wants to cancel out the disgust associated with mutilation and death visited upon her by the brother. Brian Chalk argues that Webster is ‘deeply preoccupied with death and its relationship to monuments,’ exploring how the characters in the play want to rely on the ‘symbolic value of the Duchess as a monumental emblem’.27 Alternatively, from the perspective of affect and its literary circulations—not only at the time when a text is written, read, and seen, but across time periods—Webster’s female sovereign as a tragic heroine links to Nigel Thrift’s notion of the aesthetics of ‘public intimacy’, when the public participates in ‘private passions’.28 Thrift is theorizing about fascination with intimate lives of celebrities in Euro-American popular culture and believes that ‘persons are fractal’ and a certain kind of ‘secular magic’ is generated when a multitude of fractal persons can ‘incorporate others and parts of others’.29 The idea of public intimacy is implicated in both disgust and trust, and takes us back to the Duchess’s reference to symbolic cannibalism of ‘many hungry guests’ having fed upon her. She does not say ‘beasts’, but ‘guests’, which makes her an involuntary host. Bosola’s engagement with the Duchess is not merely a result of his trusting two untrustworthy, disgust-inducing members of the aristocracy in the hope of reward. Of this part, Bosola is fully aware. What he is not aware of is the attractiveness, some of it via disgust, of becoming privy to the secret life of a female sovereign. It is the lure of public intimacy,



Trust and disgust

177

in addition to rational self-interest, that creates a bond between the predator and prey, whose hopes are contingent on the destruction of one (the Duchess) by the other (Bosola).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Precariousness of trust and the prisoner’s dilemma: Bosola and the Duchess The ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ is a central concept in Trust Theory. Of specific relevance to the fields of criminal justice, finance, and business, this dilemma hypothesizes a binary choice game based on two partners in a crime. They get caught, are separated by the prosecutor from each other, and have the binary choice of either cooperating or defecting. If one defects, informs on the other, he or she stands to gain and the other loses. If they cooperate with each other rather than with the prosecutor, both maximize their gain. In a two-person game, one chooses either C (cooperate) or D (defect); C assures maximum gain for both. In other words, mutual cooperation maximizes gains for both parties; mutual defection minimizes gains for both. Going alone, the one who defects is in a better position and the one who cooperates is in a worse position.30 Explorations of biological foundations to trust is an ‘evolutionary approach to understanding trust and trustworthiness’, and this research supports the idea that ‘cooperation and reciprocity’ have evolved because they maximize gain and minimize loss for everyone.31 This research provides strong evidence for the beneficial value of positive emotions. I argue that in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola and the Duchess constitute, albeit covertly, such a relationship, though the play complicates a merely cognitive model. Bosola defects, but his defection brings him no gain, while it causes harm to the Duchess. Yet the play recuperates its symbolic-moral gain with a final outcome where Bosola, by killing both the Cardinal and Ferdinand, takes revenge on behalf of the Duchess. In Trust Theory, the affective motif of a prison and prisoner and the cognitive template of a prisoner’s dilemma serve as exempla for social interactions involving the dynamics of trust and betrayal. In Webster’s play, however, the fact and figure of a prison, of incarceration, execution without trial, and persecution are part of the story-world reality. Home in this play, through the punishing agency of the Aragon brothers, is the carceral system of discipline and punish, as Michel Foucault might define it.32 Bosola and the Duchess are both figuratively as well as literally their prisoners. As has been pointed out above, Bosola is ‘entreated’ by Ferdinand to take the role as provisor of the Duchess’s horse, an important court position; she trusts her brother’s judgment and accepts the services. The other brother

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

says this ‘creature’ should be entertained for ‘intelligence’ about the Duchess (1.1.205–20). This is the beginning of her imprisonment. Though her brother warns that ‘the marriage night / Is the entrance into some prison’ (1.1.214–15), to the Duchess the (secret) marriage is a refuge. It is inevitable, therefore, that Ferdinand should invade that intimate domestic space thus: ‘enter Ferdinand unseen’ (3.2, emphasis added). He enters like some hidden surveillance equipment. In this scene, the Duchess, with her back turned and assuming she is talking to her husband—who without her knowledge has stepped out of the room—reveals self-incriminating information. The situational irony of this moment shows that the Duchess already inhabits a carceral space, though she is unaware of it. Bosola is a prisoner in a different way. He has been ‘for seven years in the galleys / For a notorious murder’, which is thought to have been ‘suborned by the Cardinal’. He is now employed to spy on their sister (1.1.241–50). The most spectacular moment of trust between the two prisoners occurs right after the Duchess’s noble lie, her magnanima mensogna (3.2.178). Having accidentally revealed everything to her brother, she is terrified and banishes Antonio to Ancona, along with their firstborn (to save their lives). To facilitate this departure, she falsely accuses him of mismanagement of funds. From his vantage point, Bosola observes the exchange. When asked for his opinion, he defends Antonio, while the other officers condemn him. This earns him the Duchess’s trust and she tells Bosola two important truths: ‘the good one that you spoke of is my husband’ and ‘I have had three children with him’ (3.2.263; 269). While her confession to Ferdinand was accidental, her telling Bosola the truth, and nothing but the truth, is voluntary. This is the moment where the trust matrix thickens, and where one can speculate about what might have happened had these two stuck together and the play turned out to be comedy. Yet, the word ‘service’ and the burden of service discussed in many interpretations of the play pairs Antonio with Bosola, while the Duchess’s position in the class hierarchy mostly removes her from that speculation. As a female ruler who has disobeyed her powerful brothers and compromised her social status, however, the Duchess is now worse off than a servant. She is a fugitive. As for Bosola, despite his sincerity in speaking well of Antonio, the nefarious project upon which his hopes hinge seems to have fallen into place. Now he can expect to be rewarded for his service. He has an incentive to defect; she has trusted him, and without knowing cooperated with him (to her own harm). He shared no information such as, ‘I am a mole here appointed to spy on you’, but he shared his belief in Antonio’s honesty. Sharing of beliefs is considered important for establishing trust. Trust, thus, intersects with hope, because of the contingency of risk. As other people’s minds are concealed from us, the ethics of trust is to be willing to live in uncertainty, allowing others

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Trust and disgust

179

their freedom of choice and willingness to take a risk. In his introduction to the Norton edition of The Duchess of Malfi, Michael Neill considers the bonding scene between the Duchess and Bosola (3.2) a turning point in a play that has a ‘resolutely anti-aristocratic stance,’ and the ‘simplicity of Bosola’s language makes it hard to mistake the incredulous sincerity of this speech’.33 True, the Duchess is a member of the aristocracy, and as Frank Whigham reminds us, she is implicated in the aristocratic system even as she asserts her independence, but it is also true that she has turned the system upon herself, and figuratively fed herself to the wolves.34 While the hypothetical scenario of the prisoner’s dilemma works within the binary of defect/collaborate, in Bosola’s case the binary collapses and he splits himself into many masked figures while in charge of his prisoner and the ‘poor remainder’ of her family. His defection from this point on, however, is more fully illuminated by another feature of modern Trust Theory, the notion of ‘trust as encapsulated interest’.35 Russell Hardin begins his exposition of this concept with an example from The Brothers Karamazov. As opposed to trust based on sentiment and the positive emotions of loyalty, friendship, reciprocity, and attachment, encapsulated trust is more limited and contingent because it is an encapsulation of our short-term expectations and hopes: what incentive we have for trust and trustworthiness. Bosola has a greater incentive to work for Ferdinand against the Duchess than to defect. When, in the opening scene, Ferdinand gives him money, he promptly asks: ‘Whose throat must I cut’ (1.1.242) and offers to return the money. But ‘to avoid ingratitude’ (1.1.266), he says, ‘For the good deed you have done me, I must do / All the ill man can invent’ (1.1.267–8). His ambivalence, signaled by his moral disgust even here, is not absolutely delayed to the later moment. Still, the bond of trust as encapsulated interest is in place and cannot yet be broken. The play draws a sharp boundary between trust based on sentiment and trust based on encapsulated interest. There is trust based on attachment relations between Antonio and the Duchess, on sentiment and loyalty (the Duchess and Cariola), and on friendship (Delio and Antonio). These are open systems of trust, while the encapsulated interest-based trust is a closed system. The open systems bring with them constellations and networks that are based in a permanent state of positive affect, though the Duchess and Cariola go through a harrowing of hell together and the Duchess and Antonio live in perpetual fear until they are apprehended. The original family of the Aragon brothers and their sister is not bound by trust of any kind, related either to attachment or following the principle of kin selection, nor are the terms of their encapsulated interest in each other clearly established. Ferdinand’s incestuous feeling for his sister, discussed a

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

great deal, and his uncanny disorder of lycanthropia, establish some form attachment, though a dysfunctional one. He also attests to his encapsulated interest in her remaining a widow when he says he had hoped ‘to have gained / An infinite mass of treasure by her death’ (4.2.267–9). His comment on not sparing the children, with a cryptic ‘the death / Of young wolves is not to be pitied’ (4.2.244) supports this hypothetical motive, but it is not enough. The second, secret, family that the Duchess creates is tied to positive emotions of affection, attachment, sexual desire, domestic intimacy, tenderness, consideration, shared humor, and understatement: a cluster of emotions associated with having and raising children. Bosola is a mediating figure tied to both the open and the closed systems of intimacy. The shocking reversal that frees Bosola and obliterates terms of trust as encapsulated interest occurs when Ferdinand refuses to reward his service. In the opening scene, validating Delio’s assessment of Ferdinand’s untrustworthiness, as cited above, Antonio affirms that Ferdinand does not pay his debts (1.1.175). More exactly, Delio had said: ‘the law to him / Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider: / He makes it his dwelling and prison / To entangle those shall feed him’ (1.1.169–74). Images suggesting moral disgust are evident here too. In 4.2, Ferdinand has entangled Bosola in this spidery prison of law. When Bosola confronts his master thus: ‘You are falling into ingratitude: I challenge / The reward due to my service’, Ferdinand says he will give him ‘pardon / For this murder’. When Bosola says he executed ‘the bloody murder’ by Ferdinand’s authority, the latter turns on him with ‘Mine? Was I her judge? / Did any ceremonial form of law / Doom her to not-being?’ (4.2.280–90). When Bosola betrays the Duchess and Antonio and his collaboration with the ‘pair of hearts’ that are ‘hollow graves / Rotten and rotting others’ (4.2.304–5), this expression of disgust is a visceral shock. His words ‘now that I wake’ (4.2.309) indicate that he understands the epistemology of trust. The shock he registers is consistent with the principles of trust as encapsulated interest, as well as the prisoner’s dilemma. The game is over; he will defect; he will collaborate posthumously with the Duchess, announcing with his dying breath: ‘Revenge—for the Duchess of Malfi’ (5.5.79). He will kill the brothers and, sadly, kill Antonio, ‘the man [he] would have saved above his own life’ (5.4.51) by accident, thinking it is the Cardinal. His comparing himself to an actor in a play, no doubt, is meta-theatrical, but it also simulates a schema of trust. Bosola’s final reflection that he died in a ‘good quarrel’ suggests unexpected moralism from a hardened cynic: ‘Let worthy minds never stagger in distrust / To suffer death or shame for what is just’ (5.5.101–2). His speech is not an aberration, nor is it preachy. Bosola did not do what he did because of trust in an invisible god who will reward him in afterlife. ‘This ruin’, he says, ‘yields no echo’ (5.5.96). The change in him has proven that trust is relational,



Trust and disgust

181

parallel to the root word, fede, faith. It is an aspect of all social relationships, and the epistemology of trust requires testing, trial, and risk. Trust, as Barbara Misztal explains, is

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

an attitude motivated in everyday situations by a rich mixture of factors, from which we can exclude coercion, since trust ‘can be promised and trust can be earned, but it cannot be ordered’ … Neither can it be purchased or bribed, since, as an age-old truth—immortalized in King Lear—illustrates, any attempt to ‘buy’ trust can only destroy it.36

King Lear may not have been able to buy his daughters’ trust, but Ferdinand and the Cardinal are able to purchase Bosola’s trust, but only so long as his encapsulated interest binds him to them. Once that link is broken, he realizes he has been following principles of trust as a habitus.37 ‘I served your tyranny’, he says to Ferdinand, while ‘I loathed the evil, yet loved / You that did counsel it’. In his own words, he did this to be more ‘a true servant than an honest man’ (4.2.313–17, emphasis added). Webster’s play critiques the cultural habit of a servant’s trust in his master by tying trust to various kinds of disgust. He stretches this habitus-driven trust to a tragicabsurd extreme, revealing its routines and drills as horror and terror and its primitive nature as the violent tempest that destroys a treasured nest.

Notes 1 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Michael Neill (New York: Norton, 2015). All citations are to this text. 2 Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 21. 3 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002). 4 Inger Leemans, ‘Large Data Set Mining’, in Susan Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 29. 5 Gail Kern Paster, ‘Introduction’, in Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 22–4. 6 Javier Moscoso, ‘Pain and suffering’, in Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions, p. 47. 7 Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, Trust in Early Modern Europe (London: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 36–7. 8 Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, ‘Disgust’, in Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones (eds), Handbook of Emotions (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), pp. 637–53. 9 Evans, Emotion, p. 25.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

10 Rozin, Haidt and McCauley, ‘Disgust’, p. 643. 11 Bradley Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston: Northwestern Univerity Press, 2018), pp. 30; 33–9. 12 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘“Radical Evil”: Helplessness, Narcissism, Contamination’, in Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (London: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 182–91. 13 Rozin, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 637–50. Donald Lateiner and Dimos Spatharas, ‘Introduction: Ancient and Modern Modes of Understanding and Manipulating Disgust’, in Donald Lateiner and Dimos Spatharas (eds), The Ancient Emotion of Disgust (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 23–31. In a section on ‘Projective Disgust’ the authors reference Galen’s discomfort with the pharmaceutical uses of semen collected from a woman’s vagina after intercourse on the basis of the semen being contaminated by its contact with a woman’s vagina. 14 Lateiner and Spatharas, ‘Introduction’, p. 23. 15 Douglas Cairns, ‘Metaphors of Hope in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry’, in Ruth R. Caston and Robert A. Kaster (eds), Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World (London: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 38 (emphasis added). 16 Joseph LeDoux, ‘Who Are You?’, in LeDoux, Synaptic Self, pp. 321–2. 17 Nussbaum, ‘“Radical Evil”’, p. 187. 18 William Painter, ‘The Infortunate Marriage of a gentleman called Antonio Bologna with the Duchess of Mafi, and the Pitiful death of them both’, Palace of Pleasure, in Duchess of Mafi, ed. Michael Neill (New York: Norton, 2015) (hereafter Neill), pp. 147, 150–9. 19 D.C. Gunby, ‘The Duchess of Malfi: A Theological Approach’, in Neill, p. 223. 20 Ibid., p. 225. 21 Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archeology of the Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion (London: Norton, 2012), p. 437. 22 Theodora A. Jankowski, ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess’, in Neill, p. 324, Highlighting the Duchess’s role as a female ruler, and her decision to separate the natural body from the political body, Jankowski points out that ‘the Duchess is shown as challenging her brothers’, and she is ‘presented as demonstrating her own right to choose a husband and determine how she—as a ruler of Malfi—will legitimize her choice’. 23 Lee Bliss, ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, in Neil, p. 276. 24 Sid Ray, ‘“So Troubled with the Mother”: The Politics of Pregnancy in The Duchess of Mafi’, in Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn MacPherson (eds), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), p. 21. Ray points out that Bosola’s comments on the Duchess’s pregnancy, in terms of disgust, stage the fact of the Duchess’s continued sexual activity and its morally problematic nature for an early modern audience. 25 Christopher Gill, ‘Positive Emotions in Stoicism: Are They Enough?’, in Caston and Kaster, Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World, pp. 141–4. Caution (eulabeia) in Stoicism is one of the three main wise emotions. Eupatheiai, which

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Trust and disgust

183

plays a role in the regulation of desire (epithumia), and pleasure (hedone) are foolish emotions. In Stoicism joy (chara) is also a wise emotion. The central argument of Gill’s essay is that it is modulation, or regulation, not elimination of emotion that the Stoics insisted on, though Stoicism is more often associated with denial of emotion. Based on a consensus in current cognitive neuroscience of emotion, Evans points out that the distinction between basic emotions and higher cognitive emotions is based on the mechanisms of emotion modulation; cultural difference in emotion practices and expressions is also considered a result of how different cultures reify, condemn, elaborate, and ornament basic emotions to give rise to an array of higher cognitive emotion; Evans, Emotion, pp. 5–25. 26 Robert Monroe Palter, The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots and Other Literary Fruit (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 272, 274–6. 27 Brian Chalk, ‘Webster’s “Worthyest Monument”: The Problem of Posterity in The Duchess of Malfi’, in Neill, p. 336. 28 Nigel Thrift, ‘Understanding the Material Practices of Glamor’, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 294–5. 29 Ibid., pp. 291; 303. 30 Elinor Ostrum and James Walker, Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons from Experimental Research (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), p. 392. 31 Ibid., p. 9. 32 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1977). 33 Michael Neill, ‘Introduction’, in Neill, p. xxix. 34 Frank Whigham, ‘Sexual and social mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA 100, no. 2 (March 1985), 167–86 (pp. 173–4). 35 Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), pp. 1–7. 36 Barbara A. Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies: A Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 21. 37 On the habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

11 ‘My heart is satisfied’: revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Eonjoo Park

The place of emotional satisfaction in the genre of revenge tragedy has been relatively neglected in literary criticism. The avenger’s emotional satisfaction has been read as a source of gratuitous violence, a result of impassioned judgment, and a reflection on the private nature of vengeance.1 Revenge tragedies, however, complicate the easy dichotomies between rationality and emotion, justice and revenge, and law and vengeance. In what follows, I will trace how Thomas Kyd turns the satisfactory effects of revenge into a central ground for justice in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592). I argue that emotional satisfaction transforms revenge into justice in the ‘play within a play’ in Kyd’s drama. His innovation with this literary device signals his unique exploration of the relationship between emotional satisfaction, revenge, and justice.2 The close link between the artistic realization of vengeance and emotional satisfaction gives rise to a particular type of justice—‘aesthetic justice’ as I call it in this essay—which is not satisfactorily captured by the conventional language of retributive justice.3 Kyd’s protagonist, Hieronimo, authors a play, The Tragedy of Suleiman and Perseda, and uses this dramatic setting as a medium of revenge. This inset play provides him with the most satisfying method for revenge as it prioritizes the sufferer’s perspectives in the delivery of justice. The transition of a focus from the perpetrator’s punishment to the victim’s emotional needs marks how justice is redefined along aesthetic lines. In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd foregrounds two senses of satisfaction and in doing so reimagines revenge as aesthetic justice. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, satisfaction can be the fulfillment of an obligation or an emotion.4 Hieronimo is positioned within multiple roles, from knight marshal to judge, to court dramatist, and to ordinary father. These various positions embody both senses of satisfaction and simultaneously construe different types of justice. As an official judge and a state functionary, Hieronimo’s performance is framed by an obligatory sense of satisfaction,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

185

which ultimately crystallizes retributive justice. By composing his own dramatic script and acting in the play, however, Hieronimo channels the obligatory notion of satisfaction into a more aesthetically productive form of emotional satisfaction to enact aesthetic justice. Hieronimo’s struggle epitomizes the search for an ideal type of justice, which promotes both correction and reconsideration of the customary idea that retribution and the fulfillment of obligations are the essential foundations of justice. The aesthetic space that Hieronimo creates enables him to change his focus from an obligatory sense of satisfaction to an emotional one, without causing senseless and unchecked violence. This is possible because the artistic outlet of his revenge play allows him not to adhere to the mimesis of actions, a foundational concept used in retributive justice. In order to attain retributive justice, the perpetrator is required to satisfy an obligation based on the logic of a one-on-one parallelism between the original crime and punitive measures. In other words, a symbolic imitation and reproduction of what has been stolen or harmed through inflicting proportionate punishment on the offender retrieves the lost balance. Yet, taking up art as a primary instrument of revenge, Hieronimo alters this traditional concept of mimesis so that the meaning of balance can be victim-oriented. I will call this renewed type of mimesis ‘situational mimesis’ since it seeks to interpret and replicate the victim’s reaction to the crime as well as their experiences of it. This artistic knowledge and creativity fashions Hieronimo not as a passive witness or an indifferent judge of the crime, but as a creative agent of situations, or an author in the most basic sense of the word. Vengeance-as-an-art, therefore, is not registered as a private enactment of goriness and surplus violence, but as a balanced and deliberate form of artistic execution of justice, which always implies the presence of an audience or a public. Ultimately, the reduction of the revenge tragedy into a genre of excess disregards the avenger’s artistic engineering by which sheer emotional satisfaction is converted into a creative force to generate representative situations that reciprocate the victim’s sentiments and thoughts. The formulation of aesthetic justice is highly political in the sense that the distance between a private and everyday sensing of injustice and a public and formalized way of achieving justice is overcome in an artificially extended realm of the aesthetic. Hieronimo does not suddenly become a fanatical revenger. He has always been a revered citizen of Spain whose devotion to legal justice defines his virtue and reputation. When his fatherly concern for his son’s unfair death is not met by his public duty to restore justice through law, he does not abruptly take a radical route to revenge, but rather hesitantly does so because he needs to mull over what should be done in order to continue his commitment to justice. His revenge play is a product of this contemplation of what is right and wrong. This tormenting process

186

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

of redefining justice dismantles a binary distinction between the private and the public. By opening an aesthetic-cum-political arena, Hieronimo not only improves the conventional political category of retributive justice, but also revises the virulent image of vengeance as being in opposition to justice, law, and reason.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The dual meanings of satisfaction in the Renaissance revenge tragedy The two senses of satisfaction, fulfillment of obligation and emotion, provide the proper terminology for scrutinizing how the concept of justice is diversely imagined in revenge tragedy. Satisfaction is first elaborated in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the payment in full of a debt, or the fulfilment of an obligation or claim; the atoning for an injury, offence, or fault by reparation, compensation, or the endurance of punishment’.5 The obligation fulfilled in this sense can be religious: ‘the performance by a penitent of the penal and meritorious acts enjoined by his confessor as payment of the temporal punishment due to his sin’.6 These definitions of obligatory satisfaction take retributive justice as their central principle. This form of justice begins with the recognition that a symmetrical state has been destroyed, and aims, as William Ian Miller aptly points out, at ‘restoring balance, achieving equity, determining equivalence … all matters of getting back to zero, to even’.7 This final goal is always accomplished by satisfying a certain obligation, such as paying off a debt, repairing a wrongdoing, or repenting a sin. The emphasis on these obligations is an attempted solution to the intrinsic flaw in the concept of retributive justice: that is, the impossibility of recuperating symmetry in an exact sense. If what breaches the balance concerns tangible material, such as money or land, it can be easier to restore equity because what has been stolen or seized can simply be returned. Yet this logic becomes complicated if less concrete harm or injury, such as death, is the wrongdoing. The resolution of immaterial asymmetry can only be gestured at via imposing particular obligations, which never actually fix the asymmetry but instead act to compensate for this impossibility. Retributive justice seems to undergird the world of revenge tragedies due to the discrepancy between the theoretical goal of recovery and its practical impossibility. Notably, most of the victims in the genre are inhumanely murdered or wounded, and thus there is no proper way to redress their pain, scars, or loss. Furthermore, as the victims remain on the outskirts of the play because of their death or severe injury, their family or relatives come into the play to address the victims’ predicament vicariously. This generic feature increases the totality of pain and injury to be remedied. Isabella’s half-insane lament in The Spanish Tragedy reminds us of this

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

187

problem: ‘there’s no medicine left for my disease, / Nor any physic to recure the dead.’ 8 The attainment of retributive justice through the offender’s fulfillment of obligations, however, usually also fails, and this very failure characterizes the genre. As we can see from the dilemma of Hieronimo—and also that of Titus, Hamlet, or Vindice—vengeance always stems from the avenger’s frustration with the futility or unfairness of the state legal system. Malfunctioning legal justice, in fact, typically captures the essence of how retributive justice does not go far enough in the revenge tragedy.9 The failure of obligatory satisfaction produces greater dissatisfaction on the part of the avengers and leads them to seek out a new form of justice. The second sense of satisfaction, emotional contentment, offers the avengers a different path. Satisfaction is twice placed in the category of emotion or feeling in the Oxford English Dictionary. For one, it is defined as ‘the action of gratifying (an appetite or desire) to the full’.10 For another, it indicates the result of this attempt as a ‘satisfied or contented state of mind’.11 Contrary to satisfaction as obligation, the emotional connotations of satisfaction posit a mutual relationship between external actions of gratification and internal feelings of contentment. This reciprocal association has to begin from within the agent and move outward, only to return later as something different. This move not only departs from the common perception of satisfaction as a static state of equilibrium, but is also distinguished from the obligatory concept of satisfaction, which is achieved only from without by external authority. The notion of emotional satisfaction, thus, encourages the victim of a crime to both act and feel when attaining justice. The mutual link between action and feeling in the concept of emotional satisfaction is best forged through the dramatic form of art in The Spanish Tragedy. Robert Stillman has analyzed Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance as the best vehicle to realize a ‘poetic gesture’ or ‘poetic justice’ as it ‘produce[s] the true contentment that is inseparable from justice’.12 Sidney’s eclogues, for Stillman, are an ideal locale where the golden rule of harmony and moderation is recuperated in the name of justice. The presentation of justice in art, then, affects the reader’s psychological condition by revitalizing their lost faith in justice and offering gratification.13 The notion of poetic justice is akin to that of aesthetic justice in the sense that art plays a pivotal role in combining justice and satisfaction. However, if poetic justice explains the didactic and aesthetic purposes of literature at a conceptual level, aesthetic justice is an actualized version of poetic justice.14 Indeed, the therapeutic function of art can be maximized in Hieronimo’s dramatic work, since it gestures toward not just a textual representation, but a vivid animation of the text through performance and enactment. This feature strikingly summons the etymology of the word ‘satisfy’ that lies in the Latin word satisfacĕre.15 This compound word consists of ‘satis’ and ‘facere’, which refer to ‘enough’

188

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and ‘to do’, respectively. As Hieronimo’s question, ‘Am I at last revenged thoroughly?’, hints, mounting his own revenge drama is a thoroughly satisfying act, transforming his strong desire for ‘doing enough’ into public actions (4.4.173). Andrea, a lingering ghost who eagerly awaits vengeance as a spectator of the whole play, forthrightly expresses the cathartic effect of Hieronimo’s show: ‘these were spectacles to please my soul’ (4.5.12). This contentment is indicative of how his drama lively performs, expresses, and creates passion that goes beyond the boundary of the text.

Situational mimesis and aesthetic justice The avenger sets up an artistic paradigm in the revenge tragedy in order to achieve the full recovery of harmony, rather than creating exorbitant bloodbaths. This is possible through manipulating and expanding the concept of mimesis so that the avenger does not need to focus intensively on how to outdo the original crime itself. In the notion of retributive justice, mimesis of the criminal action functions as an imperative rule, where the imposition of punishment seeks to imitate what the perpetrator committed and reflect it back upon the criminal. Aesthetic justice, though, models the concept of ‘mimesis of the situation’ so that the sufferer’s experience can be aptly translated into a presentable form, thereby resolving a major source of the avenger’s dissatisfaction. Ultimately, the notion of situational mimesis allows the avenger to pay attention to the immaterial suffering of the victim, rather than punishment for the perpetrator, which itself implies a striking conversion from obligatory satisfaction into emotional satisfaction. For this unique way of deploying mimesis, Hieronimo imitates a Renaissance artist, who deftly draws upon the literary practice of transvaluation.16 Barbara J. Bono defines transvaluation as an ‘artistic act of historical selfconsciousness that at once acknowledges the perceived values of the antecedent text and transforms them to serve the uses of the present’.17 Mimesis in the artist’s hand is a conscious dialectical practice that comes out of assemblages between an indebtedness to tradition and an active (re)interpretation of the past. Kyd has Hieronimo borrow this convention in order to preserve the past with some changes and situate history not in the world of simple mimicry, but that of innovative creation. This practice aims at mobilizing, questioning, and modifying the conventional political category of retributive justice. Hieronimo’s transvaluation is, therefore, a persistent endeavor to render the aesthetic realm a unique political category so that the notion of justice is actively reconceptualized and tested.18 The reconfiguration of the notion of mimesis is hinted at in the 1602 additions to the play text of the painter episode.19 The writer of the edited

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

189

quarto inserted a story in which Hieronimo asks a painter literally to portray ‘a tear, or a wound, a groan, or a sigh’ and ‘a doleful cry’.20 Moreover, the painter is requested to depict sequential narratives that tie the past of Hieronimo’s family, the moment of Horatio’s death, and the future followed by Hieronimo’s revenge. Disappointed by the painter’s inability to copy what he demands in a more literal manner, Hieronimo, according to the stage direction, ‘beats the Painter in, then comes out again, with a book in his hand’. Put together with the original manuscript, this scene is placed right before his famous ‘Vindicta mihi’ soliloquy, during which he accepts the power of artistic interpretation and develops the notion of aesthetic justice. Bearing this narrative progression in mind, some critics claim that the painter addition captures Hieronimo’s search for the best artistic medium for coming to terms with his own situation full of emotional torment.21 Yet what Hieronimo grapples with here has to do with not only how to convey, but also what to convey. As his request above evinces, his attention is drawn to a presentation of easily forgotten and neglected elements of the sufferer’s story. This concern is starkly contrasted with the painter’s confident response to Hieronimo’s question, ‘canst thou draw a murderer?’: ‘I’ll warrant you, sir; I have the pattern of the most notorious villains that ever lived in all Spain.’ 22 What agonizes Hieronimo is the fact that the victim’s perspectives, emotions, and histories have not been carefully dealt with, patterned, and universalized as a subject of art. This consideration urges him to rearrange the empirical world or produce another reality by which the victim’s point of view becomes focal. If the painter fails to produce a drawing that ‘should cry’, Hieronimo as a playwright succeeds in this task as he creates an alternative world that enables successful expression of the sufferer and gives birth to new sufferers who necessarily endure similar agonies and painful histories.23

Emotional satisfaction and aesthetic justice in The Spanish Tragedy The Spanish Tragedy introduces multiple aesthetic layers which reveal and overcome the crisis of satisfaction as obligation. In the opening scene, entitled ‘Induction’, we encounter the ghost of Andrea, a Spanish warrior who was killed by the Portuguese prince, Balthazar, on the battlefield. Andrea confronts three underworld judges who are unable to decide where his soul should be enshrined between the ‘fields of love’ and the ‘martial fields’ (1.1.42; 47). Then, one of the judges, Minos, orders Andrea to be sent to Pluto’s court. There he faces another crisis of judgment as Proserpine, the wife of Pluto, intervenes and sends him out of the underworld accompanied by the deity of Revenge. This repetitive impossibility of judging Andrea’s afterlife

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

190

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

encapsulates, as Gregory M. Colón Semenza puts it, the ‘subjectivism of interpretation and the attendant arbitrariness of judgment and sentencing’.24 If this initial moment alludes to the failure of satisfaction as obligation, the deity of Revenge gestures toward the aesthetic. With Revenge’s announcement, ‘Here sit we down to see the mystery, / And serve for Chorus in this tragedy’, the actual play of The Spanish Tragedy itself begins (1.1.90–1). This reminds us that justice will be carried out not in an infernal courtroom adjudicating satisfaction in obligatory senses, but through ‘mystery’ and ‘tragedy’, a self-reflectively designated artistic locus that allows emotional satisfaction to be processed. The newly opened aesthetic space of The Spanish Tragedy continues exposing the problems with an obligatory sense of satisfaction. The play, from the beginning, is densely preoccupied with the logic of equilibrium essential to retributive justice. The general’s report about the battle between Spain and Portugal is based on this principle, phrased as ‘Pede pes et cuspide cuspis; / Arma sonant armis, vir petiturque viro’ (Foot against foot and lance against lance; / Arms clash with arms, and man is assailed by man) (1.2.55–6).25 The civil and law-abiding zone of the Spanish court is not exempt. The King of Spain promises a reward for every soldier who worked toward victory, the gesture itself entailing the law of exchange between the soldiers’ hard work and the King’s compensation. His emphatic language, ‘Nor thou, nor he, shall die without reward’, however, quickly turns into a differential reward in accordance with class status when he grants two ducats to general soldiers and ten ducats to leaders of the army (1.2.100). The King’s order foreshadows a larger inherent problem: that is, satisfaction in obligatory usages can be less fair and more whimsical. In the same scene, the image of a conscientious magistrate is compromised, as it turns out that the King is swayed by nepotism. He does not properly reward Horatio, Hieronimo’s son, for his contribution to capturing Balthazar in battle despite objective evidence coming from the general: it was Horatio who ‘challenge[d] forth that prince in single fight’ and then ‘forced to yield him prisoner to his foe’ (1.2.77; 80). Rather, the King concedes the claim made by Lorenzo, his nephew, that his service should receive credit because he seized Balthazar’s weapon first. The King’s final judgment, ‘You both deserve, and both shall have reward’, still emphasizes the logic of equilibrium, but he again brings social rank to the fore: ‘nephew, thou shalt have the prince in guard, / For thine estate best fitteth such a guest: / Horatio’s house were small for all his train’ (1.2.179; 185–7). Despite the King’s whimsical abuse, Hieronimo is willing to obey the obligatory concept of satisfaction while he works as a chief judiciary. When he investigates Pedrigano’s murder case, he asserts, ‘for blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, / Be satisfied, and the law discharged’, which

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

191

explicitly defines legal justice in conjunction with the criminal’s fulfillment of obligations (3.6.35–6). As the play progresses, though, Hieronimo encounters the limitations of retributive justice more strikingly, and this experience leads him to surrender his marshalship at the expense of his own gratification of vengeful desire. Following this drastic conversion, Act 3, Scene 13 examines how Hieronimo works to develop an alternative notion of aesthetic justice. Since he has already asserted revenge, this scene should be understood as his transvaluation project to make sense of his sacrilegious and unlawful decision. The basis of this project is a text that he holds. Hieronimo reads aloud four passages quoted from two different sources, the Bible and Seneca.26 Kyd’s stage directions indicate that these quoted lines are included in Hieronimo’s book: ‘enter Hieronimo with a book in his hand’, ‘Hieronimo reading’, and ‘reading again’. Considering that the reference to the book is singular, the stage directions seem to suggest that the text in Hieronimo’s hand is either a commonplace book or his own version of a commonplace book, a collage of manifold lines he eclectically gleaned from various texts. Hieronimo’s text, thus, acts as a rough draft of his transvaluation. His explication and rearrangement of the quoted passages parallel a remaking of the world and a reordering of relations. He begins with quoting and interpreting a scriptural line of ‘Vindicta mihi’, which has been the foundation of his faith as a Christian magistrate. His analysis of this line fully accepts its original implication of Christian prohibition against earthly vengeance: ‘heaven will be revenged of every ill … mortal men may not appoint their time’ (3.13.2–5). At the same time, his recital of ‘Vindicta mihi’ spurs the epistemological question concerning who an actor of revenge should be. The Senecan tradition helps him to construct and vicariously live in an imaginative world in which he can radically revise this principle. The three Senecan characters from Agamemnon, Troades, and Oedipus are not, unlike Hieronimo, bound by an urgent necessity to justify private vengeance. Indeed, when Clytemnestra states, ‘crime must make crime safe’, she intends to conceal her moral and emotional vulnerability before murdering Agamemnon.27 Similarly, when Andromache is hiding her son in Hector’s tomb to avoid a Greek request to sacrifice him, she declares, ‘if fate is kind thou hast a safe retreat, / If fate refuse thee aid, thou hast a grave.’ 28 Finally, when Oedipus begs Creon to share the oracle’s prediction about Thebes’s misery, he claims, ‘A want of knowledge is an idle balm.’ 29 On the one hand, Hieronimo finds a point of identification with these characters in regard to their emotional burden and distress. On the other hand, these three different contexts are significantly transvalued to re-evaluate the prerogative of revenge. First, Clytemnestra’s line is drawn upon to show Hieronimo’s strong conviction that revenge is an inevitable choice, despite its sinfulness,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

to drive out evil. Next, his liberal translation of Andromache’s passage fortifies this determination. He also stretches these lines one step further and asserts, ‘If neither … Heauen couereth him that hath no buriall’ (3.13.18–19). Here he imagines that even God will sympathize with his revenge. Based on these reapplications, Hieronimo answers the epistemological question that the Bible raises: ‘to conclude, I will reuenge his death!’ (3.13.20). Then he utilizes Oedipus’ statement in order to devise his actual revenge plot. Hieronimo’s speech, engaging in the practice of transvaluation, in turn, tells us that he now willingly enters the world of aesthetics. His project tests the potential of art to create another reality in which he is able to experience both the struggles and triumphs of pioneering a new way to restore justice. Hieronimo’s confidence about the aesthetic approach to justice is solidified through his interaction with Bazulto, one of the civil suppliants of his courtroom. The play so far has touched upon pain’s inherent incommunicability by displaying Hieronimo’s solitary endurance of his anguish. This is paralleled with Bazulto’s laborious task of conveying his agony through a legal document, which typically encourages petitioners to use a shared language to communicate their own pain.30 Yet, Bazulto now urges Hieronimo to see that pain has equal value across social ranks and that its universal value itself makes pain sharable. Hieronimo metaphorically conveys his understanding of this point by arguing that a ‘raging sea’ is comprised not of ‘upper billows’ that are seemingly prevailing, but of ‘lesser waters [that] labor in the deep’ (3.13.102–5). In other words, Bazulto’s pain is equally important despite his ‘lesser things’, ‘meaner wits’, and ‘poor estates’ (3.13.99–101). Being cognizant of pain’s transmissibility, Hieronimo daringly tears up the legal writs that do not usually leave room for the petitioner’s grief. He suggests that Bazulto join the process of bringing justice back not merely as a victim, but as an agent whose artistic talent will be needed to articulate his own wounded history: ‘Come on, old father, be my Orpheus, / And if thou canst no notes upon the harp, / Then sound the burden of thy sore heart’s grief’ (3.13.117–19). Hieronimo’s integration of an artistic channel promotes the victim’s active participation in delivering justice. Act 4, Scene 4, structured primarily around Hieronimo’s revenge play, illustrates how his effort to stage The Tragedy of Suleiman and Perseda satisfies his desire for representing and remedying the afflictions of the victims. The actual script of this play as well as his intention behind it are shared with Bel-imperia, another victim, and she is even given a chance to revise the revenge story so that her own satisfaction can be accomplished. Balthazar and Lorenzo, on the contrary, participate involuntarily in Hieronimo’s production as dramatic characters. Due to their unexpected deaths on stage, they are unable to hear Hieronimo’s final announcement, which

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

193

informs the court audience of the real motive of his revenge play. This structure is strange because having a criminal recognize and repent their fault is traditionally—both in the sixteenth century and our own—an essential mechanism of a satisfying revenge.31 Rather, Hieronimo’s revenge tragedy, as Ullrich Langer notes, aims to reproduce a ‘relationship between the objective nature of the injury and the character of the person’.32 The abrupt death of Lorenzo and Balthazar in Hieronimo’s play models Horatio’s sudden death and puzzlement. Hieronimo reproduces Horatio’s death not from the criminal’s perspective, but from the victim’s point of view. The situational mimesis that Hieronimo’s play pursues, moreover, transforms the court audience into other Hieronimos, or ordinary fathers. In doing so, Hieronimo can transfer to them the same degree of pain and grief that he bore. This transformation itself is designed and incorporated as one aspect of his revenge drama. Indeed, Hieronimo’s drama adds a final statement through which he discloses Horatio’s murder, annotates his own dramatic work and argues for his authority. When Hieronimo switches his role from Bashaw to ‘the hopeless father of a hapless son’, and the ‘author and actor in this tragedy’, the audience members in the court experience a dissonant moment (4.4.83; 146). They are forced to face Hieronimo’s revenge drama not purely as The Tragedy of Suleiman and Perseda, but as the story of Hieronimo himself. His meta-theatrical gesture precludes the audience members from going back to reality by thrusting reality itself into part of the drama. Through Hieronimo’s ending remark, Horatio’s dead body is recast as a stage prop and the court audience is repositioned as players in this reality drama. This scene meets three central components of the plot that Aristotle defines in Poetics: reversal (peripeteia), recognition (anagnorisis), and suffering (pathos).33 Hieronimo’s concluding confession and revelation not only lead the court audience to recognize the nature of his revenge tragedy, but also abruptly reverse the overall mood of the play from enjoyable court entertainment to dismal havoc. Along with reversal and recognition, the court audience is invited to feel a genuine sense of pathos toward their own situation, which mirrors what Hieronimo has endured as a father who lost his son and witnessed the failure of the justice system. Hieronimo’s revenge play eventually generates aesthetic justice, which is evidenced by his bold statement that ‘now performed, my heart is satisfied’ (4.4.129). At the same time, Hieronimo begins engaging with another project to demolish the fictitious world that he has just constructed. This selfannihilation is intended to keep his emotional satisfaction as well as aesthetic justice intact from the court audience who attempt to invalidate them. The court audience persistently asks Hieronimo to speak, tell, and write more, even though he has already fully described what triggered his revenge. Confronting this challenge, he not only declares the closure of his drama,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

‘I end my play; / Urge no more words; I have no more to say’, but also gruesomely bites his tongue out (4.4.151–2). This intense moment represents a clash between the two ideals of aesthetic justice and retributive justice. In fact, the court audience’s interrogation is analogous to their public vindication that aesthetic justice based on emotional satisfaction is ‘dis-satisfying’ and only the obligatory sense of satisfaction can formulate a ‘satisfying’ type of justice. The King’s claim, ‘if in this [Hieronimo’s writing] he satisfy us not, / We will devise th’extremest kind of death’, demonstrates the court audience’s dissatisfaction (4.4.197–8). Furthermore, by asserting his competence to arrange a crueler punishment, the King accentuates his authority as a guardian of legal justice. Contrary to this, Hieronimo’s resistance articulates his empowered capacity to critique the current justice system, rather than remaining passive in his despair. His seemingly impulsive act of killing Castile is evidence of this subaltern empowerment. The knife that Hieronimo uses to stab Castile initially was given to him to mend a pen so that he could respond to the court audience’s insistence on writing more. If this request reflects their desire for rewriting Hieronimo’s act within the frame of retributive justice, Hieronimo symbolically rejects this by turning the usage of the knife from the means of legal justice into a revenge tool. While the murder might be impromptu, it is not an irrational moment. Despite the script being slightly modified, his action is still within the boundary of the original play, which is directed and staged according to the logic of aesthetic justice. Whereas the King and the court audience disapprove of Hieronimo’s authority as a creator of justice, the deity of Revenge and the ghost of Andrea support, rather than contest, his emotional satisfaction in the last scene. Andrea requests that Revenge send the criminals to hell as a form of punishment, while placing the victims and avengers in heaven. This meta-arrangement follows the legal process of meting out justice by formulating a clear division between the group of victims and the group of criminals, and by emphasizing obligations that the perpetrators should satisfy. At the same time, Andrea complies with the standard of aesthetic justice because he pays special attention to ameliorating the victims’ pain. He makes sure that Isabella ‘never feeleth pain’ and Bel-imperia enjoys ‘those joys / That vestal virgins and fair queens possess’ in their afterlives (4.5.20–2). Moreover, Andrea wants Hieronimo to stay in the place ‘where Orpheus plays’, crediting him as an artist as well as a creator of aesthetic justice (4.5.23). This concluding scene represents a union of retributive logic and aesthetic justice. It also manifests that Hieronimo’s choice is celebrated, unlike in the customary reading of revenge tragedies, where the avenger’s suicide or death is considered as punishment for private vengeance.34 Although this final scene does not determine the real audience’s evaluation and satisfaction, it can be read as



‘My heart is satisfied’

195

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Kyd’s wishful endeavor to persuade his audience to understand and consent to Hieronimo’s revenge, satisfaction, and most importantly, justice. The examination of revenge tragedy with a focus on artistic execution and emotional satisfaction shifts the notion of revenge from one set in counterpoint to justice, rationality, and legality to a recuperation of a just order. A discrete category of aesthetic justice might be read as one of those experimentally invented ‘extra-legal notions of justice’ that counter both the state legal system and its dominant images as objective, rational, and ideal.35 Aesthetic justice, however, is not a simple opposition to or replacement of legal systems or institutionalized practices geared toward retributive justice. Rather, it aggregates and responds to the period’s ongoing concern with the meaning of justice, which was constantly at stake in early modern legal, religious, and aesthetic history. Hieronimo’s journey to formulate aesthetic justice should be understood as a process in which an alternative concept of justice is actively imagined and various meanings and forms of justice can concurrently evolve. Kyd’s aesthetic intervention into the discourses on justice was one that subsequent playwrights of revenge tragedies took over, developed, and even revised as they searched for the most satisfying shape of justice.

Notes 1 There are only a few attempts to develop a cathartic discourse around revenge tragedies. See John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Harry Keyishian, Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare (New York: Humanities Press, 1995); Tanya Pollard, ‘A kind of wild medicine: revenge as remedy in early modern England’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 50 (2005), 57–69; Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the opposite position, see Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940); Lily B. Campbell, ‘Theories of revenge in Renaissance England’, Modern Philology 28, no. 3 (1931), 281–96; Charles A. Hallett and Elaine S. Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Heather Hirschfeld, The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Kristine Steenberg, ‘Emotions and Gender: The Case of Anger in Early Modern English Revenge Tragedies’, in Jonas Liliequist (ed.), A History of Emotions 1200–1800 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), pp. 119–34. 2 Early modern texts commonly discussed this relation. For instance, Gervase Markham portrays revenge as the most therapeutic response to a grievous injury, since it alone can guarantee some sort of reparatory satisfaction: ‘’tis

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

reuenge that satisfaction brings / To iniur’d mindes, and to oppressed things’. The quote is from Robert Allot, England’s Parnassus, ed. Charles Crawford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 255. 3 I share an underlying assumption with Derek Dunne that revenge stems not from madness, but from a rational decision calling forth justice. However, this chapter does not focus on the association between legal procedures and vengeance. See Derek Dunne, Vindictive Justice: Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy and Early Modern Law (London: Palgrave, 2016). 4 ‘satisfaction, n.’, OED Online. December 2014 (accessed 16 January 2015). 5 Ibid., I.1.a. 6 Ibid., I.2. Hirschfeld’s analysis of revenge tragedies centers on this religious aspect of satisfaction (The End of Satisfaction, pp. 65–93). 7 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4. 8 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, in David Bevington et al. (eds), English Renaissance Drama (New York: Norton, 2002), 3.8.4–5. Subsequent parenthetical in-text citations of the play refer to this edition. 9 For a reading of revenge tragedies as a political means to highlight the superiority of the state legal system, see Steenberg, ‘Emotions and Gender’. 10 ‘satisfaction, n.’, OED Online, II.5.a. 11 Ibid., II.5.b. 12 Robert Stillman, Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 10. 13 Ibid., pp. 11; 196–7. 14 Hieronimo’s attempt to mould aesthetic justice also interrogates the issue of allocating rewards and punishment in accord with virtue and vice. Rather than showing the established golden rule, Hieronimo’s dramatic work presents the question of how to define what is proper, just, and virtuous. For an overview of ‘poetic justice’ see Angelika Zirker, ‘Poetic justice: A few reflections on the interplay of poetry and justice’, Connotations 25, no. 2 (2015/16), 135–51. 15 ‘satisfy, v.’, OED Online, December 2014 (accessed 16 January 2015). 16 This term comes from Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), emphasis in original. 17 Ibid., p. 1. 18 For a discussion of the aesthetic as an autonomous political category in early modern culture, see Christopher Pye, The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 19 The Spanish Tragedy saw nine editions, which attest to the success of the play. The 1605 edition, in particular, featured five additions. The authorship of these extended scenes has been attributed to either Ben Jonson—based on theater manager Philip Henslowe’s diary documenting upfront payments made to Jonson—or Shakespeare based on the language and composition style. For the authorship of Jonson, see Adrian Blamires, ‘Ben Jonson’s additions to The Spanish

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



‘My heart is satisfied’

197

Tragedy as the subject of ridicule’, Notes and Queries 61, no. 2 (2014), 265–8. For the attribution to Shakespeare, see Brian Vickers, ‘Identifying Shakespeare’s additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): a new(er) approach’, Shakespeare 8, no. 1 (2012), 13–43. The painter addition has been discussed as integral to the original manuscript as it continues and enriches central themes of the play, including revenge, justice, and art, rather replacing the Bazulto scene. See Marguerite A. Tassi, ‘The player’s passion and the Elizabethan painting trope: a study of the painter addition to Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26, no. 1 (2000), 73–100. For a discussion of the replacement, see Levin L. Schücking, ‘The Spanish Tragedy additions: acting and reading versions’, Times Literary Supplement (12 June 1937), 442. 20 All references to the painter scene can be found in ‘Additions to The Spanish Tragedy in the 1602 edition’, in Katharine E. Maus (ed.), Four Revenge Tragedies, pp. 82–91, lines 112–13; 126. 21 Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The Spanish Tragedy: a speaking picture’, English Literary Renaissance 4, no. 2 (1974), 203–17 (p. 204); James P. Hammersmith, ‘The death of Castile in The Spanish Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama 16 (1985), 1–16 (p. 2). 22 ‘Additions to The Spanish Tragedy’, lines 130; 131–3. 23 Ibid., line 128. 24 Gregory M. Colón Semenza, ‘The Spanish Tragedy and Metatheater’, in Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 153–62 (p. 155). 25 Translation given in the Bevington et al. edition of The Spanish Tragedy. 26 See Fredson Bowers, ‘A note on The Spanish Tragedy’, Modern Language Notes 53, no. 8 (1938), 590–1. He argues, ‘we must recognise that Vindicta mihi comes to [Hieronimo’s] mind from his meditations on God’s promise and not from his volume of Seneca’ (p. 591). See also Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). She speculates that two different sources, the Bible and Seneca, are intentionally merged in order to reveal ‘the duality of authority Hieronimo faces in order to legitimate his revenge’ (p. 158). 27 For the translated Senecan lines, I refer to Ella Isabel Harris, The Tragedies of Seneca: Rendered into English Verse (London: Henry Frowde, 1904). This quote is from Agamemnon, line 122. 28 Ibid., The Daughters of Troy, lines 534–44. 29 Ibid., Oedipus, line 545. 30 For the subjectivity of pain, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 31 Francis Bacon notes, ‘the delight [of vengeance] seemth to be not so much in doing the hurt as in making the party repent’. See Francis Bacon, ‘Of Revenge’ in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 347–8 (p. 348). For the contemporary context, see Mario Gollwitzer, Milena Meder, and Manfred Schmitt, ‘What gives victims satisfaction

198

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

when they seek revenge?’, European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011), 364–74. 32 Ullrich Langer, ‘The Renaissance novella as justice’, Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1999), 311–41 (p. 322). 33 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 56. 34 See Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, p. 80; Hallett and Hallett, The Revenger’s Madness, p. 158. 35 Holger Schott Syme, ‘(Mis)representing justice on the early modern stage’, Studies in Philology 109, no. 1 (2012), 63–85 (p. 85).

12 All’s Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Patrick Colm Hogan

We often think of emotion as simple or uniform. In fact, emotion is more commonly complex, changing, and ambivalent. Literary works typically manipulate or manage that complexity and ambivalence to produce emotionally pleasing results. However, problem plays, such as Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, maintain or even enhance ambivalence. We may explain this enhancement in part by reference to genre patterns, themselves understood as developing out of human emotion systems. The following essay begins with a treatment of ambivalence in emotional experience, suggesting that emotion episodes most often involve both pleasurable and aversive elements. It then takes up the relation between the ambivalence of emotion episodes and the nature and development of story genres, focusing specifically on the cross-culturally recurring genres that, in their ubiquity, appear to dominate most literary canons—including Shakespeare’s—and to be most psychologically consequential. Finally, it turns to All’s Well That Ends Well, examining that play’s notorious ambivalence and related genre complications, the specific ways in which Shakespeare takes up and enhances the possibilities for ambivalence in the cross-cultural genre prototypes that he varies and particularizes.

The ubiquity of ambivalence Emotional experience is widely understood to be valenced, thus positive or negative. For example, in dimensional theories of emotion, valence is a key feature distinguishing emotions.1 Valence has both a phenomenological and a behavioral interpretation. It may be understood as a matter of pleasure versus aversion or of some actional outcome. The latter is most readily understood in terms of approach or withdrawal, but may also be a matter of sustaining versus altering a situation.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Perhaps surprisingly, valence is not entirely unequivocal, even in the case of a single emotion. Fear is aversive, fostering withdrawal and action to change the situation (e.g., by escaping the danger). Joy is pleasurable, fostering approach (in relevant cases) and action to sustain the situation. But what about desire, or anger? Desire may be both aversive and pleasurable. It does foster approach, but typically in such a way as to change the situation. The same points may apply to anger. Thus, even single emotions are complex and to a degree internally ambivalent. Things get messier when we consider real emotion episodes. Some emotions do appear to be simply positive or negative when considered in themselves. But as emotion episodes unfold in actual experience, things often get complicated. This is due in part to the operation of meta-emotions, our emotional response to our own emotions. For example, an emotion may be positive in the sense of being intrinsically pleasurable or in the sense of being evaluated with approbation, due to moral quality or self-interest. The approbation is meta-emotional, but it pervades our experience of the initial emotion. Thus, a fully positive emotion should, in a given context, involve the alignment of intrinsically hedonic, ethical, and prudential qualities. Any disalignment produces ambivalence. We find further tensions between sustaining and altering behaviors. Specifically, we often seek to sustain some aspects of the ‘eliciting conditions’ of the emotion episode, while endeavoring to alter others. In some situations, approach and withdrawal are simply not relevant. In other cases, they are in tension. For instance, curiosity may be partially differentiated from simple interest in the degree of ambivalence it involves regarding approach and withdrawal. If Pandora just walks up to the box and pops it open without a second thought, we may be inclined to see this as simple interest. If she hesitates, creeps forward, hesitates, and so on, we are more likely to say that she is curious. In short, even single emotion episodes are often internally divided, and appropriately considered ambivalent. Such ambivalence is multiplied in real-life situations where the interaction of worldly situations with a person’s moods and dispositions is unlikely to be confined to a single emotion. In experimental studies, researchers try to control all variables except what they are setting out to test. In consequence, laboratory work commonly focuses on the elicitation of single emotions by constraining the eliciting conditions—simplifying the external circumstances and rendering the attitudes and interests of the test subjects relatively straightforward (e.g., regarding what they are asked to do in the study, such as push a button when they see a certain word). But the circumstances we face in ordinary life are not simple, and the attitudes and interests with which we face those circumstances are not straightforward. The circumstances may partially elicit a range of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

201

different emotions, depending on just how we construe those circumstances, what memories they trigger, etc. In actual experience, then, we are likely to find an ongoing activation and deactivation of a range of emotion systems. (Emotion systems are complexes of perceptual sensitivities and cognitive and behavioral propensities that constitute motivation. For example, fear is produced by certain eliciting conditions, including things we perceive in the outer world and things we feel in our own bodies; it fosters particular sorts of cognition—including the activation of certain memories—and certain sorts of behavior, such as flight.) This is not to say that no emotions ever become dominant. Obviously, we sometimes feel principally angry or sad, desirous or disgusted. Moreover, emotion systems may enhance or inhibit one another. A small advantage in one emotion system may trigger ‘mood-congruent processing’ or ‘emotional congruency’ through which our minds select and construe ongoing experiences, activate memories, and project simulated outcomes in a biased manner, fear building on and enhancing fear, or anger building on and enhancing anger.3 Indeed, Tiffany Ito and John Cacioppo maintain that ‘the affect system has evolved to produce bipolar endpoints’; this is because such endpoints ‘provide both clear bivalent action tendencies and harmonious and stable subjective experiences’.4 But even these dominant emotions, sustained by the self-perpetuating operation of processing congruence, develop out of widespread affective ambivalence, held in a tense equilibrium. Due to the range of tendencies that comprise ‘hedonic asymmetry’, this equilibrium is relatively unstable when it leads to pleasurable emotions.5 It is much more stable when it sustains aversive feelings. In other words, the durability of enjoyable feelings and that of painful feelings are asymmetrical. We habituate or get used to the former much more quickly, taking positives for granted in a way than may never occur with negatives. Thus, fear (lingering into anxiety) is recalcitrant, whereas joy is fragile. There are presumably evolutionary reasons for this, bearing on the relative importance of avoiding harm. The key point here is that there is often an underlying ambivalence, even in cases where the overall experience has an apparently clear valence. I have been implicitly speaking about ‘egocentric’ emotions, emotions that bear on one’s own well-being. The same points bear on ‘allocentric’ emotions, emotions that concern another person’s well-being.6 For example, I noted earlier that there may be a difference between one’s immediate experience and one’s prudential evaluation. We find a closely related difference in the possible divergence between empathy (feeling with the target) and sympathy, if we take ‘sympathy’ as the response we would see as fitting the target’s best interest.7 Suppose, for example, a drug addict is going through treatment, but then leaves treatment to acquire the drug again. Empathically

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

sharing his feeling that he should get the drug would contradict sympathetically hoping for his return to treatment. Allocentric emotions include our response, not only to real people as they are, but to simulations of people. Indeed, in one sense, simulation is all they ever involve, as our experience of other people is inseparable from simulation and inference (in our understanding of their intentions through ‘Theory of Mind’ processes).8 In keeping with this, our response to literary characters is a form of allocentric emotion. The same point holds for our response to the embodiment of characters by actors. We simulate the characters’ minds (now combining the words with tone of voice, posture, gesture, and other aspects of the performance). We may also, if we wish, simulate what the actors themselves are feeling; even though the actors are real and the characters are not, our response in both cases is founded upon simulation. Allocentric emotion involves other complications and potentially further ambivalences. Generally, egocentric emotions do not vary with ‘interpersonal stance’, which in that case would be one’s attitude toward oneself. Typically, one regards oneself benevolently and sympathetically. It is again possible for meta-emotions to diverge from initial emotions. But most often, even in those cases, our attitude toward ourselves remains ‘parallel’ or empathic. In other words, when I imagine how I will feel about something—say, giving a talk to some potentially hostile group—I generally feel fear now if I imagine that I will feel fear then. I may avoid giving the talk if I anticipate an aversive feeling, or I may force myself because I believe I will feel happy afterward that I have accomplished this task. I do not typically respond with a ‘complementary’ or antipathetic emotion, relishing the schadenfreude of envisioning myself squirm and stammer before the crowd. Allocentric emotion is different. I may have either a parallel or complementary interpersonal stance regarding someone else. Broadly speaking, I may respond to a person’s or a character’s experience with congruent or incongruent emotions, sharing or despising his or her joy, celebrating or suffering his or her sorrow, and so forth. Several factors bear on this. One is identity. If I think of myself and the other person as falling into the same identity category, then I am likely to respond congruently. However, if I locate us in different identity groups, the likelihood increases that I will respond to his/her feelings antipathetically or at least not make an effort to simulate his/her perspective.9 This may seem simple, but there are complications. Each of us belongs to many groups. With any given person, we are virtually certain to share some category, and also to be opposed on some category. Depending on salience and other factors, we may shift among different identity categories, thus across different interpersonal stances,



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

203

leading to different emotions.10 In consequence, allocentric emotion may be particularly subject to ambivalence.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Stories, ambivalence, and genre Literary works to some extent organize and orient our emotions. They do not eliminate ambivalence entirely; if a work does eliminate ambivalence, it runs the risk of losing our engagement with the story, as we become aware of the implausible flatness of the good and evil characters. Literary works do, however, manage ambivalence.11 That management commonly enables ambivalence, but limits it to allow the development of dominant emotions. Thus, in a romantic plot, we will in all likelihood want the lovers to be united. In a heroic plot, we will in most cases cheer for the deposed leader and the defeated people, hoping for the triumph of the latter and the restoration of the former. There are complications here, but they fall within certain limits. For the most part, our various preferences and interpersonal attitudes are aligned; for example, our group identities usually cohere with our moral evaluations and associated meta-emotions. Thus, we tend to cheer for ‘our side’ in a story, judge ‘our side’ to be right, and not to feel, say, guilty about those responses. (Of course, who is ‘our side’ will differ across individuals and groups.) The limitation of ambivalence operates somewhat differently in tragedy and comedy. Tragedy poses a number of fairly obvious problems for understanding our emotional response to stories. On the other hand, the fact that tragedy involves ambivalence is unsurprising. What is perhaps less expected is that both comedy and tragedy generally need to constrain recipient ambivalence; they can fail, or produce difficult, disturbing, or unsatisfying results, if they deviate too starkly from a norm of ambivalence that enables some degree of clear emotional dominance—or if, having deviated, they do not in some way deal with the resulting ambivalence (e.g., by extending the story in an epilogue). There is probably not some uniform, absolute rule for how much ambivalence is permissible before we become troubled by a story. Different periods and cultures (or perhaps subcultures), and certainly different individuals, vary in where the tipping point occurs. Postmodernists seem to be willing to accept much more ambivalence than literary moralists—either religious or political. Different people surely vary in the degree to which, for example, they want their heroes to be untainted and their villains to be unredeemed. Here, genre re-enters consequentially. There are different ways in which we might organize genres. One is in terms of the recipient’s (reader’s or

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

audience member’s) preferred outcome, usually yielding tragedy or comedy. Another is in terms of the category of the protagonist’s goal pursuit. In the second case, for example, the protagonists’ pursuit of romantic union defines the romantic genre. In both cases, genre is a function of emotion. In the case of characters’ goal pursuit, the general goal is always happiness, which is specified in relation to emotion systems, such as attachment or pride. A small number of goal-defined genres recur cross-culturally.12 They share not only the protagonist’s goal, but also aspects of structure that appear to be a function of emotion intensification. For example, romantic comedies end with the union of the lovers, but this is preceded by their separation, commonly involving familial conflict, exile of one or the other, and even rumors or imagery of death. This sequence appears to result from the fact that a change from near devastation to success is more joyful than mere unimpeded progress toward a goal, that conflict is more painful—and reconciliation more rewarding—when it involves attachment objects, and so on. It may seem that the protagonist’s achievement of the goal would simply be positive. However, there is often a more complex ambivalence at the story’s end—as when heroic plots conclude with both victory for the heroes who have survived and mourning for the those who have died. In the case of heroic plots, this can lead to an epilogue in which society generally, and the hero specifically, must in some way expiate the harms they have done.13 The harms of war are painful, and if the author pays any attention to the enemy, that attention is likely to humanize that enemy in some degree and complicate our feelings about their suffering. In some genres, it is difficult to produce a comedy. Revenge stories tend toward tragedy, if for no other reason than the fact that they commonly involve a murder in response to a murder, which does not restore the earlier loss and often risks setting off a cycle of retaliation. One way of ending such a cycle is by killing off everyone involved, as in Hamlet. But, of course, Hamlet is a tragedy. Aeschylus’ Eumenides is (perhaps) a comedy. But it is comic by shifting from a revenge story to a criminal investigation story. Romantic stories appear on the whole to be less ambivalent than other prominent, cross-cultural genres. One consequence of this may be that intense ambivalence in the course of the story, and continuing ambivalence at the end of the story, become especially jarring in this genre. Again, ambivalence arises when there is some incongruence or misalignment across eliciting conditions for emotional response, as when an initial response is pleasurable (say, joy) and a subsequent response is aversive (say, guilt in a meta-emotional, moral response). Perhaps the main source of ambivalence in romantic stories derives from the complex nature of the emotion systems involved. This complexity enables disalignment of the component emotions,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

205

as well as the usual forms of disalignment (e.g., in meta-emotional, moral response). Specifically, the goals of the romantic genre are not defined by a single emotion system, but by the combination of emotion systems that defines romantic love.14 These systems include attachment, sexual desire, and the reward system, the system that governs ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’.15 Attachment is in some ways the least problematic. We tend to be highly sympathetic with attachment bonds and with the distress that accompanies separation from attachment objects. But attachment is not simple. As writers on attachment have stressed, a crucial quality of our attachment relations is our degree of security or insecurity. We are likely to have an overall tendency toward feeling secure or insecure in attachment relations; this is part of our ‘attachment style’.16 We may subdivide these feelings of security and insecurity into two broad categories—those that depend on the attachment object and those that depend on the world. My insecurity over the attachment object leads to jealousy. My insecurity over the world leads to worry about the beloved’s well-being. Some cross-cultural stories focus on attachment as such. These are familial separation and reunion stories. As this name suggests, these stories prototypically concern parents and children who are lost to one another and who eventually find one another. These stories may manifest person-based insecurity when the parents have abandoned the children. They may manifest worldbased insecurity when the separation is due to such social events as war. The reunions are often complicated by the age of the parents and the inevitability of their death, following years of (irrecuperable) separation. As a result, the comic reunions in such narratives are often bittersweet, thus relatively high in ambivalence, though they still typically retain a strong enough dominant emotion to be satisfying. Attachment is often closely related to ‘reward dependency’, in which a person’s (reward system) liking and wanting—thus his/her general sense of well-being—become contingent on some object, whether a drug in addiction or another person in some forms of romantic love. This obsessive quality may render a character unsympathetic, if he/she pursues his/her beloved in ways that are intrinsically aversive (e.g., harassing behavior), immoral (e.g., deceit), or imprudent. The imprudence is perhaps the most interesting, because reward dependency may make a lover highly sympathetic, due to his/her suffering. This is particularly true if the lover’s behavior is socially approved or perhaps mandated. In that case, we do not blame the lover for pursuing the beloved, and we may be less likely to find aspects of the pursuit immoral. But none of this indicates that the object of the lover’s reward dependency merits the lover’s devotion. Put simply, the lover might be pursuing a despicable cad. In that case, our empathy with the lover’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

reward-dependent longing is likely to conflict with our sympathetic concern for his/her best interest. This sort of pursuit is most obvious in seduction narratives. These are stories in which, most commonly, a protagonist seduces a young woman, deceitfully presenting his feelings as romantic love, which is to say, presenting their relationship as a romantic story. In fact, his motivations are not romantic love, but sexual desire. Due to its attachment and reward-dependency elements, romantic love has an enduring relationship as its goal. Sexual desire does not, or need not. In consequence, the seducer abandons the woman after the sexual encounter. She pursues him, sometimes having conceived a child. This pursuit is in some degree socially mandated as the woman’s social status, and that of her child, are often contingent on reuniting with the seducer. In tragic versions, the young woman may die. In comic versions, she may succeed in marrying the Lothario, thus giving the child a legal father and redeeming her social status. The intensified ambivalence of this comic version is clear. On the one hand, the woman’s reputation and status have been saved. On the other hand, she has entered a marriage that we are likely to find at best imperfect, and in all likelihood quite wretched. Indeed, the seduction narrative is almost always disturbing, almost always excessive in ambivalence. The distress that accompanies the seduction narrative is only intensified to the extent that the woman is driven by attachment and reward dependency as well as social considerations. In that case, the marriage is both more necessary (because the woman needs it emotionally as well as socially) and more painful (because the likely future indifference or hostility of her husband will wound her feelings). Shakespeare’s ‘problem comedies’ have been characterized in various ways. Perhaps, in at least some cases, they are best seen as works that push ambivalence beyond the limits of ‘harmonious’ and (relatively) ‘stable’ dominant emotions (in Ito and Cacioppo’s words). That ambivalence is a matter of tensions among the component emotions of romantic love and among the different modes of pleasure and aversion in emotion and metaemotion—thus, the pleasures or aversions of experience and those of evaluation, whether prudential or moral. Part of the complexity here comes from the fact that there is often no conclusion that we as audience members could wholeheartedly endorse; the plays have ‘difficult, unsatisfying endings’.17 We may have a preferred final situation, to use Ed Tan’s phrase.18 But that preference is a matter of ‘settling’, unenthusiastically putting up with the least loathsome of the options on offer. A range of writers have penned works that could be characterized as ‘problem comedies’. In Shakespeare’s case, this ambivalence may be related to a particular affinity Shakespeare seems to have had for genre mixing, the combining of distinct narrative prototypes, sometimes in ways that are

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

207

highly ambiguous. For example, Hamlet is ambiguous between a heroic usurpation and invasion narrative (with Claudius usurping the throne and Fortinbras threatening the kingdom) and a revenge narrative (the usual, but overly restrictive categorization), with elements of criminal investigation (in Hamlet’s attempts to ascertain the guilt of Claudius), as well as romantic and/or seduction plots (since the relation of Hamlet and Ophelia is never entirely clear). In most cases, however, this genre ambiguity does not lead to excess ambivalence. Critics have sometimes suggested something along these lines, as when Alexander Leggatt writes that All’s Well That Ends Well brings ‘two kinds of dramatic convention together, not in harmony (as in some of the earlier comedies), but in a positive and deliberate conflict’. However, the ‘modes’ discussed by Leggatt are not genres, but ‘romance’ and ‘realism’.19 Thus, like such influential precursors as E.M.W. Tillyard, Leggatt sees the play as relating the ‘fabulous’ to the ‘realistic’.20 A variant on this theme is articulated by Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, in his treatment of the problem plays (in this case, under the label of ‘Mannerist’).21 Richard Hillman briefly states that ‘the term “Problem Play” … conveniently signals an anomalous position vis-à-vis modern concepts of genre’.22 Similarly, Simon Barker remarks on ‘a sense of generic non-conformity’,23 and Susan Snyder on ‘generic anomaly’.24 But the idea is rarely developed, particularly with respect to a well-specified account of genre. The problem comedies are unusual in the context of literary works generally. They are also unusual in the context of Shakespeare’s dramas. They are, however, important as extreme cases of the ambivalence that appears to be a common, though often unrecognized, feature of both literary and nonliterary experience more broadly. In order to clarify and develop the nature and implications of this ambivalence, it is valuable to consider one such work in greater detail.

All’s Well That Ends Well All’s Well That Ends Well is a paradigmatic problem comedy. Consistent with the preceding points, the play’s ambivalence is largely a matter of genre mixing. The main plot, concerning Helen and Bertram, is some sort of romantic comedy. (We will return to this topic below.) The characterization would perhaps be clearer if the sex of the characters were changed, at least with regard to the first two acts. Suppose Bertram had undertaken to perform great feats of arms to win the hand of Helen (comparable to Helen performing the great feat of curing the King of France to win the hand of Bertram). This would give us one fairly standard form of romantic narrative. Indeed,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

for a twenty-first-century audience, one appealing aspect of the text is the way it presents the main female character as the active agent, achieving social excellence in the course of pursuing her love.25 As we will discuss, there are nonetheless very problematic (and nonprototypical) aspects of this romantic plot. But, again, part of the ambivalence fostered by the play is due to the genre mixing. Many romantic works are also in part heroic. The martial valor of the male protagonist may allow him a way of winning the heart of his otherwise indifferent beloved, or of gaining the favor of her antagonistic parents. There is a hint of that link in All’s Well, when Diana reports that Bertram ‘has done most honourable service’ (3.5.3–4).26 But, as Snyder points out, the war involves no apparent moral right.27 The King of France permits his followers to join either side (1.2.12–14) and the conflict does not seem to involve any greater purpose than enabling young men to fight one another and seduce young women. Leggatt comments that ‘we see nothing in the … military scenes to indicate that any of the young lords has attained the old-fashioned honor of warfare’.28 Indeed, ‘the one battle action we hear about is a muddle in which the Florentine cavalry destroyed some of their own soldiers by mistake’.29 The main representation of the war is the false capture of Paroles, leading to his betrayal of Bertram and the others on the Florentine side. This hardly cultivates admiration for heroic feats. Paroles exhibits cowardice and disloyalty. In addition, the main roles in which we witness Paroles’s compatriots are in this deceptive ambush of their own companion. Indeed, in the context of the larger play, it might be argued that the representation of Paroles’s disloyalty serves to deflate the heroic pretentions of characters other than Paroles. Specifically, Paroles is disloyal in two ways. First, he collaborates with his captors. Second, he communicates to Diana that Bertram’s professions of love are untrustworthy (4.3.212–24). The complication is that, morally, Paroles is right to convey this information to Diana, discouraging her from committing an error that would have been highly imprudent and that audience members at the time would probably have judged immoral as well. Of course, to say that disloyalty is right in one case is not to say that it is right in another. But, hearing of Paroles’s disloyalty in favor of Diana, we may think again about his action in the fake ambush and judge his character more ambivalently. More important, we may begin to suspect a parallel between Bertram’s behavior with Diana and his—or his side’s—behavior during the war. After all, one of the few things we know about these soldiers—Paroles and the rest—is that they are perfectly willing to use deceit to achieve their ends. This is clearly a different use of the heroic plot from what we might expect. Apart from the brief statement quoted above, the war does not serve to enhance the stature of the hero. Nor does it foster our hope that he and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

209

the heroine will be united. Indeed, it leads us to associate war with at best morally dubious aims and practices. Of course, the main problem with Bertram comes with his involvement in a seduction narrative.30 Bertram determines to deceive, seduce, and abandon Diana. He continually renews that determination, following it through—as far as he is aware—at every step. Moreover, when it is over, he does not repent his act, but brazenly denies it, demeaning Diana despite the potentially devastating consequences for her. In short, he is presented at best as a doubtful hero of a doubtful heroic narrative and as the anti-hero of a seduction narrative. Lest this seem too negative to inspire ambivalence, I should mention three mitigating factors. First, Helen deeply loves Bertram. This may give us reason to have some more positive feeling for him. He is at least likely to be charming in appearance (assuming the role is cast to make sense of Helen’s infatuation); this may win some audience approval despite ill behavior. Second, although the circumstances of the war partially call into question what it means for Bertram to do ‘most honourable service’, it nonetheless seems likely that Shakespeare’s audience would to some degree accept that fighting nobly is honorable. This is particularly true for Bertram’s act of ‘tak[ing] their great’st commander’ (though that is, in turn, qualified by his questionable act of killing the Duke’s brother (see 3.5.5–7)). A third mitigating factor is that Bertram is very young, so young that he is initially forbidden to go to war (2.1.27–8). This does not excuse his deception of Diana, but it does suggest that we might judge his behavior generally less harshly, in light of his relative immaturity. Returning to the seduction genre, we see that it enhances the ambivalence of the work in the usual ways. Most important, despite his youth, beauty, and possible valor in capturing the enemy commander, Bertram is not particularly likable. Indeed, he is, to say the least, very unpromising material for a spouse. In addition to the points we have already noted, he makes the bizarre promise that he will love Helen if she proves her story, presumably including that she is pregnant with his child (see 5.3.315–16). It seems impossible that Helen would prove this. Worse still, if she did, how could that possibly cause attachment, desire, and reward dependency to arise in Bertram’s heart? A peculiarity of All’s Well is of course that there is no seduction, at least not in the usual way. Bertram does follow out the Lothario’s role in the seduction plot. Moreover, he is pursued and eventually joined to the woman he slept with. But the pursuit is actually undertaken by Helen, not Diana, and it begins before the seduction. Indeed, in keeping with the unusual treatment of sex roles in the play, Helen in effect deceives and seduces Bertram. We may well feel, in this case, that Bertram deserves whatever

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

mistreatment he receives. But that is unlikely to make us feel any better about the underhanded means by which Helen achieves her goals. Indeed, before the seduction, it is difficult to sympathize with Helen’s pursuit. Unlike the violated and abandoned woman of the seduction prototype, Helen has not lost her social standing at the hands of a seducer. It is therefore difficult to understand why we should want the union of Bertram and Helen—except perhaps for the spiteful reason that they deserve one another. The match seems imprudent for both parties, and morally unmerited by both parties— though Helen does have the edge here in that her accomplishment is saving a king’s life, rather than murdering a duke’s brother. Of course, Helen does exhibit strong reward dependency on Bertram. This is part of the complexity of the romantic narrative, and one reason why we might have hoped for her reconciliation with Bertram, were it not for the difficulties just discussed. In keeping with this, the problematic qualities of this play are related to the romantic prototype as well.31 There are some striking continuities between All’s Well and prototypical love stories. For example, there is conflict between Bertram and his mother; there is a rival (two, in fact—Diana and LaFeu’s daughter); there are rumors of the death of the beloved in the middle of the story (false reports of Helen’s demise); there is exile of the lovers from home. Indeed, most of the key elements of the romantic story are present. But there are striking differences as well. Crucially, this love story never includes reciprocity.32 Bertram’s promise of love at the end is hardly believable, and he clearly does not return Helen’s feelings at any time before that. Other oddities involve the exact nature of the familial and social relations. Both Bertram’s mother and the King of France support the marriage of Bertram and Helen. This may at first seem to be a simple change from the prototype. But it suggests, rather, that we need to rethink the mapping of characters in All’s Well onto the character roles in the standard romantic structure. The Countess and the King support Helen in the way that parents and social authorities commonly support the rival in the love triangle plot of the prototypical romantic story. In other words, Helen has the role of the rival. It is as if Shakespeare had taken up the story of Romeo and Juliet from the side of Paris. On the other hand, there is no genuine beloved here, no equivalent of Romeo, no one that Bertram truly loves. In the place of the main romantic relation, Shakespeare has the seduction story, with its multiplication of deceitful manipulations.

Conclusion We often think of emotions as occurring in a pure form—happiness, sadness, anger, and so on. But our ordinary experience of emotion is much more

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

211

ambivalent. Even cases with a strongly dominant emotion are likely to involve other aroused emotion systems in a dynamic equilibrium that we do not self-consciously recognize, but that affects the course of our emotional response. This ambivalence is due to the fact that real-life circumstances, and our own moods and dispositions, provide impure eliciting conditions for emotional response. These complex eliciting conditions partially and dynamically arouse a shifting configuration of emotions, with their different memories, anticipations, attentional orientations, etc. Moreover, our initial emotions are not always consistent with our meta-emotional, moral or prudential responses. For example, with regard to All’s Well That Ends Well, a given audience member might be pleased that Helen’s scheme has worked, but feel disconcerted by his or her moral disapproval of the scheme itself. Similarly, one might be happy that the lovers are united but reflect with distress on the future torment this appears to entail for Helen, and thus the inappropriateness of the happiness. Finally, ambivalence is likely to be enhanced in allocentric (as opposed to egocentric) emotions. One effect of literature is often to organize our emotional responses in such a way as to produce satisfying experiences of relative emotional coherence. Specifically, prototypical genres commonly help to manage our ambivalence in such a way as to produce a sense of emotional prominence and subordination—for example, a sense of hope for the lovers’ union as our preferred final situation in a romantic comedy. Nevertheless, ambivalence remains and some genres exhibit ambivalence more extensively than others. Problem comedies present us with ambivalence that exceeds the bounds of emotional comfort. They enhance ambivalence in the range of initial emotions, and in the conflict between empathic (allocentric) response and sympathetic, moral or prudential response. Problem comedies do this in part through their combination of genres and their non-prototypical development of genres. All’s Well That Ends Well is a paradigmatic problem play because it fosters such an excess of ambivalence. Specifically, it encourages a complex, conflicted response to almost all of the characters and their goals. That conflict is in part a matter of the actions and events themselves, and in part a matter of our moral or prudential evaluation of those actions and events. In short, our emotional experience tends to be more ambivalent and more diffuse than we commonly imagine or than laboratory research may suggest. With their extensive use of idealization (e.g., in the utopian nature of society at the end of some sacrificial and heroic works or in the ‘happily ever after’ life of united lovers), prototypical genres are a partial exception to this.33 These points have implications for our understanding of literature. They apply most obviously to non-prototypical, ‘problem’ works. But they apply also to the study of emotional valence. It is, of course, perfectly reasonable— and, indeed, intellectually important—to rectify the imbalance in research on emotion and early modern literature by emphasizing positive rather than

212

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

negative emotions. Even so, the two types of emotion can be separated more fully in concept than in actuality. Put simply, the study of literary joy will inevitably lead us to instances of literary grief, often as part of that joy. Finally, the ubiquity of ambivalence undoubtedly has implications for life as well, given that that the latter is more often like a problem play than like an unproblematic comedy.

Notes 1 See Richard McNally, ‘Anxiety’, in David Sander and Klaus Scherer (eds), The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 42–4 (p. 42). 2 See, for example, Tobias Brosch and Agnes Moors, ‘Valence’, in Sander and Scherer, Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, pp. 401–2. 3 Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 201. Morten Kringelbach and Helen Phillips, Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 177. 4 Tiffany Ito and John Cacioppo, ‘Affect and Attitudes’, in Joseph Forgas (ed.), Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2001), pp. 50–74 (p. 69). 5 See Nico Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 323. 6 On egocentric and allocentric emotions, see Patrick Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 226. 7 For an illuminating discussion of empathy and sympathy, see Berys Gaut, ‘Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film’, in Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (eds), Passionate Views (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 200–16. 8 See, for example, Martin Doherty, Theory of Mind (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), ch. 3. 9 See G. Hain, ‘Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members’ suffering predict individual differences in costly helping’, Neuron 68 (2010), 149–60 (p. 155); and J. Gutsell and M. Inzlicht, ‘Empathy constrained’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, no. 5 (2010), 841–5 (p. 841). 10 See my Understanding Nationalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), ch. 2. 11 As I argue in How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 40–2. 12 On cross-cultural genres, see my The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). Readers have asked just how much in literature is

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre

213

cross-cultural. For example, to what extent do moral and prudential attitudes toward romantic love alter in ways that affect stories? There are of course historical changes and cultural differences. For example, some societies have nunneries, while others do not. The option of joining a nunnery, rather than accepting an unwanted spouse, is thus a story option in some societies, but not others. Moreover, if a nunnery is the heroine’s choice, the option may be more appealing to devout Catholics than to zealous opponents of Catholicism. Even so, it appears that significant emotional changes or differences are much more limited than we commonly imagine, at least in literature. Romantic stories appeal to the recipient’s sympathy for lovers even when cultural practices seem to allow very little freedom to young people in marriage. This suggests that earlier, traditional societies did not always find their emotional responses congruent with their social practices. (I might add that there may be more such incongruence in modern, Western societies than we typically admit, with the freedom of marital choice more subtly compromised by parental or other interference or disapproval.) 13 See Hogan, The Mind, ch. 4. 14 See Hogan, What Literature, ch. 3. 15 See Anjan Chatterjee, ‘Neuroaesthetics’, in Arthur Shimamura and Stephen Palmer (eds), Aesthetic Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 299–317 (p. 309). 16 On patterns in attachment, see Colin Parkes, Love and Loss (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 13–15. 17 Susan Snyder, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 1–65 (p. 17). 18 Ed Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1996), p. 98. 19 Alexander Leggatt, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well: the testing of romance’, Modern Language Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1971), 21–41 (p. 22). 20 E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949), p. 100. 21 Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22 Richard Hillman, William Shakespeare: The Problem Plays (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 1. 23 Simon Barker, ‘Introduction’, in Simon Barker (ed.), Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 1–20 (p. 7). 24 Snyder, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. 25 Snyder stresses Helen’s ‘upsetting of the gender role system’ (Snyder, ‘Introduction’, p. 31). Scragg points to the play’s ‘reversal of gender expectations’ (Leah Scragg, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well and the Tale of the Chivalric Quest’, in Barker, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, pp. 29–53 (p. 40)). Peter Erickson refers to Helen’s ‘disruptive social significance’ (Peter Erickson, ‘The Political Effects of Gender and Class in All’s Well That Ends Well’, in Barker, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, pp. 54–73 (p. 64)). See also Carolyn Asp, ‘Subjectivity, Desire

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well’, in Barker, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, pp. 74–94 (p. 78). 26 This and subsequent parenthetical in-text citations of the play refer to William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 27 Snyder, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–15. 28 Leggatt, ‘All’s Well’, 23. 29 Snyder ‘Introduction’, p. 15. See also Erickson, ‘The Political Effects of Gender and Class’, p. 55, on militarism and manhood in the play. 30 The place of ‘lechery’ in the problem plays is often acknowledged (see Vivian Thomas, ‘Shakespeare’s Problem Plays’, in Barker, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, pp. 21–8 (p. 25)). For example, Hillman explains that ‘chaste love gives way to sexual pursuit’ (Hillman, William Shakespeare, p. 7). See also Susan Snyder, ‘The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 83–97 (p. 94). 31 One reader of this essay asked if Shakespeare is showing us something about the romantic prototype. This is a good question, but the answer is likely to be disappointing. I believe it only shows that the romantic prototype can be developed and specified in emotionally complicated ways, which is not really newsworthy. As prototypes, these structures do not have rigid constraints, so we expect such variation. I do not see any reason to think that he is showing us something necessary about the romantic prototype—for example, its falsity. 32 One reader of this essay provocatively asked if a cultural critic would not read this complication very differently. Specifically, such a critic might invoke cultural difference, maintaining that reciprocity was not an important goal of romance at this time and place. It does seem to me likely that some Cultural Studies critics might be inclined to make such a claim. But it would fly in the face of everything we know about psychology and about at least the literature of romance during the period. As to psychology, it would suggest that people in early modern England might feel an attachment bond with someone and reward dependency on that person, but not care what the person felt about him or her—which would imply a radical change in both the psychology itself and in the evolutionary function of the emotion systems involved. As to the literature, if reciprocity is not important, how do we explain much of what happens in Shakespeare’s plays? For example, what difference would it make to audience members if the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream were married off to people they did not care about? Why, too, would Oberon care that Puck had mixed up the couples? The point could be repeated for many other works. 33 On idealization in prototypical narratives, see for example my What Literature, pp. 25–6, and The Mind, pp. 225–7.

Afterword

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Michael C. Schoenfeldt

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. (Romans 12.15, Authorized Version)

What gives an emotion a negative or positive charge? Is a positive emotion simply one that feels good to the subject? Or is it one that induces behaviors that are salutary for the subject? Perhaps it is an emotion that prompts behaviors that are beneficial for the subject’s social or environmental habitat? What then renders an emotion negative? Is it the corrosive ferocity of the emotion? Is it the fact that the emotion is inappropriate to the situation? Or is it something intrinsic to the emotion? What charge would one give to an emotion that elicits sensations or outcomes that are mixed? This beautifully conceived and well-executed collection of essays provokes such questions and offers an appropriately wide range of answers to these urgent but formidable inquiries. Very little has in fact been written about the role of positive emotions in early modern culture. The volume rightly sees itself as a corrective to the work that many scholars (including me) have done emphasizing the anxious, edgy way that the Renaissance sometimes talked about emotions.1 These essays offer a welcome and necessary revisionist account of the positive deployments of emotion in early modern literature; they repeatedly remind us of the more positive aspects of early modern emotion that have been undervalued in recent criticism. The volume, moreover, demonstrates convincingly the interpretive and historical gains achieved by redressing this undervaluation. Our disciplinary preference for the negative aspects of emotion has sometimes produced a tendentiously dark account of the period, one that all too frequently overlooks the ways that emotions give value and meaning and energy to life and relationships, then and now.2 By addressing the neglect of the ‘positive’ aspects of emotion in literary studies of the early modern period, then, the collection provides a real service to the field. Bringing together scholarship on various kinds of pleasurable feelings and their representations in English and European literary texts

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

216

Positive emotions in early modern literature

from the sixteenth to the end of seventeenth centuries, the volume suggests the array of possible positive enactments of emotion. One leaves this volume with a sense of ethical refreshment, and with a renewed sense of the myriad contours of pleasurable feeling in early modern Europe. The volume, then, is revitalizing in a variety of ways. It bravely takes on a wide range of genres. While one might expect that certain kinds of literature—comedy, for example—would prove more hospitable to positive emotions than others, this collection surprisingly has several essays devoted to the role of positive emotions in tragedy and historical drama, two genres not known for exhibiting the virtues of positive emotions. Indeed, Richard Strier’s dazzling opening essay has a title that might seem like an oxymoron— ‘Happy Hamlet’. Strier, though, does a wonderful job of earning this title by demonstrating just how the tragedy’s emotional devastation is augmented by the unrealized potential for happiness present in Hamlet’s positive emotional bonds. Tragedy and history plays comprise the subject of a surprising number of essays throughout the volume. Lalita Pandit Hogan finds positive emotions play a significant role in one of the most macabre tragedies of the Renaissance stage, The Duchess of Malfi. Hogan contextualizes the play’s rancid atmosphere of suppressed eroticism by emphasizing the preciousness, and the precariousness, of affective bonds in John Webster’s deeply disturbing tragedy. Looking at the first English Renaissance revenge play, Eonjoo Park explores the relationships among revenge, justice, and emotional satisfaction in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Park shows how revenge can circumstantially be experienced as a positive emotion, and suggests some strong reasons for the continuing popularity of the genre of revenge tragedy. The killing fields of the history plays also seem unpromising places for examining positive emotions, but Paul Joseph Zajac manages to emphasize the circulation of positive emotion in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy by analyzing the dilemmas of a necessary emotional containment in the plays. He even finds something like a deeply contingent form of contentment emerging from the emotionally roiled canvas of these bloody plays. There are of course essays on comedy, where positive emotions are a more expected presence, and particularly on comedies that advertise a particular positive emotion in their title. Cora Fox, for example, provides a striking analysis of the production of gendered communities around the emotion of joy in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Using recent psychological work on the functions of positive emotions, Fox shows how the collective merriment of the play produces a kind of shared solidarity. Patrick Colm Hogan likewise explores the unstable blend of mirth and melancholy in one of Shakespeare’s problem comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well. Hogan demonstrates the complexity, vulnerability, and ambivalence invariably embedded in the feelings of attachment that comedies demand.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword 217 Cassie M. Miura’s superb essay also centers on an unstable but productive mix of mirth and melancholy. Miura’s subject, though, is not Shakespearean problem comedy but rather Robert Burton’s long treatise on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Miura calls attention to the salutary aspects of unexpected laughter in that massive, and massively popular, work dedicated to the diagnosis of the causes and cures of what we would call depression. Countering the early modern stereotype of the melancholy scholar that Burton identifies, Ian Frederick Moulton demonstrates that the act of reading—which is according to Burton hazardous to body and soul—can be the source of enlightenment, and perhaps even contentment. Looking at works from the French Renaissance, Moulton suggests that Michel de Montaigne and François Rabelais bestow on the reader of their texts a gamut of emotions, including the possibility of happiness through contemplation. Relatedly, Ullrich Langer’s essay argues that the early modern experience of pleasurable sensations exhibits a kind of positive emotion, one that is not passive, but rather the result of deliberate, virtuous action. Ranging widely among classical, Italian, and French texts, Langer demonstrates the particular pleasure produced by the early modern rhetorical feature of variety. These essays together suggest that emotion can be usefully understood as contiguous to, and sometimes even identified with, the sensation of pleasure. Other essays deal with the ways that positive emotion structures devotional longing, religious belonging, and social bonding. Timothy Hampton provides a wonderful account of the social and spiritual dimensions of ‘cheer’ in a wide range or works from theology to drama. Like Strier, he suggests that the positive emotion of cheer is frequently invoked to measure the emotional devastation that issues from the destruction of community in Shakespearean tragedy. The disciplinary preference for devotional anxiety has certainly made us less able to appreciate the accomplishment of a relentlessly upbeat poet like Thomas Traherne, for whom the lyric celebration of happiness was central to his joyous embrace of God’s creation. In her fine essay, Leila Watkins analyzes Traherne’s fascination with discovering the raw materials of devout happiness in the things of this world. Where Watkins focuses on a poet engaged in the solitary pleasures of religious devotion, Bradley J. Irish explores the affective ties and ritual behaviors that produce group solidarity at court. By turning his attention to courtly factionalism in the Essex circle, Irish shows how positive emotions invariably are two-edged swords. They can be the medium of tightly knit social bonds, or the matter of dissention, difference, and unrest. Taken together, these essays make a strong case for the proposition that positive emotions are at least as important as negative ones to the understanding of early modern culture in England. The period known as early

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

218

Positive emotions in early modern literature

modern England is certainly not a nightmarish world haunted relentlessly by angst and oppression, as some recent work has suggested; but neither is it a relentlessly festive Renaissance fair. The emotions that it celebrates and controls are, I might argue, something like fire—while intrinsically neither good nor bad, fire can keep you warm, or it can burn you. What makes an emotion positive or negative is frequently a matter of degree or of circumstances. As Patrick Colm Hogan’s essay asserts, emotions may be elemental, but they are not electrons or protons, defined substantively by the absolute positive or negative nature of their charge; rather they are sentiments that carry different charges in different directions amid changing circumstances. In the epigraph to this Afterword, St Paul suggests that we should rejoice with those that rejoice and weep with those that weep. This would indicate that the positivity of an emotion is a function of how responsive it is to the emotions of those around us. But this does not account for the distinct possibility, in literature and in life, of being surrounded by an environment charged with unambiguously negative emotions. Surrounded by Satan and his rebellious angels, Milton’s Abdiel, for example, is   faithful found, Among the faithless, faithful only he; Among innumerable false, unmoved Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.3

Here, being unmoved is an unequivocal virtue. A proud regicide in Restoration England, Milton certainly understood the courage required to resist a collective surge of servile emotion. Even compassion, which we tend to think of as an indisputable good, can be negative or positive, depending on the object of the compassion. Sympathy for the devil is rarely a good thing. As Eric Langley demonstrates in his recent book, Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies, compassion is at once a hazardous threat to the integrity of the self and a necessary conduit for human connection. Frequently salutary, sometimes noxious, sympathy can either infect with toxic passion or heal with human compassion, depending on the object and the situation.4 Part of the challenge of deploying the concept of positive emotions to talk about early modern literature, moreover, may emerge from the inherent imprecision, if not the implicit anachronism, of the term ‘emotion’. It is certainly significant that all the early modern entries for the word ‘emotion’ are negative in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a word whose first uses include ‘political agitation, civil unrest’, ‘movement, disturbance, perturbation’, and ‘an agitation of mind; an excited mental state. Subsequently: any strong mental or instinctive feeling, as pleasure, grief, hope, fear, etc., deriving esp. from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationship with others.’ 5 Originally,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Afterword 219 then, ‘emotion’ did not generally designate something thought to be a positive experience in early modern England. It was for the most part a toxic distraction to the virtuous exercise of reason, and the perturbation of an otherwise calm self. Our own sense of emotion as an internal thermostat of happiness and contentment would be almost unrecognizable. As Tiffany Watt Smith suggests, ‘no one really felt emotions before about 1830. Instead, they felt other things—“passions,” “accidents of the soul,” “moral sentiments”—and explained them very differently from how we understand emotions today.’ 6 The word ‘emotion’, then, has traveled a great distance, and not in a straight line, from its early modern usage, slowly absorbing along the way the various meanings we now attach to it. It is, moreover, urgent but onerous to distinguish sensations such as pleasure and pain from emotions such as happiness and sadness. Whereas the former tend to involve a physical external stimulation of a sense organ such as touch, taste, hearing, or smell, the latter typically entail an involuntary but inward response to an object, action, or situation. While both sensation and emotion can confusingly be objects of the verb ‘to feel’, the ways that they are manifested are distinctive, if sporadically contiguous. In the early modern lexicon, ‘grief’ can designate either physical or emotional pain, as if the distinction between physiology and psychology were a later intervention. As J.F. Senault asserts in The Use of Passions, ‘Grief is a real evil, which sets upon the Soul and Body both at once, and makes two wounds at one blow.’ 7 In such a world, it is hard to call emotions negative or positive outside of specific contexts or situations. Anger, for example, demonstrates the profoundly circumstantial nature of the charge we might bestow on an emotion. As Martha Nussbaum argues, ‘On the one hand, anger is closely connected to brutality and a delight in vengeance for its own sake … On the other hand, not to get angry when horrible things take place seems itself to be a diminution of one’s humanity.’ 8 Whether anger is the product of spiteful envy at another’s fortune or the offspring of a clamor for justice depends on the circumstances that inspired it. In some situations, it is cowardly to ignore the pull of anger while in other circumstances it is noxious to act on it. The same issues relate to questions of contentment and stasis as well. As I read Zajac’s stimulating essay, I wondered if the contentment that he describes is more a Stoic state that has been liberated from all emotion, like that aptly exercised by Milton’s Abdiel when surrounded by contagious enthusiasms of ungodly rebels, or an emotion in and of itself, a kind of satisfied contentment, as Zajac seems to suggest. As the editors of this fine collection remind us, rarely are emotions experienced in isolation from other emotions. John Donne suggests in a sermon that to ‘conceive true sorrow and true joy, are things not only contiguous, but continuall; they doe not onely touch and follow one another

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

220

Positive emotions in early modern literature

in a certaine succession, Joy assuredly after sorrow, but they consist together they are all one, Joy and Sorrow’.9 The emotions entail in this regard more of a rhythm of mutual constitution than a clear opposition between negative and positive. The discerning editors of this volume assert that many of the essays here ‘undercut an easy distinction between categories of “positive” and “negative”’. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole exhibits an abiding commitment to exploring the presence and significance of positive emotions in early modern Europe. The accomplished collection attests to the critical importance of the emotions, negative and positive, then and now, for a full and meaningful affective life. Indeed, the move to positive emotions that marks this collection is occurring in the contemporary discipline of psychology as well. The subject of positive emotions is approaching full canonicity with the recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of Positive Emotions and Psychopathology, edited by June Gruber.10 An emphasis on the positive aspect of emotions, though, does not abrogate mention of the premium that early culture places on the project of self-control. As Keith Thomas has demonstrated comprehensively, self-control was central to the emergent ideal of civility in early modern England.11 Control of the emotions was an essential virtue, particularly in men; overt displays of fulsome emotion were frowned upon. In ‘Constancie’, George Herbert contrasts the largely masculine virtue exemplified by the poem’s title—one ‘who never melts or thaws’—with the behavior of ‘sick folks, women, those whom passions sway’.12 Yet as Herbert’s own remarkable portrait of the emotional ebb and flow of the devotional life indicates, what is important is not so much an absolute opposition between emotion and control, as seeing control as the necessary organ of containment for the precious but volatile substance of emotion. Navigating the early modern world, it seems, entails a continual effort to counterbalance the contrary claims of positive and negative emotions, of the precious vulnerability of emotional commitment and the prophylactic autonomy of rational control. We as a discipline are much better prepared to appreciate the full spectrum of the emotional life of this culture because of the fine work in this collection.

Notes 1 See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); my

Afterword 221

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the various essays collected in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). A notable exception to this critical tendency is Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Strier provides a deliberately revisionist account of a worldly, pleasure-loving Renaissance that recent criticism has largely ignored. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 5:896–99, from John Milton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 242. Eric Langley, Shakespeare’s Contagious Sympathies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); see also Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), and, for the particular challenges of compassion in Milton, see Kevis Goodman, ‘“Wasted Labor”? Milton’s Eve, the poet’s work, and the challenge of sympathy’, English Literary History 64, no. 2 (Summer 1997), 415–46. ‘emotion’, 2, 3, 4, meanings from 1529 to 1828, OED Online, December 2020 (accessed 16 December 2020). Tiffany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotions (London: Wellcome Collection, 2015), p. 3. J.F. Senault, The Use of Passions, trans. Henry Carey (London, 1649), p. 477. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 403; italics in original. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 4.324–45. See Jane Gruber (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Emotion and Psychopathology, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 263, lines 21, 26.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Note: literary works are indexed under authors’ names. Adams, Simon 121, 122, 130 Aeschylus 109, 171, 204 affect theory 2, 4–7, 8, 12, 148n.17, 149n.24, 156, 201 Ahmed, Sara 2, 5, 12, 136, 142–3, 156 Alfar, Cristina 142, 146n.4 ‘allocentric’ emotion 201–3 ambivalence 199–207, 211–12 Apuleius 1 Aquinas, Thomas 62, 70n.17 Aristotle 50, 193 eudaimonia in 62, 65, 66, 68, 69n.4 pleasure in 74, 80–2, 83, 85 ataraxia 51, 59n.30, 61–3, 64, 69n.11 Auerbach, Erich 65 Bacon, Francis 121, 128, 197n.31 Bailey, Amanda 4–5, 148n.17 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8 Balakier, James J. 165n.6 Barker, Simon 207 Berlant, Lauren 5, 7–8, 149n.24, 166n.13 Berman, Ronald 109 Bevington, David 111 Bloom, Harold 28n.17 Boccaccio, Giovanni 64 Bono, Barbara J. 188 Borges, Jorge Luis 44 Bradley, A.C. 32, 35 Bright, Timothy 45 Brown, Pamela 138

Burckhardt, Jacob 3 Burroughs, Jeremiah 108–9 Burton, Robert 4, 9, 10, 44–57, 60, 63–4, 68, 109, 217 Cacioppo, John 201, 206 Cairns, Douglas 171 Calvin, Jean 98–100, 101, 106n.19 Cartelli, Thomas 114 Castiglione, Baldassare 25, 33 Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto 60 Caston, Ruth R. 4 causation 54 Cecil, Robert 122, 129 Chalk, Brian 176 Chamberlain, Richard 37n.4 Chappuys, Gabriel 75, 77 charity 95–101, 160 Chaucer, Geoffrey 92, 98 ‘cheer’ 91–104, 217 Cheng, Elyssa 114 Chrétien de Troyes 92–3 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 74, 75, 76–8, 84–5 classical heritage 4, 7, 47–52, 61–2 Greek drama 109, 171 rustic life 74, 75, 76 Shakespeare and 109 cognitive sciences 6–7, 9, 127, 144, 165n.6, 168–9, 172, 174, 183n.25, 201 Cohen, Walter 136

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index 223 Collins, Randall 124–32 passim comedy 6, 8, 102, 139, 147n.4, 204, 216 ‘comedy of humors’ 143, 149n.27 community 92, 95, 97–101, 104, 136, 148nn.17–18 Constructivism 6–7 contentment 61–2, 216, 219 definitions and etymology 69n.9, 108, 119n.16 Shakespeare on 11, 21, 107–18, 119n.22, 119n.25 copia (copious style) 97, 106n.20 Cornwallis, William 121 Coverdale, Miles 94–5, 96–7 cross-cultural genres 204, 212n.12 Crowne, John 109 Cummings, Brian 3 Cyrus the Younger 76–80, 86n.10 Daniel, Simon 121–2 Darwin, Charles 7, 169 Davison, Francis 122 Dean, Paul 114 de Grazia, Margreta 28, 41n.42 Deleuze, Gilles 5 Democritus 48–52 devotional poetry 153–4, 162, 164 see also Traherne, Thomas Dickson, Lisa 110 DiGangi, Mario 4, 148n.17 disgust 30, 168, 169–76, 180–1 Donne, John 34, 161, 219–20 Du Fail, Noël 86n.10 Du Laurens, André 46 Dunne, Derek 196n.3 Dürer, Albrecht 60 Durkheim, Émile 124, 130 Elizabeth I 121, 127, 130, 131 The Merry Wives of Windsor 144, 149n.21, 150n.31 Ellinghausen, Laurie 110 elpis trope 171 embodiment 3, 6, 12, 15n.22, 202 emotional energy 124–7 emotion defined 5, 7, 9, 218–19 Emotions History 4–6, 44, 104, 132, 153, 155, 169 Epicureanism 3, 52, 59n.30, 61

Epicurus 51, 69n.11, 74 Epistle to Damagetus 50–2, 57 Erasmus, Desiderius 50, 95–101 passim, 105–6nn.17–20 Escolme, Bridget 4 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of (and circle) 11, 121–32 passim, 217 eudaimonia 61–8 passim, 153 Evans, Dylan 183n.25 factionalism 11, 121–32 Federico da Montefeltro 33 Ferrand, Jacques 46 festivity and carnivalesque mode 8, 140 Ficino, Marsilio 50, 60 Fish, Stanley 46, 49 Fitter, Chris 117 Fontaine, Lawrence 169 Foucault, Michel 177 Fracastoro, Girolamo 46 Freud, Sigmund 9 Frye, Northrop 46 Frye, Roland M. 29, 30, 33, 34, 40n.37, 150n.27 Gajowski, Evelyn 143 Galen 53–4, 59n.34, 182n.13 see also humoral theory gardens 74–85, 86n.3, 88nn.20–1 Gass, William H. 44 Gataker, Thomas 109 genre ambiguities 203–8 Gill, Christopher 182n.25 Goffman, Erving 124 Gournay, Marie de 68 Gowland, Angus 46, 48 Greenberg, Lynne 164 Greenblatt, Stephen 40n.30, 110 Guichard, Jean 52 Gunby, D.C. 173 Hall, Joseph 109 Halliwell, Stephen 50 Hammer, Paul E.J. 128, 130, 131 happiness defined 62, 153 ‘happiness turn’ 2 Hardin, Russell 179 Held, Joshua 38n.14 Hemingway, Ernest 91

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

224 Index Herbert, George 154, 161, 162–3, 220 Herodotus 62, 65 hilaritus see ‘cheer’ Hillman, Richard 207 Hippocrates 48, 50–2, 56 Hirschfeld, Heather 119n.24 Holland, Peter 148n.18 Horace 66, 76, 78 hospitality 92–4 humoral theory 3, 4, 44, 45, 46–7, 52, 53, 91 Webster and 169 Irish, Bradley J. 170 Ito, Tiffany 201, 206 Jankowski, Theodora A. 182n.22 Jenkins, Harold 38n.14, 38n.21, 39n.27, 39n.30, 40n.34 jest books 45, 46 Johnson, Samuel 44, 48, 91, 93 Johnston, Carol Ann 162 Jonson, Ben 143, 150n.27, 163, 196n.19 Joubert, Laurent 45, 46, 52 Julian of Norwich 93–4, 98 justice 184–95 Kaster, Robert A. 4 Kiséry, András 35 Kuchar, Gary 162, 167n.23 Kyd, Thomas 184–95, 216 Langer, Ullrich 193 Langley, Eric 218 Lateiner, Donald 171 LeDoux, Joseph 169, 172 Leemans, Inger 169 Leggatt, Alexander 207, 208 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 130 Leinwand, Ted 39n.22 L’Espine, Jean de 108 Lollio, Flavio Alberto 75–81 Lund, Mary Ann 46, 49, 54–5 Lupton, Julia 22, 23, 36 MacDonald, Michael 40n.37 McElroy, Bernard 35 Machiavelli, Niccolò 60 Macini, Celso 46 MacKay, Ellen 43n.65

McMahon, Darrin 2, 13n.6 Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre 207 Marcus, Leah 8 Marino, James J. 39n.24 Markham, Gervase 195n.2 Massumi, Brian 5 melancholy 2, 9–10, 60, 91, 101 Burton on 44–57, 217 diet for 53–7 Hamlet and 21, 32 Melchiori, Giorgio 143, 149n.27 merriness 136–46, 146n.4, 148n.18 Miller, William Ian 186 Milton, John 218, 219 Misztal, Barbara 181 Montaigne, Michel 9, 50, 60–1, 62, 64–8, 87n.12, 217 More, Thomas 101 Mullaney, Steven 3, 107 Neill, Michael 23, 179 New Historicism 2–3, 44, 45–7 Ngai, Sianne 8 Nussbaum, Martha C. 4, 5, 170, 172, 219 Ovid 144 pain 46–7, 67, 186, 192–4, 201, 204, 206, 219 pleasure and 9, 69n.11, 143 torture 169 Palissy, Bernard 82, 88n.21 Palter, Robert 175 Panksepp, Jaak 169, 174 Paster, Gail Kern 2–3, 169 Paul, St 95–9, 100, 218 Phillips, Harriet 136–7, 147n.12 Plato 62, 65, 69n.4, 74 pleasure defined 74, 81 Plutarch 35, 64, 65 ‘positive psychology’ 6–7, 15n.23, 16n.33 ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ 12, 170–1, 177–80 Prosser, Eleanor 39nn.29–30 Rabelais, François 55, 59n.37, 60–1, 63–5, 67, 68, 140, 217 Rackin, Phyllis 143 Ray, Sid 182n.24

Index 225

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

reading 10, 55, 59n.30, 60–8, 217 Reddy, William 137 Reformation 2, 3, 95, 107–8 revenge tragedy genre 184–7, 204, 216 ritual interaction theory 123–32, 217 Robin Hood 138, 148n.13 Rowlands, Samuel 46 rustic life 74–85 satisfaction 184–95 Sawday, Jonathan 167n.23 Schoenfeldt, Michael 3 Scodel, Joshua 28n.20 seduction narratives 206, 209–10 Semenza, Gregory M. Colón 190 Senault, J.F. 219 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 65, 191–2 Serres, Olivier de 82–5, 87n.18 Sextus Empiricus 61, 63 Shakespeare, William 21–36, 100–4, 107–18, 136–46, 206–12 All’s Well That Ends Well 12, 199, 207–12, 216 As You Like It 33–4, 108 Hamlet 4, 10, 21–36, 103, 187, 204, 207, 216 Henry VI trilogy 110–17 King Lear 21, 25, 26, 181 Macbeth 10, 11, 21, 102 Merchant of Venice 119n.24 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 11, 136–46, 216 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 104, 214n.32 Othello 21, 26, 27 Rape of Lucrece 92–3, 97–8 Richard II 128, 130 Richard III 100–2, 103–4, 107, 109–10, 117 Romeo and Juliet 37n.7, 102 sonnets 29, 108, 147n.8 Twelfth Night 25, 42n.52 Shirilan, Stephanie 47, 54, 57n.7 Sidney, Philip 25, 30, 35, 42nn.63–4, 119n.16, 130, 187 Sierhuis, Freya 3 Silver, Bruce 65 Singin’ in the Rain 62–3 Siraisi, Nancy 50 ‘situational mimesis’ 185, 188–9 Sjögren, Gunnar 22

Skepticism 52, 59n.59, 61 Skinner, Quentin 46 Smith, Henry 108 Smith, W.D. 50 Snyder, Susan 207, 208 social exchange theory 147n.7 social sciences 7–9, 13n.6, 123–32, 144 solidarity 123–9, 216, 217 Solon 62, 65 Soni, Vivasvan 153 Spatharas, Dimos 171 Spenser, Edmund 1, 13n.2 Spinoza, Baruch 5 Stillman, Robert 187 Stoicism 3, 47, 61, 108, 175, 182n.25, 219 Strier, Richard 3, 47, 221n.2 Tacitus, Cornelius 132 Tan, Ed 206 Taylor, Thomas 108 Temple, William 122 Thomas, Keith 155, 220 Thrift, Nigel 176 Tillyard, E.M.W. 207 Traherne, Thomas 11–12, 154–65, 217 transvaluation 188, 191 Trevor, Douglas 57n.10 Trust Theory 12, 169, 171, 177–81 valence 199–200 variety 74, 77–81, 84–5, 217 Vaughan, Henry 154, 158 Vicari, Patricia 47–8 Wall, Wendy 148n.14 Warley, Christopher 23–4 Watt Smith, Tiffany 219 Webster, John 12, 168–81, 216 Whigham, Frank 25, 179 Williams, Raymond 3 ‘will’ term 137, 147n.8 Wolsey, Thomas 170 Wotton, Henry 122 Xenophon 76–8 Yeats, William B. 21 Zatta, Claudia 50