The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne and Early Modern Culture

The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture Nancy Selleck The Interpersonal Idiom in Shake...

Author: Nancy Selleck

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The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture Nancy Selleck

The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture

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The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture Nancy Selleck

© Nancy Selleck 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 -1-4039-9906-1 ISBN-10: 1-4039-9906-6

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Selleck, Nancy Gail, 1956– The interpersonal idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and early modern culture / Nancy Selleck. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-4039-9906-6 (alk. paper) 1. Donne, John, 1572–1631—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 3. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Self in literature. 6. Drama—Psychological aspects. I. Title. PR2248.S34 2008 821'.3—dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2008000192

For Jörg and in memory of my mother


Contents Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: Other Selves

1

1

Properties of a ‘Self’: Words and Things, 1580–1690

21

2

Persons in Play: Donne’s Body and the Humoral Actor

56

3

Material Others: Shakespeare’s Mirrors and Other Perspectives

89

4

‘Womans Constancy’: The Poetics of Consummation

123

Epilogue: Subjects, Objects, and Contemporary Theory

162

Notes

168

Index

208

vii

Acknowledgments My work on this book has been inspired and sustained by many friends, mentors, and colleagues. At Princeton, Victoria Kahn encouraged and supported its beginnings as a dissertation, provided rigorous and incisive guidance, and became a model for me of generous intellectual engagement. Her enthusiasm and support have shaped the book’s development and mine. Michael Goldman was likewise a brilliant and careful mentor and a great example, and I am very grateful to have had the chance to work with him. Lawrence Danson was an invaluable reader and guide on this project as well, and his support also meant a great deal to me. The tremendously engaging intellectual community I found at Princeton was a real boon, and it was epitomized for me by Oliver Arnold and Vance Smith, whose generous insights, conversation, and advice clarified and expanded my thinking early on. A Mellon dissertation fellowship at Princeton’s interdisciplinary Center for Human Values was also a rich source of inspiration and insight, and I thank Amy Gutman and the many scholars who shared their work and commented on mine over the course of that year. In its early stages, this work also benefited from a Folger Institute seminar with Gail Kern Paster, and I am grateful to Gail and to the seminar members and guests for those formative discussions. More recently, I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Gil Harris for his thorough and incisive reading of the full manuscript, and to Pamela Brown for her repeated readings and encouragement in the process of developing and revising the book. I thank Pam also for starting the delightful and challenging writing group whose commentary, friendship, and examples have meant so much to me during the process of revision – Bianca Calabresi, Julie Crawford, Natasha Korda, Tanya Pollard, Rachel Poulsen, Cristine Varholy, and our dearly missed Sasha Roberts. I owe much as well to other generous scholars who have read and listened and offered their thoughts on this work over the years, including Diana Fuss, Martin Harries, Ron Levao, Christina Malcolmson, Doug Mao, Nick Moschovakis, Anne Prescott, David Sedley, Julie Robin Solomon, and Ramie Targoff. For their friendship and always lively interest and conversation I also want to thank Hyungji Park, Julia Lee, Pat Crain, Ann Gaylin, Jonathan Marks, and Irving Kriesberg. My wonderful colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Lowell continue to viii

Acknowledgments ix

provide an exciting and nurturing working environment, and I am especially grateful to Mary Kramer, Marlowe Miller, Melissa Pennell, Bill Roberts, and Tony Szczesiul for their thoughtful guidance, support, and friendship. My students too have been a constant source of inspiration and insight, particularly Jenah Blitz, Nick Colella, Jim Hurley, Ryan Kernan, John Kneeland, and Dhvani Kortua. To some I owe more than I can say. My friends Suzanne Churchill and Lisa Sternlieb have shared the whole journey of this book, valued it beyond its deserving, edited, collaborated, cajoled, and always inspired with the example of their own work. I thank my whole family too for their strong support and love, especially my late mother for all that she knew and gave, and for her example as a teacher. My greatest debt is to my husband Jörg, whose love and humor have held me up, whose wisdom has challenged and enhanced my thinking and this book, and whom ‘I throughly love.’


Introduction: Other Selves

I have a kind of self resides with you. – SHAKESPEARE, Troilus and Cressida1 Speaking and thinking about selves in English today depends on language that goes back only to the later seventeenth century, when words such as self, identity, and person started to take on their modern meanings. Hence the critical commonplace that before that point, the ‘self’ did not exist. Yet sixteenth-century speakers and writers did have a vocabulary for selfhood, albeit one that registers another ‘kind of self’ than we tend to recognize today. This book explores that prehistory, recovering an alternative language of selfhood that casts it in interpersonal rather than individual terms. Most emphatically exploited, I will argue, in texts of Shakespeare and Donne, this language provides its users with conceptions and expectations of identity as an exchange, permeation, borrowing, anticipation – in short, a great variety of other-oriented actions and configurations largely alien to our modern language of selfhood. Thus in speaking of a ‘prehistory’ of the modern self, I am not suggesting a discursive ideological development that leads toward that later construct. Rather than looking for proto-modern notions of the individual, this study focuses on a rich array of now-obsolete conceptions of identity that emerged in the period but were subsequently lost – overwritten by radically different usage. The model of history that these findings support is not one of evolution, in which, say, Hamlet represents a newly private sensibility that reaches toward the modern self or subject.2 Such analyses project a streamlined conception of selfhood onto texts that hold a far more complex idiom. The selves coined by Renaissance speakers and writers are various, but they share a tendency to locate selfhood beyond subjective 1

2

The Interpersonal Idiom

experience, in the experience of an other. Fathoming this idiom means recognizing ‘other selves’ in two senses – seeing both how they differ from ours and how they render selfhood a function and property of others. The focus of this book, then, is as much on the other as it is on the self. But in emphasizing their interdependence, it moves away from the currently familiar notion of the other as a foil or anti-self against which the self defines itself – a dyadic model that has dominated critical discussions of early modern identity. I argue that Renaissance language makes the other not merely the self’s context but its source and its locus. Identity means having, as Shakespeare’s Cressida puts it, ‘a kind of self resides with you’. This radically interpersonal ‘kind of self’ has not been adequately understood or even identified. Although Renaissance scholars and critical theorists today readily see the self as a social construct, we still tend to analyze that construct on the basis of a sharp distinction between self and other – a distinction that precludes nearly everything that Cressida’s line suggests. Ironically, that distinction is often most evident in New Historicist studies, starting with Stephen Greenblatt’s landmark Renaissance Self-Fashioning. To be sure, Greenblatt argues that identity is always ‘a cultural artifact’ – ‘the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society’.3 But spelling out the relational model involved in the production of identity, he also claims that self-fashioning is always ‘achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile’: This threatening Other – heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist – must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed. ... The power generated to attack the alien in the name of the authority is produced in excess and threatens the authority it sets out to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some effacement or undermining, some loss of self.4 A great deal of subsequent criticism addresses the alienated ‘Other’ in early modern culture, largely ignoring more subtle but equally important ways in which otherness structures Renaissance selfhood. In focusing on threatening rather than more familiar others, we limit our discussion to one model of self, in which identity is constructed in opposition to context.5 This model, I would argue, makes it difficult to discover anything but atomized selves. As critics have noted, Greenblatt’s language in this passage suggests that his analysis entails a notion of self prior to self-fashioning – a discrete entity already in place to be

Introduction: Other Selves 3

threatened by the encounter with the ‘Other’.6 The problem lies partly, I suggest, in that conception of the other as ‘alien’: such an absolute other entails a discrete self, and vice versa. Here, then, the attempt to analyze the self as inherently social falters, betraying a preconception of otherness as that which undoes rather than constitutes the self. That preconception is embedded in our language, which carries powerful conventions of individual identity that make it hard to attend to any other ‘kind of self’ or to more than one self at a time. Moving beyond a Self/Other dichotomy means conceptualizing others with the same ontological status as the self – others with whom the self can be interchanged, who can penetrate and alter the self, whose perspectives can shape and constitute the self. And it means moving beyond the concept of subjectivity that dominates our critical discourse at present. Because the notion of subjectivity takes account of only one concrete, embodied perspective (that of the subject), it entails a oneperson model of selfhood. To move beyond it involves addressing the ways that other bodies and other perspectives fashion the self. Early modern English usage entails just such an interpersonal focus. Sixteenth-century speakers lacked a vocabulary for abstract, subjective, autonomous selfhood – terms such as individual, self, character, and identity, which in their modern senses enable us to speak about persons without reference to their social context, or even to their own physicality. Renaissance usage insisted on those social and physical dimensions of the person, pointing not to an isolated and interiorized individual, but to a physically and interpersonally embedded person. This is true as well of the broader discursive conventions through which Renaissance culture understood persons physically and psychologically. The prevailing paradigms of humoral medicine and faculty psychology suggest that both body and soul function not discretely, but as part of a larger process, and these paradigms generate discourses of contingent identity.7 Analyzing this interpersonal idiom requires shifting our focus from the concept of the single subject to the ongoing exchange between plural, contingent selves. Among the most resonant theoretical models for that analysis is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogized consciousness, which recognizes the interplay of perspectives in a given speaker and casts selfhood as an engagement with, rather than a reaction against, others. For Bakhtin, to speak is necessarily to be engaged with the other’s frame of reference, and to be shaped by it: ‘The word in living conversation is ... oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates

4


it, and structures itself in the answer’s direction.’8 In this model, the self not only encounters and responds to the other, it emerges through the conceptual framework of the other. Moreover, that other is neither an abstract nor a passive entity. A speaker ‘counts on’ an active understanding on the part of his listener, and ‘therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse’ (280, 282, my emphasis). The concrete specificity of the other in Bakhtin’s model is key: it means that his conception of a self ‘populated’ by others is not a theory of internalized objects. It does not return us, after all, to an intrapsychic focus. Rather, Bakhtin’s others remain live presences offering their own distinct and changing perspectives, which therefore continue to be ‘new’. At the same time, while the other’s perspective may be different, it does not define the other as wholly alien to the self. It is worth remembering here that ‘other’ means more than just difference – it also refers to similarity, to more of the same (here’s one red chair, and here’s another). The lowercase other carries important ties to the self and is defined as much by what it shares with the self as by its distinctness. The complex combination of the other’s aliveness and its engagement with the self, which I see as a distinguishing element of Bakhtin’s thinking, makes a crucial difference to the conception of self. It lets us recognize the impact of the other not as that which deconstructs an already existing self, but as what the self is made on. A sense of engagement with a live other underpins much of the language of selfhood in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and many writers in this period magnify or harp on it. In his poem ‘The Ecstasy’, for instance, John Donne coins the verb ‘interinanimate’ to capture the process by which lovers affect each other.9 Like many of Donne’s poems, this one cultivates a language of interpersonal being in other verbs as well – twist, intergraft, negotiate, mix, transplant (ll. 7, 9, 17, 35, 37) – in order to suggest a literally ec-static self – a self located beyond or outside itself, in ‘dialogue’ with the other (ll. 15–16, 74). Donne’s interest in this interpersonal movement of the soul is evident not only in his poetry. A 1607 letter to Sir Henry Goodyer begins by asserting that ‘this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of ecstasy, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate itself to two bodies’.10 In the poem, Donne uses this idea of the dislocation of the soul to work out many key aspects of a dialogized, interpersonal identity. He takes up the common Renaissance trope of one soul


in two bodies, but also complicates it with his typically keen awareness of the already interpersonally inflected soul: But as these several [i.e., separate] souls contain Mixture of things, they know not what, Love, these mixed souls doth mix again, And makes both one, each this and that. (ll. 33–6) Here the poem resists the possibility of complete merger in this one-soul trope, holding onto the more complex sense of two persons by stipulating that when love causes two ‘several’ and already ‘mixed souls’ to ‘mix again’, it not only makes two become one, but also makes each one become two – ‘each this and that’. The interest here is not so much in oneness as in expansion. The soul, like the transplant violet, ‘Redoubles still, and multiplies’ (l. 40). As we will see, this effort to keep the discourse of lovers’ oneness from the subjectivist subsuming of the other into the self also preoccupies other writers of the period, particularly Shakespeare. Donne’s poem (again, characteristically) adds a social dimension to the mix, beyond the two lovers – a third presence whose possible observation of the lovers is imagined at two key points in the poem, both in terms of their impact on him (ll. 21–8) and as an apparently important witness to their mysterious ‘dialogue of one’ (l. 74). Part of the power of the poem lies in this counterintuitive choice not to isolate the two lovers but to give them a social context. And it is not only the layered sense of ‘dialogue’ but also the poem’s famous insistence on physicality – i.e., on the concrete other – that takes it beyond subjectivity. Moving from the ‘ecstatic’ exchange of souls to the necessity of physical exchange (‘Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book’ [ll. 71–2]), the poem exhibits a characteristically Renaissance interest in the physical media through which ‘influence’ works (l. 57). Similar notions of a ‘kind of self’ that ‘resides’ in the other abound in early modern texts, whether as part of an elaborate philosophical argument or in conventional usage. The most telling example of the latter is the sixteenth-century coinage in which ‘self’ is used in a transferred sense, to signify not oneself but one’s ‘other self’ – a beloved or supremely intimate or indispensable other.11 This now-obsolete usage was particularly prevalent in plays and poems of the 1590s – for instance, in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘Sylvia is myself: Banished from her / Is self from self, a deadly banishment’ (3.1.172–3).

6


Using ‘self’ to emphasize the importance of the other, the trope refers not only to lovers but to friends and other close associates. This other-self trope, which I explore in detail in Chapter 1, is especially interesting for the fact that it seems to be the earliest way that ‘self’ is used as a fullfledged noun in English. It introduces a category that we generally neglect in speaking of self versus others – the category of other selves. That it probably does so before the category of the ‘self’ is established linguistically may seem paradoxical to us, but it is emblematic of the distinctly interpersonal conception of selfhood among Renaissance speakers and writers – a sense that one’s identity inheres first in the other. If Renaissance scholarship has not yet managed to account for this kind of language, it has also missed an important aspect of the contest over meaning that went on prior to coining the modern ‘self’. In attending to early modern usage, this book aims to bring that contest into sharper relief – to emphasize a process of debate rather than a more abstract, monolithic, and inevitable process of cultural evolution.12 To focus on usage is to focus not just on meaning but on the voices that clash or concur over meaning. In this way, my approach is interpersonal not only in unpacking that aspect of Renaissance selfhood, but also in foregrounding the idea of concrete speakers engaged in a dialogue about the nature of the self. This view sees subjects not merely as the passive vehicles of their social context, but as a party to their own shaping process.13 In that respect, the current study joins in the effort of scholars such as Mary Thomas Crane and Margreta de Grazia to move beyond the theoretical impasses of viewing the subject either as wholly independent of or wholly determined by its context – to understand how subjects also respond to and reciprocally affect their contexts.14 In emphasizing the variety of Renaissance formulations of identity, I wish to avoid positing any sweepingly evolutionary development of selfhood per se. I assume that different modes of self-experience are available (and able to be articulated) at any given historical moment.15 It is their shifting currency in linguistic conventions that can be traced in the history of usage. Moreover, my emphasis is on how such conventions are continually both constructed and challenged by specific, concrete speakers. The terms and tropes that constitute the chapters of this study – the language of property, of humors, of mirrors, and of constancy – are sites of debate during the Renaissance, and not just terms that change over time. To say this is to reject a linear model of epistemic change in favor of a focus on the live, push-and-pull interaction of specific utterances that engage with and shape each other – that are partly determined by, but also partly determine, the broader


conventions of selfhood. In its specificity – its focus on particular words and particular voices – this approach belongs to a more flexible conception of the historical processes shaping conventions of selfhood in different periods.16 Without positing any particular writers as originating or ‘inventing’ modes of selfhood, I am interested in their active engagement in the discursive process.17 My recurrent focus on Donne and Shakespeare is part of this approach. It represents an interest in writers not as individual, self-generated centers of ideas, but as interlocutors in an ongoing debate about the nature and ethics of identity. As I argue throughout the book, the contours of that debate and these writers’ specific contributions to it differ from what is often assumed by scholars steeped in modern conventions of selfhood. Appreciating the variety of kinds of selfhood available in Renaissance discourses also allows us to recognize their ethical and political implications for writers in the period. When Donne, for instance, insists that ‘there is no Phenix, nothing singular, nothing alone’ and argues instead for a model of the self as ‘involved in’ others, he both recognizes and rejects notions of a more autonomous selfhood emerging in his own culture.18 Such efforts to define and dispute conceptions of identity often reflect an awareness of how much is at stake socially and politically in shaping the terms of selfhood.

Beyond subjectivity To recognize the other selves of early modern culture and analyze the politics of their interrelations, we need to break down the all-inclusive notion of ‘subjectivity’ into its various modes and strategies. We also need to pay close attention to our own language, which makes it much easier, even axiomatic, to speak of selves in isolation. The development of a highly abstract vocabulary for just that purpose is a topic of the next chapter. Here, however, I want to consider how the same abstractness informs our theoretical language as well – particularly the ubiquitous term ‘subject’. Since the 1980s, scholarship on early modern selfhood has tended to replace the Burckhardtian autonomous ‘individual’ with what post-structural theory defines as the externally determined subject.19 Indeed, critical theory today virtually equates selfhood with ‘subjectivity’, albeit in this revised, post-structuralist sense. But while that revised term is meant to dislodge modern essentialist conventions of the self, it is also partly a product of those conventions, and has been used in ways that subtly presuppose the distinct individual identity it was intended to problematize. To speak of subjects – however externally influenced or internally destabilized – is still to elide

8


the role of specific others, and to narrow our focus to each subject’s own experience of the world and of itself. By contrast, Renaissance usage characteristically defines selfhood as the experience of an other. For instance, when Shakespeare’s Henry IV tells his lords, ‘I will from henceforth rather be my Selfe, / Mighty, and to be fear’d’, the ‘Selfe’ he speaks of is constituted not in his own inward experience but in his outward manifestation – in their experience of him.20 The fact that Henry posits this as something that he controls, that he can choose to be or not to be, certainly makes his own will part of the picture, but it also ties that will to the other’s perception.21 Like most Renaissance ‘selves’, this one entails a specific social context, and it does so precisely because it is an object rather than a subject. As the ensuing chapters will elaborate, this distinction is not a simple binary, and it will need to be drawn in some detail. Briefly, though, an objectified self has its origins in an external or secondary perspective, as the object of another’s perception, understanding, recognition. A subjective self, in contrast, comprises only its own experience – its activities of knowing, seeing, feeling, desiring, etc.22 To speak of the self as an object is at least to imply a second or ‘reflected’ perspective, a point of view decentered from the self’s own present experience. It can become part of that experience, but in doing so it becomes one of two simultaneous modes of selfhood – subject and object – and the latter always has reference to some other perspective, always exists in the world. Thus, whereas a subjective self stands on its own terms and as its own authority, an objectified self knows another locus of authority. More or less subtly, it represents the social sources of selfhood. As Chapter 1 demonstrates, this other-inflected objectified ‘self’ appears in English usage nearly a century before the abstract, subjective ‘self’; yet it constitutes a somewhat invisible mode in theoretical and historical discussions of the self. When theorists do consider the objectified self, their focus is usually intrapsychic – the self as an object to itself – whereas the ‘selves’ of Renaissance usage are objects to others and thereby entail a social dimension.23 One area, however, in which a fuller, interpersonal sense of objectification has been an important topic is in feminist theory, which has long recognized it as a particularly feminine mode of selfhood. The emphasis here, though, is usually on the negative aspects of objectification – on the dehumanizing and disenfranchising effects of being an object rather than a subject. But objectification does not necessarily or only represent a static or diminishing or controlling process; rather, it is a broad category of being that actually encompasses much of what is often lumped under the


heading of subjectivity. Moreover, in early modern English culture, objectification was not just a feminine mode of selfhood – it was the dominant way of speaking of selves. Where we see objectification as undermining, even catastrophic, for selfhood, English Renaissance writers could see it as constitutive and crucial – a problem perhaps, but also a solution. It is, for instance, the stance assumed by the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which (as I argue in Chapter 3) deliberately and consistently resist emergent conventions of subjective authority. To understand its role in Renaissance texts is to recognize that objectification is not always a reduction of the person; the ‘I’ is richer and more socially engaged when it knows about others’ perspectives than when it is narrowed to its own isolated experience. Indeed, as I argue in Chapters 3 and 4, subjective selfhood is the reductive category for writers such as Shakespeare and Donne, for it obscures subjective others. In its stance vis-à-vis the world, the purely subjective self takes account only of its own perspective and tends to see others only as objects. The interpersonally objectified self, in contrast, implies an awareness of the subjective other because it implies that other’s perspective. It is ‘a kind of self resides with’ some ‘you’. As Cressida’s image suggests, these different modes of subject and object (which are more than ‘subjectpositions’) are part of the politics of selfhood that Renaissance texts often vividly render. The ways such texts resist the self-sufficient pose of subjective selfhood are more readily apparent if we attend to the category of the self-as-object. This study suggests that we need a much more nuanced understanding of objectified selfhood in order to grasp its very different valence for many Renaissance writers. But if the interpersonally objectified ‘self’ of Renaissance usage is not an obvious category for us, the social embeddedness that it represents has been increasingly important to twentieth-century theorists of the self. Psychoanalytic theory, for instance, has become steadily more ‘relational’ in focus in the later twentieth century, particularly in those theoretical perspectives that emphasize a ‘two-person’ or ‘fieldbased’ understanding of the self as intrinsically part of a social matrix.24 In particular, the interpersonal and object-relations schools of psychoanalytic thought have challenged the drive-based conceptions and intrapsychic focus of classical psychoanalytic theory, stressing the self’s actual experience of others. A similar trend is evident in other fields as well – for instance, in neuroscience, where recent studies have explored how certain areas of the brain are shaped in interpersonal experience. Especially significant here are the 1990s discoveries of so-called mirror neurons – neural networks that appear to be activated

10 The Interpersonal Idiom

both in the performance of particular motor actions and in the observation of others performing such actions.25 As Vittorio Gallese and colleagues explain, this ‘automatic embodied simulation’ process suggests a direct underlying link between first- and third-person experience. In regard to facial expressions, for example, ‘[t]he other’s emotion is constituted, experienced, and therefore directly understood by means of an embodied simulation producing a shared body state. It is the activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed that enables experiential understanding’.26 Gallese et al. see the effect of this neural process as ‘a direct experiential take on the world of others’ (156), and its exploration has generated a great deal of work in fields concerned with empathy and intersubjectivity. The relational trend is also apparent in infant- and child-development research findings on the constitutive role of the other in the development of selfhood. The work of Daniel Stern, for instance, illuminates the crucial role of infant–caregiver attunement and the infant’s very early interpersonal awareness.27 More recently, the research of Peter Fonagy and colleagues suggests that a kind of objectification is key in the very creation of the infant’s sense of self. Their study finds that the infant’s capacity for that sense of self originates in its caregiver’s resonant representations of its emotional states – representations that provide the basis on which the infant can begin to distinguish its own affective experience from that of others.28 Arguing that the self is constructed in an interpersonal, objectifying process and is thus ‘originally an extension of the experience of the other’ (8), this work clearly resonates with the findings of the present study, and I return to it in more detail in the Epilogue. In one respect, however, such theory is at odds with what we see in Renaissance texts – namely, it emphasizes early life as the moment in which the other is formative for the self, whereas Renaissance formulations make this an ongoing, adult process. Indeed, the thrust of much contemporary psychological theory is sufficiently different from that of Renaissance formulations of selfhood that I have not tried to bring such theory directly to bear on the early modern texts considered here. Certainly these perspectives have enlarged and informed my sense of the categories and problems of selfhood, but they have not been sufficient to explain what is at stake in Renaissance representations, particularly in regard to the category of the interpersonally objectified self. My approach, as a result, has not been to mine Renaissance representations of selfhood for evidence confirming twentieth-century theories but to read those representations for their own theoretical positions – in other words, to start with the


language of the period and extrapolate from it. Not that the application of contemporary theory would always lead to problems of anachronism such as the one just mentioned. But in the case of this project, the ideas in question are all too easily overwhelmed by the language that succeeded and supplanted them historically. As a result, I have reserved for the Epilogue a discussion of some of the connections and resonances between contemporary psychoanalytic and developmental theories and Renaissance selfhood. In the chapters that follow, I will occasionally hold early modern formulations side-by-side with pertinent modern and postmodern conceptions for the sake of the ways they can illuminate each other, but without expecting them to be congruent. In characterizing Renaissance formulations of selfhood as ‘interpersonal’, then, I use the word in a general, descriptive sense, rather than with reference to a particular theoretical concept or term of art. Less abstract than ‘relational’ or ‘intersubjective’, the term ‘interpersonal’ helps to retain the sense of a self’s live context, to recognize the specificity and plurality of persons involved – particularly if we keep in mind the more concretely social and physical meanings of ‘person’ in early modern usage. Since the Renaissance ‘self’ is not reducible to subjectivity, neither are its relations adequately captured by the now common idea of intersubjectivity. The prevalence of objectification in Renaissance selfhood means that any dyad entails not just two subjects, but also two objects, and this too makes ‘interpersonal’ a more appropriate term for my purposes here. To talk about subjectivity even in the post-structuralist sense is to stay closer to the kind of focus initiated by the late seventeenth-century coining of terms for subjective selfhood. Once coined, the subjective ‘self’ promotes a different way of understanding persons, for it lets us refer to a single entity and analyze persons one at a time, intrapsychically. As its own authority, the subjective self subsumes its contexts within its own single perspective, obscuring its indebtedness to other perspectives. It is that condition of indebtedness, I argue, that Renaissance writers are often acutely aware of in trying to speak of selves. Ironically, then, when critical theorists today reject the concept of the ‘self’, they reject a modern convention quite different from the central conventions of Renaissance selfhood, which actually challenge that later, freestanding ‘self’ more radically than does the postmodern ‘subject’. For that ‘subject’ is a similarly freestanding and potentially allsubsuming term, and so while its meaning seems to be social and interpersonal, in practice it can still resemble the newly isolated nineteenth-century philosophical ‘subject’ in which it has its roots.


As Sylviane Agacinski argues, that philosophical tradition is unable to account for ‘a true experience of the other: that is, an experience of the bond by which I am already “tied” to the other, already dependent on it prior to any question of coexistence or autonomy’. Since the philosophical subject begins ‘by detaching itself (from the world and from others), and by forgetting that it is, before anything else, in-the-world and with-others’, it makes itself abstract and only conceives of others as independent subjects like itself.29 Agacinski argues that this problem persists with the postmodern subject as well, noting, for instance, that while ‘Habermas’s theory of the communicative act ... asserts the irreducibility of communication, it does not, for all that, break with a theory of the subject, that is, of an individual or communal thinking that coincides with itself’, for it still presumes ‘an original atomization of subjects ... capable of being isolated’ (13). Similarly, Jacques Derrida argues that theorists such as Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault do not do away with the ‘subject’ but retain it as an ‘indispensable’ term.30 Really to move beyond the subject would mean to take ‘the experience of the other as the point of departure’ (Agacinski 13). This is precisely what I argue that Renaissance usage manages to do. Of course, scholars have found Althusser’s or Lacan’s ‘subject’ useful because of the additional dimension of subjection with which it revises and complicates the modern philosophical notion of an experientially subjective self. Thus we now speak at once of ‘subjectivity in both senses: the being subject to another and the becoming the subject of discourse’.31 But with this newly complicated ‘subject’, the reference is still to only one perspective, one voice, one center of experience. Moreover, to conflate these two meanings of ‘subject’ is to yoke together two historically distinct senses of the word – the politically subjugated ‘subject’, which dates from the fourteenth century,32 and the discursive ‘subject’ of modern philosophy, which in English is a late eighteenth-century coinage.33 And while it may be legitimate to deconstruct the modern philosophical ‘subject’ by revealing its underlying condition of subjection, the process is not reversible: the political ‘subject’ of sixteenth-century discourse can only be anachronistically conflated with the modern concept of an experiential subjectivity. Thus in applying the post-structural ‘subject’ to Renaissance texts, we can lose the sense of a significant difference between modern and early modern ‘subjects’.34 Replacing the ‘individual’ with the ‘subject’ only revises the terms and not the trajectory of Burckhardt’s history: since we also understand ourselves as ‘subjects’ in the post-structuralist sense, the new link between early modern and modern forms of identity


represents a familiar historical scenario, in which we find in Renaissance texts the beginnings of our own cultural world. Thus Catherine Belsey, for instance, finds in Hamlet the origins of a recognizably modern ‘liberal humanist subject’.35 In this way, ‘subject’ becomes an all-purpose term that can obscure rather than elaborate historically different conceptions of identity.36 In some cases, that is the explicit intent: for Althusser, ‘the category of the subject’ is transhistorical and ‘may function under other names: e.g., as the soul in Plato, as God, etc.’ and as ‘the constitutive category of all ideology ... whatever its date – since ideology has no history’.37 His conflation of the historically different meanings of ‘subject’ produces what he calls a basic ‘ambiguity’ in subjectivity, whereby ‘individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects’ (164): In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he ... shall (freely) accept his subjection. ... There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. (169)38 In a sense, Althusser is merely insisting here that the older meaning of ‘subject’ persists in the later ‘ideological’ sense. But applied to Renaissance ‘subjects’, the reverse becomes a problem: what Althusser calls ‘the whole mystery of this effect’ is not a mystery at all for the Renaissance subject, which knows about its own subjection and is not ‘already’ a ‘free subjectivity’ in the modern philosophical sense. That later sense of ‘subject’ carries expectations that can make it difficult to recognize other kinds of selfhood. It results, for instance, in Belsey’s analysis of identity in Renaissance drama as an anticipation of the modern self – i.e., not yet, but on its way to becoming, the subject of that ‘fully-fledged humanism’ that will later produce the ‘individual’ (40). While I agree with Belsey’s description of the individualist self that develops after the English Revolution, I find her overall progressive history problematic in the way that it reads back into Renaissance texts the expectation of what would come later. In her narrative, the Renaissance stage hangs suspended between the emblematic and the


illusionist stages that precede and follow it, its plays carrying ‘intimations of the construction of a place which notions of personal identity were later to come to fill’ (40). It thus becomes a moment of emptiness rather than one with its own configurations of self (and of theatre) – a hollowing out of inward space in preparation for the self of the future. Hamlet is an attempt at modern subjectivity that fails because it ‘cannot produce closure in terms of an analysis which in 1601 does not yet fully exist’ (42). While Belsey rightly challenges the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury readings of Hamlet that went in quest of the character’s interior essence, she only observes that ‘the object of it is not there’.39 Or, as Francis Barker puts it in a similar argument, ‘At the centre of Hamlet ... there is, in short, nothing.’40 But to say this is to suggest that a unitary, essential self is all that might have been there. The post-structuralist critic makes no attempt to supply other terms, to observe other kinds of identity or relatedness, than the ‘fully present’ and ‘unified ... subject’ that Belsey broadly associates with humanism (50, 52). The only alternatives to that essentialist identity in her analysis are either ‘uncertainty’ or the equally negating terms with which she analyzes the characters of medieval morality plays as ‘unfixed’ and ‘discontinuous’ ‘fragments’ (17). It seems there is either the liberal humanist subject, or nothing.41 The notion of a ‘gap’ that opens up in its absence seems to keep us hovering over these early modern texts in a strange allegiance to the very notion of ‘unity’ that we are ostensibly trying to reject. Increasingly, scholars are seeking a more complex theory of ‘subjects’ that will allow greater historical specificity. As Peter Stallybrass explains, Renaissance scholarship needs to challenge Althusser’s notion that ideology interpellates the individual as a subject, since historically, the reverse is true – ‘the subject precedes the individual’: Althusser’s synchronic formulation masks a curious diachronic reversal. It would surely be more exact to say that within a capitalist mode of production, ideology interpellated, not the individual as a subject, but the subject as an individual. For the individual is not the simple given of bourgeois social formations. On the contrary, he/she is a laborious construction in the political defeat of absolutism, when political freedom is gained at the expense of the occlusion of economic dependence.42 Arguing that neither Shakespeare nor early seventeenth-century English culture ‘was in the business of producing individuals’ (606), Stallybrass


suggests that we need to open up and explore in more detail the earlier notion of ‘subjects’ in order ‘to show what were being produced before the English Revolution. “Subjects,” we might say, but it would take much labor and analysis to show just how complex and unstable such “beings” were’ (606). In that effort, recent scholarship has begun to move toward a fieldbased understanding of Renaissance ‘subjects’, relating them more specifically, concretely, and reciprocally to their contexts. The current interest in the objects of material culture is part of this movement toward relational approaches, suggesting that we cannot adequately understand subjects apart from their interactions with these material contexts. The use of cognitive theory has a related thrust. In Mary Thomas Crane’s work, for instance, the concept of the ‘embodied brain’ helps to integrate the conceptual framework of the subject or ‘author’ with that of the wider culture, focusing on the materiality – i.e., the historical specificity and placement – of a subject’s cognitive process.43 The recent return to Bakhtin and to speech act theory in Shakespeare studies, particularly in the work of David Schalkwyk and Lynne Magnusson, marks an even more specifically interpersonal conceptual turn. Attending to the forms and practices of ‘social dialogue’ in letter writing as part of the conventions within which selves and their relationships are improvised, Magnusson charts a Bakhtinian ‘stylistics of interaction’ in Shakespearean texts.44 Part of what is at stake in this approach is that language itself is taken as action and not just as representation – a focus which, as Schalkwyk notes, is in line with ‘the pre-eminence of rhetoric in the early modern period’, whereby ‘language was principally appreciated as a force working in the world’.45 Such are the theoretical terms that enable an interpersonal, field-based approach to representations of selfhood. Like Crane’s study, this book focuses on the evidence of language use – the work that various words and tropes do to express and codify particular modes of selfhood, and the conceptual changes and choices registered in their use. And it also uses this evidence to retheorize the selves at stake in early modern texts. It is worth noting that, when Stallybrass rejects the concept of the ‘individual’ for Renaissance culture and invokes the project of exploring what kind of persons ‘were being produced before the English Revolution’, his referent is plural. The premise of this book is that such a plural focus is necessary in analyzing Renaissance selfhood – that the Renaissance self entails other selves. Taking the current emphasis on the relationship of self and object a step further, this study looks at selves as objects – that is, as part of a


reciprocally constitutive social field. It interrogates the many ways selves can be positioned or can position themselves as objects in relation to each other, which go beyond our accustomed subject–object dyad. Ultimately, I show that that dyad is often reversed in the Renaissance – that positioning the self as an object tends to make the other a subject. The final step in analyzing this interpersonal idiom is grasping the implications of that subjective other – a live, concrete, agentive other that is also not alien but in dialogue with the self. Whether that other is God or a lover or a rival or an enemy, it too represents a center of experience that objectifies the self and renders it contingent and contextualized. At the same time, I take ‘subjectivity’ in the more limited sense of a single perspective, using it not as a term for any and all self-experience, but for a particular viewpoint and stance vis-à-vis the world. As this study pursues it, such subjectivity represents more than just an inward turn or an outward subjection. A subjective stance can be an effort of self-assertion, even domination, in which the self insists on its own perspective and overrides or excludes others. It can enlist the other’s empathy or identification with the self; it can also refuse that process. In this sense, subjectivity is more than a mode of self-experience: it is an action in relation to others. It is not just an independent condition of being (much less a given or necessary condition) but an interpersonal strategy of self-representation, and part of the politics of selfhood. Distinguishing these different modes of identity can help us to see even subjective selfhood as an interaction, and thus to resist its self-isolating stance and restore its contexts. In Hamlet, for instance, we can look for more than just the ‘new concept of privacy ... centered within the self’ that critics of various persuasions have found in such texts.46 Identity in Hamlet is not just a question of the inwardness (failed or otherwise) of its protagonist, but of how inwardness is socially deployed or interrogated. Here, as in many Renaissance texts, the so-called inward turn has an interpersonal epistemological motivation, both in the efforts of others to penetrate Hamlet and in Hamlet’s need to fathom others. His claim to ‘have that within which passeth show’ is one strategic self-representation among many others in the play, and a specific response to Gertrude and Claudius’s prodding to behave as they would like. And even here the point is not really privacy. While Hamlet does suggest the possibility of a separation, as Barker puts it, ‘between the inner reality of the subject ... and an inauthentic exterior’,47 such a separation in his own


case is what he is denying. His point is that his exterior is not inauthentic – that he is not just playing a role: Seemes, Madam? Nay, it is: I know not Seemes: ’Tis not alone my Inky Cloake (good Mother) Nor Customary suites of solemne Blacke, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitfull Riuer in the Eye, Nor the deiected hauiour of the Visage, Together with all Formes, Moods, shewes of Griefe, That can denote me truly. These indeed Seeme, For they are actions that a man might play: But I haue that Within, which passeth show; These, but the Trappings and the Suites of woe.48 Although they are but trappings, these outward signs of Hamlet’s grief are not false, nor are they merely an observance of ‘Formes’. But since they might be so construed by others, Hamlet needs to affirm their truth. Though his reference here is to something ‘Within’, the action of Hamlet’s speech is interpersonal – an effort to parry Gertrude’s attempt to put him off his course. Thus at issue in the speech is not just who Hamlet truly is, but who he is for others. At this point at least, Hamlet wants the world to know his authentic feelings. Indeed, the threat he poses to power lies in their outward manifestation. In his unwillingness to ‘look like a friend on Denmark’, Hamlet refuses to let his inward feelings be dismissed or to keep them private: they are a matter of public behavior, and if he chooses to give them scope, Claudius and Gertrude will have to deal with it.49 Thus this outward assertion of subjective experience is part of a power struggle, and its apparent rejection of the idea of ‘show’ is ironic, as that is precisely what it depends on. While Hamlet seems to be rejecting Gertrude’s objectification of him, he actually spells it out in much more vivid detail. In other words, he takes control of it, making it clear that he knows just what he looks like and how his experiences ‘seem’ and ‘show’ outwardly. And such is his strategy throughout the play. Far from retreating into some private subjectivity, Hamlet stages himself constantly, and the process of objectification remains key as he both presents and tries to interpret various kinds of ‘show’. In this sense he is very much ‘the observed of all observers’ – which is to say, the continual object of other subjects.50 In this theatrical mode of being, the connection


between inner and outer phenomena remains Hamlet’s elusive but crucial goal.51 I will return in Chapter 2 to the problem of performative selfhood that Hamlet and so many other Renaissance texts raise, arguing that a dichotomous critical discourse of public versus private selves is an inadequate conceptual tool for its analysis. But for now I want to observe that identity for Hamlet is not a question of self-fashioning, but happens interpersonally. A self here is not defined or arrived at or even really understood subjectively; it is something improvised within a context of others, as Hamlet himself seems to indicate when he asserts that the ‘readiness is all’ (5.2.222): in a sense, we are what we encounter. Or more precisely, we are what we become in the encounter. Of course, ‘readiness’ also suggests a preparation for the encounter – an anticipation of it – which is another deeply interpersonal, dialogized movement of the self. To characterize selfhood interpersonally this way is not the same as saying there is ‘nothing’ there. It is rather to stipulate that what is there inheres not in the individual, but in the mix – in the precarious engagement with others. The ensuing chapters explore the problems raised by this model of a contingent and contextualized self. Their topics aim at developing some of the basic features of such objectified, interpersonal selfhood: its externality, its permeable embodiment, its perspectival multiplicity, and its necessary inconstancy. Chapter 1 gives a broad overview of early modern English vocabulary for selfhood, analyzing the strikingly different linguistic properties of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘selves’, and identifying a shift from the visceral and social ‘persons’, ‘parts’, and ‘humors’ of Renaissance usage to a later language of discrete, reified interiority. The complex histories of words such as ‘character’, ‘identity’, and ‘person’ confirm that a ‘self’ in Renaissance texts is a different kind of thing than it becomes in later usage, resulting in a different placement vis-à-vis others. The language of property is important to both conceptions of selves as things, but in radically different ways. Instead of the selfpropriety that emerges after the English Revolution, Renaissance selves are based in exchange – transposed with and possessed by other selves. Chapter 2 takes up the language of humoral medicine, both as an experiential basis of selfhood and as an ontological paradigm for the self-in-relation. Renaissance writers connect the experience of being in the humoral body and also of living in the language of humors with a performative selfhood – a self profoundly in play physically and socially.


Taking the emphatic physicality of Donne’s religious texts as a central focus, I show that the special importance of the humoral body for Donne expresses a deeply dialogized physical and spiritual self that has much in common with the humoral actor represented in Shakespeare and Jonson. Despite their different agendas, for each of these writers, humoralism generates a performative ontology based not on our usual dichotomy of public and private selves but on the self’s penetration by and absorption with its contexts. Chapter 3 looks at constructions of self in the context of early modern faculty psychology and the language of vision and mirroring. Studied closely, these discourses of perception suggest various self–other formations that differ from modern concepts of ‘mirroring’. Taking account of the tensions within these discourses, especially in regard to the status of the self as either transcendent of or dependent on its significant others, I examine the ways these theories and paradigms inform dramatic and poetic representations of the self in relation to other subjective perspectives. Here I argue that Shakespeare rejects both Neoplatonic visual epistemology and Petrarchan subjectivism, embracing a more materially interpersonal conception of mirroring that acknowledges the self’s fundamental and ongoing indebtedness to others’ perspectives. The final chapter explores the ways the ubiquitous Renaissance concern with sexual constancy combines so many of the liabilities of objectified, interpersonal selfhood laid out in previous chapters – particularly its diachronic mutability and synchronic multiplicity. One characteristic Renaissance solution (exemplified in Spenser’s Faerie Queene) is to project the problem of constancy onto women. But other writers, most notably Christine de Pisan, diagnose that strategy of cultural projection and reject the fiction of male constancy at which it aims. Donne and Shakespeare work the problem through in ways that valorize inconstancy along with a different kind of ‘projection’ – a decentering and projection of self into the place of the other. Because these topics not only concern or emerge in drama, this study gives as much attention to Renaissance poetry and prose as to dramatic texts. I return repeatedly to texts of Shakespeare and Donne because, contrary to many influential critical arguments, I find they offer some of the fullest and most radically interpersonal constructions of selfhood. But the book takes up many other Renaissance writers as well. Some push the language and conventions of selfhood in different directions, but none begins or ends with an abstract, independent self.


To paraphrase Althusser, we might say that there are no selves except by and for other selves – only adding that that claim should be limited historically. The findings of this study suggest that it applies to English Renaissance usage. I do not assume that it applies to earlier periods or to other Renaissance languages,52 and I know that it cannot be said comprehensively of modern culture. Our language has helped to change that.

1 Properties of a ‘Self’: Words and Things, 1580–1690

Self is that conscious thinking thing ... which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. – LOCKE, Essay Concerning Human Understanding [A]s we are our selues, what things are we. – SHAKESPEARE, All’s Well that Ends Well1 What did it mean to begin to use the word ‘self’ as a substantive term – to make it a thing rather than merely using it as an emphatic or reflexive pronoun? The question concerns not only what would cause such a development in usage, but what resulted from it – what difference it made to have and to use the word in this sense. To pursue these questions, we also have to ask what the word actually meant when it began to be used this way, which turns out to be far less predictable than one might have thought. ‘Self’ does become a thing in late sixteenth-century English, but not at all the same thing it becomes about a century later. Locke’s 1689 coinage gives a ‘self’ the properties that dominate modern usage: his ‘conscious thinking thing’ is at once abstract and radically subjective – a function purely of ‘consciousness’, and that consciousness purely its own. In contrast, the earlier ‘selves’ of Renaissance usage are often less familiar and always less pure. Not only do they tend to refer to the body more than the mind, they also have fundamentally social dimensions. Instead of honing an individual, freestanding identity, they seem to have an opposite aim – to tie the self to its world. In fact, among the first substantive uses of the word in the late sixteenth century, the most common is the now-obsolete trope in 21


which ‘self’ refers not to oneself but to a significant other. As I will argue, the prevalence of this transferred ‘self’ in Renaissance usage is no coincidence; it expresses in compressed form many of the issues emerging throughout the language of identity in the period. In addition to their newly substantive uses of ‘self’, sixteenth-century speakers and writers used an entirely different vocabulary for selfhood than we use today. This chapter analyzes that vocabulary, distinguishing the properties of early modern selfhood that gained currency during the century before the ‘individual’ began to coalesce in usage. It also traces the ideological choices registered in the language as it changed over the course of the seventeenth century. While this analysis invokes various social and political contexts for these seismic shifts in the language of identity, my primary aim here is to follow the words, taking usage as historical evidence in itself and laying the linguistic and theoretical groundwork for the chapters that follow. The evidence of usage reveals the emergence of divergent and conflicting models of selfhood in this period, and as writers seem to experiment with the language, they show a keen awareness of the politics of selfhood. Perhaps because they are experimenting and have not inherited the conventions that can make a substantive ‘self’ seem inevitable to us, they often convey a sense of paradox, even of impropriety, in speaking about selves. Much of this striking complexity stems from the way that, in general, the selves of Renaissance usage tend to be objects – concrete things understood and judged from another perspective. These earlier, objectified senses of ‘self’ have been little studied or even noticed, and they deserve more sustained attention if we want to understand what was at stake in these linguistic developments.2

Substance and meaning My initial distinction between using ‘self’ merely as a pronoun (‘He himself was there’, ‘I let myself in’, etc.) and giving the word some substantive content of its own (‘the self I was’) is not always so clear in Renaissance usage. This is partly due to the custom of making ‘self’ a separate word and using adjectives between it and the pronoun, a practice that makes ‘self’ sound to us more like a true substantive than it may be. Phrases such as ‘thy sweet self’, for instance, often simply mean sweet thee, with ‘self’ providing emphasis or reflexivity but no particular meaning beyond that of the pronoun.3 At times, though, a certain context can suggest something more, as when one speaks of ‘revealing oneself’, which can seem to refer to a sense of identity, though it could

Properties of a ‘Self’: Words and Things, 1580–1690 23

also just mean ‘unmasking’ or ‘coming forth’.4 Many sixteenth-century uses can seem to evoke a substantive idea by doubling the reference to ‘self’ – as Wyatt does, for instance, in phrases such as ‘I my self my self dispyse’ or ‘I my self, my self alwayes to hate’.5 This kind of doubling suggests meaning in part by setting up more than one ‘self’ and thus creating a sense of a self’s alienation from itself. As if exploiting the chance to play with meaning, such borderline uses seem to lead to the possibility of the full-fledged noun.6 The shift, which is often subtle, involves using ‘self’ not just to speak about persons, but to speak about what it means to be a person. Such meaning is quite varied in the earliest clearly substantive uses of ‘self’ in Renaissance texts, but on the whole these tend to make a ‘self’ an object rather than a subject. As a result, they highlight the interpersonal (and hence the ethical and political) dimensions of selfhood.7 In Shakespeare’s First Part of King Henry the Fourth, for instance, Henry warns his rebellious lords, I will from henceforth rather be my Selfe, Mighty, and to be fear’d, then my condition Which hath beene smooth as Oyle, soft as yong Downe, And therefore lost that Title of respect, Which the proud soule ne’re payes, but to the proud. (1.3.5–9, TLN 326–30) This ‘Selfe’ (which the Folio capitalizes as it does other substantives in the passage) is more than pronominal, but its referent is not the essential, subjective experience a modern speaker would evoke with the phrase ‘be myself’. Rather, this is an objectified ‘Selfe’. It describes what belongs to Henry’s role as king, particularly his appearance and meaning for others – ‘Mighty and to be fear’d’. This sense of himself as an object continues as Henry contrasts this ‘Selfe’ to what he calls his ‘condition’, which we might paraphrase as ‘behavior’, and which is also described in terms of the way it is perceived by others.8 Both terms are objectifications of himself, but interestingly, ‘Selfe’ seems to mean something less intimate or natural than ‘condition’ does here. It connotes what ‘person’ often means in Renaissance usage: not something private, but a social role, often in the sense of authority or office. ‘Person’ occurs in this sense in Part II of Henry IV, when the Chief Justice explains his prior rough treatment of the prince: ‘I then did vse the Person of your Father: / The Image of his power, lay then in me’ (5.2.75–6, TLN 2958). Such a ‘Person’ is transferable among agents and


consists in an ‘Image’, much as Henry’s ‘Selfe’ is an outward manifestation and not essential – something he chooses to be at will.9 And while this ‘Selfe’ is a role of power, it is not self-created, as the play foregrounds when Worcester quickly reminds Henry that his ‘greatnesse’ was not independently achieved, but something ‘our owne hands / Haue holp to make so portly’ (1.3.8–9, TLN 333–4). The only substantive term in Henry’s passage that does seem to capture subjective selfhood is ‘soule’, which figures an experiencing (‘proud’) agent.10 But significantly, this subjective perspective belongs not to Henry but to his interlocutors. Thus Henry’s awareness of the ‘Selfe’ he posits consists in understanding himself as an object and understanding the other as a subject. And indeed, the first entails the second, since one knows oneself as the object of some other subjective awareness. The fate of this sovereign (i.e., relational) ‘Selfe’ in the eyes and minds of others is Henry’s own constant focus as well as what the play continually explores.11 In fact, Hal uses nearly the same formulation later in the play. When his father complains, ‘Not an Eye / But is awearie of thy common sight’, he responds, ‘I shall hereafter ... Be more my selfe’ (3.2.95–6, TLN 1906–7). Once again, the referent of ‘selfe’ is an object – something Hal will ‘be’ not inwardly but in the eyes of others. Being such a self is very much a matter of will (in Hal’s case, it is a matter of careful planning), but the aim of that will is centered in the consciousness of others. Yet neither is Hal alienated from this role. Indeed, calling it ‘selfe’ suggests the opposite – that he need not be the source or locus of his ‘selfe’ in order to understand it as his. Furthermore, it is not only this proper role that constitutes a ‘selfe’ for Hal. He also uses the word at the end of Part II to refer to his past behavior when he tells Falstaff, Presume not, that I am the thing I was, For heauen doth know (so shall the world perceiue) That I haue turn’d away my former Selfe. (5.5.58–60, TLN 3268–70) Now the ‘Selfe’ in question is that earlier manifestation of ‘common’ behavior that every eye (according to Henry) was ‘awearie of’. And it implies a new self as well – presumably the one Hal earlier promised to become. Whether one or the other of these selves is the true Hal does not seem to enter into the meaning of the word ‘selfe’, which makes being (i.e., ‘the thing I was’) a matter of what the world and heaven witness both before and after the change.12


None of these three substantive uses of ‘selfe’ is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, which also ignores other examples from the period that fit none of its definitions. Like those of other terms for selfhood, these definitions are skewed toward modern meanings.13 Yet they do take us part of the way toward sixteenth-century usage, and they also offer some interesting implicit distinctions among the meanings of the word. The first fully substantive, nonobsolete sense (C. 3) expresses subjectivity and refers to something both permanent and essential: 3. Chiefly Philos. That which in a person is really and intrinsically he (in contradistinction to what is adventitious); the ego (often identified with the soul or mind as opposed to the body); a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness. The OED editors associate this sense with the philosophical ‘subject’, and it corresponds fully to Locke’s conception of self as conscious, subjective experience (in fact, two of its first four examples are from Locke). But it is also a more broadly familiar conception in our culture, one that any college freshman can articulate and that most would offer as the first definition of a ‘self’: what one is inside, ‘really and intrinsically’. The ‘real’ in that ‘really’ can be heard as both colloquial and philosophical – as ‘true’ and as a reference to substance, to the status of a thing. But the ‘thing’ in question is an abstraction, and having this ‘thing’ so readily in our culture is, as this chapter aims to show, partly the result of having the language for it, including this now conventional subjective ‘self’. The OED’s first example for this sense is from a poem of 1674,14 and I have found none earlier fitting this idea of a unified, essential subjectivity (though a few of the examples I discuss below, particularly two in Spenser, approach this idea). The OED distinguishes this purely subjective ‘self’ from two other senses that entail contingency and multiplicity: 4. a. What one is at a particular time or in a particular aspect or relation; one’s nature, character, or (sometimes) physical constitution or appearance, considered as different at different times. Chiefly with qualifying adj. (one’s) old, former, later self. 4. b. An assemblage of characteristics and dispositions which may be conceived as constituting one of various conflicting personalities within a human being. better self: the better part of one’s nature.


These two senses begin to cover what we see in Renaissance usage and what I am calling objectified selfhood. They concern what can be observed about a person, by others as well as oneself. In contrast to the subjective self of sense 3, these objectified selves are characterized as unstable or divided: either a ‘self’ is susceptible to change over time, or it is in conflict with other parts of the person. We might call sense 4a a contextualized self, noting that the OED editors link its instability to its existence ‘in a particular aspect or relation’ or ‘at different times’. Sense 4b, on the other hand, captures the idea of a partial self, suggesting a sense of the person’s overall dividedness or multiplicity. The OED’s only example for any of these senses before the late seventeenth century is from Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), and it is for the partial self (sense 4b): ‘and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane, / most lively lyke behold your semblant true’.15 In context, this ‘selfe’ carries different meanings than sense 4b covers, as I will discuss below, but it does at least suggest the idea of more than one coexisting ‘selfe’.16 For sense 4a (the changing, contextualized self), the OED cites Dryden in 1697 as its first example;17 however, we have already seen one much earlier example of a ‘former self’ in Shakespeare, and there are at least two other literary occurrences. A poem of Sir John Beaumont (1602) describes how the use of tobacco can cause a man’s behavior to change so that he is ‘from his former selfe estraunged’.18 And Thomas Middleton’s Triumphs of Truth (1613) includes an exhortation to the new Lord Mayor of London to ‘strive t’excell / Thy former Selfe’, which the text itself glosses as that which is manifest in ‘Acts’ and ‘Deeds’.19 While these last two examples are admittedly somewhat obscure, it is difficult to know why the OED editors would pass over the Shakespearean example of a ‘former Selfe’, unless perhaps the definition was not meant to include anything as fundamentally behavioral or social as these instances of ‘selfe’ imply.20 And none of the OED’s definitions allows for a self that is purely physical or external, such as we get, for instance, in a poem of Richard Barnfield (published in 1594): And her selfe more worth than a wealthy Souldan of Egypt: And her selfe more worth than all the wealth shee possessed; Selfe? indeede such a selfe, as thundring Jove in Olympus, Though he were father could finde in his hart to be husband.21 The way that this passage seems to develop a substantive ‘selfe’ out of a standard pronominal use, as if its speaker were working out spontaneously


what ‘such a selfe’ might mean, is not uncommon in early instances. In this case, it becomes gradually clearer as the passage progresses that the referent of ‘selfe’ is a female body, and again, this is characteristic of Renaissance usage. In general, pronominal uses of ‘self’ in the sixteenth century tend far more often to refer to the body than in modern usage, and this is even more regularly the case when the referent is female.22 In part, this is one way the language registers the tendency to objectify women more than men. But Renaissance speakers can use ‘selfe’ to refer to male bodies as well as female. In Jonson’s Cataline (1616), Fulvia deflects Curious’s sexual advances with an objectifying pronoun that may also have bawdy connotations: ‘Best put your selfe, i’ your case again, and keep Your furious appetite warme, against you have a place for ’t.’23 And although this ‘selfe’ is associated with ‘appetite’, that notion too is thoroughly concrete and physical. Even an ‘inward selfe’ can be expressly conceived as physical in Renaissance usage. In a poetic example of 1615, a speaker tells the figure of ‘Care’ to return to hell and torment his ‘inward selfe’, which turns out to mean quite a physical and well-visualized process: ‘Fret thine owne bowels forth, stamp, stare, be mad, / be euer heauy, never blithe, nor glad.’24 This potentially tormented ‘inward selfe’ would seem to inhere not as much in the heart or the mind as in the body – even in the gut. The surprising concreteness of such an ‘inward selfe’ arises in part from early modern humoral conceptions of the person, which are simultaneously physical and psychological, and which profoundly link identity with bodily manifestations and with behavior. As Michael Schoenfeldt notes, humoral theory renders ‘bodily condition, subjective state, and psychological character ... fully imbricated’.25 These concrete selves correspond to the way the word ‘person’ also signified something more concrete in the Renaissance than it does today. In addition to the sense of social role noted above, ‘person’ also developed a range of meanings in Middle English referring to physical appearance (including clothes and adornment), to the body itself, to one physical person as opposed to others, or to one’s bodily presence or action. In sixteenth-century literature, it is used predominantly in these senses, in reference either to the physical body (‘To rest thy weary person in the shadow coole’ [Faerie Queene 2.7.63.9]), or to appearance (‘Thus did I keepe my Person fresh and new’ [1 Henry IV 3.2.55, TLN 1874]). As an adjective, then, ‘personal’ is a way of differentiating self from world without necessarily referencing an interior or private space, and it carries some very concrete associations. And while ‘person’ is used in reference to a discrete individual (one person as opposed to


others), it does not necessarily suggest a single or stable whole: people are capable of multiple manifestations called ‘persons’.26 In reference to the monarch, ‘person’ often comprehends both the physical body (particularly in the sense of its sanctity) and the sense of authority or power discussed earlier, and thus references to ‘the king’s person’ rather than just ‘the king’ often signify respect.27 In this sense, ‘person’ also refers to the idea of rank, as in a passage from The Faerie Queene: Kings Queenes, Lords Ladies, Knights & Damsels gent Were heap’d together with the vulgar sort, And mingled with the raskall rablement, Without respect of person or of port.28 In such references to social rank, ‘person’ often retains a sense of concreteness or even physicality – as in a complaint of Cardinal Pole in 1538 about his treatment by the king, that he had ‘never heard of the like in Christendom, against ony that bear that person, that I do at this time’.29 These early modern uses of ‘person’ suggest that conceptions of selfhood at that time were both more fundamentally social and more consistently concrete and physical than later conceptions. Modern English no longer has an equivalent for the idea of a ‘person’ in the social and physical senses the word once carried. Our use of the word today in the sense of the body – to be somewhere ‘in person’, to carry something ‘on one’s person’ – represents just a vestige of its earlier, very general use in this way. It would seem that ‘person’ in the sixteenth century is a complex term that corresponds in some ways to ideas like ‘character’ or ‘function’ but is also significantly different from them – i.e., more concrete, more exposed, and more about presence. These are the connotations that have to be stripped from the objectified ‘person’ of Renaissance usage in order for conventions of the subjective ‘self’ to develop. The process is visible in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he has to wrestle with existing linguistic meaning to hone a concept of an abstract and individual ‘person’. He starts by distinguishing the ideas of ‘person’ and ‘man’, asserting that the word ‘man’ (‘in most people’s sense’) refers to both the immaterial spirit and the body together, whereas ‘person’ refers to a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times


and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking and, as it seems to me, essential to it.30 Of course, while this sense of ‘man’ may indeed be the common one, as he claims, this idea of ‘person’ as a subjective ‘thinking thing’ is not. In literary use, both the physical sense of ‘person’ and the sense of one’s social role are still everywhere in evidence at the end of the seventeenth century. And even while Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) cites Locke for its first definition of ‘person’, it also lists ten other senses, including that of the human being ‘considered with respect to mere corporal existence’ (sense 3, for which the example is from Dryden). Locke gets around this common older meaning by embracing it as part of the idea of a person, only to reject it as an inessential part: Thus, the limbs of his body are to everyone a part of himself; he sympathizes and is concerned for them. Cut off a hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness he had of its heat, cold, and other affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself ... Thus, we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity. (2.27.11) The momentary violence of Locke’s imagery here seems emblematic of the effort required to hone this new definition of ‘person’ – to distinguish it as something separable from the body, in order to transform it into a term for what is continuous and contained within consciousness.31 But however problematic the logic by which he arrives at it, Locke’s meaning is the one that becomes the dominant usage, and that later forms of the word, such as ‘personality’, will be based on.32 Locke everywhere equates this person-as-consciousness with his notion of self as well, and self in turn with personal identity: When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions, and by this everyone is to himself that which he calls self. ... For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being. (2.27.9)


Locke’s focus on self-consciousness does not make the self an object. He talks of the self as ‘knowing’ its own experience rather than perceiving its outward manifestations – i.e., one is conscious of consciousness here rather than of appearance or meaning. And his emphasis is on ‘present sensations and perceptions’. Even in the next section, in which he refers several times to the awareness of past selves, it soon becomes clear that what he means is still that immediate, subjective ‘thinking thing’: For as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come. (2.27.10; original emphasis) Here Locke is careful to isolate subjective experience rather than the objectified awareness of self that one might have of anyone else as well – i.e., of the body as appearance or the person as social role.33 To be truly freestanding, it is not enough for the self to be ‘inward’ – it also has to be abstract, for a physical self is still available to an outside view, to objectification. In sum, for Locke, the material, contingent human being is ‘man’, and the essential, conscious human being is ‘person’. And this newly abstract ‘person’ is also newly stable, continuous, and unified, as well as interpersonally less available. It constitutes a reification of subjective interiority independent of any external connection, divine or otherwise.34 In general, Renaissance uses of ‘person’ tend to belie this notion of interiority as distinct or separable from one’s exterior, visible, or corporeal self. And thus even when not as visceral as the tortured ‘inward selfe’ cited above, Renaissance references to ‘inwardness’ can still be objectified. When Gervase Markham, for instance, speaks of both ‘outward and inward behauiours’ as presenting ‘the figures of a noble descent’,35 the usage suggests a well-developed sense of what might constitute this interesting category of ‘inward behauiours’ as well as of their potential visibility – that is, their availability to interpretation by others. The same idea is evident in Hamlet, in Claudius’s assessment of the prince: ‘not th’ exterior, nor the inward man / Resembles that it was’ (2.2.6–7, TLN 1026–7) – the implication being that both are visible. Such usages should make us wary about assuming that references to


‘inwardness’ are always meant to suggest a private or subjective self. Markham’s conception of observable ‘inward behauiour’ could be what is at stake, for instance, in Sidney’s reference to an ‘inwarde selfe’ in the Defense of Poesie, where he cites the ‘fruitfull’ influence of reading about Aeneas and committing to memory ‘how in his inwarde selfe, and how in his outward government’ he conducts himself.36 Though Sidney does not elaborate on this ‘inward selfe’, it too suggests an observable ‘behauiour’ objectified in Virgil’s narrative. When he lists Aeneas’s exemplary forms of self-government, all seem to be what we would call ‘outward’ except perhaps for the ability ‘in obeying Gods Commaundment, to leave Dido, though not onelie all passionate kindnesse, but even the humane consideration of vertuous gratefulnesse, would have craved other of him’. If the latter is the only example of Aeneas’s ‘inwarde selfe’, even this seems to be constituted not in some independent interiority, but in interpersonal behavior as well as in relation to God. This interpersonal dimension is still often missed in discussions of Renaissance inwardness. It is true that, as Katharine Maus argues, a tendency among historicist critics to discount the possibility of interiority in the Renaissance has often obscured a good deal of evidence that the period was in fact quite preoccupied with ‘inwardness’.37 But it is also important to recognize how differently that inwardness is configured, how much more it is constituted in relation to others, than is the abstract interiority of modern usage. The ‘inward’ turn in Renaissance discourses entails different assumptions from those belonging to later conventions of the individual, and these assumptions make coining an ‘inward self’ a highly complex process that needs to be analyzed in its full context. The fact, for instance, that in Renaissance usage the ‘heart’ is not merely a metaphor for inward space but is literally taken to be the locus of sense impressions means that Renaissance ‘interiors’ are more concretely connected to the external world than a modern ‘inner self’ is.38 Efforts to coin a more abstract ‘inward self’ come out of this context, in which it is common to think of a person as both a physical and a social entity, and so they often entail an explicit, differentiating reference to both kinds of selves. We see this, for instance, in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, where the underlying question of sonnet 52 concerns what actually constitutes ‘Stella’s selfe’ – is it her ‘faire outside, which our hearts doth move’ or her ‘vertuous soule, sure heire of heav’nly blisse’?39 In this very early (1581–2) use of a substantive ‘selfe’, the allegory of a strife ‘betweene Vertue and Love’ (line 1) sets up a choice


between subjective and objectified selves, between the abstract and the concrete. And because the subject here is not the speaker’s own ‘selfe’ but that of his beloved, it already entails an interpersonal context. If this ‘selfe’ is physical (‘Her eyes, her lips, her all’) it will be available to him (i.e., it can be claimed by Love). But if it is her soul – that subjective province which, because it is also ‘vertuous’, holds him at bay – it will not. In this scenario, the possibility of her subjectivity is in tension with his own, obliquely referenced here as ‘our hearts’ and ‘our sute’: Love’s ‘sute’ is stayed by Vertue. Yet while the speaker seems to let Vertue’s argument (that Stella’s ‘selfe’ is her soul) prevail, his punch line grants this idea happily provided it means her body is not claimed by Vertue: Well, Love, since this demurre our sute doth stay, Let Vertue have that Stella’s selfe; yet thus, That Vertue but that body graunt to us. The joke is partly that beneath his legalistic argument is an insistence that she is primarily her body for him – that her inner self (or ‘soule’) is irrelevant or at least less important to her lover than her body, and that he is willing to divide her soul and body in order to get the body. Similarly, sonnet 45 of Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) hinges on the opposition of inward and outward selves, although this time there is no question of an inward self being female. As the speaker addresses his beloved, the abstraction of his own ‘selfe’ seems to be achieved via the concreteness of hers: Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene, Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew: and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane, most lively lyke behold your semblant trew. As in many of these early examples of ‘selfe’, the repetition of the word helps to signal that the speaker is using it in a new way, and to distinguish it from the more common, pronominal reference to the female body (‘Your goodly selfe’). This ‘inward selfe’ expresses something closer to the OED’s subjective ‘self’, since it turns out to consist of his view of her and perhaps his feelings about her. But constructing a subjective ‘selfe’ in this way is not the same as using ‘self’ without reference to any context. This subjective ‘selfe’ is also decidedly interpersonal – infused with the image of the other’s ‘goodly selfe’, which resides in his ‘inward selfe’ (or, as he puts it more traditionally in the


next stanza, in his ‘hart’). This is not to say, however, that the relationship here is mutual – the roles of these two selves are quite asymmetrical, hers purely objectified and his intangible (although it is not explicitly identified as invisible, the speaker never offers an image of it). Functioning as a mirror, this ‘selfe’ objectifies her but is not itself an objectification of him.40 Thus this usage turns out to be less related to the OED’s sense 4b (the partial self, for which it is given as the only Renaissance example) than it first seems, since it has little to do with ‘personality’ or ‘characteristics’ or any other objectifiable identity. Instead, Spenser seems to be using the term ‘inward selfe’ to construct an inner space that cannot be objectified – a space that is private because invisible, from which to interpret without being interpretable. Yet this strategically ‘inward selfe’ is still implicitly contrasted to the more common idea of an outward self, and so it also does not correspond to the unified and fully individuated self of modern usage. Spenser also uses ‘Selfe’ in the context of another kind of opposition – this time not between abstract and concrete, but good and evil. Toward the end of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590), in the sexual context of the Bowre of Blisse, ‘Selfe’ expresses the notion of an inward, guiding spirit, which is also a ‘celestial power’ in charge of ‘the care / Of life, and generation of all / That liues’: Who wondrous things concerning our welfare, And straunge phantomes doth let vs oft forsee, And oft of secret ill bids vs beware: That is our Selfe, whom though we do not see, Yet each doth in himself it well perceiue to bee.41 This ‘Selfe’ has to do with self-interest as well as desire and is posited as a kind of intuitive imaginative power (which Spenser says was externalized as the god Agdistes in antiquity [2.12.48]). It has a matching, opposite capacity, which is not called ‘selfe’, but identified as the figure at the gate of the Bowre of Blisse: ‘The foe of life, that good enuyes to all, / That secretly doth us procure to fall, / Through guilefull semblaunts, which he makes vs see’ (2.12.48). The positive ‘Selfe’ is a new term for one part of a dichotomized concept of moral agency: the notion of mutually opposed attendant spirits, or ‘geniuses’.42 This capacity that Spenser calls ‘our Selfe’ does involve subjective experience and seems, once again, to resist objectification (Spenser is careful to note that ‘we do not see’ this ‘Selfe’). In some ways, then, this idea moves toward a more modern, subjective notion of self than most


Renaissance examples. Yet it still does not represent a unified interiority, but only a part of the person – a capacity that is also ‘celestial’. It is striking how consistently these rare efforts to coin a subjective ‘selfe’ entail a sexual context. And indeed, Renaissance references to inwardness are generally not without reference to context, which is often the means by which they construct themselves imaginatively and rhetorically.43 In the Sidney sonnet, the concern is with the inwardness of the other – of Stella – and this is generally an important focus in Renaissance texts. As Maus’s study shows, early modern culture is frequently concerned with the epistemological problems of inwardness – in other words, with its interpersonal dimensions – which I would suggest constitutes a different category from that of modern, contextindependent interiority. In Renaissance culture’s increasing scrutiny of the inwardness of others, there is an insistent emphasis on keeping selfhood a social category. Thus Thomas Wright’s treatise on the passions, for instance, offers to ‘deliuer some meanes, whereby in particular conuersation, euery one may discouer his fellowes naturall inclinations’.44 Jean-Christophe Agnew argues that such discovery seemed increasingly urgent in the period, for the culture was developing, in its most extreme forms, ‘a model of the self as a placeless and Protean entity – a liminal being always on the verge of becoming something or someone else’.45 Agnew suggests that the changing modes of selfhood in Renaissance England were a ‘response to the placeless market’ – that ‘the personal properties of the self were becoming as ambiguous as the “real” properties to which that self, as a “freeborn Englishman”, might lay claim’ (57, 58). Yet Agnew’s analysis ultimately falls back on familiar modern terms to explain the period’s developing modes of selfhood, for he sees these primarily in terms of a ‘new concept of privacy ... centered within the self’ (97). This formulation ignores the ways in which the developing ‘model’ is so interpersonally charged, so much about the perception of selves. What tends to be missed in all these examples of Renaissance interest in inwardness is their meaning as interactions – as questions between and not just about persons. With the rise of a ‘placeless market’, the growing concern with the other’s inwardness reflects not merely the potential for a newly separate selfhood, but also a preoccupation with resisting it.

Transferred selves and other identities Such resistance is inherent in the trope of a transferred self, which – if we want to talk about properties and markets – figures the self as a


process of interpersonal exchange. In this now-obsolete usage, a speaker expresses intimacy or devotion by calling a friend or beloved ‘my self’ or ‘my next self’ or ‘an other self’. Unlike the examples discussed so far, this transferred ‘self’ is not a rare usage – on the contrary, it is ubiquitous in literary texts of the 1590s and early 1600s.46 The idea had ancient and proverbial roots, coming down into English through the Latin form, ‘Amicus alter ipse’.47 In English it appears first with ‘I’ rather than ‘self’, in the saying that calls a friend an ‘other I’ (1531).48 The expression was central to Renaissance friendship discourses and, as Laurie Shannon has shown, it was widely disseminated through humanist teaching of its Latin sources.49 In translations of Cicero’s De amicitia, we see some of the earliest efforts to find a substantive term to express this status of the all-important other: for instance, in Thomas Newton’s 1577 translation, ‘he is a freend, which is (as it were) an other himselfe’.50 By the 1590s, the ‘other self’ is an established trope, and poets and playwrights use it often to express intimacy and inseparability. Interestingly, then, this other-self notion arises as early as any substantive uses and may even be the earliest way the substantive ‘self’ enters the language. Certainly in written use, it is the most prevalent. And its earliest uses refer not only to same-sex friendship. As Stephen Booth points out, the other-self idea also has roots in the marriage service, in which man and wife were said to be ‘one flesh’ and ‘he that loveth his own wife, loveth himself’.51 The rhetoric of ‘one soul in bodies twain’ belongs to heterosexual contexts as well as discourses of friendship, and in the context of marriage the focus on the ‘flesh’ makes the oneness physical as well. Thus Adriana in Shakespeare’s Comedie of Errors (?1592) calls herself her husband’s ‘deere selfes better part’, and tells (the wrong) Antipholus, ‘as easie maist thou fall / A drop of water in the breaking gulfe, / And take vnmingled thence that drop againe / Without addition or diminishing, / As take from me thy selfe, and not me too’ (2.2.124–30, TLN 518–24). In an even earlier instance – a poem attributed to Elizabeth I, thought to have been written around 1580 – the reference is not to a spouse but to a Petrarchan beloved, and again it involves an intense physical and emotional attachment: ‘I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, / Since from myself another self I turned.’52 In such instances, the otherself trope often says as much about the nature of the ‘self’ as it does about the status of the friend or lover, and usually the point is to negate the possibility of that self’s independence. In the Countess of Pembroke’s 1592 translation of Antonius, the expression seems to arise


as a spontaneous response to the proposition of an individuated self. When Charmion, trying to dissuade Cleopatra from following Antony in death, argues that ‘Our first affection to our self is due’, Cleopatra responds simply, ‘He is my selfe.’53 The conciseness of the assertion captures a profoundly interpersonal conception of self, suggesting that somehow, what is most vital in oneself is actually not within oneself but in the other. In many texts, the other-self trope becomes more than just a way of expressing love; it also expresses complex and varied conceptions of identity as an interpersonal phenomenon. In part, the transferred ‘self’ captures a process of exchange similar to an older trope of lovers’ exchanged hearts. A song in Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1577–80), ‘My true love hath my hart and I have his’, uses the concrete image of exchanged hearts to figure the ‘bargain’ of the lovers’ exchange of feelings, their possession of each other, and their mutual wounds (or ‘equal hurt’).54 In such conventional usage, the heart is a term for the inward embodiment or site of emotion and desire, traditionally figured as the most private domain but also the most vulnerable to a beloved. Its exchange usually has to do with an exchange of interests and values, and also with the idea of constancy, since to give one’s heart to someone is to make it unavailable to anyone else. Much of this meaning persists in the transferred ‘self’, but the new trope also captures a broader transaction. If the heart is the locus of subjective experience, the ‘self’ is more, for it represents objectified identity as well. Self for a Renaissance speaker is not only what is felt but what is observed and recognized. The ‘other self’ is thus not merely a trope of intersubjectivity; it is interpersonal in the Renaissance sense of ‘person’, as it joins not only two subjects, but two objects. A key passage in Cicero suggests that the intense intimacy of friendship involves understanding who one is from another perspective: ‘who so evir seeth his frende, seeth a maner lykenesse of hym self’.55 The transference of self objectifies the self: what one is most deeply is now ‘over there’ – embodied, personified, concrete. So Antipholus in Comedie of Errors calls Luciana ‘mine owne selfes better part: / Mine eies cleere eie, my deere hearts deerer heart; / My foode, my fortune, and my sweet hopes aime’ (3.2.60–2, TLN 850–2). The friend’s or lover’s mirroring capacity, however, is not just about ‘lykenesse’ in the sense of similarity. There is more at stake than a visual image. These otherself discourses stress the oneness of friends or lovers more in terms of their mutuality, highlighting a sharing or ‘mingling’ of selves without


boundaries. In Florio’s Montaigne, for instance, friends are understood to ‘entermixe and confound themselves one in the other, with so universal a commixture, that they can no more finde the seame that hath conjoyned them together’.56 Because this intermixing involves a sharing of perspectives, it produces a greater self-knowledge than the self can achieve alone. And the knowledge goes both ways – one knows oneself as the ‘other self’ of the other, too, as Marlowe’s Edward II shows when he identifies himself to Gaveston as ‘Thy friend, thy self, another Gaveston’.57 As a result, this oneness also creates a sense of radical interdependence: the other is oneself by virtue of being indispensable. The inseparability of self and other is stressed by frequent use of the trope in moments of separation or loss, such as in Edward’s response to Gaveston’s exile: ‘Thou from this land, I from myself am banished’ (1.4.118). Shakespeare uses the same language of self-estrangement in the loss of a beloved in Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Valentine claims that ‘Sylvia is my selfe: banish’d from her / Is selfe from selfe. A deadly banishment’ (3.1.172–3, TLN 1241–2). In this way, the trope gets at how the ‘self’ is primarily invested outside itself. Acknowledging the source of oneself in or through the other, it suggests concretely that the self inheres in the other. At times, then, its use seems to examine not just dependency but the mystery of origins, of self-experience as both one’s own and not one’s own. Such objectification amounts to much more than a recognition of similarity. It is the recognition that one is constructed in the relationship, that the exchange – of interests, of awareness, of attachment – has produced this ‘self’. Interestingly, it is not classical but Renaissance writers who take the idea of exchange furthest with this usage and make the self most radically relational. As Shannon points out, classical texts on friendship sometimes emphasize a sense of ‘autonomous and integral’ selfhood prior to the engagement of friendship (30). She cites a passage in Cicero arguing that ‘to the extent that a man relies upon himself and is so fortified by virtue and wisdom that he is dependent on no one and considers all his possessions to be within himself, in that degree he is most conspicuous for seeking out and cherishing friendships’.58 In contrast, Renaissance writers often suggest the priority of the other’s role and the sense that the self cannot in fact claim ‘possession’ of itself. Perhaps the clearest theoretical statement of that priority comes in Shakespeare’s Troylus and Cressida, when Ulysses discusses the idea ‘that man, how dearely euer parted, / How much in hauing, or without, or in, / Cannot


make boast to haue that which he hath; / Nor feeles not what he owes, but by reflection’. The necessity of such ‘reflection’ means That no ma[n] is the Lord of any thing, (Though in and of him there is much consisting,) Till he communicate his parts to others: Nor doth he of himselfe know them for ought, Till he behold them formed in th’applause, Where they are extended. (3.3.97–117, TLN 1949–69) As a gloss on Cicero, this passage would suggest that the sense of autonomy in which one ‘considers all his possessions to be within himself’ is actually a retrospective construction, achieved not prior to, but through the process of exchange – the process of communicating what one is or has ‘to others’. Even subjective experience has to be mediated, known interpersonally, as one ‘feeles not what he owes [i.e., owns], but by reflection’. It is only as a result of that exchange – of the involvement with an ‘other self’ – that one has a substantive ‘self’.59 This constitutive role of the friend or lover is what the Renaissance other-self trope invokes, and its use seems an effort to coin language for this notion of a dependent and fundamentally relational selfhood. If this is, then, the first way the noun ‘self’ enters the language, its precedence is emblematic of the relational understanding of selfhood it comes to express – the sense that identity starts with the other. And the ‘other self’ is not the only relational term for selfhood coined at this time. In fact, some terms that would later come to define the abstract, independent self are used in the early seventeenth century in this opposite, interpersonal sense. The word ‘individual’, for instance, only acquires its modern, substantive sense of a freestanding, single human being in the eighteenth century.60 But that usage has a long prehistory, stemming from the word’s original meaning of indivisible, which includes its use in the early seventeenth century to describe two distinct persons or things as inseparable from each other: ‘Where ere thou go’st I still will folowe thee / An indiuiduall mate’ (c. 1600).61 At nearly the same time, it begins to be used substantively in the opposite sense, for a single person, though still with reference to a context – ‘as opposed to Society, the Family, etc’ (1626).62 For a while, both uses have currency – indeed, as Peter Stallybrass argues, there seems to be ‘an active struggle over definition’ going on. During the early and


mid-seventeenth century, many new forms of the word develop in reference both to things and persons, and nearly all of them in both senses – the inseparable and the atomized. In the former, the reference is not to the person per se but to a relationship, and it basically means just what the transferred ‘self’ does, as we see in a passage from Brathwait (1630) describing a friend as ‘being indeed a mans second selfe, or rather an individuate companion to himselfe’.63 The distinguishing sense, which seems to occur primarily in philosophical contexts early on, is of course the one that eventually takes hold in general use in the eighteenth century, when ‘individual’ finally begins to refer to persons non-relationally – that is, ‘without any notion of contrast or relation to a class or group’.64 Yet early seventeenth-century dictionaries suggest that only the first sense of ‘inseparable’ was widely in use at that time. Cockeram’s 1623 dictionary, for instance, defines ‘individuall’ only as ‘Not to be parted, as man and wife’, and Cotgrave’s 1611 French–English dictionary translates ‘individu’ as ‘Undividable, inseparable’.65 And, of course, ‘individuality’ is not yet used in the sense of uniqueness or personality, but only as that quality of being one irreducible specimen of a group or kind. Two other words, however, have emerged by this time to describe what pertains to single persons, though with different associations than ‘individuality’ will carry: ‘singularity’ is in use by the early seventeenth century to mean ‘being like no body else, in opinion, or other ways’ or ‘a desire to be odde from other men’,66 and ‘genuine’ is defined as ‘peculiar, or naturall’.67 Like the seventeenth-century use of ‘individual’, these are relative terms that still imply a context to which the person is being compared rather than identifying a single, freestanding entity, and their meanings are still quite fluid. The same overall movement from the interpersonal to the individual characterizes the history of the word ‘identity’. In reference to persons, its first uses are relational, positing the sameness of self and other rather than self-sameness.68 A poem of William Hammond (1655), for instance, makes ‘Identity’ the upshot of marriage: ‘The Harvest is not till we two / Shall into one contracted be; / Love’s crop alone doth richer grow / Decreasing to Identity.’69 The word here is a new bottle for old wine – the oneness of lovers expressed in earlier tropes of one soul in two bodies, one flesh, exchanged hearts, or an ‘other self’. Although this relational sense of ‘Identity’ is somewhat more abstract than those earlier expressions, it still reflects a fascination with the intensity of connection, the imbrication of persons. This discourse of interpersonal ‘Identity’ appears in religious contexts as well.


For instance, a poem by Abraham Cowley on the death of Katherine Philips describes the state of persons in afterlife: ‘There all the blest do but one body grow, / And are made one too with their glorious Head, ... There Love into Identity does go.’70 Religious doctrinal discourses are deeply implicated in the development of much of the vocabulary of identity, as Stallybrass also notes.71 ‘Person’, ‘individual’, and ‘identity’ are all key terms in the debate over the nature of the Trinity, and the theoretical understanding of the possibilities of being, oneness, and distinctness provides a discourse that seems subsequently to be picked up and used to capture the interpersonal dimensions of human ‘identity’ as well. Eventually, this reference to the oneness of plural persons gives way to a focus on the ‘identity’ or self-sameness of a separate, single person, as we see particularly in Locke.72 However, there is as yet nothing about personal identity in Johnson’s Dictionary, which defines ‘identity’ only as ‘sameness’. Johnson’s omission of Locke’s definition of ‘personal identity’ seems to indicate that it does not represent a general usage, but a particular application of the idea of ‘sameness’ to individuals. Applying the word ‘identity’ to a single person offers a way to conceive of that person in relation only to himself, without reference to any context, and it not only marks a shift in focus from the interpersonal to the individual, but also reflects and creates new expectations for selfhood. In Locke’s coinage, ‘identity’ does not have the sense we tend to give it today, of who one is, or how one is known.73 It corresponds not to the objectified, contextualized self (i.e., ‘self’ in the OED’s sense 4a – ‘what one is at a particular time or in a particular aspect or relation’) but rather to the essential self (the OED’s sense 3 – what is seen as intrinsic and unchanging about a person). It allows and perhaps even encourages us to conceive of persons in terms of whatever it is about them that does not change, as if to be who one is now meant to stay the same. It is a somewhat counter-intuitive usage, and the more common and important the word ‘identity’ becomes, the less its users seem to hold it to this narrow sense. But it seems to have been coined as part of an increasing concern about the problem of locating what is stable in a person, a problem it offers to solve by extricating the self from its context linguistically. This becomes clearer if we consider the language in use before ‘identity’ is coined. A sixteenth-century term for this root sense of sameness is ‘constancy’ – certainly an important idea for Renaissance writers, but not a term that was attributed generally: people were not seen to have ‘constancy’ in the same way that people would later


be seen to have ‘identity’. Moreover, ‘constancy’ often implies a contextualized process – the issue is not one of being the same so much as of staying the same in relation to a changing world, and often in relation to a particular other, as in the powerful Renaissance concern with sexual ‘constancy’. (Chapter 4 will elaborate this interpersonal problematic of ‘constancy’ as a central figure of Renaissance selfhood.) On the other hand, ‘identity’ in the sense of who one is or how one is known is also an important issue for Renaissance writers, yet it tends to be conceived and articulated differently. Much of the language for this idea in the Renaissance does not have the effect of restricting and interpreting the problem as one of sameness, but carries quite different implications. The word ‘shape’, for instance, often expresses the idea of objectified identity, and in connection with the figure of Proteus, frequently evokes the problems and possibilities of change rather than sameness in a person.74 But it can also refer generally to one’s characteristics, both physical and mental, as it does, for instance, in a comic song in Sidney’s Arcadia, where ‘to show her shape’ means to describe qualities including looks, chastity, temperament, foresight, and grace.75 Other Renaissance terms also objectify one’s nature – even one’s inner nature – yet are neither abstract nor self-contained. ‘Complexion’, for instance, is a common term for a person’s ‘nature’ and ‘constitution of the body’,76 a visible component of one’s ‘humor’. The theory behind both of these terms offers ways of knowing about what a person is like internally, yet in a very concrete sense – i.e., what one knows about is the person’s actual physical makeup, the dominant humor or elemental quality in them. Thus they can suggest what we might call ‘personality’ (e.g., one can be said to be of a ‘jealous complexion’77), but they also entail a wholly different set of assumptions about the person than those associated with abstract interiority. For humoral theory posits ‘personality’ as a function of the body, and that body is itself conceived as contingent on and open to its physical context. In this way one’s ‘humor’ or ‘complexion’ also figures the psychological or spiritual self as contingent on its environment. In late sixteenth-century texts, these terms develop complex figurative uses, though they generally retain their connection to humoral theory, still conceiving of the physicality of humors as a state affected from without. The implications of this theory for selfhood are profound, and the next chapter looks in more detail at the way that Renaissance writers not only use the language of humors incessantly but interrogate the meaning of the whole paradigm. For now, it is important to note that the debate about the meaning of ‘humor’ is a Renaissance phenomenon.78 By the end of the


seventeenth century, the word has lost its clear association with the medical theory of humors and has become a general term for ‘mood’ or for one’s essential nature or personality, without any sense of reference to the body. Another Renaissance expression for ‘identity’ in an objectified sense is the simple term ‘parts’, which refers to a person’s known attributes, whether good or bad, single or many, inward or outward. The reference can be to a shared human capacity or faculty: one’s ‘reasonable part’ (i.e., one’s reason), for instance, or one’s ‘immortall part’ (i.e., one’s soul).79 But ‘part’ and ‘parts’ also frequently refer to the attributes by which specific persons are identified: ‘I pray thee now tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in loue with me?’80 Such attributes can be seen as natural endowments or as the achievement of learning – ‘She is the blosome of grace and curtesie, / Adorned with all honourable parts’ – and they often suggest prestige or social standing, as when Jonson writes that the children of Penshurst can ‘Read, in their virtuous parents’ noble parts, / The mysteries of manners, arms, and arts.’81 Where a later era would speak of one’s better or worse self, Renaissance speakers would likely use the plural ‘parts’ instead. It is a flexible usage and can shade into several other kinds of meaning, including a suggestion of material belongings, or the idea of a role or action (e.g., ‘if man’s noblest part be love’82), or the physical body (particularly when the subject is female).83 In the plural, it can suggest an aggregate of qualities amounting to something like our notion of ‘character’, though even that aggregate will not imply a unity. This is not language that attributes a single or stable identity to the person, nor any overall synthesis of abstract qualities.

Character and property The possibility of attributing a synthesized aggregate of qualities to the person is precisely what is at stake in the seventeenth-century development of the word ‘character’, which, like ‘individual’ and ‘identity’, is not used in its fully modern sense in the early seventeenth century. Originally meaning a mark or stamp or kind of writing, ‘character’ only begins in the mid-seventeenth century to be used figuratively in reference to an aggregate of qualities, and particularly to suggest the totality of a person’s inner qualities.84 Among the many interesting aspects of the word’s history, perhaps the most crucial concerns the way that it goes from meaning that which is read or in evidence on an exterior to


what is seen as belonging to a person inwardly. In other words, in its figurative senses, ‘character’ starts out meaning a sign and ends up meaning something behind the sign. The underlying and gradual ideological shift that permits this development inheres in the conceptual movement toward a reified interiority capable of containing attributes considered as inherent qualities. But before this modern sense of ‘character’ begins to occur, at least two new (and, as I will argue, relational) senses emerge in the early seventeenth century, which subsequently become obsolete.85 Only one of these is noted by the OED: ‘The face or features as betokening moral qualities; personal appearance. Obs’ (sense 10). The first example given for this sense is from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (?1601): ‘I will beleeue thou hast a minde that suites / With this thy faire and outward charracter.’86 Here, however, I take it that ‘charracter’ does mean ‘appearance’, but may not yet mean features ‘betokening moral qualities’. Rather, the speaker’s whole statement concerns her decision to associate appearance (‘outward charracter’) with the moral qualities of a mind. It should be noted, too, that the remark comes early in a play that will be concerned throughout with questioning the nature of the connection between outward appearances and inner qualities.87 An earlier use of ‘character’ in the sense of ‘personal appearance’ but without any moral implication can be found in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596): ‘To his owne loue his loialtie he saued: / Whose character in th’Adamantine mould / Of his true hart so firmely was engraued, / That no new loues impression euer could / Bereaue it thence.’88 A use of ‘character’ that agrees more clearly with the rest of the OED’s definition occurs in an elegiac poem by Jonson (?1625–40): ‘And best he [God] knew her noble character, / For ’twas himself who formed, and gave it her’.89 Here, ‘character’ (called ‘that form’ in the next line) refers to the meaningful appearance of the body as God’s sign of a person’s goodness. In this poem, such an appearance or ‘character’ is God’s sign in both senses – God ‘forms’ the sign, and God also reads ‘Each line, as it were graphic, in the face’ (l. 154). Actually the body is not just a sign of inner qualities in this elegy, but seems to be fused with them. God ‘knows the hearts of all, and can dissect / The smallest fibre of our flesh; he can / Find all our atoms from a point to a span’ (ll. 150–2); and, it seems, knowing the body, he knows the person.90 In this sense, then, ‘character’ has a physical referent, not wholly unlike ‘humor’ or ‘complexion’, except that the assumed connection between body and spirit is not medical, but


symbolic. Despite the moral dimension, this sense does not resemble the modern use, in which ‘character’ refers to an abstraction and not to concrete physical appearances. Another use of ‘character’ that arises in the early seventeenth century (this one not listed in the OED but familiar to scholars of early modern culture) has to do with the written description or ‘portrait’ of a social type. This sense was popularized by a text printed in 1614 – a collection of pieces called ‘Characters’, attributed to Sir Thomas Overbury and other anonymous authors, which went through many expanded editions.91 As the text itself eventually makes clear in the penultimate piece of the 1622 collection, the term ‘character’ refers not to the types sketched, but to the sketching of them: ‘If I must speake the Schoolemasters language I will confesse that Character ... signifieth to ingrave. ... And for that cause, a letter ... is called a Character. ... To square out a Character by our English levell, it is a picture (reall or personall) quaintlie drawne in various collours, all of them heightned by one shadowing’.92 Aside from two ‘characters’ of things (a ‘happie life’ and a prison), all of the entries in the collection are of recognizable social types (‘A good Woman’, ‘A Courtier’, ‘An elder Brother’, ‘A Whore’, ‘A Foote-man’, ‘A fayre and happy Milke-mayd’, etc.) depicted not in narratives but in descriptions of typical actions.93 The claim to realism, which also appears in a title page of the sixth printing – ‘New Characters (drawne to the life) of severall Persons, in severall qualities’ (47) – should not confuse us as to the conception of ‘persons’ or the ‘personall’ involved here. In fact, it is telling evidence that the ‘personall’ in this period is what belongs to behavior, to the surface, to the visible and common features of persons, rather than to ‘individuals’ in our sense of the term. This sense of ‘Character’ as a kind of writing is used frequently throughout the seventeenth century, and it is not unrelated to the last sense discussed – of a person’s appearance. Both concern a kind of image, though the referent of ‘character’ in the one is what belongs to the person’s appearance (‘thy fair and outward character’), and in the other, the writer’s portrayal. Setting these two senses of ‘character’ side by side helps to show that they both involve, as Edward Burns argues, ‘a two-way process’ – of seeing and of being seen – which amounts to ‘a transaction between two human subjects’.94 What counts here, though, is that that transaction remains, in both of these early seventeenth-century senses, a question of signs, of what is objectified and meaningful for the other: appearance and behavior. Between both these senses and the modern sense, then, there is an important disjunction, for the modern sense,


again, refers not to the available sign of something external about a person, but to abstract qualities within the person. The modern term is thus a reification, conferring concrete status on an abstraction (i.e., those qualities). Reifying such qualities as ‘character’ rather than using that term to refer to their visible signs or to a description of them eliminates the role of the other in either reading or describing them. Reified, they stand on their own and represent what a person ‘is’ or ‘has’ inside.95 Reification is the element that allows these new coinings – individual, identity, character, as well as person and self in Locke’s newly abstract senses – to reduce the problem of selfhood from relationship to singleness. Reifying inwardness (as a ‘conscious thinking thing’ or as ‘character’) makes it a viable entity on its own, without reference to surround. And it tends to interiorize judgment of the self’s authenticity as well. This is evident, for instance, in the changing use of the word ‘guise’, which has a long pre-seventeenth-century history in which it does the work of words such as ‘character’ and ‘identity’, yet participates in a different conception of the person. By the end of the seventeenth century, this word too has undergone a significant, related shift in meaning. Originally, ‘guise’ refers to a wide variety of visible aspects of persons – fashion, appearance, clothes, habits, style, manner – making identity a matter of customary appearance and behavior. By 1690, though, it has become synonymous with ‘disguise’ (OED, sense 5c, 1662). In the new sense, ‘guise’ still means surface appearance, but surface appearance no longer means something true. What is true now is only what is inside. The change represents a new split between any observable outward manifestations (style, behavior, etc.) and the inner person. As with the reified meaning of ‘character’, the loss of the older meaning of ‘guise’ represents a shift in the prevailing conception of the person, whose locus changes from his observable surface to an abstract interiority. The eventual effect of this new vocabulary is to establish a noncontingent interiority that is not only inward but autonomous and selfproprietary. That proprietary notion is evident in the political discourse of the English revolution, where, as Stallybrass has suggested, ‘for the first time, the word “individual” is explicitly used to displace the implication of subjection in the subject. ... For the more radical of the Levellers, it was the free individual, a quite new political concept, who would overthrow kings and priests.’96 He cites the opening of Richard Overton’s 1646 An Arrow against All Tyrants: To every Individuall in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is


himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himselfe, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature, and of the Rules of equity and justice between man and man; mine and thine cannot be, except this be.97 Though this is not yet a fully substantive ‘self’, Overton’s notion of ‘selfe propriety’ clearly moves in the direction of Locke’s reified, subjective self, suggesting that for a man to ‘be himselfe’ entails that he own himself. Subjectivity is also key in the assertion of this new ‘individuall property’, in which the only relations posited ‘between man and man’ are the rules that govern property – ‘mine and thine’ – which do not require being objectified by (i.e., subject to) any other. The primary appeal here is to ‘nature’; the primary attachment, the self’s to itself – a model of ownership rather than exchange. For this abstract, proprietary version of identity, the metaphor of ‘coining’ the self is particularly apt. While a coin represents an abstract value, it also gives that value concrete form – reifies it – and thereby becomes usable without reference to the economic context that created its value. Similarly, an abstract, interior ‘self’ – once we have the language for it – becomes a distinct thing that one can have and use without reference to the social context that created it. But the language of property is not newly associated with selfhood here. Premodern texts use economic language to formulate conceptions of identity too – as we have already seen in Cicero’s idea of having one’s ‘possessions’ within oneself, and in Shakespeare’s articulation of the opposite idea (that man does not ‘haue that which he hath; / Nor feeles not what he owes, but by reflection’) in Troylus and Cressida. When Renaissance texts use economic tropes for selfhood they generally resist or complicate the idea of self-ownership, making the thing that constitutes selfhood not an abstract property but an interpersonal process of exchange, often both a physical and a social phenomenon. (This is even the case in the Ciceronian passage, which posits the selfpossessed self ideally as something to be exchanged with the friend.) In Renaissance texts, it is often the notion of a proprietary self that the transferred self undermines. Donne’s poem ‘The Legacie’, for instance, plays with reification as a way of exploding the idea of a self’s control or ownership of itself. Its underlying conceit – that the speaker ‘dies’ whenever parted from his beloved – allows him to explore what he is relationally, as that which is exchanged: ‘Though I be dead, which sent


mee, I should be / Mine owne executor and Legacie.’ Using the otherself trope, he asserts: That my selfe, (that is you, not I,) Did kill me, and when I felt mee dye, I bid mee send my heart, when I was gone, But I alas could there finde none, When I had ripp’d me’, and search’d where hearts did lye. (ll. 10–14)98 Exploring the vicissitudes of a self in the context of a relationship, the poem discovers a multiplicity of selves: at stake is not just the depth of the speaker’s attachment to his lover, but an elaborate recognition of problems of change and continuity (‘Though I be dead, which sent mee, I should be / Mine owne executor and Legacie’), and a recognition of different selves coexisting (‘I heard me say’, ‘I felt mee dye’, ‘I bid me’, etc.). Indeed, Donne’s use of a transferred ‘self’ seems to produce the poem’s subsequent recognition of selfhood as multiple and contingent, both subject and object, and through it the poem offers an analysis of selfhood as inherently interpersonal. In the process it also transforms the trope of lovers’ exchanged hearts: Yet I found something like a heart, But colours it, and corners had, It was not good, it was not bad, It was intire to none, and few had part. As good as could be made by art It seem’d; and therefore for our losses sad, I meant to send this heart in stead of mine, But oh, no man could hold it, for twas thine. (ll. 17–24) Although the poem ends on the contrast between ‘mine and thine’, the stability of the contrast has been wholly undermined by the transferred ‘self’ of line 10, which problematizes the self’s ownership not just of itself but of the other as well. Because of this problem of possession, the ‘heart’ is no longer a given, conventional idea here, especially as the speaker finds ‘where hearts did lye’ only ‘something like a heart’, whose ‘colours’ and ‘corners’ and various owners preclude its representing a purely subjective or essential interiority. Describing ‘The Legacie’ in


terms of the speaker’s own sense of ‘his mislaid personality’, John Carey captures the overall feel of the poem, but also subscribes to the fallacy the poem subtly exposes as it shows that such ‘personality’ is no fixed, unitary, self-contained, or self-generated entity.99 For while there may be an attempt here to unify or at least oversee all of these competing consciousnesses – i.e., an effort toward a controlling subjectivity – the point of the poem is that it fails. Love and friendship are the ideal contexts in which Renaissance writers refute self-propriety, but such extremes often seem to serve not just as special cases but as models. Even an apparently occasional poem such as Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and Turtle (?1601) goes into great theoretical detail to work out a logic (or illogic) of selfhood as that which, ideally, one cannot own, as something neither single nor separable from the other. Through the conceit of the lovers’ identity, the terms of individualism – ‘essence’, ‘division’, ‘right’, ‘property’ – are here either subverted or transformed.100 The problem of property is especially intense in the shared possessive pronoun by which these ideal lovers are said to have each been ‘the other’s mine’ (36) – which is to say, the other’s self, property, source of wealth, even perhaps the other’s underminer: collapsing, exploding, giving access. In the poem’s allegory, ‘Reason’ is certainly undermined or ‘confounded’ (l. 41) by this attachment, which is nevertheless not a simple merger: Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same. Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called. (ll. 37–40) Editors tend to gloss this ‘self’ that ‘was not the same’ as a substantive – either an essential or a changing ‘self’.101 But the more dominant sense to an Elizabethan reader would have been a play on the adjectival use of ‘self’ in the sense of ‘same’: thus we would read ‘the self’ as grammatically parallel to ‘the same’, with an implicit substantive modified by both.102 In this reading, the line plays on the common word ‘selfsame’ and poses the paradox that for these ideal lovers, what was the self thing was not the same thing – that is, what was one in the sense of shared was not one in the sense of single. The two belong to each other, are thoroughly ‘compounded’ (l. 44), yet are still ‘Two distincts’ (28). The doubleness is just as important here as the oneness, else the


other ceases to present that all-important otherness. This mode of ‘self’ is not so much about change, then, as about exchange – hence property is appalled. When the next line’s mention of ‘nature’ and ‘name’ begins retrospectively to add the connotation of personal identity to this use of ‘the self’, it is immediately with an overriding awareness that the interpersonal dimension ideally resists distinct identity or separate selfhood.

Strategies of selves This radically interpersonal idiom is not confined to such idealized models of lovers’ exchange. As we began to see above, some of its clearest expressions occur in the very nonidealized context of Shakespeare’s Troylus and Cressida, a play especially preoccupied with the interpersonal politics of selfhood. It is articulated not only when Ulysses cites the theory of a dialogized, interpersonally derived selfhood, but also in Cressida’s more succinct formulation in the preceding scene – ‘I haue a kinde of selfe recides with you’. Another version of the transferred self, this figure is also a powerful statement of the process of objectification, and it joins many of the issues this chapter has been pursuing. In the context of the play’s other explorations of objectified selfhood, it helps to demonstrate that the Renaissance awareness of selves as objects also produces an awareness of selves as strategies. Cressida’s substantive use of ‘selfe’, like many of the examples in this chapter, has a spontaneous, improvised quality, and it arises in response to the uncomfortable situation she finds herself in. Having worked herself (most critics say intentionally) into a tight spot by alternately revealing and trying to be coy about her love for Troylus, she offers to leave in order to escape her own disturbing company. Troylus’s insistence that she cannot shun herself elicits the idea of a ‘kinde of selfe’ located not in herself, but in him. Yet she also immediately worries the idea, playing on the word kind: ‘But an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another’s fool.’ Thus Cressida uses the word ‘self’ in at least two different ways, both of which attempt to describe not so much herself per se as the nature of her relationship with Troylus. The first part of her statement describes her own sense of her existence in Troylus’s eyes, in his consciousness, so that for the moment she expresses the idea that she had better leave that self (i.e., that representation of herself) behind with him – unsullied, intact – rather than go on making her conflicted confessions. This objectified, detachable self is similar to what we saw in Henry the Fourth, where the selves


posited by both Henry and Hal were also objects – also resided with others – though neither called attention to it as a problem. And like those contextualized selves, Cressida’s entails change as well: at least, her sudden conceptual shift invokes such instability, as she goes on in the next line to posit the same self in subjective terms, as capable of both knowing and betraying her own interests. In part, the objectification involves grasping and sharing Troylus’s subjective perspective – his view and estimate of her – and this capacity generates both change and division within her ‘self’, as it can suddenly become ‘unkind’ as well as leave itself. But Cressida is not just talking about division here – she is explaining that her ‘self’ does not belong to her at all. The frank vulnerability of this objectified mode of selfhood is quickly evident. No sooner has she posited the idea of her ‘self’ and conceived of it as ‘residing’ with Troylus in this way, than she apparently regrets the idea, sees its risks, and adds these to the description, as if no longer sure that sharing his perspective has anything to do with controlling it. What Cressida gives voice to here is more than a passing riddle; it is consistent with the kind of awareness she manifests elsewhere in the play, perhaps most strikingly in her dense and difficult Act 1 soliloquy, in which she explains her strategy of ‘holding off’ with Troylus: Women are Angels, wooing, Things won are done – joyes soule lyes in the dooing: That she belou’d knowes nought that knowes not this; Men prize the thing vngain’d more then it is. That she was neuer yet, that euer knew Loue got so sweet, as when desire did sue: Therefore this maxime out of loue I teach; Atchieuement is command; vngain’d, beseech. That though my hearts Contents firme loue doth beare, Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appeare. (1.2.305–14, TLN 444–53) This is basically a disguise speech (not unlike Hal’s ‘I know you all’ soliloquy), in which Cressida lets us in on the reality behind a feigned behavior, creating a double view both of her subsequent actions and of the behavior we have just witnessed. And its language also plunges us into the present complexity of Cressida’s own awareness. This language is especially remarkable for the way that it encompasses the male perspective within the female, primarily by repeatedly dropping the nouns or pronouns that would differentiate the subjects of


various actions. For instance, the statement ‘Women are Angels, wooing’ has two subjects, the second of which is only implied: it may be paraphrased as ‘women are angels while men are wooing them’. (The suggestion that women may be doing the wooing is not to be dismissed, of course; but the speech’s obvious sense – under pressure because of its odd formulation – is a scenario in which women are the ‘things won’ and men do the ‘wooing’.) The same odd syntactical pattern occurs again in ‘That she was neuer yet, that euer knew / Loue got so sweet, as when desire did sue’, where getting love, desiring, and suing are all the actions belonging to the male, yet are expressed as if the speaker could just as readily be their subject as their object – indeed, as if being their object entailed grasping the perspective of their subject. The point of view in such lines keeps shifting, but no pronouns keep track of it for us: here, for instance, what women know is that ‘love got’ (by him) means a situation not nearly ‘so sweet’ (for her) as it was (for her) when (his) unsatisfied desire kept (him) suing (her). Similarly Cressida’s ‘maxime’ – ‘Atchieuement is command; vngain’d, beseech’ – identifies neither subjects nor objects, but implies both in alternating positions: if she is achieved, he can command; if she is ungained, he must beseech. The effect of this style is not mere compression; it also creates a sense of the speaker as inhabiting both perspectives. And the speech suggests not only that Cressida knows herself as an object, but also that this is typically what any woman (‘[t]hat she belou’d’) knows. A great deal of criticism has focused on the question of Cressida’s ‘kinde of selfe’, generally finding it inadequate. Gayle Greene, for instance, sees Cressida’s character as representing ‘several principles we have come to understand as crucial to women’s psychology – the tendency of a woman to define herself in “relational” capacities, to derive self-esteem from the esteem of others, and to “objectify” herself’.103 But for Greene, as for many subsequent commentators, this typically feminine selfhood makes Cressida ‘a character that lacks integrity or autonomy’ (136).104 Along the same lines, even critics challenging essentialist conceptions of selfhood can still apply individualist measures of selfhood to Cressida: Alan Sinfield exonerates Cressida’s sins on the grounds that she ‘is hardly allowed to exist as an independent person’.105 In the face of this perceived inadequacy and their own persistent disapproval, critics often resort to the idea that Cressida’s characterization is not intended by Shakespeare to be realistic,106 but only to show in a schematic way the effects of patriarchal oppression. Thus she has been seen as a ‘character who is


no character’, and a figure who ‘alternately engag[es] us in the hallucinations of representation and reveal[s] herself as a trick of signs’.107 Either way, there is no ‘real’ self here, ‘only’ – as critics keep glossing Cressida’s crucial line – ‘a kind of self’.108 I will return to the question of how we judge Cressida’s ‘character’ in Chapter 4, but here I want to emphasize that although this objectified, relational awareness is extreme in her, it is not inconsistent with the representation of selfhood throughout the play, nor in most of the uses of ‘self’ discussed in this chapter. In addition to the explicit theory of context-dependent identity that Ulysses quotes, the play everywhere explores male characters’ interactive negotiations and strategies of selfhood. Especially telling are the scenes in which enemies meet, where the characters tend to engage in a kind of ritual posturing and mutual praise in the face of their recognized hostility.109 One common element in these moments involves the recognition of oneself as different in different contexts. When Aeneas and Diomedes meet, each expresses his acute awareness of his own ambiguous relationship to his ‘noble’ enemy, and his own resulting mutability and role-playing: AENEAS: Health to you valiant sir, During all question of the gentle truce: But when I meete you arm’d, as blacke defiance As heart can thinke, or courage execute. DIOMEDES: The one and other Diomed embraces, Our blouds are now in calme; and so long health. But when contention, and occasion meetes, By Jove Ile play the hunter for thy life, With all my force, pursuite, and pollicy. (4.1.8–16, TLN 2183–91) Such moments foreground the contextualized self – in the OED’s terms, ‘what one is at a particular time or in a particular aspect or relation’. And they emphasize the contradictory process by which the warrior’s identity is constructed in relation to an other – ‘We simpathize’, ‘We know each other well’ – whom he nevertheless aims to destroy: ‘and long to know each other worse’ (4.1.23, 28–9; TLN 2198, 2203–4). Similarly, when Agamemnon greets Hector in 4.5, his self-objectification is again accompanied by an underlying theme of mutability. This time, the point is even more clearly the construction (or ‘straining’) of


a particularly desired self-image out of the flux that is the contextualized self: Worthy of Armes: as welcome as to one That would be rid of such an enemie. But that’s no welcome: vnderstand more cleere What’s past, and what’s to come, is strew’d with huskes And formelesse ruine of obliuion; But in this extant moment, faith and troth, Strain’d purely from all hollow bias drawing: Bids thee with most diuine integritie, From heart of very heart, great Hector welcome. (4.5.163–71, TLN 2730–38) The clarity, purity, and ‘diuine integritie’ Agamemnon is after as one fixable ‘extant moment’ in his relationship to Hector can only be plucked from the complexity of that ongoing relationship and its contexts. That troublesome complexity seems in this play to be the result of an interesting involvement with and investment in the other, in which it becomes impossible simply to define oneself in opposition to one’s enemy. The result is thematized most strikingly in the aborted contest between Hector and Ajax, in which the constitutive role of otherness in selfhood is imaged in Aeneas’s description of the relationship of the two warriors: ‘This Ajax is halfe made of Hectors bloud; / In loue whereof, halfe Hector staies at home: / Halfe heart, halfe hand, halfe Hector, comes to seeke / This blended Knight, halfe Troian, and halfe Greeke’ (4.5.88–91, TLN 2644–7). Again the play’s language figures the imbrication of self and other, as well as the self’s specific contingency. But of course, Ajax’s ‘commixion’, as Hector calls it (132, TLN 2688), has also been treated comically when Cressida’s man described him at the beginning of the play as having ‘rob’d many beasts of their particular additions’, and as one into whom nature hath so crowded humors that his valour is crusht into folly, his folly sauced with discretion: there is no man hath a vertue, that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint, but he carries some staine of it. ... hee hath the joynts of euery thing, but euery thing so out of joynt, that hee is a gowtie Briareus, many hands and no vse: or purblinded Argus, all eyes and no sight. (1.2.25–33, TLN 180–8)


This blindly imitative selfhood, which absorbs without acknowledging otherness, is crucial to the tone and the trajectory of the play. It produces the ugly comedy of Ajax’s scenes with Thersites, in which first Thersites, raging, is oblivious of Ajax (2.1), and later Ajax, ‘prophetically proud’ and ruminating about his upcoming combat with Hector, is oblivious of Thersites and ‘professes not answering’ (3.3.248, 267, TLN 2124–5). Such oblivious engagement with the other resembles the kind of self-aggrandizement through others (who are yet maintained as enemies) that Hector, Agamemnon, and all the other great warriors display in their pompous meetings. In one way or another, Cressida’s objectified, interpersonal ‘kinde of selfe’ applies to all the characters in this play; she is just the only one who acknowledges it. The politics of male identity here push toward a stance of pure subjectivity – the only stance that can pretend to be non-contingent and thus ‘constant’. The play’s main representative of this strategy of subjective authority is Troylus, self-proclaimed as ‘truths authenticke author’ (3.2.187). In contrast to Cressida, Troylus is often at pains to assert his own singleness or ‘simplicity’, and he functions on the basis of the deliberate singleness of his thinking. He never volunteers to identify with Cressida’s view of him. If forced to consider her view (for instance, to wonder ‘what too curious dreg espies my sweete Lady in the fountaine of our loue?’) he rejects it (‘Are there such? such are not we’) and portrays himself as he wishes to be seen: ‘I am as true, as truths simplicitie, / And simpler then the infancie of truth’ (3.2. 70–1, 96–7, 174–5; TLN 1696–7, 1720–1, 1801–2). Troylus’s speeches are, of course, ironically (even comically) complex for a character claiming to be so simply true. (It is primarily when asserting this simplicity that Troylus has the most to say to Cressida, speaking at least ten lines to each one of hers, unintentionally highlighting his own long-windedness.) And in fact, his actions and statements are far less consistent than Cressida’s. But his rhetorical assertions tend to go unchallenged, as do most of the characters’ constant appeals to chivalry, which all posit that ideal primarily as a quality of being true, of staying the same in the face of a changing context. As I will argue in Chapter 4, the men in the play are everywhere revealed to be only fictionally ‘constant’, and the play’s satire is ultimately directed not at Cressida, but at the pretensions of subjective authority. Critics who locate inconstancy only in Cressida are buying into the fiction that these male characters promote about themselves, a fiction most powerfully belied in the emblematic image of the corrupt carcass that Hector discovers at the end of the play underneath a resplendent chivalric armor.


The various ‘kinds of self’ that characters assume in the play are thus revealed as strategies rather than as forms of what we would call ‘character’ or ‘personality’. Selfhood here is understood not as an ‘individual’ internal state at all, but as a more or less deliberate form of representation engaging with and responding to specific social contexts. The play’s underlying conception of ‘self’ still recognizes it as a relational term – there is no ‘self’ without the context from which the word distinguishes what it describes. Such selves are intrinsically part of a social matrix, whether they choose to represent themselves that way or not. Indeed, the play suggests not only that there is no selfhood apart from otherness, but also that there is no selfhood apart from the process of representation, linguistic or otherwise. The recognition of a ‘self’ as a strategic representation is implicit in most of the early substantive uses of the word discussed in this chapter. Despite the variety of these instances, they tend to share an underlying idea of a ‘self’ not as a static essence but as a construct more or less successfully deployed in interaction. Perhaps the newness of this substantive usage alerts speakers and writers to this representational act, whereas having an established referent for the term, as we do, encourages us to think of it as an entity that exists prior to the use of the word. That is, once the word is established, the ‘substance’ it refers to may seem less questionable, and its ownership far more secure, than it did when such uses were new.

2 Persons in Play: Donne’s Body and the Humoral Actor

Our whole life is like a Play: wherein every man, forgetfull of himselfe, is in travaile with expression of another. – JONSON, Discoveries Men are sponges, which to pour out, receive. – DONNE, Verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton1

Absorptions This chapter explores the underlying link between the dialogically performative selfhood of Jonson’s theatrum mundi image – a self shaped ‘in travaile with’ something beyond itself – and Donne’s idea of an utterly penetrable self – a self that initiates nothing without first receiving. My ultimate focus here will be on Donne’s religious prose and poetry, but since I will argue that much of that writing has an actorly aspect, this chapter will examine it in the light of the prevalent Renaissance notion of an actor’s transforming engagement with his context. Playing in this sense is different from the familiar terms with which we often think of an ‘act’ as something phony. Rather, like Donne’s image of the self as a sponge, it is more a matter of absorption. What connects both of these conceptions is the language of humoralism – a language with which Donne and Jonson were themselves very much ‘in travaile’, though in different ways. As we began to see in the previous chapter, humoral discourse participates in the complexly shifting linguistic conventions of selfhood in the seventeenth century. Now I want to look in more detail at the interpersonal significance of this discourse and to analyze closely the ways in which Donne, Shakespeare, and Jonson wrestle with its 56

Persons in Play: Donne’s Body and the Humoral Actor 57

implications for selfhood. Thus the focus of this chapter is primarily on the body, or more precisely on the psychophysiology that was humoral theory, and the ways it renders selfhood an interpersonal phenomenon. The humoral subject is also necessarily an object, and its inherent objectification implicates this subject in a wider frame of reference than that of individual subjective experience. But even within subjective experience, the humoral body is socially inflected, as the medium of psychological impact and influence as well. The humoral actor – as Shakespeare’s Hamlet also attests – neither simply ‘puts on’ a role nor finds it ‘within’, but rather, absorbs it. In the texts this chapter examines, the ‘humorous’ persona represents a variety of social and ontological problems involving the self’s absorption both of and with its contexts – physical, social, and spiritual. While the recent surge of critical interest in Renaissance physiology has done much to expound humoralism’s implications for selfhood, that significance has been less well explored within Donne scholarship. To be sure, readers of Donne often grapple with his urgent fixation on the body – his habit of expressing even abstract or spiritual ideas in physiological terms. In sermons, for instance, he speaks of the soul as having blood and bones, of the ‘bowells’ of the spirit, and of sin as a whole organic bodily system. He also explicitly contends that soul and body are one, and that ‘all that the soule does, it does in, and with, and by the body.’2 But while scholars account for this striking materialism in various ways, they tend to agree that Donne’s emphatic physicality represents a form of self-absorption or ‘egotism’.3 John Carey, for instance, sees the aim of Donne’s physical imagery as a self-assertive ‘intensity’ – an effort to make ‘his inner self ... sound concentrated and vehement’.4 Similarly, Elaine Scarry argues that Donne is after the materiality of language – its capacity ‘to mime, and perhaps eventually to acquire, the actual weight of what it describes’ – because he wants to ‘carry language into the body’ and thereby make that body ‘volitional’ and ‘noncontingent’. Again, the idea is that Donne’s focus on the body is all about self-will, power, autonomy.5 Such arguments share the increasingly common view of Donne’s ‘individualism’ and align his work with what is still often seen as the Renaissance movement toward a more inward and autonomous selfhood.6 But these arguments ignore the fact that Donne’s materialist conception of the soul is – explicitly and knowledgeably – a humoral one. As such, it is often at odds with the model of individual selfhood implied in these discussions. As Gail Kern Paster explains, ‘the porous and volatile humoral body, with its faulty borders and penetrable stuff,


interacts differently with the world than the “static, solid” modern bodily container’.7 This ‘ecological’ self, to use Paster’s term, is permeated by and embedded in its surround in ways that complicate the idea of a self’s agency or autonomy. Moreover, early modern writers not only live in the humoral body, they are also frequently fascinated by its implications for selfhood – particularly the ways it conflates self and world. Thomas Browne, for instance, writes that it makes men ‘Cannibals, devourers not onely of men, but of our selves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth; for all this masse of flesh that wee behold, came in at our mouths; this frame wee looke upon, hath beene upon our trenchers; In brief, we have devoured ourselves, and yet doe live and remayne our selves.’8 What Browne rehearses in deliberately paradoxical terms here is the basic humoral understanding of the body as ever remade by its physical context, which it takes in and converts to itself, both in the digestion of food and the assimilation of air and climate. In Robert Burton’s terms, ‘Such is the air, such be our spirits; and as our spirits, such be our humours.’9 In this model, what is outside the self not only influences but becomes self, and the question remains open, as in Browne’s image, whether the self is eater or eaten. Humoral theory’s central principle of assimilation presents a powerful paradigm for the social dimensions of selfhood. As a model of influence and absorption, it suggests a self not only permeated but changed, reconstituted, by what had been outside the self. The idea is perhaps clearest in the way humoral theory conceives of disease process in relation to the self: illness is understood as a humoral imbalance, and while this imbalance comes about through external influence, the disease is not seen as a foreign presence within the body, but as a condition of what has become the body itself.10 As Nancy Siraisi notes, in diagnosing and treating, for instance, an upper respiratory infection, patients and doctors ‘certainly did not think in terms of an underlying invasive entity with specific, determinate, and persisting identity’.11 In other words, the model does not resemble modern germ theory. Nor does it posit an immune system that works by distinguishing what does and does not belong to the self. Humoralism does little to describe or explain how the body resists the external world. Indeed, the language of many treatises emphasizes a lack of resistance – as when Levinus Lemnius describes man’s body as not only permeable by natural spirits and then inspired and moved with a divine spirit, but also subject to ‘externall spirites recoursyng into hys bodye and mynde’, both good and bad messenger angels that ‘slyly and secretly glyde into the body of man’.12 As this passage also reflects, humoral theory posits no Cartesian split


between mind and body, so that these susceptibilities and assimilations are psychological as well as physical.13 Donne’s emphasis on this body, then, does not evoke the selfcontained, independent self that modern conceptions of the body can suggest. In fact, with his constant focus on disease and digestion, Donne insists on a sense of selfhood that is never securely bounded, that even embraces its own penetration from without. His physical treatment of selfhood incorporates the self with the body and the body with the rest of the world. The result can best be compared to the Bakhtinian grotesque – a physicality that resists the representation of discrete selves. Recent scholarship on early modern physiology has largely ceased invoking Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism because of its tendency to ‘displace’ the idea of the open, degraded body ‘onto lowerclass festivity’.14 But my interest here lies less in the idea of social inversion that critics have stressed in Bakhtin’s work than in its principle of social connection. Recognizing the social enmeshment of the Renaissance body, Bakhtin argues that ‘the material bodily principle in the work of Rabelais (and of the other writers of the Renaissance)’ combines ‘cosmic, social, and bodily elements’ in ‘an indivisible whole’, presenting the body ‘not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal. ... [T]his is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized’.15 In its inclusiveness, the grotesque body ‘is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context’.16 For Donne, the openness of the humoral body carries a similar imperative of social enmeshment, and it also gives him the crucial principles of digestion and assimilation with which to imagine and articulate the mutuality of the self’s engagement with God. Donne’s physical imagery is clearly grotesque rather than what Bakhtin calls ‘classic’ (30). As Carey notes, readers have often been disappointed by the way that Donne’s poetry is not about beauty, but about sensation. It is often not a very visual imagery, but tactile and experiential, particularly in the way it seeks to draw the reader into the physical experience of what it describes – as Carey puts it, ‘to haul our bodies into [its] descriptive activities’ (142). In his frequent recourse to images of anatomy, for instance, Donne’s tendency is to open the body up, to make it available and not private. Everywhere he portrays the body in extremity, particularly in his own or his lovers’ fevers – that is, the body as it has been penetrated and altered from without. His physical imagery is often degrading in Bakhtin’s regenerative sense: in sermons and sonnets such as ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’,


images of physical penetration and humiliation shatter the body in the interest of renewal or salvation. In the love poems and verse letters, nakedness, promiscuity, and all manner of interpersonal exchanges produce interpenetrated or (in Donne’s coinage) ‘interinanimated’ selves.17 In its own enlivening way, then, Donne’s intensely physical imagery brings grotesque realism into the realms of both love poetry and Christian doctrine. And in this way, his emphasis on the body is not a means of self-involvement or self-assertion, but a way of representing the self’s connection and even subjection to other bodies, souls, and persons – including the ‘persons’ of God. Not all Renaissance texts embrace this ‘ecological’ selfhood – this sense of the self’s embeddedness in a dynamic context – as readily as Donne’s often do. In Jonson, for example, the same phenomenology can produce instead a Stoic preoccupation with constancy and a condemnation of the ‘humorous’ character. Yet such resistance is not as much akin to a modern sense of individual agency as scholars have argued. It is true that, as Michael Schoenfeldt stresses, the body’s lability and porousness often generated a remedial regimen of self-monitoring and self-control, and many Galenic treatises aim at increasing their readers’ sense of autonomy and self-empowerment through greater knowledge and control of their own humoral makeup. In such treatises and in poetic representations of temperance and moderation, Schoenfeldt finds evidence that this kind of self-discipline ‘produced the parameters of individual subjectivity’.18 But to some extent, this finding is the result of a predominantly individual focus on Schoenfeldt’s part that often passes over the role of others, not just in such ‘acts of self-fashioning’ (11) but in the interplay of bodies and humors. Even when Renaissance writers resist or query the humoral model, their own discourse is necessarily inflected with the ways humoralism undermines or even precludes autonomy. As we will see in Jonson, humorousness keeps seeping back into the representation of the social as well as the individual body, as a basic if lamentable aspect of persons and their actions. In arguing that Galenism constitutes a ‘brilliantly supple discourse of selfhood and agency’ (11), Schoenfeldt often underplays the extent to which that agency is located outside the self. His intrapsychic focus reflects the same premise noted above in Donne scholarship – that the physical is the individual – as opposed to the Bakhtinian premise that for Renaissance writers, the physical is still very much the social. The former premise makes it easier to interpret references to the humoral body as resisting rather than acknowledging its proclivity for change and penetration. In contrast, my aim here is to


recover the ways humoralism can render selves interpersonally exposed and engaged. To do that, it is important to look not just at the subjective experience of the individual humoral body, but also at the ways it ties the self to its social world. Humoral theory can take full account of the influence of social environments as well as physical. The profoundly non-dualist connection it posits between body and soul means that the body can be affected through the psyche, and vice versa.19 And because the environment is ‘construed holistically to include both the physical world and the sociocultural context’, the cures as well as causes of illness can be social.20 Lemnius, for instance, argues that ‘no man is to thincke or perswede himselfe, that an ill nature may not be altered’; and so for one ‘of nature’ given to symptoms of melancholy, he recommends ‘to frequent dancing, singing, womens flatteryes, allurements and embracings’ (though only, as he hastily adds, ‘in honestye and ... within the bounds of lawfull Wedlocke’) (sig.6v). This social treatment recognizes an outside-in shaping of ‘nature’ and temperament. Similarly, as Paster acutely points out, Burton’s treatment of virgins’ melancholy locates a ‘subtending social cause of this illness’ in ‘the patriarchal enforcement of women’s sexual obedience and its repressive consequences’ (Paster 97). In this way, despite the implicit essentialism in some aspects of humoral theory, it also suggests a field-based, contingent identity. Of course, as Paster notes, in practice humoralist treatises generally aim at reinforcing rather than challenging social norms and hierarchies, especially those of gender (125).21 But as a model for selfhood, it is often the humoral body’s powerful context-dependency that interests early modern writers, and that they draw on both literally and figuratively to capture the relational foundations of self-experience and behavior.

‘Humorous’ acts The key factor in this social ecology of the self is the way that humoralism makes it a legible object, to itself and others – in a sense, rendering the self always already interpersonal. When Donne’s speaker calls himself ‘humorous’, he references an outward, behavioral manifestation as much as a subjective state of being. Indeed, since ‘humorous’ in part denotes a proclivity to change, using the adjective entails a subtle but crucial conceptual shift – from immediate subjective experience to an observed sense of self-difference over time. The awareness of change implies comparison: what one was a moment ago is no longer what one is, and in the comparison neither state remains immediate. In other


words, rather than experiencing one state of being, the self is reflecting on two. And while the humoral subject thus quickly becomes an object to itself, it is also readily an object to the world – and not just the superficial object that the modern body can be, but one that signals to the world what it is deeply. ‘Inwardness’ seems to be particularly visible to humoral observation: for instance, Lemnius’s description of the signs of perfect temperance takes the visibility of inwardness even more for granted than outward appearance: ‘not only in the inward mynd of man, do these ornamentes and giftes of nature appeare and expressely shew out themselues but euen in the outward shew, shape and behauyour of the body there is evidently descryed and perceyued a comly grace and portly dignitye’ (sigs.36r–v). The legibility of humors, their manifestation as visible signs, physical and behavioral, of inward subjective conditions, makes the self necessarily less private and hidden and creates an intimate connection between inward experience and outward show. In the simultaneity of this subjectivity and its objectification, the self becomes available to a shared reading, something known at once to self and others. In this way too the humoral self is penetrated by its world. The popular discourse of ‘humors’ is built on this interpersonal ontology. Drawing on both the essentialism and the contingency of the humoral person, it becomes a physiologically based language both of personal types and of interpersonal impact. Beyond the basic humoral categories of sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic, we begin to get ‘humors’ of greed, thrift, idleness, revenge, and so on, with the reference to both habitual and temporary frames of mind and behaviors. Based on the physiological idea that the extreme mutability of persons stems from their shifting humoral balance, the term ‘humorous’ takes on a rich array of meanings, signifying not only being changeable but also fanciful, lovesick, moody, odd or fantastic, untrustworthy, uncontrollable, etc.22 While often temporary, these states are not understood as superficial conditions, but represent a deeper, physical reality that is nonetheless witnessed by others. Indeed, popular usage frequently suggests the impact of a person’s ‘humor’ on others. Understood as a physical process, it signals the force of personal inclination – for instance, in a person or character with a ‘humor’ of jealousy. Such an identity is all the more potent because it is not an abstract interiority but represents the work of the body: appropriate or not, interpersonally, a ‘humor’ will not be easily resisted or ignored. This ineluctable quality is part of what Shakespeare parodies through the figure of Nym in Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor with his repeated references to the given ‘humor’ of a situation, thing, or person. Be it ever so temporary, there is always something inevitable and unyielding


about a ‘humor’ for Nym. His signature line, ‘that’s the humor of it’, becomes an all-purpose term for any legible condition about which nothing can be done. In this way, as Paster suggests, humor also becomes ‘a linguistic weapon’ for characters who deploy it ‘as a mode of competitive social practice’ (202). As such, the bodily humors can be ‘part of a self-interested claim to emotional privilege and peremptory interiority – a way of demanding the humoral right of way’ (197). In such interpersonal jockeying for position, it is both the physicality and the legibility of ‘humor’ that puts this interiority into play socially. So too in the careful observance of aristocratic ‘humor’ by social subordinates that Paster delineates.23 The discourse of humors has its own terms for this business of social accommodation – particularly the common idea of ‘feeding’ or ‘upholding’ someone’s humor (i.e., treating them in a way that addresses their temperament or current mood), which is a figurative development of the idea that one’s psychophysiology is changed or maintained by continual intervention from without. With its always partly physical reference, such language gives interpersonal relations the concrete form of actions. So Spenser’s Trompart strives to ‘uphold’ Braggadochio’s ‘ydle humour with fine flattery’, and Shakespeare’s Hal decides temporarily to ‘uphold / The unyoked humour’ of his tavern friends’ ‘idleness’.24 The social play and semiotics of humorality are of course particularly resonant in the theatre. The legibility of the humoral person opens the possibility of feigning – i.e., observable traits also become playable traits. Yet here too the underlying physiology remains important, and the performative dimensions of the humoral object are more than ‘put on’. In Henry V, for instance, while Nym can read the ‘humors’ of situations, Henry can also deliberately play them. And we can see some of what that process entails when he coaches his men at Harfleur to do the same: In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger, Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect, ............................... Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit To his full height.25


Implicit throughout this exhortation is a deeply physical conception of acting. Of course, part of what is at stake here is the contrast between Henry, who knows how to play this hot and rageful temperament when circumstances demand it, and his former rival Hotspur, who could only be choleric. Henry’s capacity for behavioral range and control seems to comment on the more determined sense of ‘humors’ represented by Hotspur’s actions and Nym’s discourse.26 And yet, if Shakespeare is satirizing the typical humors character and suggesting in Henry the possibility of a more self-determined mode of identity, it is important to recognize that the strategy behind it still relies on a humoral reciprocity of mind and body. For clearly it is not just a superficial act that will win a battle, but the physical state that that act produces: Henry’s speech is not meant to give his men a sense of how to fake a condition, but to give them a physical recipe for creating it. This mimetic theory is an important part of humoral medicine, which credits the same outside-in process of behavioral change. Here to ‘imitate’ is to become; to ‘disguise’ is to truly change. The actor-soldier learns to remake himself in the moment of his action by manipulating his own ‘spirit’. And it is that transformed substance which he then, according to Henry’s final charge, should ‘follow’ (3.1.33). Because of its humoral basis, the acting process that Shakespeare cites here does not necessarily involve the disjunction between inner and outer realms that we often assume today in discussing ‘theatrical’ selfhood. It may grant the actor a high degree of control, but that does not entail our usual dichotomy of public and private selves.27 In this kind of self-fashioning, the effect is not a hidden, inner self but a linear process of transformation – i.e., the self is not split, but changed, both inside and out. Joseph Roach explains that ‘the rhetorical theory on which seventeenth-century discussions of acting were based rested not on a foundation of dramaturgy, but on an understanding of how the passions operate on the human body, specifically on the body of one who is actively transforming himself, “fashion[ing] all his active spirits,” into some shape he has imagined’.28 The psychophysiology of acting must to some extent qualify our sense of what Katharine Eisaman Maus calls ‘the frank fakeries of the playhouse’, which she says ‘stand for the opacities that seem to characterize all the relations of human beings to one another’.29 Certainly Maus is right that the problem of knowing others preoccupies early modern writers, but so does the humorally based, outside-in shaping of identity, which leaves the actor (both on and off the stage) less discrete and self-contained, and more open to the interpersonal environment through the process of his action.30 Within such


a phenomenology of literally fashion-able spirit, the humoral actor embodies not the dichotomy of public and private selves but the process of becoming who one is at a given moment through the simultaneously physical and social manifestations of a signifying body. Even Hamlet – regularly understood as the herald of a new, modern sense of discrete interiority – is deeply concerned with this concretely interpersonal process of acting. As I suggested in the Introduction, Hamlet’s Act 1 claim to ‘have that within which passeth show’ is not the statement of dichotomous selfhood that it is frequently taken to be, but an interpersonal assertion of his own affective state: ‘ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak ... That can denote me truly’ (1.2.77, 83). In other words, this outward show has a deep and powerful source. In Paster’s terms, we could say Hamlet is here claiming ‘the humoral right of way’ (197) – publicly asserting the validity of his melancholy humor. It has become a critical commonplace to cite this passage as a statement of ‘the absolute, unbridgeable gap between internal reality and its external manifestations’.31 But while Hamlet’s speech does raise the possibility of such a gap, I would argue that the idea has been overemphasized at the expense of what else is going on in the speech interpersonally – particularly the way that Hamlet is deploying the visceral truth of his passion here, not positioning it as hidden or inaccessible.32 At the same time, his recognition that his own humoral condition also represents ‘actions that a man might play’ suggests a problem not just of personal but of interpersonal knowledge and casts it in the theatrical terms that will preoccupy him and us throughout the play. At this point, Hamlet’s deployment of inwardness merely opposes Claudius and Gertrude’s efforts to reconcile him to the court; later, his role of revenger will require an ‘act’ of concealment, and it is then that Hamlet becomes fascinated by the Player’s self-transforming skills. As it progresses, the play’s representation of acting becomes increasingly complex. In particular, the ‘antic disposition’ that Hamlet initially suggests he may put on (1.5.173) unfolds as a conflation of, rather than distinction between, inner and outer phenomena, and his ‘act’ seems less like pretending and more like Henry V’s process of becoming. In the end, rather than finding it impossible to reveal what is ‘within’, the play suggests that it is impossible not to do so – that action entails that level of engagement. Analyzing several competing theories of self in play in Hamlet, Mary Thomas Crane traces a shift in Hamlet’s thinking about the soul, in which a tendency to speak of ‘inner cognitive process’ is ‘replaced in part by an obsession with digestive process, in part by a new acceptance of his own role as “instrument” in the larger plot’.33 The humoral language


of digestion is, in fact, related to that ‘instrumental’ sense of self. The point of both is the self’s engagement with its social context, both taking in and ‘digesting’ context, and being so digested, or used, itself. Such language emblematizes Hamlet’s absorption of and by the world. And a key step in the development of this conception is Hamlet’s reaction to watching the acting process of the Player in Act 2. Here he is amazed that the Player, spontaneously performing a speech, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit. (2.2.530–4, my emphasis) Reflecting a fascination with the connection between the ‘soul’ and the outward, physical ‘forms’ of passion (in visage, tears, aspect, and voice), Hamlet’s language here also suggests that the causal direction of that connection is complex. The Player ‘forces’ his soul, but it is ‘her working’ that produces the outward physical effects. In this conception, the soul is an intermediary in the process between inward thought and outward action. And yet the ‘conceit’ was not the Player’s in the first place – he is clearly, as Jonson would have it, ‘in travaile with expression of another’, which is also what so impresses Hamlet: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?’ (536–7). Hamlet’s advice to the Players in Act 3 similarly involves both inward and outward directionality, as he coaches them to ‘use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness’ (3.2.5–7). Acquire and beget – the process involves both absorption and expression, almost a kind of copulation of passion with ‘forms’, in which the actor is impregnated with and also fathers his action.34 This two-way, give-and-take conception of the acting process (reflected again in Hamlet’s chiasmic phrasing – ‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action’ [3.2.16–17]) corresponds to Hamlet’s own functioning, for his role as the court’s malcontent is both actual and assumed – his real position and also what he plays.35 Yet the nature of that role means that he needs to resist any social give and take – that is, he needs to know without being known. Although he urges others to be open with him (‘be even and direct with me’, he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and ‘If you love me, hold not off’ [2.2.279, 282]), he must


strenuously resist their penetration of him.36 Interpersonal constraint is an overriding issue in the play – for instance, in Polonius’s Act 1 advice to Laertes to ‘Give thy thoughts no tongue’, ‘Give ... few thy voice’, and ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ (1.3.59–75), as well as his charge to Ophelia to withhold herself from Hamlet (1.3.132–5). Constraint is even more concretely manifest in the next scene, in the efforts of Horatio and Marcellus to hold Hamlet back from following the Ghost (‘do not go with it’; ‘Be ruled. You shall not go’ [1.4.43, 58]). And though Hamlet breaks this constraint, the result is an even greater one, which he must impose on the others as well as himself – ‘never to speak of this that you have seen’ (1.5.155). Such injunctions are in tension with an equally urgent demand for speech in the first half of the play (the word ‘speak’ occurs fifteen times in the first scene alone). As David Hillman points out, the play puts great emphasis on the need to know what is ‘within’ others.37 But the absence of frank exchange creates an increasingly paranoid atmosphere in which Hamlet finds that ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (2.2.239). Indeed, the tension between images of poison and prison restricts interpersonal options to a choice between being violated by the other and being confined to oneself. Thus if we tend to find, looking for what Hamlet has ‘within’, that there is ‘nothing’ there,38 it is because he lacks engagement. In the role of revenger, he has to hold back with others and to try to penetrate without being penetrated – without letting anything in. But if acting is a give-and-take process, Hamlet’s interpersonal constraint makes that difficult. And if, as Donne’s verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton claims, ‘[m]en are sponges, which to pour out, receive’, Hamlet can do neither. At least, not on purpose. But while his ‘antic’ strategy is meant to fool the court – to create a discrepancy between his actual intentions and feelings and the way they are perceived and understood – he is not, in fact, always able to do that. At times Hamlet seems to use real passions as if they were a façade, so that his ‘act’ assumes much of his true condition, and his condition is tainted by the performance. When he tells Ophelia, for instance, that her (or all women’s) behavior ‘hath made me mad’, it seems both an act and a true statement – true in regard to his mother’s behavior, though possibly only feigned in regard to Ophelia herself. His behavior with Laertes in the graveyard scene appears mad to Claudius and Gertrude, and though we may wonder whether he is still feigning, he later confesses to Horatio that it was a reaction to Laertes’s passion: ‘the bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow’ring passion’ (5.2.80–1). And his encounter with his mother in 3.4 produces an


unfeigned agitation that seems to Gertrude of a piece with his ‘distemper’ and ‘ecstasy’ on seeing the Ghost (3.4.114, 128). Even in staging The Mousetrap, Hamlet’s efforts to know without being known are compromised. Though his purpose is to show something resembling Claudius’s crime, the play Hamlet has chosen actually carries an ambiguous message. Convinced that the ‘show’ he has staged for himself – Claudius’s reaction to the play – has convincingly revealed Claudius’s guilt, Hamlet seems not to realize that in the course of it, he has revealed himself as well. For in the process of continually interjecting his own interpretations and commentary during the play’s enactment, he calls the murderer not the brother but the ‘nephew to the King’, which is, of course, his own relationship to Claudius (3.2.223).39 He also bids him dispatch, as ‘the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge’ – a term that represents not Claudius’s motive for killing King Hamlet, but Hamlet’s motive for killing Claudius (3.2.232, my emphasis). In this light, Claudius could construe the whole staging of the play as a threat from Hamlet, and his reaction could be anger and alarm as much as the guilt that Hamlet imputes. Unintentionally, then, Hamlet’s secreted inner identity bleeds into the play, and the staging process – despite his urgent need to have it otherwise – enmeshes his actual inner experience with its interpersonal context. In Hamlet, then, acting (in both senses) is an ineluctably dialogized process that exposes rather than hides and also alters the self through its engagement with others. Because of his situation, Hamlet often has to resist that process himself, and earlier scenes show ambivalence about such a contingent selfhood. Just prior to the Mousetrap episode, Hamlet expresses an affinity for what he sees as Horatio’s imperviousness to the world and to his own ‘passion’. In Hamlet’s humoral understanding of it, Horatio’s ‘blood and judgement are so well commingled’ that he remains ‘as one in suff’ring all that suffers nothing’ (3.2.62, 59). (Yet at the same time that Hamlet lauds this sanguine independence, he acknowledges that his own soul has ‘sealed [Horatio] for herself’ and speaks of wearing him ‘in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’ [3.2.58, 65–6].) And while he here admires Horatio’s seeming stability, he has also wanted to be more like the passionate Player – able to enter into the part scripted for him and change with it. Thus it makes sense that he adopts, as Crane argues, an outside-in view of selfhood later, when he tells his mother that to ‘put on’ the appearance or ‘livery’ of virtue can eventually make one virtuous in fact, since ‘use can almost change the stamp of nature’ (3.4.151.4–8). Almost. There is still some reluctance here to acknowledge


the salutary effects of custom, which he otherwise sees as a ‘monster’ (3.4.151.1). Only in the final scene does he fully embrace a contingent view of selfhood as inhering nowhere but in ‘the readiness’ for encounter (5.2.160). The improvisational self that Hamlet ends up with – a self not empty but shaped by interpersonal encounter – is what Jonson brings out in his comparison of selfhood with the acting process, wherein every man, forgetfull of himselfe, is in travaile with expression of another. Nay, wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves: like Children, that imitate the vices of Stammerers so long, till at last they become such; and make the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten.40 The insistent imitation of others is, here at least, something that Jonson accepts, though the passage carries a negative inflection in the example of imitating ‘vices’. Simultaneously expressing a strikingly non-essentialist view of selfhood and seeming to lament it, Jonson acknowledges that our ‘nature’ is remade – inevitably, it would seem – through our necessary absorption of and with the discourse of others.41 The image of imitation as ‘travaile’ emphasizes the physicality as well as the arduousness of the process, and again brings in a strong sense of identity as a double process of impregnation and giving birth. It also peripherally suggests the idea of travel, i.e., of a linear movement of self to a new place, which fits Jonson’s understanding of the permanence of a change ‘never forgotten’. In this transformative acting process, the ‘selves’ we were are remade by imitation rather than just temporarily masked. Yet, in his next paragraph Jonson claims a few rare exceptions to the selfforgetfulness of this perpetually performative selfhood, which he seems to find so compromising: ‘For though there must be Players, some must be Spectators’, and these are ‘plac’d high on the top of all vertue’, where they look down on ‘the Stage of the world’ and judge ‘the Play of Fortune’ (ll. 1106–9). These good men (Jonson lists Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham), aloof from contamination though condemned as mad by a mad world, seem to retain an independent identity that Jonson claims is exemplary. And yet, admittedly, not dramatic – not in the play but only watching it. Lawrence Danson argues that, in his plays, Jonson’s more autonomous figures prove to be severely limited as dramatic characters: ‘The good man stays aloof, unmoved, but by that token he is dramatically void.’42 Jonson’s poetry, as we saw in the last chapter, lauds a ‘gathered self’, ostensibly to its own self true (or at least ‘the same’), though


it can also reveal the social embeddedness of that ‘gathered’ identity.43 Thomas Greene argues that Jonson’s ideal of an orderly autonomous self in harmony with its context could really only work in his masques: ‘The facile affirmations of the masques are intended for spectacle rather than drama, but in the verse (as in the drama) the effort to close the circle is restored to the bitter clash of the historical world.’44 To be dramatic is to be historically (i.e., socially) engaged and thereby compromised. Jonson stages the tension between these two models of selfhood most fully via humoralism. In Every Man Out of His Humor, the humoral body serves both as a topic of satire in the representation of the social phenomenology of ‘humorous’ characters and as a structural paradigm for social interaction. Here, Jonson figures the mimetic impulse as a kind of absorption – a sponginess that his playwright-figure Asper proposes to ‘scourge’ through his play: my strict hand Was made to ceaze on vice, and with a gripe Squeeze out the humour of such spongie natures As licke vp euery idle vanitie.45 This vice of humorousness is not the only one that annoys Asper. He also expresses irritation at the misuse of the word ‘humor’, which he says really means ‘fluxure, and humiditie, / As wanting power to containe it selfe’ and is applied ‘by Metaphore’ to the human disposition (Induction, ll. 96–7, 103). But that legitimate meaning of ‘humor’ has been overtaken by a process of affectation: ‘But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather, / The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe, ... should affect a Humour! / O, ’tis more then most ridiculous’ (Induction, ll. 110–114). Affecting a humor as a claim to social distinction makes these ‘rookes’ humorous in Asper’s sense – i.e., too fluid and incontinent. Such characters are soaking up fashionable identities at the same time that they are competing for social prominence. Again we see the connection of humorousness with the imitative absorption of others. Yet interestingly, the ‘corrective’ process here is itself both performative and humoral: Asper’s cure (not unlike Hamlet’s) is to stage a play that he suggests will act as a purge – a ‘phisicke of the mind’ (Induction 132). Asper has been seen by some as a Spectator, one of Jonson’s ‘unmoved mover’ figures,46 yet his superior attitude in the Induction is compromised by his agitation, which Jonson highlights in his railing and in moments of distraction: ‘O, I crave pardon, I had lost my thoughts’; ‘But stay. I lose myself’ (Induction 87, 209). His own display is ‘humour’ too,


at least in his interlocutor’s view – Mitis identifies it as a ‘peremptory’ humor (Induction 73) and also urges him to ‘Contain your spirit in more stricter bounds / And be not thus transported with the violence / Of your strong thoughts’ (Induction 46–8). In fact, the putatively impromptu opening scene is quite dramatic, partly because it engages (i.e., objectifies) the audience through the playwright Asper’s direct comments on them. Staging his own relationship to the audience here, Jonson does just what Asper says his own play will do – ‘oppose a mirror’ to the audience – through these teasingly fictionalized judgments of it (Induction 118). Of course, this is partly a strategy whereby a figure such as Asper resists becoming an object himself. Yet Jonson makes him an object by setting him among friends who comment on his own behavior. Moreover, he has him enter the play as an actor, taking the part of the central character and engine of its reform, Macilente. And in keeping with the idea of acting-as-transformation, Jonson’s construction of the epilogue presents us with a kind of merged Macilente/Asper: ‘Well, gentlemen, I should have gone in, and return’d to you as I was Asper at the first; but by reason the shift would have been somewhat long, and we are loth to draw your patience farther, we’ll intreat you to imagine it’ (5.11.75–9). As with Viola at the end of Twelfth Night, the return to a previous outward identity is suspended, leaving a more complex stage picture. ‘Macilente’ continues in Asper’s voice, telling us that his humor too has been purged, so that he is ‘nothing so peremptorie as I was in the beginning’ (5.11.81–2), and thus including himself in the play’s general process of correction.47 Even in his seemingly aloof ‘Spectator’ figure, then, Jonson grapples with the significance of ‘humor’, working out the implications of the humoral social body, as it were, which apparently includes the playwright. As a result, the direction of the play’s satire is complex. As Jonathan Haynes argues, humors comedy tends to pit selves against each other in their assertions of individualizing humor.48 Yet it is important to keep in mind that such individuation belongs not to a model of truly independent selfhood, but to a thoroughly contextualized mode – an effort by the self to appear singular or eccentric to others. It is at such nonindependent individuation that Jonson’s satire takes aim. In Greene’s classic account of Jonson’s attraction to the ‘inner moral equilibrium’ of the ‘centered self’, it is those who fail to orient themselves toward their own center or ‘home’ that Jonson is most contemptuous of – especially the ‘humorists’ whose consuming effort is their social appearance. For Jonson, the theatricality of such characters poses not so much an epistemological problem (of some hidden, inner selfhood) as a social problem


of hierarchically unstable self-fashioning types. Macilente (like Asper) opposes this fluid social selfhood, preferring a Stoic model – an insistent immutability and self-mastery in the face of an inevitably changing social context. His dryness seems to make him the one nonhumors character in Asper’s play, not subject to the fluidity that Asper wants to ‘scourge’. And yet this status doesn’t last – in fact, he becomes very much absorbed with others. His own ‘humor’ of Envy orients him toward others, and his function of ‘dishumoring’ those others involves him in a sort of structurally humoral process. His vexed social role – outsider status, hunger for position and recognition, malice toward others – renders him unhappily but thoroughly dependent. The only cure for this problem is social: although control is clearly desirable, the Stoic model won’t work here, as Macilente himself complains: but, Stoique, where (in the vast worlde) Doth that man breathe, that can so much command His bloud and his affection? (1.1.2–4) Self-administered cures aren’t working either: I striue in vaine to cure my wounded soule; For every cordiall that my thoughts apply Turnes to a [corrosive], and doth eate it farder. (1.1.5–7) Macilente claims he is not cynical about the possibility of happiness (i.e., he is not inclined to give up and see ‘beggery’ as ‘the onely happinesse’); but he is also not capable of turning inward as a solution, like ‘patient fooles’ whose recourse is ‘To sing: My minde to me a kingdome is’ (1.1.11–14). Thus even Macilente, whose rhetoric is all opposed to the idea of admitting external influence, cannot help turning to ‘the worlde’ for remedy, even though doing so drives him crazy with envy. He is reluctantly but unavoidably a social being, and since his social context is the problem, he can only pursue a social corrective for his own ills. Thus Jonson uses the humoral paradigm as a metaphor for the kind of social process that is identity in this play. In ‘purging’ the other characters, Macilente is himself transformed. By the end of the play we are told that he is ‘plotting some mischieuous deuise, and lyes a soking in [all the other characters’] frothy humours like a drie crust, till he has


drunke ‘hem all vp’ (5.4.24–7). Interestingly, this image of him as a ‘dry crust’ resembles Asper’s original image of the humorous sponge. And so what Jonson initially rejects – such ‘spongie’-ness of character – he also in the end embraces in the way that he makes Macilente the means of correction for all the other characters. Administered as a kind of physic himself, he is the agent that restores humoral balance by adding himself to the social body and causing both it and himself to change. In the end, Macilente also becomes a fluid force himself when Cordatus describes him as storing up malicious thoughts till the ‘torrent’ of his envy breaks forth, when it will so violently oppose itself ‘against the course of all [the other characters’] affections’ that ‘the current of their Dispositions’ will be suddenly altered (4.8.155–9). But the play’s goal of ‘dishumoring’ its characters is brought about with a violence that critics have found alarming for comedy. As Danson notes, the tone of the ending seems to bring ‘not just “alteration” but obliteration’ (186). Significantly, though, that violence has been directed outward from the center that is Macilente, and what it achieves is the obliteration of all the other characters on whom he has been so unhappily dependent. Having successfully purged them, he himself is left ‘at peace’: I am as emptie of all enuie now, As they of merit to be enuied at. My humour (like a flame) no longer lasts Then it hath stuffe to feed it, and their folly, Being now rak’t vp in their repentant ashes, Affords no ampler subiect to my spleene. (5.11.55–60) His success leaves Macilente free of the others he has both condemned and envied. In light of this ending it is not enough to speak of the play’s portrayal of a social selfhood; it also embodies a particular kind of social selfhood – a specific attitude of the self toward its others, its social world. That attitude, expressed in the Envy at the heart of the play, is one of hostile competition. Though Macilente craves recognition and a place, he has no particular interest in mutuality, and his final attitude toward the others is more aloof than benign: I am so far from malicing their states, That I begin to pitty ’hem. It grieues me To thinke they haue a being. I could wish


They might turne wise vpon it, and be sau’d now, So heauen were pleas’d: but let them vanish, vapors. (5.11.61–5) This hazy ending seems to balance itself on the contradiction of a competitive social selfhood: as Macilente emerges again aloof, the ethic of the unmoved mover appears to prevail, even though it has done so only by means of a profoundly dramatic and social engagement. So while the play’s trajectory has been to let the humoral process of transformation wash over everyone, including Macilente, his own transformation (‘I begin to pitty ’hem’) seems oddly stilled in his wish to ‘let them vanish’. In this way, Macilente’s originally competitive social selfhood is not really overthrown. Nor is it something Jonson seems to disapprove of, even though in the end it is not so different from what has motivated all the play’s ‘humourists’.49 Nevertheless, in his instantiation of a humoral social process, Jonson adheres to his own notion of theatre’s compromising, dialogizing effects. Macilente and Asper both act, and are thereby absorbed in and with the social body. Jonson enacts this humoral process, as Shakespeare does, metadramatically. Like Hamlet, Asper tries to use theatre to affect others, but he does not succeed in remaining aloof from it himself. He both enters into its action through the role of Macilente (an apparent self-projection, not unlike Hamlet’s surrogate revenger in the Mousetrap, which he then enacts) and is altered by the process himself – not fully returning as himself at the play’s conclusion. Despite the play’s antihumorist rhetoric, then, the fluid self is after all quite important to Jonson, as is its ‘travaile’ with otherness.

Donne’s dialogized body This aspect of the humoral paradigm – the principle of fluidity – is something critics recognize as central to Donne’s representations of selfhood, though without connecting it with the humoral body or recognizing its relational implications. John Carey has written most compellingly of Donne’s willingness to embrace rather than resist change, explaining that he saw mutability not as an external force but as ‘a part of himself’ and recognized that to talk about himself ‘was to talk about change, and to change as he talked’ (153). Carey cites Donne’s constant use of images of fluidity to capture the nature of his experience – both physical and spiritual – as ‘personal flux’ (181). Yet Carey sets Donne apart from his contemporaries in this. Indeed, at one point he compares


Donne’s ideas to those of Walter Pater, citing Pater’s assertions that our physical life as well as ‘the inward world of thought and feeling’ are in perpetual motion. Pater sees the inner life especially as ‘a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought’ that leaves us with only ‘that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.50 But the comparison of Donne and Pater works only up to a point. For Pater, the fluid individual is also essentially self-contained – inaccessible to and isolated from others. In the same passage that Carey quotes from, Pater also insists that experience ‘is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of [our] impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.’51 Pater’s conception of an autonomous, individual mind (with its attendant scepticism about the external world) bears little resemblance to what Donne constantly portrays as an extreme degree of interpenetration of minds, bodies, and souls. The nineteenth-century theory of perception that informs Pater’s ideas about ‘personality’ and the relationship between self and world is radically different from Renaissance faculty psychology, which posits real contact between self and world. The physical and perceptual theories that Donne knows and draws on mean that mutability for him is the result not of our isolation but of its opposite – of the self’s necessary openness to and dependence on its surround. Donne’s emphasis on the fluid body figures not just change, but exchange – not just personal but interpersonal flux. Change usually takes place in the context of the encounter with another person, or text, or consciousness, and the point is not just the fluidity of the self, but how much it is made up of the other, and what that can mean. In poems such as ‘The Legacy’ or the elegy ‘Change’, a constant entanglement of self and other is evident in the exchange or confusion of emotion, perspective, or body parts that so often takes place as the poem proceeds.52 Even in an idealizing poem like ‘The Ecstasy’, which fixes on the eternity of souls ‘whom no change can invade’, he is still interested in ‘influence’ in a literal sense: ‘So soul into the soul may flow’ (59). As a result, the poem moves from the ec-static exchange of ‘mixed souls’ to the necessity of physical exchange as well: ‘our blood labours to beget / Spirits, as like souls as it can, / Because such fingers need to knit / That subtle knot, which makes us man’ (61–4). For Donne, the soul is necessarily joined to the body, and the body necessarily joined to the other: ‘So must pure lovers’ souls descend / T’ affections, and to faculties, / Which


sense may reach and apprehend, / Else a great prince in prison lies’ (65–8, my emphasis). The body seems to imply the other for Donne, which is one way of reading the multiply suggestive line from ‘Sappho to Philaenis’: ‘touching myself, all seems done to thee’ (l. 52). In his religious poetry, Devotions, and sermons, that same sense of physical connection persists, and it is still figured in interpenetrating terms. In this way, Donne uses the body to stage a powerful connection and subjection to the other. And of course, the humoral body especially captures that sense of subjection. It is not a model, however, that Donne is comfortable with early on. The opening of his first satire, ‘Away thou fondling, motley humourist’, expresses a Jonsonian discomfort with the idea of a changeable or humorous identity and a preference for more ‘constant company’.53 And Donne’s awareness that such humorous mutability suggests a subjected selfhood is clear from another early poem in which he explicitly uses the humoral paradigm as a model for the relationship between self and social world, and rejects it as such. In his verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton, ‘Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls’, Donne tells his friend that ‘Virtue is barbarous’ (that is, it lives only outside civilization), and he advises him to avoid the equally ill effects of court, city, and country: Only in this one thing, be no Galenist: to make Courts’ hot ambitions wholesome, do not take A dram of country’s dullness; do not add Correctives, but as chemics, purge the bad. (ll. 59–62) Donne’s references here to ‘Galenists’ and ‘chemics’ invoke the competition between traditional humoral theory and the more recent and controversial Paracelsian medicine, which Donne would likely have known about through his physician stepfather.54 His contrast between the two models makes it clear that what he finds objectionable about the Galenic paradigm (at least, ‘in this one thing’) is the way that it involves digestion and assimilation – that is, taking in external ‘correctives’ which then alter or become part of oneself. The ‘chemic’, on the other hand, does not alter the self per se, but only removes what doesn’t belong to it. As Thomas Willard explains, the Paracelsian model constituted a new theory of disease. In contrast to humoral theory, ‘Paracelsus regarded disease as a parasite and thought there could be as many types of disease as there are parts of the body. He is distinctly


modern at this point, in line with current germ theory.’55 This is the underlying theoretical distinction in Donne’s analogy. In the Galenic model, external elements not only penetrate but add themselves to the patient, whereas the chemical or Paracelsian process merely lifts out unwanted elements considered as alien to the self.56 In short, the Galenic process assimilates an alien ‘corrective’ to achieve health, whereas the ‘chemic’ treatment eliminates an alien ‘parasite’. For Donne, the two models suggest different options for the relationship of self and social world. Still, if Donne’s analogy rejects a humoral model for selfhood on the grounds that it represents penetration and influence, the poem as a whole is otherwise more ambivalent about such processes. For at the same time, the speaker also wants to allow and even to augment the capacity to ‘mingle souls’. He asserts a profound connection, even dependence, between himself and his addressee, without whom as an interlocutor he claims that he ‘could ideate nothing, which would please’, and would ‘wither in one day’ (l. 4). While Donne struggles here to represent selfhood in terms that assert a measure of autonomy, he also continually admits that contact with and contamination by the world are necessary: all venues are bad, he says, ‘yet our state’s such / That though than pitch they stain worse, we must touch’ (l. 10). Vice can’t be contained in a ‘flinty wall’ of virtue, since ‘Men are sponges, which to pour out, receive’ (l. 37). Yet despite this acknowledgment of our ‘spongie natures’, the poem generally encourages and praises in its addressee the appearance of being ‘free’ from the effects of the world – particularly in advising him, like the snail, to ‘Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell’ (l. 47). The speaker’s attitude toward Wotton is reminiscent of the mixture we saw in Hamlet’s embrace of Horatio as one impermeable (‘in suffering all, that suffers nothing’) and also, as such, one that Hamlet’s soul has ‘sealed ... for herself’ and that he wears ‘in my heart of heart’ (Hamlet 3.2.58, 66). In both cases, it seems independent selfhood is posited of the other more than the self. In Donne’s poem, the paradox whereby the speaker so ‘throughly love[s]’ that ideally independent other (who nevertheless has ‘suck’d all ... of worth’ from the world) allows for its own kind of mingling, despite the conscious rejection of the model of a permeable and humorous self (69, 67).57 In later writings, Donne’s attitude toward the humoral paradigm changes, and he relinquishes this already ambivalent attraction to autonomy and embraces the anxieties of interdependence. He does so both in the love poetry (to which we will return in Chapter 4) and in his religious works, where the powerful need for connection with God


is so often figured physically. For instance, in the holy sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one’, the speaker uses the humoral body as a metaphor for his spiritual condition, identifying himself in terms of the changeable or ‘humorous’ potential of that body, especially in a state of illness: Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot A constant habit; that when I would not I change in vows, and in devotion. As humorous is my contrition As my profane love, and as soon forgot: As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot, As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none. I durst not view heaven yesterday; and today In prayers, and flattering speeches I court God: Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod. So my devout fits come and go away Like a fantastic ague: save that here Those are my best days, when I shake with fear. This is one of several poems in which Stanley Fish finds evidence that ‘Donne is sick, and his poetry is sick.’58 Unfortunately, Fish is not talking about Donne’s fever metaphor per se, but diagnosing the conception of self that it conveys, which for Fish is not a legitimate kind of self at all. He reads this sonnet as a typical attempt on Donne’s part to convince himself and his reader of his own ‘sincerity’, and he argues that this is ‘also at bottom the effort to confirm to himself that he is a self, someone who exceeds the theatrical production of signs and shows’ (247). For Fish, instability means inauthenticity: ‘The problem is succinctly enacted in the first line: if contraries meet in one, then one is not one – an entity that survives the passing of time – but two or many. This would-be one looks back on its history and sees only a succession of poses – contrition, devotion, fear – no one of which is sufficiently sustained to serve as the center he would like to be able to claim’ (248). But the ‘humorous’ spiritual selfhood Donne describes is not necessarily, as Fish suggests, a duplicitous self. Certainly the speaker himself is complaining about his mutability, but in calling his contrition ‘humorous’, he is not calling it inauthentic. Sincere emotions need not be fixed emotions; rapid change is a sign of instability, but not duplicity: as we saw with Shakespeare and Jonson, to be theatrically ‘humourous’ is not


necessarily to become double, nor to control how one changes. Indeed, the problem for the speaker here seems to be precisely his lack of control over his changing behavior. Fish claims that readers seek and fail to find in Donne’s poems a transcendent self – a consciousness ‘real, purely present, valiantly o’erstriding the abyss of textuality’, which would offer ‘a state (of awareness, control, and self-possession) to which they could at least aspire’ (245). In other words, he wants (and thinks we want) a self to be subjective, stable, and autonomous: ‘A consciousness that can rewrite its own grounds in the twinkling of an eye is not a consciousness at all, but a succession of refigurings no different finally from the refigurings it boasts to have produced in others’ (232). In this view, the interpersonally based identity that Donne portrays (in both self and others) is something that ‘undoes’ the speaker, makes the poem ‘negate itself’, and marks ‘the dislodgement of the centered self by the fragmentary ... discourse it presumed to control’ (234, 231). I have cited Fish’s argument in some detail here because it is representative in many ways of what criticism of Donne often assumes about selfhood. The problem with such an analysis is its simple binary: the self is either centered or decentered. In this sonnet, though, the self is neither, and this is because it is not primarily a subjective self – i.e., not a representation of purely subjective consciousness in which the speaker’s own present-tense experience dominates. Instead, the speaker in Donne’s poem begins with a distanced view of himself from many different, external perspectives. He is the objectified ‘me’ who is vexed by the paradox of a constant inconstancy. He is the former poet of ‘profane’ and inconstant love, whose problem now is that he hasn’t really changed, but is still inconstant both in language (‘vows’) and experience (‘devotion’). He is the ‘distempered’ humoral body whose helplessness is conveyed in a list of the same paradoxical extremes that defined his libertine body – a series of opposites that ultimately enacts a loss of sense even as it expresses his lack of control over himself. It is not only the speaker’s changes but his objectifying habit of mind that produces the paradoxes – that enables him to hold more than one opposing perspective at the same time, so that ‘contraries meet in one’ and the self is vexed. And even when a subjective ‘I’ does seem to emerge in lines 9–11, it is still in a list of self-objectifications: how I felt yesterday, how I look to myself today, how I will feel tomorrow. In the end, all of this may combine to portray a subjective state, but it is not one of autonomy or of a controlling consciousness. Its main attribute, in fact, is anxiety – the affect of helplessness. And overall, what may be


most unsettling in the poem is the speaker’s final claim that this condition is valuable – that this kind of selfhood is ‘best’. Identifying the physical disease with the spiritual cure, he suggests his feverish anxiety and lack of control are right. To say that the point of this poem is the speaker’s lack of control is to take issue with Scarry’s argument that this kind of physical imagery ultimately makes for a ‘volitional’ and a ‘non-contingent’ body (93). Scarry finds in Donne’s language an ‘absorption with contract and consent’, but interprets this as an emphasis on individual will rather than on connection with the other. And although she admits that disease, with which Donne is so often preoccupied, is by its nature something to which one does not consent, she claims that this explains Donne’s ‘horror’ of it (95). In contrast, I suggest that in focusing on disease Donne often (as we have just seen) embraces it as an important metaphor for selfhood. And the disease model produces not a non-contingent body, but a contingent, necessarily negotiating self. In Scarry’s important argument about Donne’s connection of language and the body, one question she does not address is whose language is being ‘carried’ into whose body. Eliding the specifics of the interpersonal situations Donne represents allows her to arrive at the idea that Donne makes the body independent enough to be ‘volitional’. But very often, Donne’s speaker is (as per Jonson) ‘in travaile with expression of another’. In ‘O to vex me’, for instance, the underlying constant reference is to God’s judgment, and that uncontrollable perspective is what Donne says should control the speaker’s body and soul. What is difficult to capture here is the way that in his representations of self, Donne is both talking about self and talking about context – in a sense, he is talking about self as context. We have little in the way of theoretical language with which to address that kind of interpenetration of self and world, and critical discussions often fall back on an idea of a more individual self and its own (implicitly independent) agency. But what of a self whose action is not only in reference to another but generated by the other? What of the self as sponge, or, to take Donne’s increasingly frequent figure, the self that digests, assimilates, and is continually reconstituted by the other – that needs to be so reconstituted? Certainly there is agency here, but it only works in conjunction with another agent. For this we need a two-person model of selfhood that takes account of more than the single mind, body, or soul. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogized consciousness can get us part of the way there, but for the physicalizing impetus in much of Donne’s work, we should perhaps think in terms of a dialogized body – a phenomenology


of interpersonal consciousness in a humoral world. Grotesque realism – the principle of bringing the spiritual and the abstract down to the material bodily level in a way that is regenerative59 – expresses part of this, and there is also an opposite movement, for in Donne’s preoccupation with digestion, he metaphorizes the humoral body as a kind of humoral consciousness, open to and incorporating the divine or beloved or social other as the basis of self. One of the strongest examples of such a physically dialogized self is in Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes, published in 1624. Here, Donne takes the stages of his own near-fatal illness and explores their psychological and spiritual analogues. For instance, his physicians’ talk of ‘critical days’ prompts his discourse on spiritually ‘critical days’.60 Structurally, each chapter is divided – or, in the language of the title page, ‘digested’ – into a Meditation, an Expostulation, and a Prayer. That language is no accident: the figure of digestion, which Donne had resisted in his early verse letter to Wotton, has become one of his favorite metaphors.61 For instance, in a sermon predating the Devotions, Donne notes that ‘good digestion brings alwaies assimilation, certainly if I come to a true meditation on Christ, I come to a conformity with Christ’.62 Digestion is a crucial metaphor for the Devotions as well, which not only recount in detail his body’s daily condition and its medical treatment, but in their repetitive structure – Meditation, Expostulation, Prayer – also keep reenacting a kind of digestive process that expresses an intensely interpersonal spiritual engagement. The metaphor allows him to suggest a model of profound self-insufficiency which he also extends beyond spiritual to social and political functioning. Each ‘devotion’ tends to follow a basic pattern. In the Meditations, Donne presents himself (or man) in a singular, isolated state, and the sense of aloneness and self-containment leaves him abject and disconnected. Then in the Expostulations, he breaks that isolation, engaging in what looks on the page like a dialogized process of complaint, forcing an interaction by stuffing his text with God’s, speaking its language, constantly quoting biblical figures, and moving through this ‘travaile’ to a new position informed by what he now understands as God’s viewpoint. Finally, the Prayers represent a new, corrected condition, a state of calm and relaxation that claims a oneness with the wider context of divine will. The whole process, repeated over and over, resembles one of repeated digestion – of taking something in, grappling with it till it becomes part of oneself and till one’s disposition is changed by it. Even more, it resembles a purge in the humoral sense – an active engagement


of inner space with an external force that rights it. The Expostulations are where most of the biblical citations take place, and while there can also be biblical text in the Meditations and Prayers, it tends to sit quieter there, to involve less of a violent struggle. The Prayers tend each time to reassert a kind of wholeness that is neither fixed nor independent but keenly aware of its contingency on the other (i.e., God). The idea of a purge not only informs the Devotions in this structural way but is also a remedy explicitly invoked throughout the text. God is identified in the last chapter as the ‘Physician’ and Christ as the ‘Physicke’ (142). At one point, when Donne’s physicians apply live, sliced-open pigeons to his feet in order to draw the vapors away from his head, Donne proposes this as a type of Christ, sent down to draw off the world’s evil. At another point he claims that his heart is ‘alive’ because of ‘the powerful working of thy piercing Spirit’ through yet another form of purgation, ‘Wormewood’ (a medicine for expelling worms from the intestines) (65). Donne uses the ongoing analogy between his physical and spiritual conditions to portray himself as continually open to influences, both good and bad: his heart is ‘prepared’ by and for God, but it is also continually ‘subject to the invasion of malign and pestilent vapours’ (65). He sounds like Lemnius at one point, talking about how the serpent enters at our orifices and makes us sin in secret, even from ourselves, which is, Donne says, the same as being a devil to ourselves (57) – again, the paradigm being that what is outside has a powerful potential to become self. And Donne takes every opportunity to gloss biblical texts with what is his basic model of selfinsufficiency, figured throughout in the inability of the patient to ‘make himself well’ (18). Man is impotent alone, for God ‘has suffered us to destroy ourselves, and has not given us the power of reparation in ourselves’ (72–3). On its own, the soul is not a healthy system, but corrupt and self-toxic like the body, and health is made possible only by interventions from without (135). What seems to be most important to Donne in all this is not just the doctrine of his own innate sinfulness, but the way that it requires an ongoing connection with God, so that he almost seems to welcome the possible relapse of that sinfulness because it requires the continued connection. As a result of the ‘purging’ experience of the illness itself, Donne is finally able to represent his relationship with God as one of ‘participation’ and ‘possession’: ‘thy Correction hath brought mee to such a participation of thy selfe (thy selfe, O my God, cannot be parted ) to such an intire possession of thee, as that I durst deliver my selfe over to thee this minute’ (147). The paradoxical ‘participation’ of ‘my selfe’ and God’s ‘selfe’ that results from


this humorally figured ‘Correction’ constitutes an ideal selfhood for Donne. Of course, God is not the only other in the Devotions with whom Donne insists on a fundamental connection. The text is also full of passages asserting the necessity of other human beings in the makeup of self. From the famous ‘no man is an island’ passage in the seventeenth Meditation, where he claims that ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’ (98), to passages that call solitude ‘the greatest misery’ and even make it responsible for the Fall,63 this is an idea the text refuses to lose sight of. The image of the microcosm, with its suggestion of an isolated state, occurs throughout the Devotions, and always with a negative valence. For Donne it is ‘a disease of the mind’ to choose to be alone – he even argues against religious solitude, declaring that it is wrong to think that ‘the way to the Communion of Saints, should be by such a solitude, as excludes all doing of good here’ (24).64 Similarly, an earlier sermon asserts that sects are wrong because they ‘are no bodies, for there is Nihil nostrum, nothing in common amongst them, nothing that goes through them all; all is singular, all is meum and tuum, my spirit and thy spirit, my opinion and thy opinion, my God and thy God’.65 Separation and individuation make no sense to Donne as principles on which to act: ‘There is no Phenix’, he says, ‘nothing singular, nothing alone’ (Devotions 23).

The sacred plural So much for autonomy. But what of the ‘egotism’ and ‘self-absorption’ often attributed to Donne? I do not mean to discount the energy with which Donne’s works speak of self, only to argue that its thrust is not individuating. Indeed, Donne repeatedly describes the individual self as a terrible place to dwell: ‘I am no companion for myself, I must not be alone with myself’, he says in one sermon possibly from the same year as the Devotions, for ‘I am a reciprocal plague; passively and actively contagious; I breathe corruption ... upon myself; and I am the Babylon that I must go out of, or I perish.’66 This, too, is a powerful ‘I’, but it figures its own toxicity and fundamental need to ‘go out of’ itself. (It is also obviously meant as representative, though Donne’s style is to state such negative assessments as self-accusations.) ‘Will’ is also not an individual but a shared force: ‘neither God nor man determine man’s will ... but they condetermine it. And thus God is truly all-conficient, that is, concurrent in all.’67 His repeated use of the prefix ‘con’ is part of Donne’s effort to articulate a selfhood that is neither freestanding nor wholly


passive, and his sense of how this works in action is specific: for instance, God’s ‘exciting grace provokes every particular good work, and his assisting grace perfects it’.68 Sensing a kind of plurality within the self, Donne also finds a social imperative in God, who ‘loves holy meetings’: ‘religion is not a melancholy; the spirit of God is not a dampe; the Church is not a grave: it is a fold, ... it is a city, ... it is a plurall thing’.69 Donne imagines God himself as eschewing singularity, arguing that he was not ‘company enough’ in his three persons but ‘proceeded further ... to a creation’: ‘God would not be without man, nor would he not come single, not alone to the making of man; but ... god in his whole counsel, in his whole college, in his whole society, in the whole Trinity, makes man’.70 This ‘sociable’ and ‘communicable God’ affects ‘association’.71 And again, Donne’s own affection is for an association not only divine but social. In a 1628 sermon, he defines the virtue of ‘Liberality’ as ‘a communication of that which we have to other men’, and identifies it as ‘the best character of best things, that they are communicable, diffusive’. Good things ‘are so far good, as they are dispensed and communicated to others; for their goodness is in their use’.72 Throughout Donne’s work, the principle of association is manifest in a great variety of ways. To speak of his ‘self-absorption’, then, would seem to make sense only if we turn that phrase to a figuratively humoral sense of the self’s absorption of and with others. Donne’s sacred verse often takes the desire for association to the level of craving, and his penchant for physical imagery, at least in regard to the speaker himself, can become brutal. Particularly in the Holy Sonnet ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’, the self can only be saved by penetration in various forms. As Richard Rambuss notes, this sonnet’s sexual imagery states the idea of penetration in the most transgressive and shocking terms possible (in penetrating terms, we might say). The importance of such ‘sacred eroticism’ for Donne, Rambuss argues, lies in its power to ‘disrupt the perceived coherence of self’ – to undo and shatter the subject.73 The Holy Sonnets use ‘metaphors of illicit sex – rape, debauchery, sodomy – to body forth divine operations that are world-altering’ (Rambuss 58). In ‘Batter my heart’, the speaker’s plea is (once again) full of the paradox of an other-made self that is yet conceived of as active: ‘That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.’ The self cannot constitute itself, cannot even succeed in opening itself here, as it is already taken by ‘another’: I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end.


The urgent need for external ‘force’ is part of the way that this ‘I’ is not self-contained or single prior to its longed-for remaking. This is not, as Elizabeth Hodgson suggests, a ‘conventionally masculine’ first-person voice, though it does indeed use ‘first-person pronouns with increasing frequency’:74 Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend ... Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. Donne’s ‘insistence on referring to himself’ in these lines is not a matter of ‘immediate and assertive subjectivity’ (Hodgson 104), for all these images of self are objectifications, and very much mediated by their allegorical representations of the self’s spiritual relations. Every ‘I’ in the poem is not only already both subject and object, but is also surrounded by ‘me’s that figure the self as the object of physical action. Indeed, this self is not merely in relation to the other, it seeks to be the product of the other’s transforming force. As such, it is not purely passive either: as Rambuss points out, the sonnet’s enactment has a reciprocal, interactive dimension, in that its ‘same-sex rape fantasy ... also performs as a seduction, as an overweening attempt to woo a trio of divine lovers’.75 Already interpersonal, the self envisions being made new in a way that insists on physical connection as the precondition of being. Donne’s holy verse often seems to speak that participant self into being through its focus on physical enactment – its staging of connection. And not only the poetry but the Devotions and even the sermons often stage this physical self, though I would argue not merely as a bid for attention but as a way of registering the transforming potential of encounter. This is in part why the body is so important to Donne – it enables a performative engagement. It also speaks to the presence of the other. Debora Shuger’s analysis of ‘the link between eroticism and epistemology’ in sacred texts of the period is relevant here, particularly as she connects it with the ‘phantasmic psychology’ by which premodern theories saw desire and thought as dependent on ‘a process of imaging’: ‘if love requires images, then the corporeal is a sine qua non of desire’.76 Analyzing representations of a sexualized Mary Magdalene longing for the body of the dead and risen Christ, Shuger calls attention to the way that they preclude the possibility of transcending that physical longing because of their psychological premise: ‘As Mary says, Christ’s image has


been sculpted in her soul, and she needs his body to renew the image’. This concretized visual process enacts a displacement of souls, an investiture of self in other: ‘her soul/image has been literally sucked into Christ’s body’, so that her spirit, her very self ‘is in his corpse, not in herself. ... Christ’s body therefore is not simply a metaphor or allegorical sign; rather, its physical actuality is essential to the opposition of presence and absence that governs these texts.’77 Shuger glancingly links this form of erotic spirituality with Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and its ‘transgressive and excessive desires’ are certainly part of what is at stake in ‘Batter my heart’.78 It also seems relevant to love poems such as ‘The Ecstasy’ and ‘Air and Angels’ where the erotics of knowledge are less violent but equally physically intense – still staging the necessity of physical interpenetration. In ‘The Ecstasy’, pure lovers’ souls must descend to bodies (l. 65) because that is how souls work here; in ‘Air and Angels’ the other’s love is the physical ‘sphere’ (l. 24) that enables the speaker’s own love to exist – its precondition. This interpersonal epistemology is not always figured as carnal knowledge. At the end of ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’ the speaker makes the same plea as in ‘Batter my heart’ for God’s physical reformation – in this case, as a means of being known by God: O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace, That thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face. The upshot of this physically imaged restoration of the self by God is a moment of anticipated mirroring – a face-to-face recognition that seems to be possible only after the restoration of ‘thine image’. The lines compress a complex interagency – one that belongs to the distinctly unmodern type of mirror imagery that the next chapter explores, particularly in Shakespeare. Here, what is important is Donne’s imaginative sense of the physical interaction, the staging of this encounter, and the way that it makes the final phrase so arresting. In part, its complexity lies in its syntax: the speaker is not just saying once you restore me to your image, I will turn to face you, but also because you’ve restored me I’ll be able to turn, able to face you (‘That’ can govern both ‘thou mayst know me’ and ‘I’ll turn my face’). In other words, I will turn because I’ve been turned and at the same time will want to turn, will lose the shame that was increasingly evident as the poem progressed. The face-to-face countenancing of God feels like a dance movement – the speaker turns and is turned, and we feel both impulses, both presences.


The sometimes violent route to this radically participant condition is often read by critics as an expression of fear. Overlooking the interpersonal enactments of Donne’s imagery, readers have found that the Devotions as well as the sermons display what David Hirsch calls an ‘egocentric desire for a permanence of self’.79 Following Carey, Hirsch suggests that ‘throughout Donne’s lifetime ... his conception of self is deeply rooted in the integrity of his personal body’ (80). Apart from the fact that this argument ad hominem offers to analyze Donne rather than his imagery (treating him as a patient instead of crediting him with a conscious philosophical position), it also fails to explain why Donne’s imagery keeps pulling the body apart. Hirsch claims that in his many writings on the ‘revolutions of dust’, Donne is ‘horrified at the thought that the material remains of one’s body can be so easily scattered and confounded with particles of that which it is not’ (83).80 But is this repeated emphasis really evidence of Donne’s ‘horror’ at that prospect? It seems rather that he embraces this shattering and scattering of self, showing not so much a fear of it, and certainly not a will to deny it, but an insistence on its implications about our utter lack of control over any dimension of our physical or spiritual selves. So, far from representing his own ‘egotism’, such imagery aims at breaking through what he suggests is only an illusion of self-sufficiency – an illusion that would be even stronger for Donne’s modern readers than for his contemporaries. This tendency to misread as a desire for autonomy what is really quite the opposite – an insistence on dependence and a longing for connection – may occur because of the way Donne’s language can often seem to reflect our own assumptions about selfhood, unless we are careful to look for the difference. Perhaps the best example of this problem occurs in a sermon in which Donne’s constant use of the words ‘ego’ and ‘I’ might at first glance seem to support the idea of his insistence on an independent self. But interestingly, what he is really harping on with that word is an ideal union of body and soul: and yet, Ego, I, I the same body, and the same soul, shall be recompact again, and be identically, numerically, individually [i.e., indivisibly] the same man. ... I shall be all there, my body, and my soul, and all my body, and all my soul. ... I cannot say, you cannot say so perfectly, so entirely now, as at the Resurrection, Ego, I am here; I, body and soul.81 Clearly ‘ego’ means not just ‘I’ for Donne, but ‘I am here’ – a necessarily physical idea that objectifies the self and integrates body and soul. Part of what he stresses here is a lack of present coherence, which can only be


fully remedied at the Resurrection.82 And so the climax of the sermon – where he again explicitly invokes humoral physiology – speaks of a fusion with other flesh: As my meat is assimilated to my flesh, and made one flesh with it; as my soul is assimilated to my God, and made partaker of the divine nature, and Idem Spiritus, the same Spirit with it; so, there my flesh shall be assimilated to the flesh of my Saviour, and made the same flesh with him too.83 Donne is talking about self here, but it is a radically different kind of self than we often assume, entailing cohesion and connection with a wider whole rather than individual autonomy. This self is both eating and eaten, and it doesn’t really matter which. For Donne is not fearful of losing his own body – only of bodilessness per se.84 In other words, it is an abstract (i.e., purely inner) self that Donne abhors because that means (as in Pater’s conception) the loss of connection. But if we recognize that Donne’s conception of selfhood is one of intense vulnerability, contingency, even ultimate dissipation, we must also be clear that this is not a negative model for him – not a view of inevitable disaster. He is not deconstructing the self. Rather, he takes what seems to be catastrophic (for instance, his own illness) and calls it a solution. It is hard to say which comes first for Donne – whether the deep need for connection with the other makes him thrive on the sense of his own incompleteness, or whether it’s the other way around. But either way, Donne is committed to an interpersonally participant selfhood – a sense that the root or cause or locus of one’s self belongs in others. It is the intense responsiveness of self to context – spiritual, sexual, social – that Donne registers in his exquisitely physical imagery. And his best expression of it is the humoral patient – both distempered and cured by the process of penetration.

3 Material Others: Shakespeare’s Mirrors and Other Perspectives

And perspectiue it is best Painters art. For through the Painter must you see his skill, To finde where your true Image pictur’d lies – SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 24 This chapter elaborates the interplay of perspectives in poetic and dramatic representations of selfhood by examining early modern tropes and paradigms of vision and mirroring. The complex language of vision is prominent in early modern lyric tradition as well as on the stage, and critics have made much of the frequent connection in such texts between the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’. But while such discussions have been anything but simple, they have nonetheless taken a somewhat narrowed approach to this topic, focusing on the ‘eye’ of the self alone and failing to unpack the visual interplay that these texts often vividly suggest. The resulting emphasis on subjective selfhood is not always inappropriate – as I will argue, Petrarchan lyric and Italian Neoplatonism have a similar emphasis and begin to promote discursive conventions of subjective selfhood. Yet even these developing conventions have interpersonal dimensions that need to be better understood, particularly as they influence the lyric tradition. The Neoplatonic or Petrarchan ‘eye’ does strive for transcendence of the external, material world, but that model is not necessarily adopted by all who follow. It competes with other visual models, such as those of ‘mirroring’, which, in their early modern forms, can help to include rather than elide other perspectives. A great deal of criticism still assumes that the only ‘subject’ at issue in lyric is the speaker, and this one-person model has made it difficult to address the others whose perspectives both shape and reveal the properties of that ‘I’.1 Sometimes, I will argue, obscuring those other 89


perspectives is the project of the poetry itself. But not always. Examples of poetic opposition to the subjectivist tendencies of Petrarchism need to be better recognized and explored. This chapter takes up the problem of other perspectives as one way of moving beyond familiar arguments about interiority and showing that the ways texts position others are a crucial part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about selfhood. Here I am particularly interested in the material status of such others, by which I mean, first, the extent to which the other is a concrete subject in its own right rather than purely a visual object, and second, the extent to which the other’s subjective perspective is material – i.e., matters – in the construction of the self. Just as we can distinguish different kinds of selves, we also need to distinguish the different kinds of others to which they correspond. With poetry, of course, the question is not one of actual materiality – nothing in a poem is literally material except the text itself. But it can represent others as more or less physical, active, empowered, speaking, seeing – that is, as more or less alive and aware. The interplay of perspectives can take various forms – for instance, the speaker may completely suppress the other’s perspective, or wrestle with it, or adopt it – but whatever that stance vis-à-vis the other, it is part of what the poem tells us about the speaker. Such information is not essentially different from what dramatic speakers convey, and this chapter treats lyric and drama side by side. In that regard, it challenges the critical view that lyric is primarily or exclusively about its speaker’s subjective experience – that such poetry is necessarily the domain of an individual, inward-looking mind. In a recent assertion of that view, Helen Vendler claims that lyric is fundamentally not a ‘social’ form because it represents ‘the performance of the mind in solitary speech’.2 She argues that ‘in contrast to the dramatic monologue’, lyric ‘can present no “other” as alive and listening or responding in the same room as the solitary speaker’ (19). But surely the social dimensions of lyric depend not on the represented presence of a listener, but rather on the evidence of a speaker’s involvement with a social context. As David Schalkwyk points out, ‘solitary speech is as marked by social specification as any other’.3 Indeed, solitary or not, to be a speaker is necessarily to have a social context, for language itself is that. And the lyric speaker can be more explicitly engaged with others, regardless of whether they are present ‘in the same room’. It should go without saying that the sonnet is potentially among the most interpersonal forms, focused intensely on the speaker’s relationship to a specific other and often, like a letter, directly addressing that other.4 The distance of space and time need not preclude the mind’s interpersonal

Shakespeare’s Mirrors and Other Perspectives 91

engagement. And, most importantly for my purposes here, the nature and quality of that engagement can be analyzed: we can note, for instance, the extent to which a speaker takes up the other’s frame of reference or asserts only his own. Recent work on Shakespeare’s sonnets has begun to analyze their dialogic properties. Schalkwyk’s work, as well as that of Lynne Magnusson, is especially illuminating in its explorations of the performative dimensions of the sonnets’ language – how it aims at doing rather than just representing things. This necessarily interpersonal focus helps to break down the binary of public versus private realms by reading the sonnets as expressions of ‘outward social relations’.5 Like Schalkwyk and Magnusson, I will argue that Shakespeare’s sonnets are as much invested in interaction as the plays. What this chapter aims to add to this focus is a sense of the interpersonal politics of different modes of selfhood – how subjective and objectified selves interact with and position each other. The problem of the other’s subjectivity in lyric needs to be understood not just in the representation of that other, but in the representation of the self as the object of that other. The dialogized lyric self engages other perspectives not by describing or ventriloquizing them but by allowing them to impact itself – i.e., to render the self the particular object of that other perspective. In the degree to which the lyric self becomes such an object, we can see its effort either to engage or to elide the other’s subjectivity. In this analysis, Petrarch and Shakespeare stand at opposite poles. In Petrarchan lyric the speaker uses an idealized and inaccessible object (Laura) as the means of constructing a radically subjective poetic persona, which virtually never positions itself as the object of the other. We are well acquainted with this particular interpersonal grammar, and with finding the roles of subjective self and objectified other gendered male and female, respectively.6 But despite Petrarch’s influence among English poets, not all embrace that stance of subjective authority. Some take account of the perspective – the thought or feeling or perception – of the other. Shakespeare, in fact, regularly reverses the roles of subject and object altogether, constructing a powerfully objectified speaker engaged with subjective others. Sonnet 73 (‘That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold’) is a good example of this tendency: with its detailed accounts of what the other sees, perceives, and loves, the speaker’s focus throughout the poem is on how he looks and what he means to the other. And while it is the speaker who produces the powerful, complex images of his own waning and death, he achieves them by thinking himself into the ‘eye’ of the other. My point here is not that


the poem is simply self-abnegating. The speaker does indeed construct a kind of self through this language, only not a subjective self, for it lies not in his own experience but in the experience of the other. In this way, Shakespeare’s texts represent selfhood as something that entails more than one’s own ‘subject-position’. Registering its involvement with other perspectives, this poetic self also recognizes its indebtedness to them. Shakespearean texts take center stage in this chapter because they manage most clearly to articulate and represent the idea of the self’s imbrication with other frames of reference that it cannot control. This is partly a function of Shakespeare’s intensely dialogized language, which makes his sonnets, for instance, full of other potential meanings than the speaker’s own ostensible ones. As Margreta de Grazia observes, the sonnets exhibit ‘a range of linguistic activity that works independently of the speaker’s stated or implied intention and meaning’. Since they ‘comprehend the profusions and evasions of their language’, the sonnets ‘cannot be read solely as factors of the subject’s purpose’; rather, they represent ‘a self enmeshed in the linguistic surface that it only partially composes and perhaps in turn is at least partially composed by’.7 And even more specifically, they represent a self enmeshed in an interpersonal context of material others whose concrete perspectives both define the self and remain beyond its control.8 This is not to suggest that Shakespeare is unique in this view, only exemplary of it. Nor am I arguing that Shakespeare ‘invents’ any kind of selfhood thereby, only that he does represent – indeed, insists on – a particular kind of selfhood deeply informed by external perspectives.9 No doubt that insistence has partly to do with his preoccupation with drama.10 As a playwright, Shakespeare was constantly dealing with a plurality of perspectives, and as this chapter argues, their interplay is often central to his stagecraft. In the plays, characters can embrace, challenge, or manipulate each other’s points of view, but they generally ignore them at their peril. The sonnets, I suggest, evince a similar idea of the self’s necessary engagement with other perspectives – an idea that emphatically rejects the potential of lyric to enshrine the subjective self.

Visual epistemology Images of vision and mirroring figure prominently in Act 3, Scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida, in which the dialogue between Ulysses and Achilles carefully articulates a radically interpersonal theory of identity that resists Neoplatonic epistemology. The scene presents three separate


statements of the problem of self-knowledge, each based on the metaphor of reflection, each using that metaphor to capture the dependence of self-knowledge on others. First Ulysses presents the idea that one knows about one’s qualities (either internal or external) only through the ‘reflection’ of others: A strange fellow here Writes me that man, how dearly ever parted, How much in having, or without or in, Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection; As when his virtues, shining upon others, Heat them and they retort that heat again To the first giver.11 This formulation sets out the linguistic dimension of the problem – that identity involves being able to say or ‘make boast to have’ something – though it follows this immediately with the role of nonverbal experience in self-knowledge, of feeling what one ‘owes’ (i.e. ‘owns’ or ‘possesses’). Ulysses also quickly adds an ethical dimension in his reference to the impact one’s virtues have ‘upon others’. The role of others is a constitutive part of identity here, and this is what seems to prohibit Ulysses from finding some one easy term (such as our term ‘identity’) for what he is talking about. In fact, we don’t really know yet whether what Ulysses means here is ‘identity’ or something more like ‘honor’. His next image also reminds us that reflection is not necessarily a visual process – ‘heat’ can also be reflected. Achilles readily assents to the need for reflection, acknowledging that one cannot see oneself, but casting the problem in terms of vision only: This is not strange, Ulysses. The beauty that is borne here in the face The bearer knows not, but commends itself To others’ eyes; nor doth the eye itself, That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself, Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed, Salutes each other with each other’s form; For speculation turns not to itself, Till it hath travell’d and is [mirror’d] there Where it may see itself. (3.3.103–111)


Achilles here uses a trope popular in both literary and philosophical texts of the Renaissance, of eyes mirroring each other. His description, while not as directly Platonic as scholars used to argue,12 is especially characteristic of Renaissance Neoplatonism in its emphasis on vision, form, beauty, and purity. But Ulysses is dissatisfied with this purely visual interpretation of the problem. He admits that it sounds ‘familiar’, yet he restates it, emphasizing in more concretely physical terms the idea That no man is the lord of any thing, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formèd in th’ applause Where th’ are extended; who like an arch reverb’rate The voice again, or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. (3.3.115–123) The overall problem Ulysses speaks to is the impossibility of knowing oneself immediately: not only can one not see what one is, but one cannot even feel ‘what one owes’ except through the mediation of others. In this conception, if the self can be said to have form or substance, it is only via the reflected appraisals of others (‘applause’, for instance), in which one’s ‘parts’ find their only reality, or extension. Moreover, in his restatement, Ulysses resists Achilles’s visual imagery and emphasizes instead two kinds of experience that it can obscure: the physical and the verbal. Indeed, the verbal is yoked to the physical here, as if that too might otherwise become too abstract: one’s ‘parts’ must be communicated, which is to say formed by others not visually but in physical motion, sound, and heat. In Ulysses’s image, a resonant other contributes concretely to the experience of what one ‘owes’. The self is not merely reflected in the mirror of another’s eye; it is ‘formèd’ in a concrete exchange. His resistance to Achilles’s visual emphasis is, I will argue, typical of Shakespeare, and represents a resistance to a characteristically Neoplatonic rendering of the problem of knowledge – particularly of self-knowledge – in visual terms. When Achilles refers to the eye as ‘that most pure spirit of sense’, he invokes a Neoplatonic notion of sight as the highest or ‘most noble’ of the external senses because of the independence of its functioning – the idea that it suffers the least change in its encounter with the material


world. ‘Spirit’, in the physiology of perception that underlies this theory, is a subtle vapor arising in the blood and disseminated throughout the body in three stages of purity corresponding to the three levels of the soul in Renaissance faculty psychology: the external senses, the internal senses (often combined as ‘imagination’), and the intellect. These comprise a hierarchical chain of increasingly ‘pure’ knowledge: sense impressions are carried by the spirit to the imagination (or internal senses), where they are converted to images or phantasms; these images then pass to the intellect, which has access within itself to the ‘true forms’ and compares them to these images that the mind has abstracted from nature. The highest level of knowledge is understood as something that cannot be attained without the senses, yet can only be attained as the mind turns away from the material objects of the senses and towards the incorporeal forms or exemplars within itself. Pierre de la Primaudaye expresses the paradoxical quality of this theory of successive phases of knowledge: As the qualities of externall things are the matter subject of the internall senses, so their images conceived by the internal senses, and purged from all bodily matter, are the matter subject of the understanding and spirit. And the spirit labouring about them draweth out certain motions, and knoweth many things from them, which cannot moove the senses and which the senses cannot know. And yet the spirit is first mooved by these images, as the senses are by externall things.13 In Neoplatonic versions of visual epistemology this conception of vision is part of the dualism that theory aims at by stressing both the eye’s and the soul’s independence of their material objects. Rejecting Aristotelian conceptions of a more integrated body and soul, Renaissance Neoplatonic psychology posits only minimal cooperation between material and immaterial realms: the essence of visual perception lies not in the external world impressing itself on the mind, but in the mind by its own power producing the forms it sees, with the material image merely exciting the intellect to operate. With this visual emphasis, the effort is to see intellection happening independently within the mind. As Forrest Robinson explains, All that enters [the eye] is the object of mental vision, but it is possessed without affecting the essence of the soul ...; among the senses the eye alone bridges the chasm between subject and object


without apparently suffering any change. Knowledge is of like by like, but only in the sense that the soul has a kinship with the objects of its vision ... and not in the Aristotelian sense that it ‘becomes’ any of them.14 Robinson is here discussing Plotinus; he goes on to demonstrate the continuity of this Platonic strain through Augustine (who, unlike Aristotle, ‘considers sensation an activity of the soul: the inner eye looks out; the images do not rush in’ [33]) and through Renaissance Platonists such as Ficino. Only the forms of material things enter the soul, where they are compared with ‘corresponding Ideas painted within. If the shapes conform, the will is activated positively with love; if they disagree, the result is repulsion and hatred’ (Robinson 55). Ficino emphasizes that it is not the material image to which the soul responds but an abstracted Idea: There immediately appears in the intellect another species of this image, which no longer seems to be a likeness of one particular human body ... but a common Reason or definition of the whole human race equally. ... The latter raises [the soul] up to the angelic or contemplative life.15 In this theory, the mind attains knowledge not when it reproduces extramental reality, but when it generates the forms within its own nature. The soul is thus internally complete, a free and creative microcosm in which the structure of the world may be viewed with unflawed clarity.16 By contrast, Aristotelian theories tend to understand cognition as a closer cooperation between soul and body (and thus material world), seeing everything in the intellect as having been originally in the senses, and thus viewing the soul as a unity rather than seeing it in the dualist terms of Platonism.17 But if the Neoplatonist point here is to free the soul from its material context, it still begins with a very concrete physiology of perception. In this respect, it is worth noting that, unlike later philosophical efforts to establish an independent subjective self (e.g., those of Descartes and Locke), Neoplatonic epistemology is still explicitly interpersonal. The other still plays an initially important, if ultimately peripheral, role in the construction of that self, for Neoplatonic theory embraces the special role of the love object in Plato’s epistemology. In this theory, the intellect attains the highest level of knowledge through the efficacy of a beautiful object who serves as the means of the subject’s


transcendence of the material world and ultimate union with God. Yet in this transcendent paradigm, love is defined as visual attraction and restricted to unfulfilled desire, so that ultimately the subject must turn his attention away from material beauty and inward, toward its pure form in his own mind. This Platonic paradigm renders love an internal process for the subject, ultimately separable from its original context of a materially present other. Thus while the visual mode seems to suggest a model of self-construction in which the other plays a crucial role, what happens in this love theory in fact is that the subject’s vision uses the real presence of the other only to transcend it. This transcendent visual paradigm conforms in many ways to that of Petrarchan poetics, particularly in the strict subject–object dichotomy through which the Petrarchan persona achieves a paradoxical autonomy. Despite Petrarch’s strenuous claims of dependence on Laura, it is the frustration of his desire that enables his poetry, as scholars have noted.18 Her status as an ideal, inaccessible object perpetuates his desire, keeping that intensely subjective, isolated experience in constant focus. The speaker never relinquishes that focus by taking up her perspective. He studiously avoids describing her subjective experience, speaking of her only as an effect on himself – for instance, as ‘her who destroys me’ (39.10), or ‘the lovely light that is my sun’ (135.54–5), or ‘she for whom I am in prison’ (325.41).19 Nearly all references to her quickly transform themselves into statements about his own experience. Ironically, though he speaks incessantly of her eyes, he tells us only how they look, not what they see. It is his own vision and perspective that the speaker relates. Only once does he seem to see through her eyes: in poem 71, he claims that her eyes ‘see well how many colors Love often paints in my face’, and ‘can think what he does to me within’ (‘Vedete ben quanti color depigne / Amor sovente in mezzo del mio volto, / et potrete pensar qual dentro fammi’) (71.52–4). Even here, though, what her eyes ‘see’ is the manifestation of his own experience, and so the subjective focus is maintained. Keeping this focus eventually allows the Petrarchan persona to achieve the kind of transcendence aimed at in the Neoplatonic model, especially after Laura’s death.20 From that point, the work of the poems is to complete Laura’s internalization in the speaker’s own imagination and dreams, until in the end, he wants ‘only one comfort’ from her – that she’ll win him ‘grace’ (348.12, 14). This subjectivist model – in which a subjective self distances the real other in order to internalize her ideal form – emerges not only in love poetry but also in the discourses of courtly self-fashioning. Castiglione’s Courtier, for instance, teaches that sight ought to be the minister of


reason, enjoying beauty and feeding it to the soul in an already purified form with ‘little bodily substance’ in it.21 Castiglione helps to codify the gender roles in this paradigm of transcendent love, in which the beloved female object cannot represent a separate, subjective perspective, but must hold still as an object in order to enable the lover to turn his attention inward.22 In The Courtier, moreover, the process of internalizing the beautiful object is explicitly a defense against the possibility of loss, as when Bembo advises: To avoid therefore the torment of [beauty’s] absence, and to enjoy beautie without passion, the Courtier by the helpe of reason must full and wholy call backe againe the coveting of the bodie to beautie alone, and ... beholde it in it selfe simple and pure, and frame it within his imagination sundred from all matter, and so make it friendly and loving to his soule, and there enjoy it, ... without mistrust ever to lose it.23 Ultimately the soul, purged and purified, turns ‘to the beholding of her owne substance’ (318–19). Here, taking in the disembodied form of the beautiful object as a means to a transcendent identity clearly offers freedom from the contingencies that belong to the real other, particularly the potential catastrophe of losing that other. Both motives for distancing and idealizing the other as an object – its enabling of subjective authority and its transcendence of loss – make it an attractive strategy for English poets as well, though not all adhere to the paradigm fully. Sidney in particular introduces a less purely objectified beloved. While Stella is very much a Neoplatonic ideal – his ‘soul’s joy’ (48.1) – she can also be more than that at certain moments. Sidney’s speaker refers to her mind in ways that suggest, to some degree, that her perspective shapes his. Her ‘wit’ is a factor from the start of the sequence (1.6), and the speaker also notes early on that he loved her ‘not at first sight’ – that it was her ‘known worth’ rather than the visual image of her that conquered him (2.1, 4). Clark Hulse has argued that Sidney figures her as a reader, making her own subjective interpretation of his words central to the development of the sequence.24 In Hulse’s view, the sequence also suggests that their relationship is consummated, overthrowing the Petrarchan model of frustration (though if this is the case, it is so only briefly – Stella’s inaccessibility is soon restored). There are several moments early in the sequence that show Sidney to be conscious of Neoplatonic theory, yet also simply dismissing it. In sonnet 5, for instance, he acknowledges that ‘eyes are formed to serve / The inward light’ and that ‘on earth we are but pilgrims made, / and should in soul up to our


country move’ (5.1–2, 12–13). Yet the last line, like many others in the sequence, abruptly contradicts these ‘truths’. And in sonnet 21 he concedes that his behavior suggests ‘That Plato I read for naught’ (21.5). But it is Shakespeare’s sonnets that most clearly reject the model of an autonomous-because-transcendent self. Sonnet 24, for example, both uses and subverts Neoplatonic love theory: Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath steeld, Thy beauties forme in table of my heart, My body is the frame wherein ti’s held, And perspectiue it is best Painter’s art. For through the Painter must you see his skill, To finde where your true Image pictur’d lies, Which in my bosomes shop is hanging stil, That hath his windowes glazed with thine eyes: Now see what good-turnes eyes for eies haue done, Mine eyes haue drawne thy shape, and thine for me Are windowes to my brest, where-through the Sun Delights to peepe, to gaze therein on thee Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art They draw but what they see, know not the hart.25 This is one of only a handful of instances in which Shakespeare uses this ‘eye-to-eye’ trope, and none of them treats it unproblematically.26 Here the trope clearly follows the paradigm whereby the beloved’s ‘true Image’ is ‘painted’ in the poet’s heart (where presumably it is already ‘purer’ than the material image was). Yet by the end, the sonnet refuses the efficacy of this visual process, trivializing what the eye sees and ending with an ominous suggestion of an ongoing problem of knowledge – that eyes lack the cunning, or skill, really to know the other’s heart. The crux of the couplet is thus a distinction between seeing and knowing that amounts to a rejection of visual epistemology. Indeed, the rejection of Neoplatonic theory begins as early as line 3, with the speaker’s emphasis on his body, which already undermines a spiritually transcendent epistemology. And of course, the pun on ‘lies’ in line 6 plants a suspicion, which becomes an overt rejection in the couplet, of the possibility of a ‘true’ visual knowledge. In addition, the reference to ‘perspectiue’ beginning in line 4 alters the usual emphasis of such love theory on the lover himself, bringing into play the other’s experience as well. ‘Perspective’ refers to a popular kind of painting made to appear distorted except when viewed from one particular angle, or


through a small aperture. The reference captures the idea of subjectivity in visual terms, though significantly, the perspective at stake is not one’s own original point of view, but one that the painter constructs and the viewer adopts – something like seeing through the subjective perspective of another: ‘For through the painter must you see ...’. For the most part, though, what Shakespeare plays with here is the subjectivism of Petrarchan poetics. In what Stephen Booth calls a ‘playfully grotesque’ and deliberately mind-boggling elaboration of the conceit of a lover seeing himself reflected in his beloved’s eyes, it turns out here that what the lover sees in those eyes is not his own but his beloved’s image (his beloved’s eyes are ‘windows’ through which, seeing his own heart, he will be looking not at himself, but ‘on thee’). In this way, the ‘good-turnes eyes for eies haue done’ are not simply reciprocal: for the beloved, seeing through the other’s perspective (the poet’s or painter’s perspective) is the only way to see oneself, while for the poet the focus is still on the other’s image rather than his own. Yet the poem’s somewhat perverse insistence on concretizing the exchange subverts the usual Neoplatonic aim of transcendence. It converts the paradigm of visual knowledge from a process of using the other in order to turn inward (and ultimately away from the other) into a process that continues to involve the other’s subjective presence: the beloved has to be understood as seeing the speaker for this double exchange to work. Although the speaker has internalized his beloved’s image ‘in table of my heart’, he cannot turn away without losing that heart, which is itself dislocated, displaced into the beloved as a ‘shop’ whose windows are the beloved’s eyes (l. 8). For Shakespeare, then, the mirroring other is not there to show the poet an ideal other by means of whom he ultimately turns back inward and upward. Rather, the mirror seems to have value only to the extent that it holds something for the poet beyond himself, beyond subjectivity. What makes it finally clear that the thrust of the poem exceeds the poet’s own subjective perspective is the threat stated in the couplet – that while his love is about dependence and not autonomy, its object is ultimately beyond his knowledge and control. For both speaker and beloved, there is always the potential that, secreted in the other’s heart, ‘your true Image pictur’d lies’. In this way, such sonnets do not, as Joel Fineman claims, take the visual identification of poetic subject and poetic object as their starting point. Fineman’s argument is based on his view of epideictic poetry as a process of ‘specular reciprocity’ in which the poet achieves his ‘fully present self’ by identifying his poetry and ultimately himself with an idealized visual object.27 He sees Shakespeare as starting with that poetic


model in the young man sonnets (including sonnet 24) and then complicating it in the dark lady sonnets with a consciousness of the falseness of his own language, which disrupts that idealized visual identification.28 But this argument does not take full account of the way that the young man sonnets are often as much about lying as the sonnets to the dark woman are. In contrast, I suggest that it is not, in fact, visual identification with the object that is at stake in Neoplatonic and Petrarchan models (in which the roles of self and other are typically so asymmetrical), but rather the internalization of that ideal object. And it is that process of internalization that Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays reject, positing instead the self’s dependence on its engagement with a live material other – that is, an other who remains out of the self’s control. The sonnets not only figure this dependency in the authorial self, but insist on it for the other as well. While the young man is often idealized, he is also occasionally criticized, and his singleness, of course, constitutes the early sonnets’ central problem (‘thou single wilt proue none’ [8.14], ‘thou consum’st thy selfe in single life’ [9.2]). Sonnet 1, urging the beloved to marry and have children, also immediately raises the charge of narcissism: But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, Feed’st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell, Making a famine where aboundance lies, Thy selfe thy foe, to thy sweet selfe too cruel (1.5–8) The implicit mirror figure here and the charge of narcissism are not unusual in Petrarchan lyric. Petrarch uses a similar mirror image to compare Laura to Narcissus, complaining that her use of the mirror has driven him out of his ‘sweet dwelling’ (her eyes): ‘But if I had been nailed there firmly, a mirror should not have made you, because you pleased yourself, harsh and proud to my harm. Certainly, if you remember Narcissus, this and that course lead to one goal’ (45.5–6, 9–13). Of course, Petrarch’s speaker’s complaint is the loss of his own mirror – her eyes. When they reflected him, he dwelt there. In contrast, Shakespeare’s speaker’s charge of narcissism is not itself narcissistic or self-reflexive.29 He chides his beloved to move beyond his own image to some other – Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest, Now is the time that face should forme an other (3.1–2)


– not out of his own frustration, but in the effort to define the young man’s ‘sweet selfe’ as insufficient on its own, without ‘an other selfe’ (10.13). Rejecting the solipsism of Neoplatonic and Petrarchan models of subjective authority, Shakespeare’s sonnets assert a different model of identity. In both sonnets and plays, when Shakespeare uses the imagery of vision and mirrors, there is more than one perspective at stake, and the fate of the selves in question rests on moving beyond their own. In this way, his mirror imagery is often more in line with popular premodern conceptions of mirroring that differ significantly from those of Neoplatonic theory and also from modern ideas of the mirror. To get at the meanings of the mirror in Shakespeare’s poems and plays, it will help to have in mind how these other conventions can structure the self-other dyad differently.

Active mirrors Mirror metaphors are extremely popular in English Renaissance texts, particularly from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, but they tend to be used in ways that suggest an idea of reflection unfamiliar to us. In its most common early modern uses, the meaning of this prevalent metaphor has little to do with simple similitude – that is, with the mirror passively and faithfully reflecting the viewer or whatever else is in front of it.30 In fact, as Debora Shuger notes, ‘the object viewed in the mirror is almost never the self’, and in this way such mirrors are distinctly unmodern.31 The key difference, I suggest, lies in the ways Renaissance mirrors have an active dimension, engaging the viewer with something beyond his or her actual self-image, and in some way adding to or changing the self they confront. This is why book titles constitute one of the most common premodern uses of the mirror metaphor, with everything from polemical tracts to chronicles to medical and astrological treatises and practical handbooks being called a ‘mirror’ or ‘glasse’. Indeed, according to Herbert Grabes’s exhaustive study, these ‘mirror’ titles are the primary way the metaphor becomes fashionable in the Middle Ages and are probably a major factor in the subsequent development of its popularity.32 Crucially, in these titles, the mirror is almost never seen as a passive reflector: even factually informative ‘mirrors’ (such as encyclopedias or how-to books) are understood as a means of collecting and selecting data for the reader’s benefit. In the much more common, didactic type (the Mirror for Magistrates type) what appears in the ‘mirror’ is not a self-image, nor any other realistic


image, but a model – either a positive or negative exemplar. The purpose of such didactic mirrors is not to reflect, but to correct, and so the mimetic process is reversed: that is, when you ‘look into’ such a mirror, the point is not for it to reflect or copy you, but for you to imitate or apply to yourself what you see there. By presenting something other than the self, such mirrors mean to produce a more complex process than just self-recognition – they provoke comparison and make one aware of the similarity or difference between oneself and the model.33 Ultimately, then, these ‘mirrors’ do aim at the viewer’s self-scrutiny, only the point when the mirror presents such otherness is not just selfknowledge, but also change. In this sense, didactic mirrors are not about confirming identity, but about destabilizing it. Shuger identifies the distinct ‘oddity’ of Renaissance mirrors in the way that ‘they ignore the viewer’s subject-position – his or her “subjectivity”’.34 But perhaps ‘ignore’ is not quite the right word here. Certainly they don’t reflect what already belongs to the person – their reference is not to a current identity, and so they don’t objectify the self as it already is, physically, spiritually, or otherwise. But they do concern the self – indeed, they are most often about self-knowledge, as is clear in Thomas Walkington’s ‘Optick Glasse of Humors’ (to take just one among myriad examples), in which, as its title page announces ‘the foure Complexions ... are succinctly painted forth, and their externall Intimates laid open to the purblind eye of ignorance it self, by which every one may judge of what Complexion he is, and answerably learne what is most suitable to his Nature’.35 Such mirrors tend to offer the viewer a grasp of something as yet unknown about the self, or something difficult to see on one’s own.36 So Robert Greene’s Penelope’s Web offers itself as ‘a Christall Mirror of feminine perfection’ that can disclose ‘to the view of euery one those vertues and graces, which more curiously beautifies the mind of women’. And sometimes the knowledge offered by ‘mirror’ texts is not only about the self. In his introduction to The Optick Glasse of Humors, Walkington cites the dictum nosce teipsum, but he also cites the assertion of Menander that ‘that is not so well spoken, Know thy self, as this, Know others’ (3). The promise of such mirrors to reveal something beyond oneself may stem also from the specialized literal sense of the mirror as a tool of magic. In figurative use, the magically ‘unmasking’ mirror is capable of exposing an underlying negative truth veiled by an outward semblance of beauty. This is the sense of the proverbial characterization of wine as a mirror – ‘as “the glasse of the minde” that “shews what a Man is” by revealing otherwise hidden character traits’.37 Such mirrors are understood as a necessary external source of otherwise unavailable self-knowledge.38


From a modern perspective, it is entirely appropriate that Shuger registers surprise at the way the Renaissance mirror ‘does not reflect the “I” of the beholder’.39 In fact, in our effort to grasp the problem from an early modern perspective, that is a very instructive phrase. For if we stop to think about it, how would it? In the terms of Shuger’s argument, the answer lies in the notion of ‘reflexive self-consciousness’, which is defined as ‘the specular gaze or Cartesian subjectivity where the perceiving “I” separates from and beholds – as in a mirror – an objectified “me”’.40 In this conception, the self’s objectification is part of that ‘I’ originally. But this is exactly the point of the Troilus and Cressida dialogue discussed above – the objectified self must be rendered back by some mirroring other, and the ‘I’ owns it only retroactively. The move that elides that interpersonal process of exchange is a subjectivist move indeed, not just because it focuses on the self’s own ‘subjectivity’, but because it erases the other’s. There is something of the same elision in the critical notion of ‘self-consciousness’ that so readily conflates the ‘I’ and ‘me’ as a ‘subjectivity’. What Renaissance mirror concepts show is that, dilated, the actual process of reflection entails a back and forth between the ‘I’ and some other ‘subject-position’. And so it is not that the Renaissance mirror is not about self-reflection, only that it is not an isolated, individual process. Again, Shuger’s terms are instructive when she tentatively concludes ‘that pre-modern people may have found the division of the self into beholder and beheld – the habitual stance of modern self-consciousness – a rather unfamiliar experience’.41 As we have seen in previous chapters, Renaissance selves are everywhere ‘beheld’ – only by others. It is the notion of independent objectification that is unaccustomed. In Shakespeare’s terms, that notion is explicitly an impossibility. And this is the key difference in Renaissance mirror figures – they represent another ‘subject-position’ beyond the viewer’s own, and they make that subject-position the source of self-knowledge. In this way, the Renaissance mirror figures a real other – not a mere Echo who only gives back what is already there, but a kind of interlocutor. It presents a separate view that is relevant to the self, though not already of the self, and thus it presents, figuratively, a two-person model of selfhood. This Renaissance version of the mirroring process is inherently more layered and less solipsistic. Whereas our figurative sense of ‘mirroring’ assumes the self or identity being mirrored, Renaissance uses do not assume an identity prior to the encounter with the mirror. Indeed, it may be the modern convention of the self as an independent self-constituting entity that produces the more passive modern mirror metaphor. And


conversely, the more active Renaissance mirror may stem in part from the way that the idea of an autonomous ‘self’ is not the dominant convention that it is for us, so that no preexisting conventional ‘self’ is readily there to be metaphorically reflected in a passive mirror. On the contrary, early modern mirrors assume the role of otherness in the construction of selfhood and thus represent it as an ongoing, interactive process.

Holding the mirror The active mirror lends itself easily to Shakespeare’s layered and often ironic explorations of the interpersonal sources of identity. In The Winter’s Tale, to take a brief example, Polixenes uses a figure of didactic mirroring to describe what takes place between him and Camillo as he tries to get Camillo to explain the sudden danger he is in with Leontes: Good Camillo, Your changed complexions are to me a mirror, Which shows me mine changed too: for I must be A party in this alteration, finding Myself thus altered with it. (1.2.381–5) The complexity of the mirror’s meaning here is typical of Shakespeare’s use of the metaphor. At first glance, it may seem that Polixenes calls Camillo’s expression a mirror because of a likeness to his own. But this is a future likeness, and so Camillo’s face is figured as a prospective glass – another common Renaissance understanding of the mirror. And Polixenes also represents the mirror as a didactic one, teaching him what he now ‘must be’. It gives Polixenes knowledge of himself that he does not already have. In it, he recognizes something that pertains to himself but that does not yet belong to him – the image he sees is not self-generated, but comes from without. And yet the use of the mirror figure makes this brief moment not just about information but about self-knowledge. What it captures overall is the process of influence, and the urgency of that process. The moment represents both the necessity and the tenuousness of one’s dependence on another for self-knowledge: in this exchange, Polixenes has only moments to convince Camillo to explain his condition. And of course with this metaphor Polixenes is also trying to influence Camillo himself – to persuade him to be as informative as the mirror image portrays him to be.


Didactic mirroring is also at stake in Hamlet’s famous comparison of the theatre to a mirror, in which he claims that the purpose of playing is ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.20–24). Hamlet’s image is about more than simple mimesis: the theatrical mirror presents positive and negative exemplars – the feature of virtue, the image of scorn. If Hamlet’s central idea here is a kind of naturalistic performance, it is nevertheless not something normally visible without this ‘mirror’. And, as in the Troilus and Cressida passage, Shakespeare adds a physical dimension to the idea here, making sure the image includes a body and its pressure. Of course, this didactic function is also what Hamlet himself hopes to achieve in staging The Murder of Gonzago; and here he has an even further dimension in mind, for he intends his message to produce a reaction in the audience (in Claudius) that will in turn be readable to him. Yet, as I argued in the last chapter, the results of this mirroring are not as conclusive as Hamlet seems to think, for the ‘mirror’ he presents to Claudius holds an image of Hamlet himself as well when he calls the murderer the ‘nephew to the King’ (3.2.223). So here the theatrical mirroring process is not a straightforward, fully controlled, or predictable one. Hamlet uses the metaphor of didactic mirroring again when he confronts his mother and insists on setting her up ‘a glass’ wherein she may ‘see the inmost part’ of herself (3.4.20–21). While the results this time are somewhat less ambiguous, the scene still displays both the necessity and the difficulty of that interpersonal mirroring process, and also now its gender politics. Most importantly, Hamlet’s mirroring of his mother involves an intensely physical focus, evident first in Gertrude’s immediate reaction as if to a threat of violence: ‘What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?’ (3.4.22). In Hamlet’s words, he hopes to penetrate his mother’s inwardness with ‘sense’: ‘sit you down / And let me wring your heart, for so I shall / If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damned custom have not brazed it so / That it be proof and bulwark against sense’ (3.4.35–9). The metaphorical glass Hamlet holds up for his mother is of course his own discourse concerning his father and uncle, but what he actually holds up and insists she look at are pictures of the two men, and as he does so he repeatedly invokes the physical process of ‘sense’ and judgment: Have you eyes? You cannot call it love, for at your age The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble, And waits upon the judgment, and what judgment Would step from this to this? Sense sure you have,


Else you could not have motion, but sure that sense Is apoplexed, for madness would not err, Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thralled But it reserved some quantity of choice To serve in such a difference ... Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all, Or but one sickly part of one true sense Could not so mope [i.e., be dazed]. (3.4.72–82) Hamlet’s emphasis on all the senses sets up a kind of shared perceptual process in which the reference is constantly to her body and to his own judgment, with the result that she claims ‘Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul’ (3.4.90). At the same time, though, Hamlet himself becomes carried away with the imagery of her and Claudius’s lust, and only the entrance of the Ghost arrests him. Though Gertrude attributes his apparent hallucination to this overexcitement, the Ghost helps Hamlet to focus on his mother’s condition rather than his own – ‘But look, amazement on thy mother sits. / O, step between her and her fighting soul! / Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. / Speak to her, Hamlet’ (3.4.113–6). In the ensuing contest over which of them is to be judged, Hamlet soon prevails. The implication is that Hamlet’s success in this precarious exchange rests on his ability to move his mother, which entails becoming quite worked up himself, without relinquishing the role of judge. This is mirroring as mastery, and Hamlet has to become very much the emotional player he earlier admired in order to pull it off. Such interpersonal mirroring in Shakespeare is often problematic, focusing on the politics of the interaction – the way that it entails different and competing perspectives – and so highlighting the concrete existence of each of those perspectives. In Troilus and Cressida, for instance, the scene between Ulysses and Achilles does more than thematize the necessity of an outside, mirroring view of oneself. It adds an ironic context to the encounter – the fact that behind Ulysses’s discussion of identity is his plan to manipulate Achilles into being the hero he used to be. As Ulysses describes the social nature of identity and its necessary construction through interaction with others, the discussion itself is that kind of interaction. Talking about reflection, he also acts as a mirror himself, trying to give Achilles a particular view of what he looks like to others. Cleverly, he makes their interaction itself into a dialogic process, in which Achilles (inaccurately) reflects Ulysses’s remarks back to


him and Ulysses restates his point. He presents the idea of socially constructed identity as someone else’s and calls it strange so that Achilles defends it, has a stake in it. Our awareness that this is not the spontaneous dialogue that Ulysses makes it seem to Achilles adds an additional ironic and disturbing layer to the discussion. This irony, as Robert Weimann has argued, does not subvert Ulysses’s ‘theoretical position’.42 But it does add another dimension to the analysis of mirroring – namely, that if identity is partly created, as Ulysses asserts, through the reflection of others, the next epistemological question is, can you trust the mirror? Shakespeare presents the same problem in a strikingly similar scene in Julius Caesar, in which Cassius attempts to seduce Brutus into conspiracy against Caesar. Here, too, the dialogue between Cassius and Brutus turns immediately to the subject of self-knowledge, articulating the problem through the metaphor of vision (to ‘see’ oneself is to know oneself), and positing reflection as the only means to it: CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face? BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself But by reflection, by some other things. (1.2.53–5) This time, the seducer explicitly offers himself as a didactic mirror: ‘And since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your glass / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of’ (1.2.67–70). Here Cassius adds that Brutus should not be suspicious of him; but of course at the end of the scene, Cassius’s soliloquy reveals this mirroring as manipulative: ‘Well Brutus, thou art noble; yet I see / Thy honourable mettle may be wrought / From that it is disposed’ (1.2.302–4). Throughout this scene, Cassius formulates Brutus’s identity as a matter of what is ‘inside’ him, as opposed to his visible ‘outward favor’ (91), and presents himself as drawing these existing qualities out. But his cynical speech at the end makes clear that his actual intent has been to influence (to ‘humor’) him. From the audience’s viewpoint, what he achieves with Brutus is to give him a perspective on himself that enables him to do what he would not otherwise have contemplated. The scene depicts something like what critics have described as Shakespeare’s dramatic conception of character – that character consists in what is manifest in behavior, in action. Here, however, we should say not just action, but interaction. Clearly the qualities Cassius attributes to Brutus only become possible and then real with Cassius’s intervention. Thus, rather than portraying identity or character as a prior inward truth that


gets revealed, the scene demonstrates that no fixed identity preexists the encounter with another, and that this can spell trouble. I want to take a moment here to clarify that I am not echoing what has been said by both Lacanian and deconstructive critics about such moments in Shakespeare – that they represent the ‘fictionality of identity’.43 Identity – or, as Ulysses formulates it, feeling or being able to say that one has what one has – is not a fiction because it comes about only through interaction; it is a reality that comes about only through interaction. The fiction for Shakespeare is rather that which Cassius suggests – that such identity could exist autonomously. This fiction of autonomy can be produced by a mirroring other, as the scenes with Cassius and with Ulysses show. The trouble with interpersonal mirroring in both scenes stems from the way that these mirrors won’t hold still – in other words, that while they seem to be reflecting you, they are capable of action independent of what you know about, and may have an agenda of their own. This separate subjective perspective of the mirror is portrayed in each of these scenes by the manipulative context of the discussion: Cassius and Ulysses have other agendas unknown to those they are mirroring. In Cassius’s case, that agenda includes obscuring his own contribution and letting Brutus feel that ‘what he owes’ is really his, really originates inside him. But in the case of Ulysses, it is all the more ironic that his own argument offers a way to hold on to that other subjective perspective – namely, to stay in touch with the physical presence of the reflecting other. This seems to be the point of Ulysses’s emphasis on physical rather than visual reflection. In visual reflection, the mirror tends to efface itself in the process of reflecting, so that one is aware only of one’s own image, whereas in the kind of imagery Ulysses prefers – reflected heat, reverberated sound, retorted virtues – the thing doing the reflecting retains its own separate, concrete status. As a result, it renders one’s own reflection more concrete as well. For instance, the applause of others gives one’s attributes a more material form or ‘extension’ than a mirror can; similarly, a gate of steel receiving and rendering back the sun’s heat involves a more solid and distinct presence of its own than a mirror does: even when it reflects the ‘figure’ of the sun, it will always still present its own figure as well, whereas the mirror seems to present only a frame. Figuratively, the reflecting other represents another subjective perspective than one’s own: applause, for instance, embodies a separate locus of agency from that which it ‘reflects’. Thus in Ulysses’s nonvisual imagery, the fact of interaction with a real other is even clearer than in visual reflection. And in this


way, the discussion of mirroring in Troilus and Cressida goes beyond expressing the need for an other in order to see oneself; it also includes the fact that that other will always, of necessity, be not just a mirror, but a separate, subjective agent in its own right. Ultimately, identity in Troilus and Cressida proves to be a problem of how ‘to have what one has’ or ‘feel what one owes’ through others over time. As Ulysses continues his discussion with Achilles, he tells him ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion’ (145–6). Describing ‘Time’ as a demanding social context – an impatient, ‘what-have-you-done-for-me-lately’ judge – Ulysses captures the problem of whether identity, given its socially constructed nature, can endure, and if so, how. Ulysses goes on to describe a competitive and increasingly individualistic social context in which one’s identity endures only through the constant reperformance of one’s virtues. This radically contingent view of identity informs the interpersonal issues of the love plot as well, where it clashes with a distinctly Neoplatonic ideology of male selfhood. On the one hand, in the scene where Troilus as voyeur watches Cressida all but capitulate to Diomedes, he almost manages to grasp the concept of ‘Diomed’s Cressida’ – that is, to grasp the way that her identity is contingent on her immediate interpersonal context. But he responds by falling apart himself: This she? no, this is Diomed’s Cressida. If beauty have a soul, this is not she; If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, If sanctimony be the gods’ delight, If there be rule in unity itself, This was not she. O madness of discourse, That cause sets up with and against itself! Bi-fold authority, where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt. This is, and is not, Cressid! (137–46) Troilus is here, among other things, a Neoplatonic lover cracking up because his beautiful female image will not hold still and let him achieve his transcendent identity through her fixity.44 A moment such as this reveals that, despite his appeals to reason and beauty and the rule of unity, the Neoplatonic lover is in fact quite dependent on the fate of his material other.


The ethics of internalization So what, according to Shakespeare, is a lover to do? The usual modern answer to the problem of identity lies in our ready concept of internalization: one internalizes one’s ‘objects’ (as we tend to call significant others), and thereby builds a more or less permanent, stable, and separate identity.45 In a sense, Neoplatonic theory offers (at least to men) something like this model: as Castiglione’s text makes clear, taking in the form of the beautiful object as a means to a transcendent identity offers a way to free oneself from the possible catastrophe of losing that other. But this strategy of internalization is just what Shakespeare’s plays belie and his sonnets avoid, in their insistence on the self’s dependence on its engagement with a subjective other, an other who cannot be controlled or stabilized – in short, an other who cannot be subsumed by the self. The sonnets do deal with loss constantly, but they refuse to overcome it by turning inward. Instead, they insist on staying in the interpersonal mess – the cheatings, rivalries, separations, consummations, etc. The self is thoroughly dependent on the other – takes its life from the other – but recognizing the debt implied in that dependence, does not attempt to overcome or transcend it. Through this recognition of the self’s indebtedness to the other, Shakespeare’s sonnets base their authority on continually reembracing the other rather than on turning inward. The most striking example of the way Shakespeare resists the internalization of ‘objects’ is the pair of sonnets – 30 and 31 – that deal with mourning and melancholia. In the first of these, the speaker spends most of the poem describing the freshness of old losses and his inability to recover from them, which, in Freudian theory or in Neoplatonic theory, one would do by internalizing the lost or losable objects. But for Shakespeare’s speaker, such losses somehow never stop requiring payment. When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought, I sommon vp remembrance of things past, I sigh the lacke of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new waile my deare times waste: Then can I drowne an eye (vn-vs’d to flow) For precious friends hid in deaths dateles night, And weepe a fresh loues long since canceld woe, And mone th’expence of many a vannisht sight. Then can I greeve at greeuances fore-gon, And heauily from woe to woe tell ore


The sad account of fore-bemoned mone, Which I new pay as if not payd before. As so often in the sonnets, economic metaphors inform the idea of love with images of concrete exchange – though here, as usual, that exchange takes the form of an unequal, usurious indebtedness on the part of the speaker.46 But in the couplet all the speaker’s irrationally ongoing debt is just as irrationally ‘restord’ by the thought of yet another, compensatory other (the beloved) to whom the speaker, in paying this sudden tribute, again overpays by claiming that the beloved’s weight balances all former losses. But if the while I thinke on thee (dear friend) All losses are restord, and sorrowes end. Even in this solitary state, the speaker portrays himself as bound to others, filling his lines with the imagery of engagement, and responding to the costs of such engagement not with a final inward turn, but with another engagement. Though it may sound for a moment as though this is an internalization (‘I think on thee’) the next sonnet clarifies it as an outward turn, through the claim that the speaker’s beloved incorporates all those lost others: Thy bosome is indeared with all hearts, Which I by lacking haue supposed dead; And there raignes Loue and all Loue’s louing parts, And all those friends which I thought buried. This conceit amplifies and explains the previous sonnet’s abrupt assertion that all those many losses could be ‘restord’ by just one new other. Continuing the economic love imagery of the previous sonnet (his tears for lost loves were ‘stolne ... / As interest of the dead’), the speaker combines it now with imagery of contest and victory, working out his morbid conceit with careful attention to the details of exchange, past and present:47 Thou art the graue where buried loue doth liue, Hung with the tropheis of my louers gon, Who all their parts of me to thee did giue; That due of many, now is thine alone.


Despite the overall somber tone of the previous poem, it is possible to hear in this one a glancingly ironic reference to the triangular love conflicts that the speaker finds himself in, and losing, throughout the sonnets. Yet even this possibly implicit irony only seems to add to the speaker’s devotion as he makes those losses the means by which he finds himself in his beloved: Their images I lou’d I view in thee, And thou (all they) hast all the all of me. As in sonnet 24, the poet does not end up with the self-sufficiency of a portable object-world inside him. Rather, he ends wrapped (and rapt) in layers of others. Having been invested severally in his previous lovers, now that they ‘liue’ in the beloved, the poet does too. As in sonnet 30, the successful end of mourning consists not in internalizing lost or losable others but in turning to a new embracement, one that unabashedly makes the ‘me’ the poet winds up with wholly dependent on its connection with the other. This model of a profoundly dependent identity is typical of the rest of the sonnets, and is manifest even in the way they present their first-person speaker. If we take the 1609 edition’s ordering of the sonnets as intentional, it would seem to reflect this too. In the early sonnets, the speaker’s own presence is very much in the background – indeed, we get no firstperson pronouns (except for the general ‘we’ of sonnet 1) until long after the other is established. And the first ‘I’ he uses positions itself as a wouldbe respondent to the beloved: ‘O change thy thought, that I may change my minde’ (10.9). Once the poet’s own presence emerges, he constantly represents his self-insufficiency, not only with a fairly standard (if highly exaggerated) humble stance, but also with frequent and varied conceits, such as the indebtedness of sonnets 30 and 31 or the figures of visual and physical exchange in sonnets 22, 24, and 25. Another favorite exchange conceit is the transferred sense of ‘self’ – the ‘other-self’ trope discussed in detail in Chapter 1 – in which ‘self’ refers to a friend or beloved. Significantly, though, as Shakespeare uses the trope in the sonnets, it does not figure ‘identification’ in the sense of sameness or merger – in fact, the poet explicitly rejects that potential significance in sonnet 39, which considers what he seems to see as a problem of the poetry of praise: O how thy worth with manners may I singe, When thou art all the better part of me? What can mine owne praise to mine owne selfe bring; And what is’t but mine owne when I praise thee


Literalizing the trope of the other as one’s ‘selfe’ here, Shakespeare’s speaker points out the potential immodesty of such an identification. Fineman cites these lines as evidence of the way that for Shakespeare, as for traditional epideictic poets, praise of the other is automatically selfreferential because of the way the poet ‘identifies’ his poetry, and thus himself, with his ‘object’.48 But he does not cite the lines that follow, which suggest a conscious rejection of the self-referential potential of epideictic: Euen for this, let vs deuided liue, And our deare loue loose name of single one, That by this seperation I may giue That due to thee which thou deseru’st alone (39.5–8) Using ‘selfe’ in this transferred sense to suggest his own investment in and presumed oneness with the other, the poet nevertheless worries about the potentially self-serving effects of that image of unity, and so he explicitly gives over the ‘name’ of oneness in favor of a separateness intended to allow him to praise his beloved without being self-referential. Of course, this giving over is only ostensibly volitional – on a deeper, ironic level the ‘divided’ lives of the speaker and his beloved are no doubt not of his own choosing, but another contingency to which he submits. Most important in such assertions of Shakespeare’s speaker’s own abjection is that they are not complaints to his beloved aimed ostensibly at relieving a frustrating distance, as they are in Petrarchan lyric. Their main reference is not to the speaker’s own viewpoint but to the other’s – as in sonnet 78, which deals with the beloved’s comparison of the speaker and a rival poet, and deliberately diminishes the speaker’s own agency: Yet be most proud of that which I compile, Whose influence is thine, and borne of thee. In others workes thou doost but mend the stile, And Arts with thy sweete graces graced be. But thou art all my art, and doost aduance As high as learning, my rude ignorance. (78.9–14) Here it is as though the chance to claim ‘influence’ causes him to celebrate his own abjection rather than lament it. Magnusson discusses the ‘compelling strategies of complex self-presentation’ in some of the


other rival-poet sonnets as part of the socially conditioned politeness strategies belonging to the speaker’s subordinate position in relation to his addressee (52). And that position does seem to inform the poetspeaker’s acceptance of his own abjection, even in the sonnets in which he anticipates losing the young man to the rival poet: Farewell thou art too deare for my possessing, And like enough thou knowst thy estimate, The Charter of thy worth giues thee releasing: My bonds in thee are all determinate. (87.1–4) If the economic metaphors here help to invoke the speaker’s class position, they also adhere to the stance of ‘strategic non-presumption’ that Magnusson explains is part of the subordinate’s role: ‘politeness dictates making no assumptions about the wishes (in Elizabethan terms, “the pleasure”) of the other and it also dictates avoiding coercing or controlling the action of the other’ (50). Thus the speaker’s language recognizes the impact of his beloved’s will on himself without presuming to articulate the beloved’s thoughts or desires: For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that ritches where is my deseruing? The cause of this faire guift in me is wanting, And so my pattent back againe is sweruing. (87.5–8) In such abject sonnets, the speaker keeps a focus on his own vulnerability, never denying that he can lose that all-important other, and sometimes presenting the possibility of loss with no compensation whatever (as in sonnet 64). His frequent assertions that his verse can transcend the loss of his beloved claim that benefit only for posterity – for himself, he claims to be ‘shamd by that which I bring forth’ (72.13). The speaker has various strategies as well as moods for confronting this possible loss, but in all of them he both recognizes it as devastating and takes the blame, vowing to fight and to debate ‘Vpon thy side, against my selfe’ (88.3, 89.13). In other words, his investment remains in the other’s perspective rather than his own. The logic behind this stance is not simply the ‘cogito of praise’ that Fineman observes as the basis of epideictic poetry: ‘I praise, therefore I am.’49 Shakespeare’s speaker also recognizes the debt implied in that


formula, and this recognition adds an important additional dimension to it: ‘I praise thee, therefore I am; therefore without thee, I’m not.’ Through this recognition, Shakespeare’s sonnets base their authority on embracing the other rather than turning inward. As a result the sonnets evince a concern not to subsume within the speaker’s subjective self the other through which that self is constituted, but to continue instead to acknowledge the other’s own separate subjective status. It is easy for an intrapsychically focused criticism to miss this aspect of the sonnets and to read them primarily as the expression of a subjective voice.50 But in doing so, such criticism does what the sonnets resist – that is, it considers the poet’s self in a way that subsumes all others into it. This is the case, for instance, in Fineman’s Lacanian reading of the sonnets, in which he considers the ‘poetic self’ they represent purely as the expression of subjective experience. In general terms, Fineman sees the dark lady sonnets as representing the poet’s fall into language, and the whole sonnet sequence as representing ‘what happens to poetic person when true vision is captured by false language’ (26). Apart from the fact that, as we have seen, vision is just as ‘untrue’ as language in the sonnets, this theory undoes the materiality of the relationships the sonnets depict.51 Turning the interpersonal material of the sonnets into an allegory of ‘vision’ and ‘language’, Fineman in effect substitutes the idea of ‘language’ for what the sonnets represent as relationships with specific others. His focus on language allows Fineman to locate what is at stake in the sonnets within the poet’s ‘subjective’ self, as his experience of himself, which Fineman says consists in his experiencing himself ‘as his difference from himself’ (25). This emphasis – ‘contracted’, as it were, to the poet’s subjective experience – obscures the crucial role of the sonnets’ others, reducing them to a function of language and thereby achieving an intrapsychic focus. But the movement toward that contracted focus, and toward a kind of self that can be considered in isolation, as its experience of itself, is precisely the movement that Shakespeare resists. His chosen ‘objects’ in the sonnets are also subjects themselves. As we have seen, the poems to the young man often highlight the speaker’s inferior social status, and his resulting deferential stance requires according the other a subjective agency of his own. Over and over the poet calls attention to his own refusal to objectify the young man – i.e., to praise him by describing him. He explicitly rejects descriptive praise in sonnet 21, for instance, on the grounds that it would make the beloved a commodity (‘I will not prayse that purpose not to sell’), and in sonnet 83, on the grounds that it would deaden rather than keep alive the beloved’s


beauty (‘For I impaire not beautie being mute, / When others would giue life, and bring a tombe’). With conventional blazon explicitly rejected in both young man and dark lady sonnets (e.g., sonnets 21, 106, and 130), all we know of either is that he is fair and she is dark, that he is beautiful and she is beautiful in the speaker’s eyes. The sonnets convey the fact and the feel of the speaker’s view of his beloveds, but they make a point of not attempting to reduce them to, or contain them as, objects. That lack of containment manifests itself as a continual irony in the poems that claim to preserve the young man’s beauty for posterity – an irony in which we come to realize that the poet has no intention of conveying anything but the agency of beauty. The sonnets are thus about beauty’s effects on the poet, which do not include enabling his poetic mastery of that beauty. And in the sonnets to the dark woman, of course, the refusal to objectify (and thereby internalize) the beloved is part of a refusal to praise what is even more explicitly a non-ideal object, yet one that still compels his love. Again, the consciousness of other perspectives – not just the beloved’s but the view of her held by ‘the world’ – permeates these poems. She clearly escapes confinement in the role of internalizable object, as she sleeps with her lovers, lies about it, has the wrong hair and/or skin color. Yet the speaker constantly defines himself in relation to both these others – indeed, represents himself as constituted through and in them, sometimes at the same time (sonnet 133). In this way, the poet deliberately and repeatedly enmeshes himself with what he cannot control, and so represents himself not only in terms of his own selfexperience, but also in terms of what he cannot internalize or own. At the same time, Shakespeare’s speaker constantly objectifies himself. He describes his own looks in detail (for instance, his ‘tanned antiquity’ [62.10]), often considers himself as he appears to his beloveds, and continually analyzes and represents his own position in relation to them. Even as a speaking subject, he works to objectify his speech in a way that undermines his own subjectivity. Calling attention constantly to the fact and the nature of his poetic praise rather than just offering it, his poetry often amounts, as Fineman puts it, to ‘the representation of praise rather than its presentation’ (153). Yet this is not just a ‘questioning’ of the speaker’s own praise, but another way he positions himself as the object of his beloveds and derives his authority from that position rather than from his own subjective view. That such self-objectifying speech ties the speaker to his others is evident in the sonnets in which he plays on his own name. To elaborate on his name is once again to invoke his status as an object of others – one’s


name generally belongs to the speech of others rather than one’s own. As Katherine Duncan-Jones points out, the fact that Shakespeare’s sonnets name their speaker rather than their beloveds is unusual,52 and the poet also plays with the name in ways that make it especially subversive of autonomous subjectivity. He ties it to the dark woman, using ‘will’ to refer to her body (in its slang meaning of female sexual organ), and seems to suggest a confounding of his identity with the young man’s as well (he confounds his ‘will’ – also slang for the male sexual organ – with all the others he says she accepts in her ‘large Will’ [sonnet 135]). In this way the insult to his mistress is simultaneously an insult to himself, and not just because he admits he cannot have her exclusively, but also because he seems to make his name the locus more prominently of her agency than of his – ‘Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will’ (135.1) – i.e., he imagines his ‘Will’ as subordinate to hers, his name as belonging to her. Among the suggested meanings of the poet’s name, those related to desire and assertion become ironic in contrast to the generally abject and will-less stance the poet assumes throughout the sonnets. Making ‘Will’ a name for so much more than himself in these sonnets is another of the many ways he connects himself and makes himself interchangeable with his beloveds, confounding without completely merging self and others. In the sonnets to the dark woman, it is particularly her concrete physical status on which the poet stakes their connection. But that physicality is not just a question of how she looks – of the blackness that produces the divided consciousness in which he acknowledges that his heart sees her as ‘fair’ and the world sees her as ‘foul’ (e.g., sonnets 131, 132, 137). It is also what happens to that body – its mobility, its contact with other bodies, and his lack of control over it – that is crucial to him and that makes her his ‘plague’ rather than an ideal, internalizable object. Thus their connection, in its own way as profound as that between the poet and the young man, is no longer benign or even always desired. The spectre of betrayal, of playing the cuckold, is part of the way the poet continues to depict his entanglement with others. But it is also a way of figuring the problem of knowledge posed by such others as a problem of control – a problem in which the self is not one with the others it depends on. His two beloveds are so out of his control that they cheat on him with each other – or so he may ‘Suspect ... yet not directly tell’, since even knowing for sure eludes him, and he can only ‘gesse one angel in an others hel’ (144.10, 12). In the young man sonnets such suspicions mainly provoke efforts on the poet’s part to forgive, to submit, to suffer, whereas in the dark woman sonnets, while he still suffers the situation powerlessly, his tone becomes denigrating.


The difference may derive partly from the interpersonal politics of the two situations – particularly the suggestion in various sonnets that the male beloved is a patron. But the view of dependent selfhood in each case is similar. Instead of leading him to a higher knowledge, his objects tie him to the world in all its unstable and unknowable materiality. The acute epistemological problem the dark woman presents for the poet is perhaps most clearly focused in sonnet 138, which presents a complex and problematic mutuality between lover and beloved in a way that links the problems of knowing her mind and knowing her body. When my loue sweares that she is made of truth, I do beleeue her though I know she lyes, That she might thinke me some vntuterd youth, Vnlearned in the worlds false subtilties. Thus vainely thinking that she thinkes me young, Although she knowes my dayes are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue, On both sides thus is simple truth suppresst: But wherefore sayes she not she is vnjust? And wherefore say not I that I am old? O loues best habit is in seeming trust, And age in loue loues not t’have yeares told. Therefore I lye with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lyes we flattered be. As Booth notes, this sonnet is ‘an exercise in logically improbable, unnatural, and uncomfortable unions that are also indivisible’ (477). The movement toward mutuality and interdependence that Booth notices on the level of the poem’s syntax is countered by an opposite trajectory in its content.53 This is another sonnet concerned with the urgent problem of knowing about other perspectives, and like sonnet 24, it builds the self through the other’s perspective while also positing it as only partly knowable. As the lovers become increasingly integrated physically and syntactically, the woman also becomes increasingly unreadable. Booth notes that the first quatrain holds two possible interpretations: ‘lines 3 and 4 give a reason why the speaker believes (he wishes to seem young) and a reason why his beloved lies (she wishes to believe she has a fresh young lover)’ (479). But if this is the case, then that suggestion of her motivation for lying is the closest the speaker comes to identifying what is going on for her subjectively – that she wants to think him young. In the next quatrain, his recourse is to his


own objectified image – ‘my days are past the best’ – which is a truth he already knows and can attribute more easily to her knowledge. Then, as he questions each of their motives in the third quatrain, he satisfies himself with answers that refuse knowledge – that present her only in terms of an outward ‘habit’ of ‘seeming trust’ and himself in terms of what he wants not to have known. In one sense, a great distance emerges between them here even as he answers these questions for both of them. What they know about is their lack of knowledge. Or rather, turning this around we can say that their lack of knowledge of each other, which the poem makes known, becomes an intimacy in itself. They become bound to each other through the emptiness of their knowledge of each other, in which each of them figures an emptiness for the other that invites filling – in a sense, that invites consummation. In this way the poem figures consummation as the fulfillment that comes of the effort to embrace the other’s perspective. At the same time, however, the more explicit image of consummation provides a problem in another way. As always, there is no unequivocal claim that she has slept with the speaker (though this is insinuated); rather, the overt claim (as always) is that she has slept with others. While this can convince him of her physical availability to him too,54 it also ensures that she can never be exclusively his. So now his selfhood is not only not his own, but it is based on connection with an other who can never be owned or controlled by him either. Yet this lack of owning is what permits the consummation of the final pun on ‘lying’. In this poem, it is the way that he relinquishes control of her thought, and thus of her body too, that allows them to ‘lye’ together. To say that ‘she lies’, then, is not merely to represent ‘language’ thereby, but to represent a concrete, subjective other. Certainly she is a duplicitous other, but that does not mean she reduces to ‘false language’, or that, because he also lies, her language becomes interchangeable with his. Her duplicity makes her an other the speaker cannot fully know. Without being able to know, and thus to represent, her actual subjective perspective, the speaker does recognize that she has one, and that it matters to him – that is, he represents the fact, though not the content, of her perspective. In this way, the speaker’s stance toward the dark woman resembles the ‘strategic non-presumption’ that Magnusson illuminates in the sonnets to the beloved patron – the same reticence to presume knowledge of her subjective experience. In a sense, it confers power rather than exerting it. As Schalkwyk suggests, the fact that the sonnet fails to represent her voice is not necessarily ‘a sign of either disempowerment or even dismemberment’, as feminist criticism has


argued it is.55 In fact, representing the beloved’s voice (as Sidney, for instance, sometimes does) could be seen as ventriloquizing and thus coopting her subjectivity. But there is another way in which a poetic self can acknowledge another’s subjectivity – by taking up a stance as its object. As I have argued throughout this chapter, the analysis of objectification lets us discern such material (i.e., concrete and subjective) others within lyric. Each time the speaker objectifies himself he registers the viewpoint of the other and its impact on himself. The speaker’s combined acknowledgement of and reticence about the dark woman signals her fully subjective status. Thus at issue is not that the poet tries and fails to identify with her and so ends up divided in himself, but rather that she isn’t contained at all by him, physically or mentally. Yet he is committed to her nonetheless, and it is that profound attachment, rather than the mere disparagement of her, that produces the wit and the power of many of these sonnets. The recognition of and commitment to something outside himself gives the poem two subjects, and makes it not finally about his experience of himself but his experience of a physical other. That experience has implications for the speaker’s selfhood, but we cannot say it constitutes that selfhood, unless we make the internalizing move that the poet himself resists making by continually addressing her physical reality. In his speaker’s commitment to the dark woman Shakespeare insists on the importance for selfhood of the material other and thereby resists emergent conventions of subjective authority. Because she is not a distanced and thus stabilized ideal, she also cannot be used as the means – as in Neoplatonic theory – of transcending the material situation at hand. In this way, Shakespeare rejects the philosophical and poetic model in which idealized vision leads to a higher truth. Instead, his speaker’s vision leads him ever back to the material beloved – the other through whom he consciously constitutes himself. In this way, the sonnets also reject the paradigm whereby the subjectivity of the other is effaced or denied in order to assert the subjectivity of the poet at a falsely autonomous level. Rather, the sonnets, like Shakespeare’s plays, manage to represent the self’s ongoing indebtedness to others. Turning one last time to Ulysses’s formulation, this kind of selfhood is subtly captured in his idea of identity as feeling what one ‘owes’ – if we take owes now in both its Renaissance meanings, of possessing and of being in debt. In the sonnets, the poet’s objectification is crucial in establishing that debt, adding an interpersonal dimension to their representation of selfhood. To resubsume this dimension under the heading of ‘subjectivity’ – to call it a ‘subjectivity effect’ – is to obscure what


Shakespeare manages to suggest about ‘self’ that goes beyond subjectivity: namely, the way that objectification creates an ongoing dependence of selfhood on specific others. This is not merely a semantic issue: to equate selfhood with subjectivity is to speak of it wholly in terms of first-person experience. But to be an object is not only to experience oneself as an object. There is something left over – one is not only an object to oneself, but to others, and those others have legs. To say this is to get at the ineffable and uncontrollable aspects of Renaissance selfhood – those that cannot help but get lost when English culture coins an abstract ‘self’ that seems to represent what it is to be a self, but that really only represents what it is to elide the other. That coinage doesn’t happen in Shakespeare’s sonnets or plays, where being a self resides partly with others. The more purely subjective self is evident in the movement of Neoplatonic theory toward a more autonomous conception of the soul and in the practical self-fashioning strategies of works such as The Courtier. But Shakespeare’s texts resist that choice by clinging to the material other.

4 ‘Womans Constancy’: The Poetics of Consummation

Now thou hast loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say? – DONNE, ‘Womans Constancy’ The issue is embracement. – SHAKESPEARE, Troilus and Cressida Chapters 2 and 3 have registered two major liabilities of objectified selfhood: mutability and multiplicity. The self as a physical object changes over time; the self as a social object is synchronically complex, entailing more than one perspective. (In contrast, a subjective self, defined by its own single, present-tense experience, is neither temporally nor perspectivally compounded.) This chapter looks at the way these problems of change and decentering come together in early modern culture’s preoccupation with sexual constancy. A vernacular term for what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘idem-identity’ (self-sameness over time), ‘constancy’ represents the effort to transcend the problem of change.1 But unlike the language of ‘identity’, which posits the potential for selfsameness as an abstract inherent property of the individual, ‘constancy’ speaks to the problem of actual, ongoing behavior in the world. With this language, it is at least as easy to be inconstant as to be constant: not the same kind of given as personal ‘identity’, ‘constancy’ entails deliberate effort, and its success or failure is observable. And sexual constancy makes the problem of sameness over time interpersonal – not just a question of being immutable or ‘true’, but of being true to someone else. This relational conception of identity projects both self and other into the future and links selfhood to that interpersonal prospect. 123


As both a physical and a social condition, sexual constancy becomes a crucial topos of early modern debates over selfhood and its strategies. By the sixteenth century, of course, it is ‘woman’s constancy’ that takes center stage. The trope that Donne plays with in his complex poem is a well-established sense that both the need for chastity and the propensity for unchastity belong primarily to women.2 The double standard is widely recognized as such but also generally defended on the basis of women’s ‘nature’.3 Thomas Wright lists inconstancy as one of the four natural characteristics of women, and even refrains from exploring the issue in detail on the grounds that ‘I finde all bookes and commonplaces, so stuffed with these discourses, that I thought it superfluous to write any more.’4 Even defenses of women often posit their natural frailty, sometimes based on the prevailing notion that women are more sexually insatiable and have stronger physical desires than men. Christopher Newstead, for instance, claims that, given their ‘natural pronenesse’ to sexual arousal, women’s chastity is most virtuous in ‘that their minds should be sober amongst the riotous pleasures of their bodies’.5 Chastity is not only more important for women than for men, it is often the only virtue that counts for women. Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christen Woman claims that ‘the man is nat so moche bounde as the woman to kepe chastite, at leaste wayes by the lawes of the worlde’, but for a woman nothing else matters.6 [A] man nedeth many thynges, as wysedome, eloquence, knowlege of thynges, with remembraunce, some crafte to lyve bye, Justice, Liberalite, lustye stomake, and other thynges moo, that were to longe to reherce ..., but in a woman ... no man wyl loke for any other thyng ... but her honesty [i.e., chastity]: the whiche onely, if hit be lacked, is lyke as in a man, if he lacke al that he shulde have. For in a woman the honestie is in stede of all. (sig.G4) Regardless of what other virtues she has, without chastity a woman is left ‘bare and foule’ (sig.G4v). As scholars have long recognized, such persistent alarm about the prospect of women’s sexual infidelity has clear social and political causes: in patriarchal culture who one is depends on establishing paternity.7 Yet this does not fully explain the investment of early modern culture in identifying women as inconstant – an investment that contradicts the sociopolitical imperative. In the representation of male selfhood, this ubiquitous trope seems to serve an additional agenda, projecting instability onto women in order to construct a fiction of male stability.

‘Womans Constancy’: The Poetics of Consummation 125

As an interpersonal and, as I will argue, cultural strategy of selfhood, this kind of projection is related – as opposites are related – to the Neoplatonic strategy of internalization discussed in the previous chapter. Though they suggest a different stance toward the other, the two strategies are by no means mutually exclusive and indeed serve similar ends. While, as we saw in Castiglione, internalizing an ideal other as an object allows the self to transcend the threat of interpersonal loss and (ironically) achieve a greater autonomy, the aim of projection is a sharp conceptual distinction between self and a decidedly un-ideal other.8 (It should be noted that this strategy of projection differs from what is sometimes called empathic projection, to which I will turn in a moment.) The politics of selfhood in this case still concern the question of perspectives. Now, though, instead of obscuring the other’s perspective, the aim is to control it. In such projection, the problems of contingent identity are split off and assigned to women, where they can be observed, judged, and ostensibly controlled. Paradoxically, then, women’s alleged ‘inconstancy’ seems not only to pose epistemological and ontological problems for men, but to help address them as well. As Mark Breitenberg argues, this early modern propensity for anxiety about women’s sexual behavior is not only an effect of patriarchy, but a projective strategy that also ‘contributes to the reproduction of patriarchy’.9 Yet some early modern writers do much more than represent such anxieties – they also expose the strategy of projection, tracing complaints about women’s inconstancy to a prior problem of male inconstancy. As early as Christine de Pisan, defenders of women identify in such complaints a process of cultural projection. Poets and playwrights too diagnose and explore projective strategies. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, to take one obvious instance, reveals Ferdinand’s obsession with his sister’s sexual behavior as a projection of his own incontinent desire for her. More subtly but in a similar vein, much of Donne’s love poetry harps on the possibility of betrayal only to suggest in the end the speaker’s own culpability. And of course Shakespeare’s many versions of the slandered-wife plot explore the social and psychological processes by which male characters wrongly project a woman’s infidelity.10 Such texts can be distinguished from those that participate in the strategy of projection, such as The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s epic offers a complex example of the effort to fashion a stable male self via the problem of ‘woman’s constancy’. Though at times its narrative seems to identify projective strategies, it also condones and even itself engages in them. In contrast, Donne and Shakespeare not only present such constancy as a fiction; in some texts they also valorize the allegedly inconstant


female position. In the process, they redefine ‘constancy’ and ‘truth’ from the standpoint of contingent selfhood. Both Donne and Shakespeare seem interested in a different kind of projection – not the defensive move of splitting oneself off from what one projects, but the effort to anticipate the other’s actual perspective. Here I want to invoke once again Bakhtin’s notion of dialogized consciousness, particularly the idea that a speaker’s language ‘anticipates’ an answer and ‘structures itself in the answer’s direction’.11 Anticipating the other in this way is an effort of interpersonal recognition and connection rather than distancing, and it requires the self to change in relation to the other rather than to control the other. As a stance of selfhood, anticipation complements objectification, whereas the defensively projecting self is the complement of the autonomous, subjective self. Projection in the defensive sense fortifies a subjective stance vis-à-vis the other: the self attributes its own ideas to the other rather than trying to compass the other’s actual experience. That alternative – anticipating by projecting oneself into the other’s perspective – is a much more compromising operation. These two possibilities are, in practice, not fully distinct. The effort to know other minds probably always involves a dialectical combination of the two – attributing to others what we already know and finding something there that takes us beyond our prior experience. My aim here is not so much to insist on a distinction of terms as to suggest that we look at the relative degree to which a self’s stance toward others tends to emphasize one or the other process. When we use the terms ‘empathy’ and ‘empathic projection’, for instance, to what degree do we mean to suggest a process in which the self actually adapts to the other? Take the example of a character such as Iago, about whom much has been said on this score – perhaps most compellingly in Stephen Greenblatt’s account of the Renaissance burgeoning of empathy. Iago is Greenblatt’s central example of empathy, which he defines as the ability and willingness ‘to transform oneself, if only for a brief period and with mental reservations, into another’.12 But with Iago, I would suggest, the mental reservations and the temporary nature of the process are key. Shakespeare highlights them in the opening scene, when Iago discusses his attitude toward Othello and says enigmatically to Roderigo – ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago’ (1.1.57).13 While this may in part express what Greenblatt calls a ‘hypothetical self-cancellation’ (235), it also suggests a will to retain his own identity in the process of improvising. Iago can put himself momentarily in the place of Othello, but he won’t let that change what he takes to be his essence. Indeed, the idea of such an essence


seems to be precisely his point in various possible readings of the line. If it means, for instance, ‘were I Othello, I wouldn’t want to be Iago’, then the second ‘I’ represents Othello’s perspective. Yet the exercise of adopting that perspective doesn’t change Iago’s own. If we take it to mean that ‘being Othello would mean being different from what I am’, then Iago is clearly refusing that possibility. The line can even mean that ‘real empathic identification with Othello would erase my own existence’ – in other words, ‘I’m not really identified with him.’ What it does not visualize is the mutual influence of these two ‘I’s.14 Though he is a master at grasping the other’s perspective, Iago always distances himself ideologically from what he finds there – for instance, through ridicule or by putting some deliberate misconstruction on his observations. In this way, he holds back, secretly reserves, a self that is disengaged, or at least, that he won’t allow to be altered through the engagement. Though he can occupy the other’s perspective, he refuses to identify it as his own: thus feigning for him is not the transformative process we saw in Chapter 2, in humoral conceptions of acting. Playing for Iago is not fully becoming: ‘I am not what I am’ (1.1.62). The negations in these lines are crucial. Whatever its powers of perception and manipulation, this is a very different kind of imaginative engagement than, say, that of Desdemona when she sees ‘Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.252) – particularly in Stanley Cavell’s reading of that line: ‘that she saw his visage as he sees it’.15 Desdemona’s empathic projection of herself into Othello’s mind results not in her reserving, as Iago does, a fixed essence beneath a mask, but in her being ‘subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord’ (1.3.245–6). Iago’s is a more paranoid model of selfhood. And here I mean not just the paranoid symptom of his endless suspicions about who may have been sleeping with his wife, but his avoidance of any influence of the other. Such a self, feeling itself too open to its context, rigorously resists contamination from without and turns what might have been empathy into projection – i.e., dissociates itself from what it discovers in the other. Iago induces a similar stance in Othello, transforming him from a lover who was verbally engaged and able to empathize with Desdemona (who could grasp, for instance, the ‘hint’ of her desire that he should woo her [1.3.165]) into one who can only observe her from the outside.16 Using the issue of ‘woman’s constancy’ as the means of effecting this transformation, Iago disengages Othello from Desdemona’s subjective experience just as he has repeatedly interrupted their lovemaking. One form of ‘knowing’ her seems the emblem of the other, and that link between sexual consummation and the subjectivity of the other is


not unusual in early modern texts. Nor is Othello’s move from empathy to projection in the face of his sexual relationship with Desdemona. Consummation figures not just a physical but a psychological engagement with the other: embracing her desire means embracing her subjective experience. But that movement beyond one’s own experience compromises subjective authority. Consummation entails not only penetrating the other but also being penetrated – in a sense, being adulterated.17 The more one moves toward a paranoid position, the more one needs to control and define that other subjectivity rather than be reshaped by it.18 Consummation is what the Petrarchan subject has to avoid because it means the (at least temporary) end of desire as well as the encounter with a real other – both of which spell the end of pure subjectivity. The ‘morning after’ can be catastrophic for this subjective Petrarchan self, as the libertine poetry of the seventeenth-century often recognizes. What William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden have called the ‘hangover of post-coital depression’ that can characterize such poetry – a sense that ‘perhaps Ovid was not such a good idea’ – has partly to do with this. As Sir John Suckling observes: ‘He that enjoys her hath no more to say.’19 Yet the detumescence of desire, with its accompanying lack of material for the Petrarchan speaker, is not all that comes with embracement. Writers have a choice about how to awaken from Petrarchism, and those who move through and beyond consummation sometimes seem interested in that detumescent, adulterate self – its crimes, its crises, and occasionally its more positive possibilities. There is often, as it turns out, a great deal more to say.

Spenser’s split objects and the querelle des femmes Spenser’s treatment of the problem of constancy in The Faerie Queene exemplifies the connection between the strategies of projection and of subjective authority. There is an effort here to move beyond a Petrarchan constancy of frustration – to negotiate the road to consummated desire. But that negotiation involves a careful distancing of self and other – a stance comparable to the wariness and disconnection of the later Othello, but one that Spenser posits as helpful rather than tragic. The Faerie Queene is full of sexual encounters, but they figure predominantly as a threat to the self rather than an enhancement. In this text, the threat of consummation lies largely in its power to transform the self, which we see illustrated in the House of Busirane. The tapestries that Britomart studies there depict one god after another forced by


Cupid to change – from Jove and Apollo changing themselves into myriad shapes to have sex, to Mars’s transformation into a ‘meeke’ lover of ‘womanish teares’ and ‘vnwarlike smarts’.20 Among humans, love is depicted as mixing up class as well as gender: Kings Queenes, Lords Ladies, Knights & Damzels gent Were heap’d together with the vulgar sort, And mingled with the raskall rablement, Without respect of person or of port, To shew Dan Cupids powre and great effort. (3.11.46) The multiplicity engendered by sexual activity appears most threatening – ‘A thousand monstrous formes therein were made, / Such as false loue doth oft vpon him weare, / For loue in thousand monstrous formes doth oft appeare’ (3.11.51). Consummated love introduces an otherness that destabilizes the subjective self. Of course, The Faerie Queene is everywhere deeply anxious about mutability, and the ideal of constancy is its overarching goal. As James Nohrnberg suggests, the virtues in each of its legends amount to ‘six varieties of constancy’: ‘the first three ... pertain to an ideal or steadfast self, and the second three, to a social ideal of concord’.21 This formulation suggests that, in his ordering of the virtues in the six books we have, Spenser wants to locate a stable individual selfhood prior to social engagement. And yet his text reveals that that stable identity is not an original condition – that it first requires separating an already engaged self from its context psychologically. We watch that process in the first three books, where the virtues of faith, temperance, and chastity involve a deliberate and even arduous distancing from others, a retreat from emotional or even just conversational involvement. Britomart has to withhold her identity verbally as well as withhold herself sexually. Guyon repeatedly has to avoid feeling pity. Redcrosse Knight learns the hard way about the dangers of accessible females. In all three of the ‘steadfast self’ books, then, constancy entails disengaging from a social context. Each of the legends also contributes to a crucial gendering of the problem of sexual constancy. Assigning the virtue of Chastity itself to a female knight suggests, in accord with Vives, that it is the female virtue and that it is primarily women’s responsibility. And for the other knights, their own constancy seems to depend on the behavior of females – as if the


heart of the problem is ‘woman’s constancy’. In Book 1, Redcrosse Knight’s faith (or lack of it) is a function of that virtue (or its lack) in female figures. His betrayal of Una is brought about by the image of her falseness, as forged by Archimago. Significantly, Archimago’s first attempt to undermine Redcrosse’s devotion fails because it addresses the knight’s own behavior. When he tries to tempt Redcrosse to transgress sexually with a bogus Una, Redcrosse is shocked, but he does not fall: he is neither tempted himself nor thwarted from his courtly commitment to her, which he reiterates despite his dismay about her ‘light’ behavior towards him (1.1.54, 55). Only when Archimago makes him ‘see’ Una’s sexual transgression with another does his attack on Redcrosse’s faith succeed. The image of her inconstancy provokes him to ‘rage’ and ‘gealous fire’ (1.2.5) and causes him ‘ungently’ to desert her (1.2.8). In other words, the knight’s commitment can be defeated not through his own ‘wanton’ behavior, but through the image of hers.22 With the trope of ‘woman’s constancy’ comes the spectre of projection: the implication that Redcrosse is himself responsible for the image of Una as false. As the narrator suggests, Redcrosse subsequently experiences ‘the bitter anguish of his guiltie sight’ (1.2.6.2, my emphasis), and Archimago can be seen as a figure for the knight’s own imagination: Nohrnberg, for instance, notes that ‘in animating the false Una, Archimago acts the part of the fallen imagination’.23 Of course, Archimago represents much more than the individual imagination.24 As magician, false prophet, representative of Satan, and even artist,25 he can also be seen as a figure for the way the imagination works together with representational forces outside itself, in culture.26 If Spenser is representing ‘projection’ here, it operates not individually but culturally. Overall, this episode of faith follows the pattern of the slandered-wife story, in which the beloved’s inconstancy is deliberately forged, and the lover falls for it.27 As such, it would seem to present a cautionary tale about projection. In moralizing the episode, however, the narrator’s language is interestingly unclear about the source of Redcrosse’s ‘light misdeeming’ (1.4.2) of Una’s loyalty: Young knight, what euer that dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice, and change of thy deare loued Dame, Least thou of her beleeue too lightly blame, And rash misweening doe thy hart remoue:


For unto knight there is no greater shame, Then lightnesse and inconstancie in loue; That doth this Redcrosse knights ensample plainly proue. (1.4.1) While Redcrosse’s particular example indicates that the ‘fraud’ and ‘ficklenesse’ one needs to watch out for are either one’s own or a third party’s, it is possible for the first half of this stanza to hear a warning against fraud or fickleness in women. If one does, the subsequent correction reenacts on a miniature scale in the mind of the reader (who has been interpellated as a ‘young knight’), Redcrosse’s temptation by the stereotype of dangerous women. This flickering potential for female culpability persists throughout the poem, particularly in the slander stories of subsequent books, where it is not always easy to say who or what is being blamed – male imagination, cultural stereotypes, or female nature. Another such story appears in Book 2, when Guyon meets Phedon, who has killed his innocent fiancée because his traitorous friend has convinced him of her disloyalty, showing him the ‘ocular proof’ – a scene staged with the fiancée’s maid. This former friend, Philemon, is a human Archimago, a ‘false faytour’ (2.4.30) who Phedon now knows deceived him in order to destroy his fortunate marriage. Recounting the story, though, Phedon says he worsened things by killing Philemon – ‘To losse of loue adioyning losse of frend’ (2.4.31) – as if, weirdly, he can still think of him as a friend. Even more oddly, he recounts that his next thought was to ‘purge’ those crimes by killing the maid, reasoning that ‘she did first offend, / She last should smart’ (2.4.31). In fact, though, having been duped herself by Philemon, the only offense the maid can be guilty of is having had sex with him. But then perhaps this is the point – that female sexuality is the ‘first’ condition of evil. At any rate, while one woman in this story is exonerated (once dead), another is yet threatened with ultimate blame on account of her sexual behavior.28 In this way, Spenser’s text itself seems subtly but repeatedly to project the problem of male inconstancy back onto women. In Book 3, where ‘monstrous’ love needs to be controlled through the virtue of chastity, jealousy can still pose a major threat, and the moral can still be re-aimed at women. Here Malbecco, an old husband so afraid of being cuckolded by his young wife that he locks her away from all society, ends up as the embodiment of Gealousie when he does indeed lose her to one of Britomart’s companions. In this episode, the initial implication is that


Malbecco’s treatment of his wife causes her unchastity (and here the Squire of Dames suggests a kind of projection as well – specifically, that ‘The priuie guilt’ of Malbecco’s own impotence ‘makes him alway / Suspect her truth’ [3.9.5]). And yet in the other knights’ discussion of the situation, Satyrane also blames what he foresees as the inevitable outcome on the wife’s inconstant female nature: Extremely mad the man I surely deeme, That weenes with watch and hard restraint to stay A womans will, which is disposd to go astray. (3.9.6, my emphasis) Though present, Britomart offers no argument in response to this, and no language in the rest of the episode contradicts the view of women as the ultimate source of the problem here. (Indeed, the narrator has identified the wife in advance as a ‘wanton Lady’ [3.9.1].) Perhaps we should say then that for Spenser both men and women are responsible for breaches of female ‘honesty’ – men because of their fears and expectations of unchastity in women, and women because of their weak, inconstant natures. And yet, if the latter is correct, the former is justified. This is how Spenser’s allegory keeps reassigning responsibility for the problem to women, at times identifying male (cultural) projections as initiating a problem where none exists, and at times reverting to the position that the problem is inherent in women, and only overcome by a few. Following this episode, Spenser’s narrator explicitly assigns both the cause and the control of male jealousy to women, and does so in a way that positions his female readers in the responsible role too: And ye faire Ladies, that your kingdomes make In th’harts of men, them gouerne wisely well, And of faire Britomart ensample take, That was as trew in loue, as Turtle to her make. (3.11.2) This seemingly generous ascription to women of ultimate power in love carries problematic implications. While it makes women responsible for containing male jealousy through their own chastity, the fact that their ‘governance’ takes place in the hearts of men actually puts it potentially out of their control. For the heart in Spenser is the locus not just of


feeling but of images, and one of the main pathways to it is visual. And vision, of course, is highly unreliable – the problem of deceptive appearances in both men and women haunts Spenser’s poem throughout. In women, although beauty is the sign of truth, it can also be imitated. Thus Redcrosse falls for Fidessa because he relies on vision – ‘More busying his quicke eyes, her face to view, / Then his dull eares, to heare what she did tell’ (1.2.26) – and because she successfully feigns virtuous looks – ‘the seeming simple maid / Let fall her eyes, as shamefast to the earth’ (1.2.27). Again, the narrator’s language leaves unclear whether the source of this deception lies in the knight’s power or Fidessa’s, merely noting in passive voice that ‘in his falsed fancy he her takes / To be the fairest wight, that liued yit’ (1.2.30, my emphasis). In spite of the ensuing encounter with Fradubio, who was also unable to distinguish between true and ‘forged beauty’ (1.2.36), Redcrosse remains ‘too simple and too trew’ to figure out that Fidessa is really Duessa (1.2.45). Even the narrator, in opening the next canto, links Redcrosse’s mistaken pity for Duessa with his own ‘deare compassion’ for Una – as if admitting the impossibility of accurate moral judgment of beauty. But while recognizing the fallibility of vision, Spenser does not reject its key role in the relationships of men and women. The visible female other is central to his Neoplatonic model of selfhood, and The Faerie Queene makes no effort to relinquish the dichotomous roles of male subject and female object. Indeed, the crucial requirement is that the object not become a subject herself – not present her own perspective but concentrate on his (i.e., on herself as an object). Book 3 is therefore deeply preoccupied with the psychology of female objectification, and the trials of Chastity involve a strengthening of that objectified position. What Britomart encounters in the House of Busirane are images of her own situation and experience in love, and as Isabel MacCaffrey explains, her task is to learn to recognize the nature of what she herself has gone through from an outside perspective: At the House of Busirane she is called upon to consider from ‘outside’ the nature and consequences of her emotions. ... Her position in relation to the tapestries and the masque is analogous to the position of the reader of an allegory, observing, meditating, understanding. ... (T)he tapestries tell a true story. But the implications of the truth can be assessed only by those who remain outside it.29 This ‘outside’ awareness aligns her psychologically with the social forces that require her chastity. Britomart’s preparation in the various chambers


involves studying the objectifications of love’s charms and learning to recognize them as such, so that when she enters the torture chamber she is ‘neither of idle shewes, nor of false charmes aghast’ (3.12.29). Developing this objectified view of her role seems in fact to constitute the central work of her quest. There is nothing quite comparable in the quests of Redcrosse or Guyon, who develop their virtues through practice rather than observation (i.e., through subjective experience rather than objectification). This is not to say that Book 3 does not develop the idea of chastity as the other books develop their respective virtues, increasing our awareness of what is at stake in them. Clearly it does so, although the process does not always involve Britomart herself, who is absent from much of the book of which she is the titular knight. But Britomart’s fidelity to Artegall is never breached in the way that, say, Redcrosse’s devotion to Una is. Redcrosse’s lack of faith is a corrigible mistake – he can attach himself to Duessa and survive with his quest intact. But female unchastity is unredeemable, and so Britomart never swerves from her attachment. Nor is she ever wanton: though she worries about this herself at the beginning, the discussion with Glauce makes clear that, since what she feels is only for an image, it is love and not lust (3.2.40–1). (Indeed, Britomart’s concern about this is self-chastening.) More the object than the subject of her own quest, she is already called ‘constant’ (3.1.19) and ‘chaste’ (3.1.53) from its beginning. In Britomart we get our only inside view of the position occupied by all female figures in The Faerie Queene – that of the visual object. Unlike Shakespeare – who, as I argued in Chapter 3, resists the category of the female object – Spenser keeps reinforcing it, insisting on a split between the idealized, stable object and a dangerously inconstant alternative. This tendency to split the object into good and evil possibilities is a common recourse in the period, as William Kerrigan notes. Kerrigan, however, considers such splitting inevitable in any age, for reasons of male psychosexual development, and he takes Spenser’s model as universal: ‘the men of the world count Unas and Duessas’.30 Thus he fails to analyze such splitting as an interpersonal or cultural strategy. Nor does he recognize it as something a text may be showing rather than doing – as is the case in his main examples, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare’s male characters often speak in such bifurcated terms, but his representations of female characters tend to be mixed rather than split into the purely good or bad. Even in the dark lady sonnets, where the speaker’s language embraces the extremes of ‘fair’ and


‘foul’, the point is that he cannot fix her as one or the other. Spenser’s text consistently divides female figures into the good and the bad – or, more often, the beautiful and the monstrous. The latter two categories are not really more extreme, but they are primarily visual, which is why they are useful for Petrarchan or Neoplatonic subjectivity. Such split objectifications are a strategy of control – both within and beyond Spenser’s text, they offer a means of male self-representation that requires a specific psychological positioning for the female character (and reader) and that, for the male, preserves the possibility of the stable female mirror. In Book 3, Spenser justifies this splitting tendency in another address to his readers, insisting that the story of ‘a wanton Lady’, provides an instructive contrast: ‘neuer let th’ensample of the bad / Offend the good; for good by paragone / Of euill, may more notably be rad, / As white seemes fairer, macht with blacke attone’ (3.9.2). In other words, he wants the categories not to contaminate but to invigorate each other. Yet the powerful threat of female evil permeates the poem to a degree that often manages either to efface or to undermine the presence of any female good. In this sense, Spenser’s splitting resembles that of misogynist tracts of the period, which also tend to be dominated by extreme objectifications of women. In Joseph Swetnam’s The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Vnconstant Women, images of female evil often serve to undermine the possibility of the good with the inevitability of falseness, by identifying beauty as merely a deceptive outward cover for the monstrous: women are ‘painted coffins with rotten bones’, and even natural beauty will have ‘a flower as white as snow, but a roote as black as inke’.31 Such tracts are often notable for a bizarre lack of integration regarding such extremes, in which the writer veers back and forth between them as if refusing to be conscious of both at once. This is especially the case in Swetnam’s two introductory epistles, one to female and one to male readers, in which he contradicts himself without acknowledging the fact. Toward the end of the pamphlet too, there are sudden changes in Swetnam’s tone with no accounting for them (46–7). In such splitting, it seems the male voice does not have to recognize its own ambivalence or division, a strategy that serves to shore up the sense of its unity.32 At the same time, the doubleness of the object in such tracts suggests not a mixed moral status, but pure evil. In Hic Mulier, for instance, the threat of mixture, indeterminacy, and mutability in female cross-dressing produces an insistence on extreme categories of good and bad, black and white – a rigid contrast between the


‘monstrous deformity’ of cross-dressed women, who are ‘not half man/half woman ... half beast/half Monster, but all Odious, all Devil’ and, on the other hand, ‘you good women, you that are in the fullness of perfection’ and that are ‘ever young because ever virtuous, ever chaste, ever glorious’.33 While such writers do tend, like Spenser, to stop now and then and claim exceptions to the evil they describe, they also seem to forget such exceptions as soon as they make them and proceed to generalize freely, as the author of Hic Mulier does a moment later. Misquoting ancient authority to assert that all women are bad, he twists a statement in Aristotle that was originally about men and claims that ‘Sophocles, being asked why he presented no women in his Tragedies but good ones and Euripides none but bad ones, answered he presented women as they should be, but Euripides, women as they were’ (268). Similarly, despite the occasional reminder about ‘good’ (i.e., perfect) women, Spenser’s text is full of references in the narrator’s own language to women’s inherently false, weak, wicked, or monstrous natures. At one point, for instance, Duessa’s hidden monstrousness applies to all women when the narrator refers to ‘Her nether parts, the shame of all her kind’ (1.8.48) before going on to describe her more uniquely monstrous attributes. And even in the context of the chaste Britomart’s rescue of the long-suffering Amoret, the narrator can still easily make general reference to ‘wauering wemens wit’ (3.12.26) – a typically deprecating remark that belies the more politic language about women’s capacity for constancy found elsewhere in The Faerie Queene. In this way, while ostensibly aimed at glorifying Elizabeth, Spenser’s poem also frequently betrays the sense of a persistent underlying threat from its female figures.34 The Faerie Queene contains this threat primarily through the virtue of female chastity, which it increasingly defines as a self-chastening process.35 Interestingly, Spenser includes a reference to just such containment of threatening women in the historical past, claiming that ‘antique’ women had been successful knights ‘Till enuious Man fearing their rules decay, / Gan coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty’ (3.2.2). And yet Spenser’s own depiction of female knighthood involves such a strict curb too. His ideal female warrior has a threatening counterpart (Radigund) whom Britomart herself has to overcome. In this crucial battle, as Philippa Berry points out, Britomart’s victory replaces the active, independently androgynous female figure with one whose goal of becoming the ‘genetrix of a line of kings’ complies with patriarchal needs (161). The image of Artegall in subjection to the Amazonian Radigund elicits from the narrator a passage so clear in its antifeminist


ideology that the author of Hic Mulier quotes it in support of his own attack on ‘bold’ and ‘impudent’ women: Such is the crueltie of womenkynd, When they haue shaken off the shamefast band, With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd, T’obay the heasts of mans well ruling hand, That then all rule and reason they withstand, To purchase a licentious libertie. But vertuous women wisely vnderstand, That they were borne to base humilitie, Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie. (5.5.25)36 As Theresa Krier notes, the last line here is an ‘oddly hasty bow to the Queen and to the prudent position on the controversy over feminine rule’.37 But the stanza as a whole represents Spenser’s thrust throughout the poem, in which the ‘shamefast’ stance of the chaste (i.e., chastened) woman is the necessary basis of ‘all rule and reason’.38 For the most part, Spenser associates female chastity not with ‘base humilitie’ but with an exalted and mysterious status; yet this does not mean that his insistence on it has any less to do with control. Krier argues that such ‘numinous’ female figures are Spenser’s way of defusing the sexual threat involved in the male perception of female beauty, with the aim both of protecting female privacy and of preserving the male ‘desire for vision, including sexual vision’ (149). She cites such moments as Una’s encounter with the satyrs, in which their ‘potentially dangerous sexual energy’ is transformed into a Vergilian ‘wonder before the beloved woman’ (5–6). But these moments, I suggest, have less to do with the female’s ‘beloved’ status than with her virginity. The wondrous effects of that virginity are part of an ideology Spenser shares with Vives, according to whom ‘Virginite was ever an holy thing even amonge theves, breakers of Sayntuary, ungratious liuers, mourderers, and also amonge wylde beasts. ... Virginite hath so moche marveylous honoure in it that wylde lyons regarde hit.’39 This is of course precisely what happens with Una when she is wandering helpless and winds up protected rather than attacked by a hungry lion, who is ‘amazd’ and forgets ‘his furious force’ at the sight of ‘the royall virgin’ (1.3.5). Vives goes on to argue that the power of chastity is such that there is actually no such thing as rape if the woman is truly chaste – that virginity is something ‘whiche no man wil take from her agaynst her wyll, nor


touche hit, excepte she be wyllynge her selfe’ (G4). Such a conviction is played out in Spenser’s text in the Florimell and Amoret stories, in which these women are tortured but not deflowered by their captors. So it is also important that the woman who is successfully carried off – Malbecco’s wife – has already been identified as ‘wanton’ (3.9.1). Spenser’s emphasis on the power of true chastity represents not, as Krier argues, his ‘decorums and tactfulness’ (132) toward female figures, but control of them. Perhaps the most telling example of this is the episode in which the chaste Chrysogonee’s sleeping body ‘all naked bare displayd’ is impregnated by the sun’s beams, which ‘bright upon her body playd, / Being through former bathing mollified, / And pierst into her wombe, where they embayd / With so sweet sence and secret power unspide, / That in her pregnant flesh they shortly fructifide’ (3.6.7). Krier feels Spenser is aiming here at ‘the revelation of a [female] life candid, complete, and apart from the watcher’ (139), though what meaning candor or completion can have for a sleeping subject is unclear. (It is also not clear how this life is ‘apart’ either from the sun, whose beams play upon and pierce her, or from the reader’s gaze.) This is a chief example of what Krier sees as ‘the poet’s attempt to acknowledge a feminine experience of selfhood’ and ‘to honor the otherness of feminine bodily life’ (139). Instead, I suggest the episode indicates that Spenser’s ideal female figure is one who is fully available to the sexual imagination without experiencing it as such or being able to respond herself. Her immobility (the emblem of her chastity) and her unconsciousness are the enabling conditions of a gaze that can penetrate and control the other’s body and yet leave its subject free of any change or effect himself. The female viewpoint, as Spenser constructs it psychologically, is built on a knowledge of the male perspective, while the male view detaches itself from any empathic alignment with women by keeping an objectified image (either good or evil) of her firmly before the eye. Such split images are in themselves a stabilizing mode of detachment, but the model also requires that women cooperate with this division of psychological labor by embracing their own objectification. Spenser’s text enforces that objectification in a variety of more or less subtle ways, ranging from the explicit reader-addressed references to women’s responsibility for their own images in men’s ‘harts’, to the allegorical representation of the psychology of chastity, which involves understanding and managing one’s own experience of love from an outside perspective, while also at the required moment being able to deliver the physical self one has preserved inviolate into the lawful subjection of marriage. The virtue of chastity is very much a state of mind here, as it is in Vives’s text, but that


state of mind is precariously double, involving a continual movement out from one’s own experience – a sort of permanent openness of mind in the service of a closed body. Being true to another here requires the capacity to receive the split projections of the male view and align oneself with the good ones. In this way, those projections are not simply a mental act on the part of males, but a cultural interaction.40 This complex cultural process of projection is something Renaissance defenders of women were at times able to grasp, analyze, and decry. Christine de Pisan, for instance, whose revolutionary Livre de la Cité des Dames was translated into English in 1521, was probably the first writer to attack misogynist projections as such, not just refuting the time-honored accusations against women but looking at the motivations behind them.41 Her critique grasps the importance of the attackers’ own orientation, a recognition that allows her to begin to demystify patriarchal assumptions. As Constance Jordan explains, Christine was aware of ‘the ideological dimension of her culture’: She recognizes that existing discourse on women is prejudicial not by accident but because it is inextricably bound up with the interests of men; that the authorities on this subject identify themselves as men; and perhaps that their language (and hers) is conditioned to express a masculine perspective on the world.42 Christine’s breakthrough is to begin by identifying the ubiquitous attacks against women as a kind of behavior and asking Lady Reason what causes it.43 One of the chief answers is that such ‘slaundres’ are motivated by ‘grete envye’. Men harbor a suspicion that women are actually superior – either that they are more virtuous (having ‘gretter understandynge’ and being ‘more noble of condycyon’) or that they have more fun sexually (i.e., their attackers are impotent men who ‘knowe not howe to put away theyr sorowe but to blame women’).44 Christine also analyzes how such widespread cultural projections succeed on the basis of the psychological positioning of women, which she perceives in herself. Finding herself, despite her knowledge and experience to the contrary, unable to disagree with the universal male opinion that women are ‘fully enclyned to all vyces’, she concludes that her acquiescence in this opinion has been due to a habit of seeing herself through others’ perspectives. I coude not perceyue that suche Jugementes myght be trewe agaynst the naturall condycyons or maners of women. [Yet] I argued ... that


it sholde be to grete a thynge that so many famous men ... sholde haue spoken or wryten lyengly. ... [A]nd soo I reported me more to the Jugement of other then to that I felte or knowe of myselfe. Thus in this thought was I as a persone halfe from hymselfe.45 Christine’s careful analysis of her thought process recognizes that the negative objectifications of male authority have trumped her subjective self-knowledge as a source of judgment. Unable to integrate the two, she finds herself dislocated – ‘as a persone halfe from hymselfe’. Yet crucially, Christine’s solution to this predicament is not purely an appeal to her own subjective experience, but involves a continual embrace of other perspectives. The allegorical Ladies (Reason, Rectitude,46 and Justice) who exhort her to ‘build’ a refuge for women certainly figure her turn away from male authority and reliance instead on her own revisionary judgment. But each also carries an emblem (a mirror, a ruler, and a measuring vessel, respectively) that captures the way that revisionary judgment, as Jordan puts it, ‘depends upon reflection and comparative assessments’ (114). In opposing the negative objectifications of women, her recourse is not to a merely subjective judgment, but to a fairer objectification. And embracing this objectified mode of selfhood, Christine also ultimately embraces subjection – ‘it is not some tymes beste to a creature to be free out of subieccyon’47 – a move that modern feminist scholars have found disappointing, considering her otherwise revolutionary work. But the choice reflects not only her Christian culture but also the more socially subjected forms of selfhood dominant in her period, in which freedom is not yet an ultimate value. Subsequent Renaissance critiques of antifeminist projection follow Christine in understanding the phenomenon as an ideological tool and a strategic practice that entails a particular positioning of women. As Jordan explains, sixteenth-century defenders of women could attempt ‘to prove the virtue of women not by trying to disprove the claims of their detractors but rather by framing misogynist opinions with explanations of their causes in social attitudes and practices’ (72). They were able to see through assumptions about ‘nature’ and the supposed disinterest of historians who had portrayed women as inferior, and to consider the status of women through a ‘cultural relativism’ and a historicizing of misogynist texts (120, 130).48 In a proto-anthropological approach, such writers provide ‘examples of cultural difference’ (133), and thus question ‘the notion that the subordination of woman [is] a universal phenomenon, changeless and impervious to historical or local pressures’ (154). In particular, many of them recognize that projection


takes advantage of the silence deliberately imposed on women by patriarchal rule. Agrippa, for instance, sees that women have been misrepresented largely because they have been forbidden to represent themselves: had women been able ‘to make lawes, too wryte histories, how gret tragedies (trow ye) wolde they have writen of the inestimable malice of men’.49 In such cases, feminist arguments recognize projection as a behavioral loop in which men project onto women an inferior status in order to render them controllable, accusing them of being what they also force them to be. Such arguments describe a range of ways in which projection can work, most of which go beyond the psychoanalytic concept. In Freudian theory, projection is an individual psychological mechanism that deals with what are seen as internally arising conflicts – in other words, the self is the source of what it projects. Freud uses the term to denote a defense involving ‘the externalization of an internal process’ – that is, ‘the attribution to another ... of qualities, feelings or wishes that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognize in himself’.50 The motivation for this mechanism is also internal – to create the illusion that one can escape that seemingly intolerable part of oneself: ‘the subject projects [his own endogenous excitations] outside so as to be able to flee from them ... and protect himself from them’, as if they were external (352). The drive or instinct theory underpinning this idea posits inherent impulses that, when they become sources of unpleasure, have to be either repressed or projected onto the outside world.51 Thus for Freud, Othello’s notion of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, for instance, would be a projection of his own wish to be unfaithful to her: he gets the idea of it from his own impulse.52 But while we may not want to rule out such an implication, we cannot limit ourselves to this model without effacing the wider forces that Renaissance texts also include as sources and motivations of projection.53 This is the thrust of the ideological interpretations discussed above, which understand projection as motivated by practical considerations or issues of power, and as part of a social process. A sixteenth-century French defense of women, for instance, recognizes that accusations of unchastity can be economically motivated, as when a father who has enough money for only one daughter’s dowry ‘sends the others off to convents, excusing his conduct with the trumped-up charge that his daughters are given to licentiousness’.54 Such self-justifying behavior obviously draws on a ready stereotype. And even when writers account for projection on an individual level (as in Christine’s charge that a man’s own impotence or lack of virtue makes him project maliciously)


the motivation has to do with interpersonal politics, not individual drives: projection serves to shore up a weak or injured appearance, and also aims at positioning the other as morally inferior by transferring blame. And though what is repudiated may be an image of self, it will be understood as externally given: Men, knowing that they have been rejected as vile and abjectly horrible persons, don’t know how to respond other than by vilifying the entire female sex. ... And this response is so far off the mark that women are marked with vices that they altogether lack.55 Such arguments about projection share with Freudian theory the realization that what is attributed to the other is false. But only in Freud is it also seen as arising pre-socially, in instinct. This crucial difference reveals different underlying conceptions of selfhood. Drive theory makes it possible to account for psychological phenomena individually, whereas Renaissance texts make it part of a wider, cultural phenomenon. Thus to apply the term in a psychoanalytic sense can be to obscure what Renaissance writers saw as the source in culture of individual impulses. But if we use the term in the sense of the complex social process I have been sketching in connection with Spenser, it proves particularly apt for the conventions and the concerns of many Renaissance texts.

Donne and the purgatory of engagement Donne’s love poetry reflects a fascination with the kind of projection that figures so prominently in the querelle des femmes. This poetry frequently raises the idea of female inconstancy, and usually in the context of interpersonal projection. Unlike what we have seen in The Faerie Queene, however, Donne’s representations of projective process take it not as a useful strategy of subjective authority but as the sign of the impossibility of that authority. Exposing the interpersonal embeddedness that underlies such projection, this poetry also exposes efforts to overcome that embeddedness. Straddling both sides of the issue at once, it often has the quality of perversely celebrating the painful and difficult contingency of the self in love. Donne’s interest in the process of projection has sometimes been mistaken for the act itself: Donne’s speakers (and even Donne himself) are seen as projecting inconstancy onto women. John Carey, for instance, argues that Donne’s fondness for the theme of women’s inconstancy


involves an unconscious projection of guilt about his own unfaithfulness to the Roman church: What seems to happen is that Donne, in the fantasy world of the poems, rids himself of his disloyalty by transferring it to women, and directing against them the execrations which he could be seen as meriting. He avails himself, in this way, of the healing distortion of the truth with which fiction always rewards its creators.56 This formulation is inadequate, not because the issues of inconstancy and Donne’s apostasy are not clearly related, but because it is unlikely that Donne himself is unaware of the connection. Given his constant use of religious imagery in this context (such as references to recusancy and apostasy in the elegies), it is more likely that he was highly conscious of it. No doubt it is true, as Carey argues, that ‘when [Donne] abandoned Catholicism he lost an irreplaceable absolute’, and that his poetry shows signs of his subsequent struggle with this loss.57 But it also tends to face it head-on, confronting and even exacerbating the qualities of uncertainty, of multiple and competing perspectives, and of inevitable change that characterize the non-absolute. Thus inconstancy is never simply projected onto women in Donne’s poems, but always becomes an issue for their speakers as well. And it often does so in a way that exposes the process of projection, which Donne not only critiques but also explores as a basic though problematic aspect of selfhood. The emphasis on influence and interpenetration that we saw in Donne’s religious works in Chapter 2 is all the more intense in the love poetry, but here that subjection to the other is often joined with themes of loss or betrayal, so that identity also becomes a problem of knowledge and control. Many of the love poems are about the question of which of the lovers is really unfaithful, and generally the blaming of women turns out to be only apparent. At some point a more or less subtle implication of blame falls on the man. In ‘Confined Love’, for example, the speaker (sounding like Christine’s Lady Reason) identifies the source of the law confining women to chastity as ‘Some man unworthy to be possessor / Of old or new love, himself being false or weak’, who thought to lessen his own ‘pain and shame’ by wreaking his anger on womankind – in other words, wreaking his anger at his own infidelity or impotence on women, by punishing them for his faults.58 Similarly, at the end of ‘His parting from her’, the speaker offers as a final image of his own constancy his faith in his lover’s: ‘I love so true, / As I will never look for


less in you.’ The suggestion here is that looking for less than constancy in her would be a sign of his own inconstancy. In these lines, Donne is consciously working with a notion of projection, and these clarifications serve to debunk the stereotype of female inconstancy. In the process, as Ronald Corthell argues, the poems also produce for the reader ‘a heightened awareness of ideological problems’ that makes the work of ideology itself ‘available to critical analysis’.59 In some poems, projection becomes a key element in Donne’s analysis of selfhood as exchange. The faultiness of projection notwithstanding, this is a movement of the mind that interests Donne, because it has to do with the problems and possibilities of a radically contingent self. What he often portrays in his speakers’ projections is a sharing and even confusion between self and other of affect, attitude, and awareness. ‘Woman’s Constancy’ is perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon, a poem that presents itself as a careful confusion of identities and motives. Readers have raised questions as to who is who in this poem – whether the speaker is male or female – and about the meaning of its generalizing title.60 Is the poem about woman’s constancy in the sense that it doesn’t exist (if the speaker is a man), or in the sense that it may dissolve in the face of male inconstancy (if the speaker is a woman)? Now thou hast loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then antedate some new made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons, which we were? Or, that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? Or, as true deaths, true marriages untie, So lovers’ contracts, images of those, Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change, and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vain lunatic, against these ’scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstain to do, For by tomorrow, I may think so too. Along with the problem of identities, there is also the difficulty of knowing in which of the lovers the impulse to be unfaithful originates.


Thinking in terms of projection, we would say that the speaker’s own intention of being unfaithful is attributed to the lover, only to be owned again in the end as if in response to the unfaithfulness of the lover: ‘I may think so too.’ But that owning exposes the projection, and the focus here is more on the process by which the speaker does acknowledge the lover’s influence, even while anticipating betrayal. Most important is not the validity of the speaker’s detailed conjectures about the lover’s motives and intentions, but the intense involvement of self with the perspective of the other – the kind of mental and emotional interaction – that they entail. Our sense of uncertainty about the speaker’s gender is a product of this involvement, whereby whoever is speaking so much inhabits the other’s perspective as to be virtually interchangeable with him or her. The effect of the poem’s ironic twist is to revise our sense of the speaker’s own feelings and attitude, which began as if worried about the lover’s constancy. But it is also to throw into unresolvable question the whole issue of where feelings and attitudes originate. The speaker has two conceptual frameworks in mind here, and the ultimate effect of the discussion is not to clarify which is whose, but to suggest their interrelatedness. The upshot is an interpersonal conception of ‘constancy’, one that seems to get at its etymological sense of standing with – i.e. whatever you do, I will follow. In this way, it also involves a radical rethinking of the concept, for in that interpersonal dimension, it turns out that constancy entails change. This is more than a typically Donnean paradox, for it is also a possibility that emerges repeatedly, particularly in the elegies. In ‘Change’, for instance, the speaker at one point suggests that perhaps, in order to maintain connection with a changeable mistress, he should try being as mutable as she: Likeness glues love: then if so thou do, To make us like and love, must I change too? (ll. 23–4) While in this case the speaker rejects the idea of changing ‘as oft as she’, he does embrace the necessity of change, not only in her but also in himself. In doing so, he also enacts a change in himself – one that is palpable for the reader as part of an ongoing process of dislocation and revision throughout the poem. In the first four lines he presents a rapidly shifting progression – from her original love, sealed by marriage,


to the confirmation of her new love in the ‘apostasy’ of her affair with himself, to his persistent fears of her inconstancy: Although thy hand and faith, and good works too, Have sealed thy love which nothing should undo, Yea though thou fall back, that apostasy Confirm thy love; yet much, much I fear thee. (ll. 1–4) Landing, as it were, on this fear, it sounds as though he will go on to express a desire for an assurance of constancy; yet instead, he goes on to recognize the necessity of inconstancy. The poem sets up an expectation only to shift from the perspective that generated that expectation. For the speaker, that shift involves adopting the perspective of his lover (or rather the view he projects onto her) and also, it seems, a wider perspective, in which he sees them all – her, himself, and any other ‘fowler’ that may catch his ‘bird’ (ll. 7–8). This time that view explicitly entails conventional generalizations about women – particularly, that they are capable of more sexual activity than men. Yet this is not merely an accusation but also a joking tribute: women are not just ‘more hot, wily, wild’ than men, but are also ‘apter to endure’ – in a physical sense, more constant as lovers, and hence, naturally in need of more than one man. In making an uneasy case for women’s natural liberty, the speaker’s ambivalent, witty logic calls attention to its own constructedness. It also makes us intensely aware that his view of her is based on ‘opinion’ – i.e., expectation – and that this shapes his own course (l. 27).61 Changing himself, he abruptly leaves her behind at this point, switching to the third person and never addressing her again, anticipating his own subsequent paradoxical advice that the ‘purest’ waters keep moving and ‘Never look back’ (l. 34). Nevertheless, it is clear that his decision to embrace change is in direct response to the inconstancy he attributes to her, which justifies his own conclusion that ‘change is the nursery / Of music, joy, life and eternity’ (ll. 35–6). Donne’s poem makes projection part of a general epistemological process, in which self-knowledge depends not only on the objectifying perspectives of others, but also on the perspectives one attributes to others in an attempt to foresee what is coming.62 Such foresight or, as I called it above, anticipation is another way the self can be shaped by the other – if, in the effort to grasp the other’s frame of reference, one allows oneself to be changed by it. Often, Donne celebrates the mystery


of this change. In ‘The Ecstasy’, for instance, love ‘interinanimates two souls’ so that their union constitutes a defense against separation – i.e., ‘controls’ the possible ‘[d]efects of loneliness’ (44). In this poem, it is clearly this mutual anticipation – ‘our souls, (which to advance their state, / were gone out), hung ’twixt her, and me’ – rather than a Neoplatonic incorporation of her by him, in which the speaker locates this transcendent power. The mutuality of this ‘ecstasy’ – this standing outside oneself – is the result of a dialogic exchange: both mean, and both speak (l. 26). But while this poem isolates a moment between ‘souls, whom no change can invade’ (48), and insists that there will be ‘small change, when we’are to bodies gone’ (76), other poems are not so certain in their anticipations. When this effort of mental and emotional exchange encounters the necessity of separation, it often leads Donne’s speakers to the idea of the other’s inconstancy. Thus Donne’s love poems take up a range of positions on this issue, portraying the interdependence of self and other at times as an ideal of oneness, at times as a dangerous threat, and at times, subtly, as both. But whether his speakers lament, fear, denounce, acknowledge, or embrace the inconstancy of the other (and they often move through several of these stances), the upshot is always an exploration of how the necessity of embracing that inconstant other belies attempts to construct a stable selfhood. While many of the poems about separation express a high level of certainty about the extent to which ‘love’s magic’ means that ‘I am you’, or that ‘our souls are tied’,63 others offer chilling witness that such interpenetration is full of risk. In the elegy ‘Oh, let me not serve so’, for instance, that state is not heaven but ‘purgatory’: When my soul was in her own body sheathed, Nor yet by oaths betrothed, nor kisses breathed Into my purgatory, faithless thee, Thy heart seemed wax, and steel thy constancy. (ll. 11–14) This image holds a hidden implication, once again, of the speaker’s own culpability (purgatory suggests his sinfulness), and thus the line depicts the lovers linked and implicated in each other’s fallen state. The poem comes to the same defensive conclusion as ‘Woman’s Constancy’ (‘watch out, I can retaliate’), but its emphasis is on her denial of a real physical connection between them and his powerfully negative response to that distance. Her inconstancy this time consists in her physical distance from


him as well as her flirtations with others, and he represents it with the image of a stream who leaves her wonted ‘channel’ behind, dry (24). Yet the valence of these images works against the moral indictment of her: she is enviably fluid and alive. In the wake of this image, he proceeds immediately to reentangle their affect and experience, jumping not to his bitterness but to hers, which he suggests will in turn produce ‘scorn’ in him: Yet let not thy deep bitterness beget Careless despair in me, for that will whet My mind to scorn; and Oh, love dulled with pain Was ne’er so wise, nor well armed as disdain. Then with new eyes I shall survey thee, and spy Death in thy cheeks, and darkness in thine eye. (ll. 35–40) Here, as the speaker projects into the future of their interaction, the mutual emotional influence he envisions becomes increasingly dark and damning. And all of this scorn proceeds from the neglect whereby he receives ‘no tribute’ (7) (that is, no physical compensation) from her. In this way Donne’s love poems are more than the usual carpe diem efforts to persuade the addressee to sex. They take that physical consummation as a crucial element of the relationship. Over and over, Donne’s lyrics explore the interdependence of self and other in the face of losing or leaving that real, physical other. Most of these lyrics celebrate the lovers’ connection in order to maintain it in the face of separation, but Donne can also depict moments in which the prospect of leave-taking elicits malevolent projection. In ‘Witchcraft by a Picture’, a moment of parting produces a seemingly dangerous reciprocity, though in the end the woman herself is exonerated. In this poem, the speaker suddenly imagines his lover as a witch, capable of destroying him by making and then destroying his picture. I fix mine eye on thine, and there Pity my picture burning in thine eye, My picture drowned in a transparent tear, When I look lower I espy; Hadst thou the wicked skill By pictures made and marred, to kill, How many ways mightst thou perform thy will? But now I have drunk thy sweet salt tears, And though thou pour more I’ll depart;


My picture vanished, vanish fears, That I can be endamaged by that art; Though thou retain of me One picture more, yet that will be, Being in thine own heart, from all malice free. The ‘picture’ – his reflection in her tear – is one of many such images in Donne’s poetry of lovers’ interpenetration by means of reflection, but for Donne this is different than the usual Neoplatonic love rhetoric, of which it actually offers a critique.64 His reflection in a falling tear, and not just in the other’s eye, makes this another image of the fluidity of self, here quite obviously interpersonally figured. She doesn’t just passively mirror him, but holds and moves and possibly drowns him. And the tears, of course, represent the impact of an all too real (and morally inflected) experience of parting.65 This concrete image of his implication in her tears provokes the misogynist projection of ‘witchcraft’, which carries a whole array of associations about isolated, sexual women. But it also turns out that he only need fear ‘that art’ if he himself stays to make the picture in her tears; gone, there will be no image of him there, even though she may continue to cry at their parting. The only image that will remain – the one in her heart – will be safe. In other words, the speaker is himself the source of ‘malice’ – or rather, the danger only arises from their interaction, their presence together. From amid all these complex implications of influence and blame, however, we do still grasp that the real problem is the lovers’ loss of each other. Thus we also sense the speaker’s defensiveness in claiming that his leaving will solve the problem. Donne seems to enjoy such perverse choices as further evidence of the paradox of the lover’s identity. Despite the intensity of danger or suspicion, Donne’s poems keep insisting on the lovers’ connection (as even ‘Witchcraft’ does in its final suggestion that his image remains in her heart). In some, the suspicion itself is the sign of that connection, and a simultaneous faith and skepticism can contribute to their more mysteriously climactic moments. In rehearsing the list of possible ‘scapes’, the speaker in ‘Woman’s Constancy’ moves imaginatively closer to what she (assuming for the moment a female speaker) projects as the lover’s consciousness; but at the same time there also looms a kind of unbridgeable gap between them. She begins by trying to imagine the lover’s speech – ‘what wilt thou say?’ – and her first idea is vague, viewed at a distance: ‘some new made vow’. Then, she imagines in growing detail a series of casuistic arguments – about the legal status of fluid selves, the status of


oaths made under duress, the status of private versus public contracts between lovers – presented through a series of images of the transience of speech acts, of emotions, and of life. And finally, she arrives at a logical argument that is no longer something the lover would say, but only something he may have in mind: Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change, and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? This is a suspicion of the worst – that the lover never meant any of what passed between them, and was all along planning to be untrue. No longer imagining the lover speaking, the speaker now imaginatively occupies the private consciousness of the other. And yet that merger happens just at the moment when all belief and trust in the other has given way. At such a moment, it is as if a gap or fissure had opened, to figure the essentially unknowable status of the interpenetrating other. So while many of the poems discover the contingency of the speaker’s identity on his or her engagement with the other, they also often confront this kind of gap – particularly in the potential for losing or being betrayed by the other. In this respect, Donne’s love poems share with Shakespeare’s sonnets a commitment to an other whose perspective is both an unknowable and an inescapable component of the speaker’s identity. (And of course they also share a propensity for figuring this problem of identity through the idea of the sexual inconstancy of the beloved – for Shakespeare, both male and female beloveds.) But more than Shakespeare’s, Donne’s lyrics also represent the kind of conjectures that try to substitute for that needed knowledge, exposing the process of projection through which the speaker tries at least to fake a sense of control as well as to maintain the connection. In the intensity of their suspicion, Donne’s speakers have a sense of being all mixed up with something that is yet alien to them.66 But the resulting danger is also something Donne’s poems allow their speakers to encounter and even subtly to acknowledge as their responsibility. In this way, there is more at stake than critics have recognized in Donne’s rejection of the Petrarchan paradigm, for he is not just rejecting the poetics of frustration in favor of an Ovidian poetry of consummated desire, but is also relinquishing the safety of distance and embracing the risks of engagement.67 In a sense, he is not replacing failure with success, but control with danger, object constancy with the mutability of mutual exchange, and debunking the strategies of control that would avoid the


costs of interaction. Whereas Petrarchism exalts the poet’s own imagination, Donne suggests that the imagination is in some ways not the poet’s ‘own’, but the product of interaction with other bodies and minds. His poems both insist on that interaction and recognize its costs.

Shakespeare and the adulterate self In the last chapter, I argued similarly that Shakespeare’s sonnets emphasize the sexual activity of their beloveds as part of the way they challenge the poetics of subjective authority, confronting the self with subjective others whose experience is both crucial to the self and beyond its full knowledge and control. There is no hope here of transcending the corrupt, material situation; indeed, the speaker repeatedly rededicates himself to it. This emphasis on sexual consummation is increasingly evident in Shakespeare’s plays as well: after 1600, it is nearly always either a trigger or a central focus of the plays’ action, and often emphasized (for instance, with a pregnant Juliet onstage throughout much of Measure for Measure, or through Hamlet’s obsession with the sexual desire behind his mother’s remarriage). And here, as in the sonnets, the point is often about the interplay of perspectives and about confronting the other’s subjectivity. Shakespearean comedy is particularly at pains to incorporate female characters’ perspectives centrally and to grapple with the difficulty of doing so within the context of patriarchal structures.68 The ‘problem’ plays all confront Petrarchan lovers with material, subjective others – romantic ‘objects’ who refuse to remain or cooperate as objects. The heroines of All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida have their own agendas in regard to love: Helena expresses a profound desire, the fulfillment of which becomes the central aim of the play; Isabella, on the other hand, repudiates desire and has no interest in being its object; and Cressida, desiring but also acutely aware of the Petrarchan economy of desire – i.e., aware of herself as the object of a temporary desire, lasting only as long as it is frustrated – assumes a deliberate stance of ‘holding off’. The frank sexuality of these plays takes the problem of the Petrarchan lover beyond the limits of earlier comedies such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It. The cross-dressing plays explore a complex female selfhood – actorly, engaged, supremely flexible – and allow their heroines a virtuosic mastery of multiple perspectives. But the problem comedies, because they introduce the consummation of female desire (Helena’s, Marianna’s, Cressida’s), also make her subjectivity a material factor for


the Petrarchan lover. Their bed-tricks and other obvious consummations are a major part of the new dramaturgy of these plays, and their generic instability stems in part from the way that female subjectivity is so difficult to work into conventional narratives of love. These consummation plays are even more critical of their Petrarchan lovers than previous plays, with a particular focus on the problem of male inconstancy and/or detumescence: Angelo has dumped Marianna, Troilus is eager to leave Cressida on the morning after, and Bertram is done with Diana as soon as (he thinks) he has slept with her.69 There are plenty of such inconstant, detumescent males in Shakespeare’s tragedies as well: Hamlet rejects Ophelia, Othello comes to suspect his new wife, Lear rejects his daughter, Antony decides to leave Cleopatra. Cressida’s observation on the morning after with Troilus – ‘You men will never tarry’ – is something Shakespeare’s plays everywhere observe, though not always obviously. The less obvious this problem of male inconstancy, the more prominent the theme of projection, which also figures throughout Shakespeare’s plays, especially in his many versions of the ‘slandered-wife’ plot. Here, unlike most of his contemporary playwrights, Shakespeare nearly always portrays situations in which the woman’s alleged inconstancy proves untrue – that is, proves to be a projection. The powerful exception to this pattern is Troilus and Cressida, a case in which the hero’s fears of his lover’s infidelity come true. In the other plays, there is a falsely perceived betrayal, and the play’s trajectory is simultaneously toward its punishment and toward the correction of the misperception that it was committed – whichever comes first determining whether we have tragedy or comedy. In both genres, there is a reality that differs from male perceptions of women, and eventually it is revealed. But Troilus and Cressida – notoriously poised between genres – never offers that other reality. Rather, Troilus gets what he projects. The process unfolds in a world where neither the solutions of comedy nor the closure of tragedy applies – a world in which projections onto women do not merely distort reality, but become reality. This play is also deeply conscious of the problem of ‘woman’s constancy’ as a matter of male projection. The obvious theme of the play is female inconstancy; but despite the persistent clamor of characters and the felt insistence of literary tradition, the underlying and more ubiquitous problem is actually male inconstancy. It is first raised by Cressida in her Act 1 observation that for men ‘things won are done’ (1.2.273), and it permeates the play, both in the form of infidelity in love (as René Girard has pointed out, Troilus is not as true as he


claims – he both loses interest in Cressida on the morning after and fails to fight the decision to trade her70), and in the wider sense of mutability. The play presents a general crisis of male stability, most notably perhaps in its persistent imagery of detumescence – ‘to have done is to hang / Quite out of fashion’ (3.3.151). This imagery is reminiscent of the way feminist defenses repeatedly identify male impotence as an underlying source of misogynist projections of inconstancy onto women.71 And the inconstancy of the detumescent male also figures in connection with the war plot. Agamemnon’s first speech describes the way that hope always ‘fails in the promised largeness’, and he figures their military frustrations as the gods’ trial ‘to find persistive constancy in men’ (1.3.4, 20). Ulysses’s speech on degree raises the problem of emulation, which also carries the threat of mutability in that it entails role-playing and hence changeable identity. And on the Trojan side, all the appeals to chivalry posit that ideal primarily as a quality of being true – of staying the same in the face of a changing context. Yet in pursuing honor, both Troilus and Hector become inconsistent. Troilus, arguing to ‘stand firm by honour’ in keeping Helen, is contradicting his own earlier view that she was ‘too starved a subject for my sword’ (1.1.91) – his language inadvertently fostering the association of honor with sexual performance. And Hector makes his own inconsistency explicit when, after arguing cogently for the return of Helen to her husband, he suddenly reverses himself, recalling his earlier chivalric challenge to the Greeks, and revealing the discrepancy between honor and truth: ‘Hector’s opinion / Is this in way of truth. Yet ne’ertheless, / My spritely brethren, I propend to you / In resolution to keep Helen still; / For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependence / Upon our joint and several dignities’ (2.2.187–92). Yet despite all the inconstancy in men, Cressida becomes the figure in whom it is loudly deplored. As one critic puts it, the ‘instability and fictionality of identity is finally located and exorcized’ in her.72 It is the fictionality of that projective process that the play highlights, especially in the troth-plighting scene, which opens with each of the lovers anxious about Troilus’s future performance as a lover. He himself fears that his powerful desire will result in ‘death’ and ‘destruction’, and he admits to Cressida ‘the monstruosity in love’ – ‘that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.76–7). And Cressida worries that ‘all lovers swear more performance than they are able’, and monstrously display ‘the voice of lions and the act of hares’ (3.2.75–83). Yet by the end of the scene, the dominant focus has shifted to the idea (though not yet the reality) of Cressida’s inconstancy.73 This scene is where Cressida begins to take on her literary-traditional role as the


symbol of falseness – an attribution notably ahead of schedule.74 Before the scene with Diomedes in Act 5, Cressida neither does nor expresses anything in the direction of betrayal. On the contrary, she vows fidelity along with Troilus and grieves the loss of their union far more feelingly than he does. But her vow at the end of this scene is expressed in negative terms, in formal contrast to Troilus’s positive claim: when he swears to be so true as to be forever remembered for being true, she swears to be so true that, if she is false, she will be forever remembered for being false. This deliberately precipitous reference to the way Cressida will ultimately be judged is key, for it signals that there is more driving such judgment than Cressida’s later act of betrayal. As the lovers surrealistically project themselves into the literary future with their vows, and Pandarus steps in to seal ‘a bargain made’, the linguistic process he seals is a generalized projection of inadequacy onto women: ‘I’ll be the witness. ... If ever you prove false one to another, ... [l]et all constant men be Troiluses, all false women Cressids, and all brokersbetween Pandars!’ (3.2.187–93). The gap between the antecedent condition – ‘if ever you prove false one to another’ – and the concluding expectation of ‘constant men’ and ‘false women’ is filled by the process of gender-specific projection. It is tantamount to saying, ‘If ever one of you proves false to the other, we’ll say it was Cressida.’ Clinching this projection of falseness onto Cressida is the disturbing scene of her arrival in the Greek camp, where she is ‘kissed in general’ by the Greeks and ends up labelled a whore. In this scene, it is Ulysses who both suggests the ‘general’ kissing and then calls her a wanton, sluttish ‘daughter of the game’ (4.5.63). In between, of course, he has been angered, not by licentious behavior on her part, but by her refusal to kiss him. Actually, Cressida refuses to be kissed as soon as she has the chance: Agamemnon, Achilles, and (twice) Patroclus all kiss her without asking her permission; Menelaus is the first to say ‘by your leave’, at which Cressida takes the opportunity to decline, sparring wittily with him and then humiliating Ulysses, who also asks for a kiss. He responds by interpreting her body rather than her speech: Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts


To every ticklish reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game. (4.5.55–63, my emphasis) Ulysses’s furious response to Cressida’s treatment of him invokes the pervasive Renaissance code associating women’s chastity with their silence to label her body as a source of transgressive speech. But Cressida – though she may have been ‘glib of tongue’ – has not said anything transgressive. What she has unclasped is only the desire not to kiss him. In retaliation, he decisively uses his own rhetoric to construct her publicly as a whore, projecting the responsibility for the fate the Greeks obviously intend for her (as one of the ‘spoils of opportunity’) onto her own behavior.75 The power of this projection can be measured in part by the extent to which it often succeeds with the play’s critics and interpreters. Since the 1970s, the tendency has been to defend Cressida, yet not in a way that approves of her behavior or that finds her particular ‘kind of self’ adequate. Rather, understanding her as a victim of her patriarchal culture still leaves most readers convinced that Cressida represents some kind of failure, only excusably so. Despite their conscious resistance to the powerful projections within the play that identify Cressida as a ‘whore’, most feminist readings still basically follow the lead of Gayle Greene’s analysis, which on the one hand recognizes that Shakespeare is not out to condemn Cressida in this play, but still on the other hand sees her as a ‘cynical coquette’ who understands ‘the game’ and plays it to the best of her ability.76 Greene’s complex reading sees the play’s overall portrayal of women as ‘more sympathetic’ than it seems, in that it ‘provides a context that ... constitutes a critique of stereotyping’ (145), but she also argues that Cressida herself ‘forfeits claim to our feelings’ by becoming an ‘angler’ (140). But to say this is to see the issue through the eyes and judgments of characters like Ulysses, rather than through Cressida’s own perspective; yet this is what many critics do.77 Heather James, for instance, in assessing the Greek camp scene, cites Ulysses’s lines rather than Cressida’s, merely claiming that she speaks with ‘a cool and pert familiarity that draws Ulysses’s withering condemnation’ (108, my emphasis). But Cressida’s lines can be played in various ways, perhaps most powerfully by going against the grain of Ulysses’s subsequent interpretation and conveying an underlying alarm at the threat she faces in this nasty, mock-friendly greeting.78 Of course, it is difficult to hold onto Cressida’s ‘own perspective’ because of the way it is so frequently caught up with those of others – so


constantly anticipating the other. As I discussed in Chapter 1, her sense of her ‘selfe’ as something that resides with the other represents an intensely interpersonal awareness, and it often seems to get her into trouble both in the play and with critics. Even among those resisting the idea that the play indicts Cressida, there is a tendency to resort to an understanding of her as somehow unreal – as a character so inconsistent as to indicate ‘the presence of some principle of characterization other than the realistic’.79 Yet interestingly, readers don’t have the same problem with Troilus. In spite of the fact that Troilus’s actions and statements are even less consistent than Cressida’s, he does not generate the same sense of deficient selfhood. The difference, it would seem, is that Cressida is a character who allows herself to appear divided – allows the cracks to show, as it were, even frequently calls attention to them – while Troilus consistently represents himself as ‘true’ and ‘simple’. Thus the discrepancy in critical reactions to Cressida and Troilus seems to have to do with subtly persistent ideas that equate selfhood with subjective assertion. But that is not the only ‘kind of self’ this play realistically presents, and the fact that Cressida’s kind turns out to be less viable does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare finds it culpable, or just the unsatisfactory effect of patriarchal culture.80 The play makes clear that that culture creates and requires that psychological position for women, but as I argued in Chapter 1, the play emphasizes objectification as basic to male selfhood as well. What it exposes, I suggest, is the kind of subjective (i.e. self-authoring) claims of unity and stability with which Troilus in particular strategically asserts his own subjective authority. One example of how this works is the beginning of the troth-plighting scene, where Cressida’s behavior takes on a duplicitous appearance as a result of the underlying doubleness of her thinking. It is important to note, though, that the audience is aware of the irony of this appearance of doubleness – we know that her maneuvers are based on her fears about Troilus’s constancy. What ensues is a concrete example of her capacity, captured in her earlier soliloquy, for inhabiting more than one perspective.81 Her initial focus on Troilus’s performance places her in a dependent and responsive role, from which she makes only indirect assertions, and hasn’t ‘men’s privilege / Of speaking first’ (3.2.121–2).82 When she does change course and declares her love, her confession only adds to her problems: since it entails an admission that she had previously feigned indifference, it casts her as duplicitous. Troilus adds to her appearance of duplicity by frequently disbelieving her claims, as when she offers to leave in confusion, complaining ‘I know not what I speak’, and he contradicts her: ‘Well know they what they speak that


speak so wisely’ (142). Here, Cressida accepts the duplicitous (‘wise’) role he ascribes to her for the moment in a conditional fashion, using it as a platform from which to complain (again) about his silence: Perchance, my lord, I show more craft than love, And fell so roundly to a large confession To angle for your thoughts; but you are wise, Or else you love not. For to be wise and love Exceeds man’s might; that dwells with gods above. (153–7) In other words, if Troilus thinks she is ‘angling’ for his thoughts, he is ‘wise’ enough not to respond – that is, he is wiser than she. Yet perhaps it is not wisdom that keeps him silent, but a lack of love. Either way, she can infer the lack of love, and this is her complaint.83 Cressida is thus ‘angling’ again – that is, entering into his perspective of her in order to try to engage him. But as usual, his response captures only his own thinking, and his view of her is generalized: ‘O that I thought it could be in a woman / ... To keep her constancy in plight and youth, / ... How were I then uplifted!’ (158–68). His speech ignores her complaint and, as usual, keeps to the image he wants to project of himself, though interestingly, in doing so, he implies his own lack of faith: ‘if only I could believe a woman could be true’. This is the problem faced by the heroes of all Shakespeare’s slandered-wife plays, where the accusation of inconstancy is always clearly a projection. Concluding that, alas, he cannot choose but be ‘simple’ rather than be so ‘uplifted’, Troilus’s response to her complaint that he ‘loves not’ is to describe himself as so simple that he can’t fool himself into believing a woman will be true – a simultaneous assertion of his oneness and her duplicity. Neither of these assertions is accurate, but partly because they influence our expectations, the labels stick. In the voyeuristic scene in which Thersites watches Troilus watching Cressida capitulate to Diomedes (5.2), the final projections of the play result from another kind of misengagement with the other, this time one in which the other is the center of attention, but only as the focus of blameful judgment that refuses the viewers’ own implication in the situation. Thersites identifies Cressida’s ambivalent behavior toward Diomedes (so reminiscent of her back-and-forth behavior with Troilus in 3.2) as a ploy – a ‘juggling trick – to be secretly open’ (5.2.23) and a deliberate attempt to ‘whet’ Diomedes’s appetite for her (5.2.74).84 Yet once again, we have not a


correct interpretation of Cressida but a display of how she is mislabeled. As the scene progresses, she seems truly divided – ‘Ay, come. O Jove! Do come. I shall be plagued’ (5.2.105) – once again manifesting an alternating perspective on her own actions and situation. (There is no way to play these lines without showing a true ambivalence.) If this scene offers a gloss on the earlier one – i.e., if Thersites presents a retrospective clarification of what Cressida was doing with Troilus – that interpretation seems to be offered only to be decisively refuted here: for Cressida’s complexity and division are apparently not manifested for Diomedes’s benefit, since they persist after he leaves: ‘Troilus farewell! One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see’ (5.2.107–8). Her ensuing self-condemnation – what Carol Cook calls a ‘moralizing comment’ that ‘sounds like an effect of ventriloquism’ (51) – results from her self-objectification too.85 Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find, The error of our eye directs our mind. What error leads must err; O, then conclude, Minds sway’d by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.109–112) This judgment, of course, should also be applied to all the mindsswayed-by-eyes watching Cressida as she says this. But neither Thersites nor Troilus thinks to associate Cressida’s moral with his own voyeuristic behavior. Taking her judgment of ‘turpitude’ to apply only to herself, Thersites declares it ‘proof’ that her ‘mind is now turned whore’ (112). After this decisive labeling, Cressida’s point of view, as Janet Adelman points out, is suppressed for the rest of the play.86 That suppression is not so much a failure to represent Cressida’s character, but another representation of the social forces and interpersonal politics to which she is subject – perfectly captured in Troilus’s onstage tearing of Cressida’s letter without reading it, which lets us know concretely that we are missing her side of the story. Troilus declares her ‘false’ (5.2.177) in opposition to his own ‘truth’, which he once again asserts: ‘Never did young man fancy / With so eternal and so fixed a soul’ (5.2.165–6) – an odd statement, really, since what clearly consumes Troilus now is not ‘fancy’ but sheer rage. The next scene argues for a different view of ‘truth’ – as contingent rather than absolute or ‘eternal’. Hector, arming for battle against the advice of women (his wife and sister), swears by the ‘everlasting’ gods to


fight, and insists that ‘I must not break my faith’ (71). But Cassandra argues for the importance of context, and makes the case for mutability: ‘It is the purpose that makes strong the vow; / But vows to every purpose must not hold’ (5.3.23–4). For Cassandra, truth is not a matter of fixity, but its opposite: one can only be true to a changing situation by changing with it. Troilus also dismisses Cassandra as a ‘foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl’ (79), but that dismissal is ironic. For Shakespeare puts this argument for the contingency of truth in the mouth of the prophet we know proves right, and it is Hector she condemns: ‘Thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive’ (5.3.89–90, emphasis added). What Cassandra suggests applies to Cressida’s situation: the refusal to recognize the contingency of ‘truth’ – i.e., in Cressida’s case, the contingency of selfhood – itself generates ‘deceit’: Cressida is gradually made ‘false’ over the course of the play by a world that both constrains her and refuses to allow the mutability such constraint entails. The play’s many ironies combine to suggest that Shakespeare is revising the Trojan story and subtly identifying Cressida as more true than Troilus, by revising the meaning of ‘truth’ – very much as Donne in ‘Woman’s Constancy’ revises the meaning of ‘constancy’. Like Donne’s analysis, Shakespeare’s play presents two kinds of projection: a defensive, scapegoating strategy of subjective authority and a more benign process of anticipation – the latter a necessary component of contingent selfhood. As part of an imaginative involvement with others that impinges on selfhood, projection in the latter sense is prominent in Troilus and Cressida too: Cressida is projecting in the troth-plighting scene, not in the sense of scapegoating, but in the sense of trying to foresee the actions of others and shaping herself in anticipation of them. Anticipation – or, in the play’s language, ‘expectation’ – is a theme throughout the play, from the Prologue’s announcement that ‘Now expectation ... sets all on hazard’ (20–22) to the unheeded prophecies of Cassandra in the closing Act. Fearful expectation of the hazards of engagement dominates the lovers’ encounter in 3.2, highlighted especially in Troilus’s ‘giddy’ soliloquy: ‘expectation whirls me round’ (3.2.18). Such moments evoke the audience’s own expectation, particularly when the play foregrounds the audience’s prior knowledge of the Trojan story, as it does with Cassandra’s prophecies. And prophecy is an embodied image in the play in the figure of Calchas as well, who appears immediately following the surreal troth-plighting scene in Act 3 and describes how foresight has made him a traitor: through the sight I bear in things to [come], I have abandon’d Troy, left my possession,


Incurr’d a traitor’s name, expos’d myself From certain and possess’d conveniences, To doubtful fortunes; sequest’ring from me all That time, acquaintance, custom, and condition Made tame and most familiar to my nature; And here, to do you service, am become As new into the world, strange, unacquainted. (3.3.4–12, my emphasis) Like Cassandra’s, Calchas’s role as a prophet seems a key emblem in this play so fraught with expectation. Having projected himself into the future, Calchas faces the ongoing and crucial problem of social connection and ‘acquaintance’ – knowing and being known – which he is here about to address by requesting that movable asset, his daughter, be constrained to follow him as a buffer. On a more general level, Calchas’s speech captures the fate of any self as it anticipates the future and reshapes itself in relation to it. This is especially the case when the self projects or anticipates the subjective other – an anticipation that dislocates us from our own perspective and exposes us to uncertainty as well as to change. As we saw in Donne, anticipating the other in this way entails mutability, so that in a sense, one is always a traitor to whatever one has been. Thus it appears that ‘expectation’ is the play’s term for what I have been calling ‘projection’, a term that does not mystify the complex possible sources of the process. The basic attempt to foresee what is coming is behind all the interpersonal politics of the play, including the ultimate gendered scapegoating that takes place. And while in this play the scapegoating clearly wins out, the play’s bitter tone is still a strong indictment of it. In this dark analysis of gender politics, it is not Cressida’s confessedly dependent mode of selfhood that Shakespeare criticizes, but projective strategies that assign that role to women and then condemn or abuse it in the service of a fictional male stability. Dependence, as we saw in Chapter 3, also characterizes the kind of self Shakespeare’s speaker adopts in the sonnets. In this way, Shakespeare here seems to betray what Constance Jordan describes as a ‘sympathetic identification’ with women’s position apparent in some male writers of the period: as the ‘quintessential’ Renaissance subject, women present a figure in whom such writers can recognize aspects of their own social and political situation and with whom they can thus at times identify more completely and authentically than can twentiethcentury male feminists.87 Looking closely at the way Shakespeare has crafted a female role such as Cressida’s reveals not just sympathy but a


fascination with the ‘kinds of self’ women assume, particularly the other-oriented, actorly awareness of a character like Cressida. In the culture of Troilus and Cressida, that character is sacrificed to subjective strategies that both depend on and punish her context-dependent inconstancy. Yet that contingent, or one might even say adulterate self seems to be more authentic for Shakespeare, as for Donne. In these texts, it seems the issue is indeed ‘embracement’ and its discomforts. The interpersonal model of selfhood entails being objectified as well as anticipating the other, both of which produce the truth of ‘woman’s constancy’.

Epilogue: Subjects, Objects, and Contemporary Theory

Wanting to keep to the perspectives of early modern culture, I have largely resisted the temptation throughout this book to associate its findings with those of contemporary research on selfhood. An epilogue seems a good place briefly to yield to that temptation. Recent work in various fields – particularly psychoanalysis – has begun to move toward interpersonal models of the self, and I want to suggest some connections between some of that work and the early modern conceptions that the foregoing chapters have explored. Broadly speaking, two points of connection stand out: a sense of the priority of the interpersonal self and a concern for the ethics of selfhood – that is, for the way that different modes of selfhood are part of its interpersonal politics. Within the ‘relational’ conceptual turn in psychoanalytic theory and infant-development research of recent decades, an emphasis on the ethics and politics of selfhood is most evident among feminist theorists. The alignment we saw in the last chapter between Christine de Pisan’s insights and those of Shakespeare and Donne already suggests an important correlation between feminist issues and those that constitute the interpersonal idiom under scrutiny in this study. Though I would not want to overstate the case for seeing some Renaissance writers as feminist, I do think that their interpersonal conceptions of identity have a great deal to do with what feminists since Christine have emphasized, and that feminist theory can gain from studying this early modern model of interpersonal selfhood. Since the 1980s, psychoanalytic theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Jessica Benjamin, and Nancy Chodorow have offered a powerful and detailed critique of the ways that the dominant theories of self-development have prioritized narratives of separation and individuation over those of relation.1 Chodorow, for example, points to the developmental importance of recognizing the 162

Epilogue: Subjects, Objects, and Contemporary Theory 163

subjectivity of the other. In an effort to redefine the process of ‘separation’ in infant development, she stresses that the growth of ‘ego capacities’ is not enough. Theorists need to recognize how the infant’s relationship with the other is key: In most psychoanalytic formulations, and in prevalent understandings of development, the mother, or the outside world, is depicted simply as the other, ... one who does or does not fulfill an expectation. ... The self here is the infant or growing child, and psychoanalytic accounts take the viewpoint of this child. ... However, adequate separation ... involves not merely perceiving the separateness, or otherness, of the other. It involves perceiving the person’s subjectivity and selfhood as well.2 As a result, she argues, development ‘must precisely involve two selves, two presences, two subjects’, and ‘recognizing the other as a subject is possible only to the extent that one is not dominated by ... one’s own exclusive subjectivity’ (103, my emphasis). Chodorow sees this understanding of developmental process as ‘absolutely essential to a feminist appropriation of psychoanalytic conceptions of differentiation. Since women, as mothers, are the primary caretakers of infants, if the child (or the psychoanalytic account) only takes the viewpoint of the infant as a (developing) self, then the mother will be perceived (or depicted) only as an object’ (104). The ethical point here is that female objectification results partly from a model of normative (male) self-development that ignores the role of the subjective other. Like other feminists, Chodorow calls attention to the way that in psychoanalytic theory ‘there is little sense that masculinity is problematic’ (195), and she subscribes to a relational, two-person model of development in order to comprehend that the person should be constituted by more than its own ‘exclusive subjectivity’. This need to recognize other selves as separate from and yet crucial to the self is something we’ve seen repeatedly in Renaissance texts – for instance, in poems of Shakespeare and Donne that strive to hold onto the distinction between the self and its ‘other self’ even as they insist on their utter imbrication. These recurrent efforts to distinguish the other’s otherness tend to be ethical reminders. When Shakespeare’s speaker in Sonnet 39, for instance, plays with the trope of a beloved ‘other self’ and worries about the apparent immodesty of praising that ‘self’, his solution is to let ‘our dear love lose name of single one, / That by this separation I may give / That due to thee which thou deserv’st alone’ (ll. 5–8 ). Implicit in this typically modest stance toward the other is


a broader point about the way that, although real love produces a sense of oneness with the other, it must also teach ‘how to make one twain’ (l. 11). The same point is evident in the way that Donne, too, always invokes a multiplication rather than a mere union of selves in love, suggesting in many of the poems about love a sense of the growth or complexity that comes with attachment – a continual reminder that each of the lovers becomes both subject and object, ‘each this and that’.3 The implication is that, if the other is important, then recognizing the other’s subjectivity is crucial – otherwise the tendency is for the self to subsume, merge with, or dominate that other, turning it into a mere extension of the self and losing its separate perspective. For these writers, the ethics of interpersonal selfhood aim at preserving that other as distinct precisely because the other-as-subject is so deeply important to the self, as its ongoing source. The language for this – separate but one, mine but not mine – is paradoxical, for the point is that the recognition of the other’s separateness (or subjectivity) is what most profoundly signals the real tie, the real penetration of self by an other, as opposed to a stance either of holding the other at bay or of subsuming the other within the self.4 The emphasis on paradox that we’ve seen in so much Renaissance usage represents a theory that corresponds to what we tend to call ‘intersubjectivity’ today. Yet, as I have argued, Renaissance texts actually suggest something more than what that term captures – not just the interaction of two mutually constitutive subjectivities, but a process in which each self is also the object of the other. Like Chodorow and other contemporary theorists interested in the self’s capacity for intersubjectivity, Renaissance texts often suggest that selfhood involves the full recognition of the other. But they also suggest it involves that recognition in another sense of the genitive – not just self recognizing the other, but self being recognized by the other. Some recent developmental research has moved toward understanding the latter mode of this interpersonal dyad as well, finding that the subjective other plays a major role as the source of objectifications that are crucial in the development of selfhood. In a comprehensive study of child development, Peter Fonagy, György Gergely, Eliot Jurist, and Mary Target have recently argued that the other is fundamental to the capacity for any sense of self at all. Attending to cognitive and affective development, their research is primarily concerned with the way that ‘the understanding of the self as a mental agent grows out of interpersonal experience’.5 In particular, they argue that the self is constructed in the developing capacity to regulate affective experience, a capacity enabled by a joint process between infant and caregiver that involves


the attunement to and understanding of the infant’s emotional state by the caregiver first, before such understanding can be taken over by the infant and owned. Interestingly, they theorize a representational quality as key in this interpersonal developmental process. The infant grasps the existence of its own emotional state through the caregiver’s response to it, which is ‘marked’ as an imitation of that emotional state even as it resonates with it. Fonagy and his collaborators emphasize that this ‘marked’ response is much more than simple mirroring, for it involves the sense of ‘alternate perspectives’ (13).6 The pretended quality of the caregiver’s resonant response – a sort of theatrical heightening and exaggeration that in effect tells the infant, ‘this is your feeling and not mine’ – helps him to contain and identify that affect. For Fonagy et al., this sense of representation is the basis for the distinction between one’s own mind and the world. It consists in the parent’s own capacity simultaneously to resonate with and to distinguish herself from the child. Empathy is implied in this mimetic process, but it is not the whole process. There is a third entity at stake here beyond the child’s emotion and the other’s emotion – the other’s representation of the child’s emotion as that which belongs to the child and not to the other. That distinction is crucial, for without it, according to Fonagy et al., the child is flooded with affect and cannot identify the experience. Over time, this repeated experience of the other’s marked responses ‘helps the child to learn that feelings do not inevitably spill out into the world. The child’s mental state is decoupled’ from its surround (9). In this way, Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, and Target argue that even subjective selfhood (the self as mental agent) is not the innately given capacity it has long been taken to be in the ‘traditionally powerful Cartesian doctrine of first-person authority that claims direct and infallible introspective access’.7 Instead, they see it as ‘a hard-won developmental acquisition’ (3–4). They argue that ‘the self is not merely open to environmental influence: it is in part constituted through its interaction with the social environment. Freud, arguably, saw infancy as a time when the self saw others as extensions of itself. ... Our emphasis is the reverse – we see the self as originally an extension of the experience of the other’ (8). The striking connection between these particular research findings and what the present study finds in Renaissance conceptions of self lies in the importance of being the object of the other – the sense that even the subjective self originates in that other’s experience. Both suggest that objectification is not just one important mode of selfhood but a necessary precondition of any mode of selfhood. It is also striking that,


in making their overall argument, Fonagy et al. place it historically as a challenge to a modernist philosophical tradition that begins with Descartes.8 The pre-Cartesian emphasis of English Renaissance usage is likewise a radically interpersonal understanding of selves that captures just what Fonagy et al. argue – that the self owes its existence to being known, experienced, by another. Of course, in making this comparison between Renaissance conceptions of selfhood and those of recent developmental theory, it is important to keep in mind that for Renaissance writers, the sources of selfhood in interpersonal representation are not just part of a developmental process, but are ongoing: adult selves too are created via the other’s representations.9 The persistent emphasis of much psychoanalytic theory is on how the self develops and matures, and it tends to privilege childhood as the moment of self-formation.10 The emphasis of Renaissance texts – a more ethically charged focus – is on how the self is tied in perpetuity. That focus seems to me crucial for an enhanced feminist understanding of relational selfhood. While feminist theorists have radically challenged the priority of autonomy and separation in selfhood, they have not yet challenged the related valorization of subjectivity in that individual model. Their emphasis on women becoming subjects is understandable, of course, in the context of a culture that equates true selfhood with subjectivity. But while being a subject may indeed be, as Carol Gilligan stresses, part of ‘being in relation’, it is not the whole picture by any means. Moreover, if it is true, as this study suggests, that the male ‘subject’ has always had an unacknowledged constitutive object, then the project of making women subjects is fraught with an unacknowledged burden – a sort of vacuum where that subject’s object would need to be. An emphasis such as Gilligan’s on the voice – on the need for girls to speak the truth about themselves – gets at something important, but it also takes subjectivity as the source, as well as the only valid mode, of selfhood. Feminist theory tends to reject objectification as if it were a state in which selfhood went to die, rather than one of its important sources. But there are different ways of being objectified, and I would argue that to understand their differences we have to distinguish the tenor of the interactions of which they are a part. In the more destructive form of objectification – that of the traditional Petrarchan model – one self is made purely an object in the service of the other self’s pure subjectivity. In this rigid subject–object dichotomy, the Petrarchan self refuses its own objectification and completely elides the other’s subjectivity, disallowing the back and forth, the mutuality that comes with being perceived


and with embracing that external perception. It is that mode of pure subjectivity that writers like Shakespeare reject, rather than the fundamentally social self-as-object. In the more mutual form of objectification, where both selves are potential objects of each other, they find their mutual penetration. The interplay of perspectives needn’t be perfectly symmetrical or even always positive. The vision here is not a naively rosy picture of ideal intersubjectivity but a sense for the pushand-pull reality of being in the world, in the live encounter, in the mix. This kind of objectification is enlivening, as long as it is not one-sided – in feminist terms, as long as it doesn’t follow the conventionally gendered model in which it is only the woman who lets the other in. Here, I think, is the real thrust of the feminist resistance of objectification – a resistance of that traditional, purely subjective male stance. And this is where an interpersonal focus offers a crucial enhancement to theory, for in a two-person model, there are not just two possible roles but at least four, with each self potentially both subject and object. Attending to the objectified self and the subjective other along with the two more familiar positions allows a more nuanced understanding of who is doing what to whom – i.e., of the politics of selfhood. Moving in such a theoretical direction, we might be able to stop throwing out the baby of objectification with the bath water of male subjectivism, and at the same time stop subscribing to a model that still subtly views the external as the enemy of the self, as that which destroys it or makes it inauthentic. Grasping the very different valence of objectified selfhood in Renaissance texts – as well as the historical link between conventions of autonomy and of subjectivity – can help us to define a broader goal than individual subjectivity. As I have tried to show, in these Renaissance representations the interpersonal attunement, engagement, and resonance of selves involves more than ‘intersubjectivity’. Attunement means grasping the other’s perspective, which includes experiencing oneself as the object of the other’s experience. Engagement means acknowledging one’s ongoing indebtedness to others. Resonance means making oneself contingent on the other – entering into play. In all these ways, Renaissance texts recognize the power of interpersonal objectification as catalytic for selfhood. Going forward in that recognition ourselves, it may help to go back to a cultural moment that held more choices – a moment when conventions of language had not yet solidified around the idea of the subjective individual.11 Feminist theory can mine this interpersonal idiom for the ways it corroborates the priority and the ethics of the ‘kind of self’ that belongs to others.

Notes Introduction: Other Selves 1. Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.135. Unless otherwise specified, quotations of Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1997). 2. Arguments to this effect are numerous and, as I will discuss below, include some key New Historicist studies. Some recent work moves away from this tendency to rediscover modern selfhood in Renaissance texts. Important examples include Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, NY, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 256. 4. Renaissance Self-Fashioning 9 (my emphasis). 5. Martin Buber theorizes this distinction as the difference between an I–It mode of relatedness, which depersonalizes the other, and an I–Thou orientation, which engages the whole person. See Buber, I and Thou. Trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1970); originally published in 1923 as Ich und Du. For an analysis of Buber’s work in contrast to that of Heidegger and of Freud, see Daniel Burston and Roger Frie, Psychotherapy as a Human Science (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006) 162–74. 6. Karen Newman, for instance, notes that in Greenblatt’s analysis of Othello, he ‘implies as somehow anterior to identity-as-performance an essential self, an ontological subjectivity, an Edenic moment of black identity prior to discourse’ (Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991] 83). 7. Recent scholarship on humoralism has begun to develop terms with which to better understand the implications of these discourses for selfhood. Gail Kern Paster, for instance, speaks of an ‘ecological’ phenomenology of selfhood in the Renaissance, the result of the humoral self’s permeable relationship to its physical surround (Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004] 18). Chapter 2 looks at the ways this medical discourse also offers Renaissance speakers paradigms for the self’s relationship to other persons as well. 8. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 280. 9. ‘The Ecstasy’, l. 42. Quotations of Donne’s poetry are from John Donne. The Oxford Authors, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 168

Notes to Introduction 169 10. Quoted in John Donne. The Oxford Authors, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 144. See also the similar expressions in Donne’s verse letter to Sir Henry Wotten, ‘Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle souls’, which I discuss at some length in Chapter 2. 11. See Oxford English Dictionary, substantive sense 2. 12. A recent study that posits a more conflicted history of selfhood in this period is Cynthia Marshall’s The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Marshall still emphasizes the ‘emerging idea of subjectivity’ that scholars continue to find in early modern culture, but complicates this with what she identifies as ‘Renaissance modes of self-shattering’, which she suggests constitute ‘a counterforce to the nascent ethos of individualism’ (2, 3, 2). Indeed, she argues that ‘the contradiction between autonomy and instability defined the emerging subject’ (14). The terms of this interesting argument thus remain within the tradition of a one-person or intrapsychic analysis. 13. This involvement is the result of the properties of language itself – speakers are shaped by the language they learn to use, but language is also changed and developed by its speakers. The early modern period is an especially good one for studying such linguistic change. Its proximity to the advent of print means that shifts in usage are preserved via surviving texts; but at the same time, since print is relatively new, it has not yet inhibited linguistic flux to the degree that it does later. This may partly account for the recent trend in Renaissance scholarship toward a focus on language. 14. See, for instance, Crane’s discussion of this issue in Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory, 16–19. See also de Grazia, ‘Locating and Dislocating the “I” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985) 443. The recent interest in the historicity of language among scholars of early modern culture has in part to do with this interest in theorizing historical change without recourse either to totalizing or to individualist narratives – in rethinking the problem of ideology with a model of ongoing negotiation rather than entrapment. The former model of negotiation is implicit both in this book’s focus on usage and in the interpersonal concepts of self that it recovers in Renaissance usage. 15. David Schalkwyk makes a similar point: ‘Human subjectivity does not belong to any one culture or period. ... We should not be misled by the undeniable historical case that techniques for the representation of such speech acts do develop historically, but it is a mistake to believe that this represents the development of human subjectivity itself’ (Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays [Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002] 107). 16. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White formulate a similar historical model in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). In the effort to avoid ‘any simple before/after model’ of conceptual change, they emphasize ‘the contradictory movement of (and between) semantic territories within a structural model of uneven development’, yet without making ‘the opposite error, that there is no change’ (195–6). 17. In Chapter 3, I discuss the claim of Joel Fineman that Shakespeare ‘invents’ modern poetic subjectivity in the Sonnets.

170 Notes to Introduction 18. Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923) 23, 98. 19. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). 20. I quote here from The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, in The First Folio of Shakespeare (Norton facsimile, second edition, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996) 1.3.5–6, TLN 326–7. 21. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of this passage and the predominantly objectified selves of Renaissance usage. 22. Sylviane Agacinski defines subjective consciousness as ‘that thought capable of resting upon itself, of always coming back to itself, of always appropriating what is outside it for itself’, and speaks of it as having ‘a passion for autonomy or adequacy’ (‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’, in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy [New York and London: Routledge, 1991] 15). 23. An exception is the interpersonal psychoanalytic theory of Harry Stack Sullivan, which includes a concept of ‘personifications’ – representations of the self that have their roots in self–other encounters. In addition, Sullivan’s concept of the ‘self-system’ includes the objectified categories of ‘good-me’, ‘bad-me’, and ‘not-me’ – self-states that in Sullivan’s thinking are clearly interpersonally derived. See Harry Stack Sullivan, Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953). 24. For overviews of the increasingly mainstream ‘relational’ schools of psychoanalytic thought, see Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Elizabeth F. Howell, ‘The Interpersonal and Relational Traditions’, in The Dissociative Mind (Hillsdale, NJ and London: The Analytic Press, 2005). 25. Vittorio Gallese, Morris N. Eagle, and Paolo Migone, ‘Intentional Attunement: Mirror Neurons and the Neural Underpinnings of Interpersonal Relations’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55:1 (2007) 131–76. 26. Gallese et al. 144. Further references are cited within the text. 27. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 28. Peter Fonagy, Gyorgy Gergely, Elliot L. Jurist, and Mary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self (New York: Other Press, 2002). Further references are cited in the text. 29. Sylviane Agacinski, ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’, in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 12, 14. (Further references are cited within the text). 30. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 97. 31. Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 69.

Notes to Introduction 171 32. See Oxford English Dictionary, senses 1, 2, and 3. 33. See OED, sense 9. The OED also lists ‘a transitional use’ beginning in the late seventeenth century that anticipates the modern philosophical use of ‘subject’ since Kant to mean ‘the thinking or cognizing agent’. (The grammatical sense of ‘subject’ as opposed to predicate dates to the seventeenth century, according to the OED). 34. Katharine Eisaman Maus makes a similar point, claiming that, in denying ‘the possibility of a subjectivity prior to or exempt from social determination’, new historicist and cultural materialist critics are actually ‘making a claim not only about English Renaissance subjectivity, but about subjectivity tout court’ (Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995] 26). Maus’s argument, however, is that there are important similarities, which we ignore ‘at our peril’ (215), and she only finds historicists’ arguments ‘disingenuous’ in not acknowledging the connection (28). 35. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, passim. See also the similar argument of Francis Barker that Hamlet represents an anachronistic subjectivity that reaches toward the modern (The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection [London and New York: Methuen, 1984] 35–40, 59). 36. This is by no means to suggest that the historicist debate has not been fruitful. Certainly discussions of selfhood have become more complex and sophisticated, and even professedly Burckhardtian critics concede that the ‘paradoxes of selfhood’ that historicist critics bring out are ‘real and important’ (Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989] 223). And yet the question remains whether we are looking at what amount to the constraints and paradoxes of selfhood in any age, or whether there are real discrepancies between notions of selfhood then and now. As I discuss below, despite Belsey’s affinity for the possibility of change, the concept of the ‘subject’ leaves her without a nuanced, varied array of possibilities and with only the choice between subjective selfhood and its absence. 37. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971) 160. Further references are cited in the text. 38. This ‘interpellation’ is a one-way process, and its source (an external ‘Subject’) is an Other for which the lower-case subject is only a passive mirror and not an interlocutor: i.e., the subject is shaped purely from without. In contrast to Bakhtinian theory, there is no sense here of the subject’s participation in a process: ‘ideology’ is not affected by subjects. This passivity is both crucial to Althusser’s theory and one of its more problematic aspects for some historicist and materialist scholars, limiting its capacity to account for historical and cultural differences. 39. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy 41. 40. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body 37. 41. Katharine Eisaman Maus rightly challenges this tendency to deny the possibility of ‘interiority’ in the Renaissance (see Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995] 1–34). Yet, as I will argue below, there is much more to be said about the interpersonal dimensions of such ‘inwardness’ as well.

172 Notes to Chapter 1 42. Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (NY: Routledge, 1992) 593. Further references are cited within the text. 43. On the embodied brain, see Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain 10–24. Jeffrey Maston’s work on authorial collaboration (Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]) also moves in this direction of contextualizing ‘individual’ writing. 44. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 36. 45. David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 10. 46. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 97. 47. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 35. Barker too figures this supposed separation as an ‘opening’ in which we begin to get ‘the figure that is to dominate and organize bourgeois culture’ (35). 48. Hamlet, in The First Folio of Shakespeare (Norton facsimile, second edition, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996) 1.2.76–86, TLN 257–67. 49. Mary Thomas Crane points out that Hamlet’s statement is also a way of countering Claudius, questioning the sincerity of his expressions of emotion in this scene, especially the ‘dropping eye’ with which Claudius claims to be still mourning King Hamlet’s death (125). 50. Cf. Terry Eagleton’s observation that in Hamlet, ‘society is presented, and is present to each character, as a continuous network of causes, agents, and effects, a network of men reciprocally using and exploiting one another. The reciprocity is important: men both use others and are used, and as a result they have two senses of themselves, as source and as agent (or object)’ (Shakespeare and Society [New York: Schocken Books, 1967] 40). 51. For an astute discussion of the tension between inwardness and theatricality in Hamlet in the context of Elizabethan religious practices, see Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’ (Representations 60 [Fall 1997]: 49–69). 52. In fact, this study offers some evidence to the contrary.

1 Properties of a ‘Self’: Words and Things, 1580–1690 1. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London: J. M. Dent, 1994) 2.27.17. Shakespeare, All’s Well, That Ends Well, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Norton facsimile, second edition, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996) 4.3.18–19, TLN 2125–6. Quotations of Shakespeare’s plays in this chapter are from this facsimile edition, and will be cited parenthetically in the text with both its through-line numbering and the act, scene, and line numbers of The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). 2. Despite a growing emphasis in Renaissance studies on the historicity of language, the basic vocabulary of selfhood has received little sustained attention. Important exceptions are Peter Stallybrass’s analysis of

Notes to Chapter 1 173

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

seventeenth-century uses of ‘individual’ in ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’ (Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler [NY: Routledge, 1992]) and Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Jeffrey Masten’s discussions of the ‘individual’ in the context of collaborative theatrical writing in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, NY, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The Oxford English Dictionary divides ‘self’ into pronominal, adjectival, and substantive uses and under the first substantive sense places all uses in which the pronoun is expressed substantively. The vast majority of substantive uses of ‘self’ before the late seventeenth century belong to this still basically pronominal sense. However, most of the clearly substantive sixteenth-century examples I discuss below are not cited by the OED. It is easy to read substantive meaning into Renaissance uses where it does not necessarily exist. In Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, Antony’s agonized wish to ‘[s]ubdue my worthiest selfe’ may sound to us at first like a comparison of different selves, when it actually means ‘subdue myself (who am most worth of being subdued)’ (4.12.41, TLN 2806). Similarly, although Polonius’s advice to Laertes – ‘to thine owne selfe be true’ – can sound like a substantive use of ‘self’, it specifies nothing more than a pronoun does (‘be true to him’ or ‘be true to me’), as the subsequent line, ‘Thou canst not then be false to any man’, makes clear (1.3.80–2, TLN 543–5). Of course, the question of what it means to be true to oneself and therefore to others is at issue throughout Hamlet; clearly, the precept is not borne out in Polonius’s own proceedings. Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘I see my plaint with open eares’ (l. 6) and ‘The louer laments the death of his loue’ (l. 13) from Songes and Sonettes (1557). See also OED’s comments on the grammatical circumstances contributing to changing uses of ‘self’. An interesting moment in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, briefly foregrounds the question of whether a self can be a substance. Proteus, betraying Julia in trying to woo Silvia, begs for Sylvia’s picture: To that ile speake, to that ile sigh and weepe; For since the substance of your perfect selfe Is else deuoted, I am but a shadow; And to your shadow, will I make true loue. Julia, secretly watching him, responds to Proteus’s inflated rhetoric with the pointed aside, ‘If ’twere a substance you would sure deceiue it’ (4.2.123–7, TLN 1745–9). Her simultaneously linguistic and ethical critique cuts two ways, suggesting both that a ‘self’ is not a ‘substance’, and yet that there is something substantial at stake here that can be betrayed, particularly by the idealizing Petrarchan lover caught up in the image of a female body. As we will see below, questions of gender – particularly male constructions of female selfhood – arise frequently as writers play with the possibility and the meanings of substantive selfhood.

174 Notes to Chapter 1 8. The OED lists many premodern meanings for ‘condition’, including ‘particular mode of being of a person or thing’; ‘mental disposition’; ‘personal qualities; manners, morals, ways; behaviour, temper’. 9. Henry uses ‘person’ in a related sense of a social image, something experienced by others, when he discusses the politics of appearances with Hal: ‘Thus did I keepe my Person fresh and new’ (3.2.55, TLN 1874). 10. In some ways, ‘soul’ is a term that corresponds better to the modern subjective ‘self’ than do Renaissance uses of ‘self’ or ‘person’, as it refers to incorporeal, inward experience and awareness. Yet its primary religious sense carries what I will argue in Chapter 2 is an interpersonal dimension in its availability to and potential infusion by God. 11. I deal more fully with the significance of subjective others in Chapters 3 and 4 as well as in the epilogue. 12. There is, of course, a continual emphasis in this play on questions of ‘true’ versus ‘counterfeit’ identity, but the categories are often pointedly confounded. For instance, when Dowglas, frustrated with fighting so many royal imposters at Shrewsbury, encounters Henry with the question, ‘What art thou / That counterfeit’st the person of a King?’ and Henry replies, ‘The King himselfe’, the response suggests both an assertion of authenticity and an awareness that, in fact, ‘the King himselfe’ counterfeits ‘the person of a King’ (5.4.27–9, TLN 2986–8). 13. Certain biases are evident in the OEDs entries for much of the vocabulary of selfhood. In particular, they tend to emphasize the modern meanings of words, classifying earlier historical examples under these when they might better be distinguished, and ignoring examples that don’t fit those modern definitions. As a result, throughout this chapter, I make only provisional use of its analyses of words and historical examples, rejecting them where inadequate, and offering earlier examples whenever possible as well as examples not covered by any of the definitions given. As Raymond Williams notes, ‘to work closely in [the OED] is at times to get a fascinating insight into what can be called the ideology of its editors’, and yet it is possible to use its valuable historical evidence while drawing ‘different and at times even opposite conclusions from it’ (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983] 18–19). 14. ‘A secret self I had enclos’d within, That was not bounded with my clothes or skin’ (Thomas Traherne, Christian ethicks; or divine morality. In Poetical works, [London, 1903]). 15. Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion 45, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einer Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 16. A better example might have been a line from Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum (1599): ‘Why want I meanes my inward selfe to see?’ (The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975] l. 190). Yet in the subsequent stanza it becomes clear that what Davies is referring to here is ‘my Soule’, which can be seen by means of ‘an inward light’ provided by God. Thus this ‘inward selfe’ does not really conform to the definition of one among other conflicting selves, yet neither does it work for sense 3, as it is expressly tied to God. Moreover, as Debora Shuger points out, Davies’s self ‘turns out to be generic rather than individual’, reflecting ‘theological commonplaces


17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

rather than anything we would be likely to call a person’s “inward selfe”’. (‘The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt [Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999] 26). ‘In vain he burns, and in himself his former self requires’ (John Dryden, Works, a 1700. The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneis, trans. 1697; III. 160). Sir John Beaumont, The Metamorphosis of Tabacco (London: John Flasknet, 1602) l. 1042. Middleton, Triumphs of Truth (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613) rptd. ChadwyckHealey full-text database (Cambridge 1994). The other uses of ‘selfe’ by Henry and Hal are harder to classify under sense 4a (the changing self), but also do not fit any of the OED’s other definitions. ‘Helens Rape. OR A Light Lanthorne for Light Ladies’, from The Affectionate Shepheard (London, 1594) rptd. Chadwyck-Healey full-text database (Cambridge 1994). Two examples in The Faerie Queene may help to illustrate this kind of use: ‘that angry foole ... did with his smarting toole / Oft whip her dainty selfe’ (6.7.39); ‘he seekes ... to spill / Her person, and her sacred selfe to slay’ (5.8.19). Often these uses seem to qualify as true substantives in which ‘self’ means body. Ben Jonson, Cataline His Conspiracy. A Tragoedie in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616) 2.301. Robert Tofte, trans. Benedetto Varchi, ‘Sonetto’, in The Blazon of Jealousie (London, 1615) 8, ll. 12–18. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, NY, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 1. Katherine Eisaman Maus notes that this was often ‘invoked more casually’ as well: ‘In vernacular sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century speech and writing, the whole interior of the body – heart, liver, womb, bowels, kidneys, gall, blood, lymph – quite often involves itself in the production of the mental interior’ (Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995] 195). I discuss the language of humoralism and its implications further below and in Chapter 2. This corresponds also to the theological sense of ‘person’, which refers ‘to the three distinctions, or modes of the divine being, in the Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) which together constitute the Trinity’ (OED, sense 7). A good example of the way these two senses tend to combine comes in Richard II, when Richard, fatally struck, asserts ‘That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire / That staggers thus my person’ (5.5.108–9). Spenser, The Faerie Queene 3.11.46.1–4. ‘Cardinal Pole to the Lord Crumwel’ (1538) in John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (London: Samuel Bagster, 1816) 6.76. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding 2.27.8, 9. Further references will be cited parenthetically within the text. The violence done to corporeality in this passage perhaps deserves further comment. It is striking that Locke is content to suggest that the cutting off of a hand would produce no ‘change of personal identity’, for while the hand itself might no longer be ‘part of’ consciousness, its absence certainly would

176 Notes to Chapter 1 be. But consciousness of change is not what Locke wants to focus on, for that would entail objectification. (I return to the principle that un-self-sameness entails objectification in discussing humoral objects in Chapter 2). 32. Discussions of the early modern use of ‘person’ usually focus on the theatrical sense that derived from the Latin ‘persona’, which meant a character or role acted (i.e., dramatis persona), or one who performs such a part. And a frequent point of reference for this discussion is Hobbes’s definition of the word (1651), which insists on this root meaning. Noting that the Latin persona ‘signifies the disguise or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage’, Hobbes explains that the English word has been ‘translated’ from the stage ‘to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as theatres’. Thus, he says, ‘a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act, or represent, himself or another’ (Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1994) 1.16.1, 3, original emphases). A person for Hobbes is a representative (of himself or of another), not only in the sense of likeness, but also in the sense of substitution, since a ‘person’ can also be the representative of something inanimate: a church, hospital, or bridge ‘may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer’ (1.16.9). Interestingly, while Hobbes notes that persona means the disguise or appearance of the actor, he consistently uses the English ‘person’ only in the sense of the actor himself. The relation between this representing ‘person’ and whatever it represents is understood as one of authority – the ‘owner’ or ‘author’ of what is represented (i.e., its source – either oneself in the case of a ‘natural person’ or another in the case of an ‘artificial person’) is legally responsible for the representation. But the responsible one is identified only through that concrete representation, and thus it seems that the exterior is all that constitutes the ‘person’ for Hobbes, and he has little to say about the nature of its authoritative source. In this sense, Hobbes’s definition has been understood as representing a very old sense of the word – one that, as Deborah Kuller Shuger points out, goes back to Lorenzo Valla and that captures the Renaissance conception of selfhood as basically theatrical and social (see Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990] 95–6). But Hobbes’s understanding of the ‘person’ has also been seen as representing a new, modern sense of the self’s ownership of itself as a kind of private property, which contrasts with Renaissance conceptions of selfhood (see C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism [London: Oxford UP, 1962]). Hobbes’s discussion of the ‘person’ holds two possible perspectives on selfhood, depending on whether we locate selfhood in his use of the word ‘person’ or ‘author’. In a sense, Hobbes’s insistence on the theatrical meaning of ‘person’ opens the possibility that the essence of selfhood lies elsewhere – i.e., in authority. This, I would argue, is a step toward the abstract ‘person’ that Locke will later coin, except that Hobbes is, in a sense, discarding ‘person’ as a term for selfhood rather than redefining it. Thus it is important to note that the theatrical sense of ‘person’ in Hobbes’s discussion is not necessarily the same as in Medieval and Renaissance uses, which tend rather to grow out of the sense of ‘external appearance’. (On Hobbes’s definition see also Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the ‘theatrical mask secured by authority’ in ‘Psychoanalysis and


33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

Renaissance Culture’ in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986] 223). It should be clear from this discussion that I am not using ‘objectification’ in the way Charles Taylor uses it in his discussion of Locke’s ‘punctual self’ (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989] 160). For Taylor, objectification is a ‘disengagement’ from one’s normal way of seeing things (160), yet it is also a purely subjective move – a ‘radical reflexivity’ that is the self-contained opposite of engaged exploration (163, 164). Unlike the objectified selves that Renaissance usage figures as the experience of others, the ‘punctual self’ Taylor identifies in Locke eschews all external authority in favor of its own ‘first-person standpoint’ (168). Taylor’s use of ‘objectification’ is intrapsychic, mine interpersonal; nevertheless, my argument about Locke is essentially in accord with Taylor’s. Locke justifies the abstractness of this concept by claiming that ‘immaterial spirit’ is ‘at least as clear’ an idea for us as body. See 2.23.15, 28, and 32. Gervase Markham, The Second and Last Part of the First Booke of the English Arcadia (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613) 23. Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (1595), in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962) vol. III, 25. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 2–3, 26–9. While Maus does warn against ‘carelessly conflating’ Renaissance inwardness with more modern notions of autonomy or individualism (Inwardness and Theatre, 212), she does not much highlight or explore the profoundly interpersonal dimensions of this inwardness. Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 52 (ll. 7–8) in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Spenser’s speaker adopts a Neoplatonic strategy of internalizing the idealized image of the beautiful other, a strategy that often seems to cede control to the beloved, though its ultimate aim is transcendent. Chapter 3 discusses this Neoplatonic model and its implications for a more autonomous selfhood. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.12.47. In Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). In Christian terms, the good and evil angels each person is born with (see OED, ‘genius’, sense 1.c). Interestingly, in this use of ‘genius’ Spenser conflates the Christian idea with one related to the etymology of the word – the spirit of generation. Here and in Book 3, Spenser’s ‘Genius’ is a morally double-natured figure, who presides over the process of human reproduction (see 3.6.31–2). Spenser’s ‘Genius’ also seems to fit two other of the OED’s senses: (1.a.) With reference to classical pagan belief: The tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his character, and finally to conduct him out of the world, and (1.e.) The quasi-mythologic personification of something immaterial (e.g. of a virtue, a custom, an institution). This constructedness is evident in another substantive use of ‘self’ that makes a clear bid for an image of autonomy, in Jonson’s Epigram 98: ‘He

178 Notes to Chapter 1

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

that is round within himselfe, and streight, / Need seeke no other strength, no other height ... / Be alwayes to thy gather’d self the same: / And studie conscience, more then thou would’st fame’ (Ben Jonson: Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), my emphasis). This ‘gathered self’ hints that a self is a particular kind of construct, a coherence of parts that must be pulled together before one can be ‘round within’ oneself, constant, or independent. Even the form of Jonson’s poem itself, as a friend’s ‘judgement’ and encouragement of its addressee, begs the question why it should be necessary or desirable, if that self were as autonomous as the poem wants to insist. On the tensions within Jonson’s ideal of a ‘centered self’, see Thomas M. Greene, ‘Ben Jonson and the Centered Self’ (SEL 10 [1970]: 325–48). Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971) 104. Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 94–5. Further references are cited within the text. The OED gives the first example for this usage as 1605 despite numerous earlier occurrences. It does, however, list this as sense 2, ahead of its other fully substantive senses. Erasmus, Adagia. Collectanea Adagiorun Veterum in Opera Omnia (1703, vol. 2) 14F, cited in Morris Palmer Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950) F696. Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), ed. Se. E. Lehmberg (London: J M Dent, 1962) 134. See Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 29. See also Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse, 32ff. Cicero, Fowre Seuerall Treatises of M. Tullius Cicero, Conteyninge His Most Learned and Eloquente Discourses of Frendshippe. Trans. Thomas Newton (London: Thomas Marshe, 1577) fol. 34r. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) 197, 333, 192. A line in the anonymous Arden of Feversham (1592) rehearses this doctrine via the otherself trope: ‘but she’s myself, / And holy church rites makes us two but one’. Drama of the English Renaissance, Vol 1: The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (Prentice Hall, 1976) 8.37–8. ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’, The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Leicester Bradner (Providence: Brown University Press, 1964). Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Antonius (London, 1592), 2.594–5 . Pembroke’s translation of Robert Garnier’s text follows the sense of the original French, ‘Mon espous est moymesme’, although there the idea is still expressed pronominally and as a doctrine of marriage (Marc Antoine in Oeuvres Complètes de Robert Garnier [Paris: Société les Belles Lettres, 1974] 40). Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 167. Cicero, De amicitia. Trans. John Tiptoft (London: William Caxton, 1481) fol. 7v. Montaigne, Michel de, The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (NY: Modern Library, 1933) 149.

Notes to Chapter 1 179 57. Christopher Marlowe, Edward II (1592?) in Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 1.1.142–3. Further quotations of Marlowe’s plays are from this edition and are cited within the text. 58. Cited in Shannon, 31, from Cicero, De senectute, De amicitia, De divinatione, trans. William Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923) 140–43, my emphasis. 59. One might say that this priority of the other for selfhood is evident even in the classical discourses of friendship in the way that they seem to require autonomy not in the sense of demanding it as a prerequisite but in the sense of bringing it into being through the rhetoric of friendship. Shannon seems to suggest as much when she argues that the ‘discourses of amity address [the] sovereign self – in order to produce it’ (34). 60. The OED gives the first example of this sense in 1742. 61. Anon., Timon (c. 1600) (Shakespeare Society, 1842) 1.2.6. Cited in OED, sense 2, as the first example. ‘Individual’ is used in this sense as late as Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) – ‘To have thee by my side / Henceforth an individual solace dear’ ( John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [NY: Macmillan, 1957] 4.485–6). On its use in The Two Noble Kinsmen, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual and the Text’, and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse 51–2. 62. OED, sense B3, first example 1626. In reference to things, this distinguishing sense emerges earlier (OED sense B.2, 1605). 63. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (1630), (London: Iohn Dawson, 1641) 165. 64. OED sense B.3b, first example 1742. It should be noted, however, that Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) does not list this (or any) substantive sense. The earliest literary instances of ‘individual’ in the modern sense that I have found are in Dryden (‘Translation of the latter part of the third book of Lucretius’, l. 26) and Congreve (The Old Batchelor 5.1.2). 65. Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionary of 1623 (New York: Huntington Press, 1930); Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), facsimile ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1950). 66. Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words (1604), facsimile ed. (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966); Cockeram, English Dictionary (1623). 67. Cawdrey, Table Alphabeticall (1604). 68. In its basic meaning of ‘sameness’, identity is used in reference to things by 1570, either to compare two or more things or to speak of the self-sameness of a single thing. The relational uses in reference to persons cited here are the earliest that I have found. They are not cited by the OED, which defines ‘identity’ of persons only as self-sameness. 69. Hammond, ‘Husbandry’, Poems (London: Thomas Dring, 1655) rptd. Chadwyck-Healey full-text database (Cambridge 1994). 70. Abraham Cowley, ‘On the death of Mrs. Katherine Philips’, in Katherine Philips, Poems (1667) l. 5. The same idea is prominent in texts of Donne discussed in the next chapter. 71. Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’ 594.

180 Notes to Chapter 1 72. The OED cites Locke for its earliest examples of ‘identity’ in reference to human beings, and here again we see the centrality of subjective experience in this individual conception: ‘Consciousness always accompanies thinking, ... in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e., the Sameness of a rational Being’ (Essay Concerning Human Understanding [London: J. M. Dent, 1994] 2.27.9). 73. The OED still does not list such a definition (though other modern dictionaries do). It gives only one sense for persons, which conflates the idea of sameness with personality: ‘The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.’ 74. See Tilley, Proverbs in England, on the idea of having ‘as many shapes as Proteus’ (S285). In this sense, change rather than sameness often seems the normative concept for persons. 75. See The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (London: Penguin, 1987) 77–8. 76. Cawdrey, Table Alphabetical (1604). ‘Complexion’ loses the broader reference to one’s ‘nature’ by the time of Johnson, who defines it only as referring to the body. 77. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing 2.1.295. 78. As Katherine Rowe notes, the language of humors exhibits a ‘gradual and uneven transition from early modern humoralism (with its environmentally permeable body and labile animal spirits) to the proprietary body theorized by Descartes and Locke’ (Rowe, ‘Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson [Philadelphia: U Penn Press, 2004] 174). 79. Shakespeare, King John, 3.4.56, TLN 1438; Romeo and Juliet, 5.1.19, TLN 2742. 80. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 5.2.54–5, TLN 2478–9. 81. Spenser, ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’, Yale Shorter Poems, ll. 528–9; Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, ll. 97–8. 82. Donne, verse letter, ‘To the Countess of Huntingdon’, l. 95. 83. There is some disagreement among writers in the period about exactly what things constitute one’s ‘parts’. A text of 1614 on marriage, for instance, asserts that ‘parts’ should be distinguished from mere ‘additions’, which include appearance and belongings: ‘Birth, Beauty, Wealth, are nothing worth alone, / All these I would for good Additions take, / Not for Good Partes; those two are ill combinde [i.e., married], / Whom any third thing from themselves hath joynde’ (Thomas Overbury ‘A Wife’ in The Overburian Characters [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936]). But in many other texts’ ‘parts’ does refer to one’s titles, appearance, or belongings. 84. In the OED’s definition, this usage involves a moral dimension: ‘The sum of the moral and mental qualities which distinguish an individual or a race, viewed as a homogeneous whole; the individuality impressed by nature and habit on man or nation; mental or moral constitution’. OED, sense 11, earliest example 1647. 85. In the sixteenth century, there are also figurative senses in which ‘character’ suggests an act of signification in natural appearances and thus refers to the sign or token of some particular trait in a thing or person (OED, sense 8. E.g., 1502: A spyrytuell token [that] these theologyens call caractere, that maye neuer be defaced; 1597: Felicitie seemeth to bee a character of the favour ... of the diuine powers).

Notes to Chapter 1 181 86. Twelfth Night 1.2.51–2, TLN 102–3. 87. Mary Thomas Crane’s analysis of Twelfth Night emphasizes this issue. See Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) 94–115. 88. Spenser, The Faerie Queene 5.6.2.5–9, emphasis added. 89. Jonson, ‘Elegy on my muse’, Underwoods 84, part 9, 155–6. 90. In this poem, Jonson insists that moral judgment of the person involves judging the unity of body and spirit, rather than isolating inner qualities as moral: earlier the poem cites the three ‘natures’ of medieval Aristotelian philosophy, one corporal, one spiritual, and a third which is not single but ‘commixed, / Of body and spirit together, placed betwixt, / Those other two; which must be judged, or crowned: / This as it guilty is, or guiltless found, / Must come to take a sentence ...’ (53–7). 91. Reprinted as The Overburian Characters, ed. W.J. Paylor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936). Subsequent printings of this popular work added more and more ‘characters’ by additional anonymous authors, probably including Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and, for the 1622 collection, John Donne. Introduced into English by Joseph Hall in 1608, the ‘character’ is a form adapted – like the satire and epigram – from classical literature, consisting of a brief description of the typical actions inspired by one dominant vice. The Overburian characters, however, tend to center not on particular vices but on different social types. In this form, the ‘character’ becomes and remains quite popular throughout the seventeenth century. For a detailed history, see the introduction to the 1936 edition. 92. The Overburian Characters 92. The phrase ‘reall or personall’ is originally a distinction in law between what pertains to things and what to persons (OED), and so the distinction here is probably between the ‘characters’ of social types and those of things. Further references are cited within the text. 93. On the genre of character books, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart, especially 74–83. 94. Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-modern Stage (London: Macmillan, 1990) 2, my emphasis. Burns argues that the necessarily intersubjective dimension in what constitutes ‘character’ in this period can also be rediscovered in the modern meaning, and he ultimately aims ‘to reinstate ideas of cognition, of reciprocal identification, of the mutual construction of identities, into a discourse of character, in order to open up to scrutiny the historical formation of that discourse’ (6). 95. While the word ‘character’ begins to be used in this reified sense of an aggregate of inner moral qualities in the late seventeenth century, it is not until the mid-eighteenth century that it develops the sense we associate with ‘personality’, and not until that sense develops that we get its theatrical use. Thus it seems the reference to a dramatic ‘character’ develops only after the reified notion of ‘character’ is established, when this is something the culture is accustomed to and can be self-conscious about. During the Renaissance, the ‘characters’ of drama are referred to either as ‘persons’ (or personae) or as ‘actors’. These terms signify both what we call a ‘character’ and what the Renaissance called a ‘player’, which also suggests that, for Renaissance culture, the reference in speaking of such fictional figures as ‘actors’ is to their behavior rather than to any conception of inner qualities.

182 Notes to Chapter 1 96. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 610. 97. Quoted in Stallybrass 610. 98. Quotations of Donne’s poetry in this chapter are from Donne: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Grierson (Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 1990). 99. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 174. 100. The Phoenix and Turtle, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (NY and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), ll. 26, 27, 34, 37. 101. For instance, the Norton edition gives this reading: ‘The notion of an essential self was thus weakened by the fact that the self was not identical to itself’ (p. 2005, n. 8). The Riverside edition, on the other hand, reads it as a changing ‘self’: ‘property (essential quality) was thus impaired since self (single nature) had been altered’ (1891). But the poem would not likely start referring to only one ‘self’ here. 102. See OED’s sense B (adj.) 2: ‘absol. With def. art. (The) same person or thing. Obs’. 103. ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: “A Kind of Self”’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983) 135–6. Further references are cited in the text. 104. Greene questions the viability of this objectified mode of selfhood: ‘Without positive, assertive ways of defining selfhood ... women are more dependent than men on external supports for identity, more vulnerable to ‘opinion’ (134). Claire M. Tylee argues similarly that Cressida has no ‘essential integrity of personality’, and reasons that this is because ‘she seems to have had no opportunity to act autonomously, according to her emotions, and so she seems never to have been allowed to develop her own sense of herself, a sense of her own identity’ (‘The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek Camp Scene’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 [1989]: 63–76; 65). From a French feminist-psychoanalytic perspective, Deborah Hooker identifies Cressida as the character who embodies ‘the madness of discourse’ in the play, and momentarily infects Troilus with it. See ‘Coming to Cressida through Irigaray’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88:4 (Fall 1989): 928. 105. Alan Sinfield, ‘Kinds of Loving: Women in the Plays’, Self and Society in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, ed. J. A. Jowitt and R. K. S. Taylor (Leeds, 1982) 27–44, 34. 106. Greene 135. See also the analyses of Cressida in Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993). 107. Carol Cook, ‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’ 51, 48, in Theatre Journal 38.1 (March 1986) 34–52. 108. Linda Charnes uses this locution in querying what she analyzes as the characters’ ‘notorious identities’: ‘what happens ... when the ‘self’ for whom one is taken is only a ‘kind of self’, a self that is really beside itself?’

Notes to Chapter 2 183 (Notorious Identity 70). Later, she explains Cressida’s statement as a confession of her own ‘inevitable betrayal’ (78). 109. This behavior also represents, as Cook has noted, a kind of ‘mirroring’, for adorning one’s enemy with praise is a form of self-aggrandizement too (Unbodied Figures of Desire 44).

2 Persons in Play: Donne’s Body and the Humoral Actor 1. Jonson, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) vol. 8, ll. 1093–99. Donne, Verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton, ‘Sir, more then kisses’, l. 37. All quotations of Donne’s poetry in this chapter are from John Donne, The Oxford Authors, ed. John Carey (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 2. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62) IV:14.481–2 (Easter 1623) [9:223; 2:84; 9:124; 1:192; 4:358]. 3. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990) 82, 265. See also Elaine Scarry, ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his booke”’, in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 70–105; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory’, SEL 31, 1 (Winter 1991): 69–94; Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force; Donne and Verbal Power’, in Soliciting Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 223–52. Arguments about Donne’s self-absorption prior to Carey are well summarized by Ilona Bell, ‘The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets’, SEL 23, 1 (Winter 1983): 113–29. An important exception to this tendency is Richard Rambuss’s Closet Devotions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), which sees in Donne’s erotic religious poetry a very different model of selfhood, as I discuss below. 4. Carey 151. Further references are cited in the text. 5. Scarry, ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his booke” 81, 84, 93. For another argument about Donne’s attribution of substantiality to language, see Judith Anderson’s Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Anderson also finds in Donne a ‘bid to abolish the borders of verba and res and to assert ultimate control over his own meaning’, but she emphasizes as well the simultaneous possibility of an ‘alternative reading’ (215). 6. For another version of such arguments, see Richard Strier’s ‘Radical Donne’, ELH 60, 2 (Summer 1993): 283–322. But for a different interpretation of Donne’s self-presentation in the context of his politics, see Annabel Patterson, ‘All Donne’, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Harvey and Katherine Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 37–67; and ‘John Donne, Kingsman?’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 251–72. Patterson argues in contrast to Carey that Donne is not ‘a monster of ambition’, but rather ‘a mass of contradictions’ (1990, 42), and that, in his


7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

tenuous political position, he resorted to a strategy of a ‘formally divided self’ (1991, 265). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 23. Further references are cited in the text. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. Jean-Jacques Denonain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 57 (ll. 1300–1305). Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 233–4 (1.2.2.5). This is because, as Levinus Lemnius explains, one’s disposition is determined by the ‘grossness or subtlety’ of the spirits the body receives, partly from nourishment and partly from the condition of the air and state of the region (Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton [London: Thomas Marsh, 1576] 13). As Nancy Siraisi explains, celestial influences too ‘were often considered responsible for variations in the health or sickness of the body, either directly or via changes they brought about in the air’ (Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990] 123). This aspect of Galenic theory was challenged in the sixteenth century by Paracelsian medicine, which, as we will see below, did introduce a conception of disease as just such a determinate entity. For a rich exploration of the implications of this newer medical model for conceptions of national identity, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, esp. 14–15, 87–88. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine 117. Lemnius, sigs.21v-22. Similarly, Robert Burton, in a long ‘Digression of Spirits’, describes how malignant spirits can work ‘both upon body and mind’. Citing numerous authorities, he writes of ‘unclean spirits’ that are said to become ‘mixed with our melancholy humours’, and to ‘go in and out of our bodies, as bees do in a hive’ (The Anatomy of Melancholy 192–4 [1.2.1.2]). The physical link between body and psyche is spirit, a vapor ‘generated by the heat of the heart out of the more subtle blood’, and used by the soul ‘for the exercise of the interior as well as the exterior senses’ (Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. and ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke [Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989] 111). Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 14. Further references are cited in the text. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 18–19. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 22. Stallybrass and White initially critique Bakhtin’s ‘wishful’ and one-sided ‘cosmic populism’, though they do find that it holds ‘an acute perception about the historically variable nature of the body-image’ (10). They later find a second and ‘more adequate’ model of the grotesque in Bakhtin, formed more ‘through a process of hybridization or intermixing of binary opposites’ (44).

Notes to Chapter 2 185 17. ‘The Ecstasy’, l. 42. 18. Schoenfeldt 15. 19. On the reciprocity of the passions and humors, see Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604, reprinted, ed. William Webster Newbold [NY: Garland, 1986] book 2, chapter 3, 135–9). As a result of this reciprocity, treatment would often involve addressing the patient’s mood as well as intake of air and sustenance. As Timothy Bright explains in his Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), one’s ‘diet’ also consists of one’s activities (because these affect the body’s condition) as well as one’s ‘house, habitation, and apparel’ (242–3, and see also chapters 38 and 39). 20. Paster 97. Further references will be cited in the text. 21. Gender also plays a crucial role in determining the makeup of the humoral body: the female body is understood as innately colder and moister than the male, from which most theorists argue for women’s natural and social inferiority in relation to men. Although these differences are not central to my arguments in this chapter, it is worth noting that the humoral body’s basic vulnerability to the external world is increased in the female body. As Ian Maclean writes, Renaissance physiologists see men and women on a continuum: ‘all mankind is in a process of continual change linked to age and health; but in this process woman changes more, and more often, and within a shorter space of time’ (The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual life [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980] 46). Yet women are also, of course, considered to be more limited in their range of physical and psychological types. See also Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women’s Imperfection in the Humoral Economy’. English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 416–40. Mark Breitenberg (Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England [Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996] 14) argues that the humoral body makes early modern men that much more vulnerable to ‘feminization’ because fluidity is associated with women. In that case, to embrace the body’s flux, as Donne in particular does, might also be construed as embracing that feminization. In Chapter 4, I will argue that this is often what happens in the love poetry, though there Donne’s metaphors are less often specifically humoral. 22. Cotgrave’s 1611 dictionary defines ‘humourousness’ as ‘bisarrerie, fantasticalnesse, toyishnesse’. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611), facsimile edition (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1950). 23. Paster 190–4, and see also Jonathan Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 41–3. 24. Spenser, The Faerie Queene 2.3.9.8–9; Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I 1.3.174. 25. Henry V 3.1.3–9, 15–17, my emphasis. Quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). 26. See, for instance, Robert L. Reid, ‘Humoral Psychology in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, Comparative Drama 30, 4 (Winter 1996–97): 471–502, who suggests that Hal’s ability to be ‘of all humors’ reflects his basically sanguine complexion. But he also argues that ‘Hal’s perpetual contrivances suggest Shakespeare’s faith (at this midpoint of his career) in the subservience of


27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

humors and spirits to the rational soul’ – an indication that for Shakespeare ‘kingship is self-fashioning more than royal blood, tour de force acting more than true golden temper’ (492). Ramie Targoff argues similarly about the nondichotomous understanding of performance in the context of early modern religious practice, challenging the frequent critical assumption ‘that the private and public self are entirely discrete and separable agents’. See ‘The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’ (Representations 60 [Fall 1997]: 49–69) 50. Targoff points to the conviction of antitheatrical polemicists that the ‘practice of playing threatened to transform actors and audiences alike’ (50, 52); she cites, for instance, the way William Prynne likens ‘the effects of playing to a physiological contamination that “infuseth falsehood into every part of soule and body”’ (52, quoting from Prynne’s Histrio-mastix [London, 1633] 159). Such a statement testifies to the strong sense of a connection between inner and outer phenomena, which could also be taken positively, as in the religious arguments on the devotional efficacy of the performance of common prayer that Targoff explores. For Targoff, ‘what emerges in the aftermath of the Reformation is less a triumphant embrace of the individual’s private and invisible self than a concerted effort to shape the otherwise uncontrollable and unreliable internal sphere through common acts of devotion’ (Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001] 6). Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985) 30 (Roach is quoting here from Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors [1612]). In his detailed discussion of the humoral basis of Renaissance acting, Roach also claims that in Renaissance theory, physical transformation via spirit extends beyond the individual actor and includes the spectators: ‘It was widely believed that the spirits, agitated by the passions of the imaginer, generate a wave of physical force, rolling through the aether, powerful enough to influence the spirits of others at a distance’ (45). Thus the actor’s passions can transform not only his own body internally but also ‘the physical space around him’ and ‘the bodies of the spectators who shared that space with him’ (27). Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1995) 1–2. As Katherine Rowe points out, Shakespeare’s plays tend to explore an ‘affective contagion’ among characters, which she stresses was ‘an ordinary and pervasive feature of humorally conceived passions’ in the seventeenth century (‘Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004] 176). David Hillman, ‘Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the Early Modern Body’ in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) 90. In the case of Hillman’s argument, he is surely right to focus our attention on ‘a realm of specifically corporeal interiority’, though I question the extent to which that realm is always ‘contrasted with mere outward signs’ (91).

Notes to Chapter 2 187 32. David Schalkwyk suggests that what Hamlet gets at here is ‘not primarily an ineffable inwardness, but rather his singularity ... his difference from the society around him’. His is ‘not an inwardness that is metaphysically unknowable, but one that, like Cordelia’s love for her father ... cannot be expressed because no context is appropriate for its expression’ (Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002] 116–17). 33. Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 141. Crane details the way Shakespeare’s play both draws on and moves beyond Timothy Bright’s 1586 Treatise on Melancholy. Bright partly breaks with humoralism’s ‘material theory of mind’ by trying to separate soul and body and thereby ‘anticipat[ing] the Cartesian split’ (244, n17). Crane argues that Hamlet offers not a single theory of self and action but a range of possibilities: ‘there is, or is not, an essential self (variously the soul, rational faculty, heart) that works as a stable locus of agency; this self can, or cannot, be altered by influences from outside; this inner self can, or cannot, be reliably expressed; actions do, or do not, create the self’ (141). Her analysis is especially revealing about the way Hamlet constitutes a site of debate about these theories. 34. In this connection, see Crane’s discussion of the idea of pregnancy in early modern English as a way of naming ‘the multiple ways that bodies are penetrated by the world and produce something – offspring, ideas, language – as a result of that penetration’ (Shakespeare’s Brain 159). 35. Such crossings take place in relation to the audience of Hamlet as well, according to Robert Weimann, who argues that the metatheatrical aspects of the play result in ‘a simultaneity in the awareness of life in the theater, and the theater as a supreme form of life: the indivisibility, that is, of the appropriation of the world through and on the stage and the appropriation of the stage through and in the world. Thus, Hamlet’s production of The Mousetrap can be seen as some dramatized metaphor of the appropriation of the world of the play through mimesis, which appropriation – as it affects Hamlet’s position in the play – is itself turned into drama’ (‘Mimesis in Hamlet’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory [New York and London: Methuen, 1985] 288). 36. Again, I would stress that Hamlet’s refusal to let others ‘pluck out the heart of [his] mystery’ is not a general statement about unreachable interiority but a necessary interpersonal strategy in his circumstances. Clearly he deems it possible to penetrate others – to ‘tent [Claudius] to the quick’ (2.2.574) to show Gertrude ‘the inmost part’ of herself (3.4.20), and to have the play work as ‘wormwood’ on her (3.2.163). 37. Hillman, ‘Visceral Knowledge’ 91. Hillman argues, however, that Hamlet perceives ‘a denial of access to the interiors of others’ bodies’ (91), and finds in Hamlet a Cavellian skepticism motivated by an underlying refusal to acknowledge the other (Hillman, 98 n3, citing Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987] and The Claim of Reason [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979]). I believe Hamlet’s position can be seen as more paranoid than skeptical when we observe the specifics of his interpersonal situation and strategies. 38. See Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984) 37; see also the discussion of Barker’s and Catherine Belsey’s arguments about Hamlet in the Introduction.

188 Notes to Chapter 2 39. Bruce Danner makes a similar point about Hamlet’s use of ‘nephew’ in ‘Speaking Daggers’, Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003) 32. 40. Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) vol. 8, ll. 1093–99. Further references are cited in the text. 41. Cf. Roach’s observations that the Renaissance actor’s protean powers were not always seen as positive, with more than one physician commenting on ‘the perils of habitual self-transformation’ and noting an ‘unsettling resemblance between inspiration and disease’ (The Player’s Passion 50). 42. Lawrence Danson, ‘Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self’ (PMLA 99 [1984] 179–93) 183. 43. Epigram 98, l. 9. 44. Thomas M. Greene, ‘Ben Jonson and the Centered Self’ (SEL 10 [1970] 325–48) 329. 45. Induction, ll. 143–6. Quotations of Jonson’s plays are from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). Further references are cited in the text. 46. See, for instance, Lawrence Danson, ‘Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self’ 183. 47. It is worth noting that at the beginning he was told it was a humor, and at that point he rejected the term and launched into his tirade against the popular usage of the word. By the end, then, it seems he has accepted that earlier objectification of himself. 48. Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 35–8, 47–51. 49. That Jonson would approve of such a competitive social selfhood may help explain why he seems to sympathize (at least temporarily) with characters like Volpone or Mosca, whose intent is so ruthlessly antisocial, even as they depend on those they despise. 50. Quoted in Carey 165. 51. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Modern Library, 1873) 196. 52. Susannah B. Mintz makes a similarly relational argument about Donne’s love poetry in regard to gender, demonstrating how it often plays with ‘the boundaries of gendered identity’ and achieves a ‘pleasurable overlap of inner and outer, of self and other’. See ‘“Forget the Hee and Shee”: Gender and Play in John Donne’ (Modern Philology 98.4 [2001] 577–603) 583. Mintz uses the object-relations psychoanalytic theory of D. W. Winnicott to get beyond the notion of ‘gender play as a carnival of transgressions that always, ultimately, reaffirms power hierarchies’, arguing instead that Donne’s love poetry ‘offers the possibility of both identification with women and a recognition of their separateness’ (580). I return to Donne’s love poetry in Chapter 4, arguing that even those poems most anxious about the beloved’s constancy reveal a characteristically interpersonal movement of the speaker into the subjective position of the other. 53. Satire I, ll. 1, 11. This poem also shows an un-Jonsonian sense of the speaker’s own complicity in what he satirizes, as he points out that he himself is inconstant in changing his mind and joining the humorist in the street (65–7). And beyond this subtle inclusion of himself with his target, the speaker’s tone does not preclude a sense of sympathy with the ridiculed


54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

humorist, who is often addressed directly as ‘thou’, is even at one point called ‘my lost sheep’, and at the end returns to the speaker, beaten. Even in the concluding joke that he now ‘constantly a while must keep his bed’, there is no suggestion that the speaker disavows him – indeed, the statement that he ‘directly came to me hanging the head’ suggests a certain unspoken acceptance (111–2). On this and Donne’s other satires, see Ronald J. Corthell, ‘Style and Self in Donne’s Satires’ (Texas Studies in Language and Literature 24, 2 (Summer 1982): 155–84. On the connection between such verse satires (banned in 1599) Jonson’s comical satires, see Jonathan Haynes, Social Relations of Jonson’s Theatre 61–3. See Thomas Willard, ‘Donne’s Anatomy Lesson: Vesalian or Paracelsian?’, John Donne Journal 3, 1 (1984): 35–61. As Willard notes, Donne’s stepfather, John Syminges ‘belonged to the Royal College of Physicians at the time when Paracelsian ideas were making their first inroads’ (43). Willard 40. This is not to suggest that Paracelsian theory is not also about influence, for that kind of purge still uses an external entity to change the self’s makeup. As Michael Schoenfeldt notes, Paracelsus ‘retains a significant amount of Galenic theory in his elaborate theories of correspondence and influence’ (Bodies and Selves 3). The subtle distinction that Donne cites here is about whether the additive becomes part of the self in transforming it or not. My reading of Donne’s underlying ambivalence about selfhood in this early verse letter is consistent with that of David Aers and Gunter Kress, who interpret it in relation to Donne’s status as an ‘alienated intellectual’ at this point in his life. See their ‘“Darke texts need notes”: Versions of Self in Donne’s Verse Epistles’, reprinted in Critical Essays on John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (NY: Macmillan, 1994) 102–22. Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in Soliciting Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 223. Further references are cited in the text. See Rabelais and His World 19–21. On dialogized consciousness, see Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 259–422. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. John Sparrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923) 78, 72. Actually, Donne has many ways of making the analogy – it is quite a rich relationship between physical, social, and spiritual issues that emerges in this text. Carey also notes ‘Donne’s extraordinarily persistent references to digestion, which of all bodily operations seems to have fascinated him the most’ (254). Sermons II:9.547–9 (March 28, 1619). In the twenty-first Meditation, Donne considers the idea that man might not have fallen had he been left alone in the Garden, and rejects it: ‘God saw that Man needed a Helper, if hee should bee well.’ In fact, he finds, it was Eve’s isolation that left her vulnerable to the Devil: ‘When God and wee were alone, in Adam, that was not enough; when the Devill and wee were alone, in Eve, it was enough. O what a Giant is Man, when he fights against himselfe, and what a Dwarfe when he needs, or exercises his owne assistance for himselfe’ (Devotions, 126). The lack of gender distinction by Donne here is worth noting.

190 Notes to Chapter 2 64. This is the same attitude we see in an earlier sermon, where Donne speaks against monasticism: ‘Men should not retire from the mutual duties of this world’. Sermons III:6.495, (?late November 1620). 65. Sermons III:2.544–7 (30 April 1620). 66. Sermons IX:13.544–8 (possibly 1624–5). 67. Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952) 80. 68. Ibid. 80–1. 69. Sermons VI:7.69, 72–4 (13 June 1624). As Ramie Targoff points out, Donne also dislikes individual, ‘extempore’ prayer: ‘For Donne, there ought to be no distinction between the petitions of the self and those of the church: “no prayer is so truly, or so properly mine,” he ... declares, “as that that the Church hath delivered and recommended to me”’ (Common Prayer, 88, quoting from Sermons IX: 218–19). 70. Essays in Divinity 128–9, 158–61. 71. Ibid. VI:7.163–4, 80. 72. Sermons VIII:10.102–4, 118–19 (15 April 1628). Donne’s wording here is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s in Measure for Measure: ‘Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, / Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues / Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike / As if we had them not’ (1.1.32–5). 73. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998) 59–60. Further references are given parenthetically within the text. 74. Elizabeth M. A. Hodgson, Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Newark: University of Delaware Press/ London: Associated University Press, 1999) 104. 75. Rambuss goes on to argue that ‘the power dynamics in play in “Batter my heart” are far more polyvalent than the various “abjection readings” of the sonnet, feminist and nonfeminist alike, have thus far allowed’ (59). 76. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994) 173–4. 77. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible 174. Shuger notes that in Reformed theology ‘this preference for the body over the text is reversed. Knowledge in Calvin is based on reading rather than seeing’ (174). There is a further distinction to be made as well between different kinds of seeing – this Aristotelian imaging that Shuger discusses vs. the Neoplatonic version of visual epistemology which, as I argue in the next chapter, posits a subsequent transcendence of the ‘physical actuality’ of the other. Such Neoplatonic transcendence of the material other represents a step toward a more autonomous conception of self and, as such, is rejected by Shakespeare. It seems not even to occur to Donne as a possibility. 78. Shuger 190. She also compares erotic representations of the Magdalene to passages in Donne’s sermons ‘where he describes how Christ covers sin “by coming to me, by spreading himself upon me ... Mouth to mouth, hand to hand”, and conversely how Donne, like Ballavia’s Mary Magdalene, spreads himself atop Christ’s crucified body: “I put my hands into his hands, and hang upon his nailes, I put mine eyes upon his. ... I put my mouth upon his mouth. ... to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes”’ (cited in Shuger, 168, from Sermons 9:11.417–18; 2:14.480–85; 10:11.668–70).

Notes to Chapter 3 191 79. David A. Hedrich Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory’, SEL 31, 1 (Winter 1991): 69–94, 88. Further references are cited in the text. 80. Raymond-Jean Frontain also sees Donne as habitually trying to integrate and unify a threateningly fragmented self and world. See his ‘Introduction: “Make all this All”: The Religious Operations of John Donne’s Imagination’, in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995) 1–27; 2, 8. 81. Sermons III:3.687–9, 691–2, 706–7. It should be noted that Donne uses ‘individually’ here in its now obsolete but then only sense of ‘indivisibly’ – the modern sense of ‘independently’ or ‘singly’ being a later coinage. 82. Coherence for Donne is not an individual but a relational condition – as when he laments in the First Anniversary that ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that there can be None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee. (ll. 213–18) This is the same type that Donne (like Jonson) satirizes as ‘humorous’ – the point here being that this pompously ‘singular’ stance refuses to recognize its own subjection to social context. 83. Sermons III:3.799–803. 84. In a 1622 Sermon, Donne insists that even heaven ‘hath not all that it must have to a consummate perfection, till it have bodies too. In those infinite millions of millions of generations, in which the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity enjoyed themselves and one another, ... they thought not their glory so perfect, but that it might receive an addition from creatures; and therefore they made a world, a material world, a corporeal world, they would have bodies’ (Sermons IV:47).

3 Material Others: Shakespeare’s Mirrors and Other Perspectives 1. A recent exception is Bruce Smith’s ‘I, You, He, She, We: On the Sexual Politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer [NY and London: Garland, 2000] 411–30), though this essay also tends to equate self with subject and others with objects. 2. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997) 2. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3. David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 14. Further references are cited within the text.

192 Notes to Chapter 3 4. Despite Vendler’s insistence that lyric speech is not ‘social’, some of her most important insights about the sonnets suggest the contrary. For instance, among what she calls their ‘dramatic’ compositional strategies she cites the speaker’s frequent tendency to ‘quote in indirect discourse something one or the other of the dramatis personae previously said’ (21). She even argues that many sonnets ‘have been misunderstood because they have been thought to be freestanding statements on the speaker’s part rather than replies to the antagonist’s implicitly quoted words’ (21). Similarly, she speaks of ‘an implied other’ at work in many sonnets, whereby ‘the utterances of the speaker are being generated by invisible strings “behind” the poem’ – ‘a series of actions or speech-acts which are, imaginatively speaking, in process while the sonnet is being uttered’ (30, original emphasis). Such ‘give-and-take’ (21) with implicit interlocutors seems to me strong evidence of the sonnets’ intensely dialogic properties. Interestingly, Vendler does admit that in these ‘rebuttal-sonnets’ (as she calls them) ‘we come closest ... to Shakespeare the dramatist’ (21). 5. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 38. Further references are cited with the text. For Magnusson, this is manifest primarily in the speaker’s ‘strategic and context specific’ stance of politeness toward his male addressee, which she links with established forms of social dialogue (38). For Schalkwyk, reading the sonnets in the context of Shakespeare’s plays and as the work of a ‘player-poet’ brings out Shakespeare’s ‘extraordinarily developed sense of language as a performative force’ (239). 6. As Nancy Vickers has shown, ‘his speech requires her silence’, and the threat of his own dismemberment spurs him preemptively to dismember (i.e., to objectify) her instead, in blazon. See ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’ (Critical Inquiry 8.2 [1981]: 265–79) 279. 7. Margreta de Grazia, ‘Locating and Dislocating the “I” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, ed. John F. Andrews [NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985] 443). 8. C. L. Barber has written acutely about this openness of Shakespeare’s sonnets to their others, though he often finds it ‘disturbing’: ‘the poet ... is twisted on the rack of an openness to life and a need for relationship, for love, which cannot let go of actual persons’ (‘Shakespeare in His Sonnets’ in Barber and Richard P Wheeler, The Whole Journey [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986] 173–4). 9. Cf. Joel Fineman’s argument that Shakespeare ‘invents’ modern poetic subjectivity in the sonnets, in Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, L.A., London: University of California Press, 1986) 43. My effort throughout this book is not to chart a progressive historical development of the self, but to identify and analyze competing notions of selfhood within the period. 10. On the dramatic qualities of the sonnets, see also C. L. Barber’s ‘Shakespeare in his Sonnets’ in Barber and Richard P. Wheeler’s The Whole Journey (Berkeley: UC Press, 1986), and Georgio Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Meditations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 15.

Notes to Chapter 3 193 11. Troilus and Cressida 3.3.95–102. Quotations of Shakespeare’s plays in this chapter are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), and hereafter will be cited within the text. 12. New Variorum Shakespeare, Vol. 24 (Philadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1953) 411–15. J. M. Robertson in 1909 refuted the likeness of the passage to Plato as well as the possibility that Shakespeare knew Plato, noting that Achilles’s very commonplace idea was available from other non-Latin sources, and that the further, completely non-Platonic idea, was available in Montaigne (especially in ‘Of Vanity’). 13. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie; Fully Discoursed and Finished in Foure Bookes. (London, 1618) 611, emphasis added. Book II, a treatise on the soul, was first printed in 1594. See also Batman upon Bartholome, his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (London, 1582) Book 3, and Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586). Shakespeare is known to have read Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum (1599), which may be an immediate source for Achilles’s statement in 3.3. 14. Forrest Robinson, The Shape of Things Known (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) 26–7. 15. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985) 7.1. 16. Robinson 53. 17. Robinson 44–5. 18. See John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel’ (Diacritics 5 [1975]: 34–40), as well as Kerrigan and Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance 160, and Gordon Braden, ‘Unspeakable Love: Petrarch to Herbert’ in Soliciting Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 258. 19. Translations of Petrarch are from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), and are cited parenthetically in the text by poem and line numbers of the original Italian. 20. Indeed, the later sonnets suggest that she was really a Beatrice all along – a figure who ‘teaches me to go straight up’ (286.9). Here he understands (that is, interprets) what she was doing and why – that she reined in his will to save him (290.13–14). 21. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561) (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1948) 313. The dualist emphasis in Castiglione is clear: beauty produces ‘certaine vertues’ in the soul that ‘thrust out through the eyes those spirits which bee most fine vapours made of the purest and clearest part of the bloud, which receive the image of beautie’ (316). 22. Ann Rosalind Jones explains that, in actual courtly practice, the notion of women as mirrors held a basic contradiction as the metaphor of mirroring was extended to language – that is, women were supposed to be interlocutors, creating the problem of speaking (i.e., subjective) objects, which were harder to control (The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990] 15–20). But in poetic form, the theory was consistent enough to offer


23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

considerable potential for the construction of male subjectivity. Despite the way the conclusion of The Courtier leaves open the possibility that women may also be capable of this spiritual love, it clearly genders the paradigm of transcendent love, in which a male lover’s vision ultimately bypasses the lady in order to ascend to the divine forms within his own mind. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 313, 316, 317, emphasis added. Further references are cited in the text. See Clark Hulse, ‘Stella’s Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney’s Sonnets’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 272–86. Quotations of Shakespeare’s sonnets are from Stephen Booth’s edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977). Further references are cited within the text by poem and line numbers. There is a great deal of interpersonal mirroring in Shakespeare’s poems and plays, but very little of it takes the conventional form of lovers’ eyes reflecting each other. In Love’s Labor’s Lost the trope appears only to be mocked, in the king’s attempt at a love sonnet (4.3.38); and in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare uses it only when Adonis dies, so that the beloved’s mirroring eyes are not just part of what the lover seeks in her beloved, but also what she loses when he dies – again, the emphasis being on the way that the mirroring other is separate and ultimately uncontrollable (1129). Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye 136–7. Although I use the terms ‘young man’ and ‘dark lady’ here for ease of reference in the context of critical arguments that use them, my reading of the sonnets does not assume an overarching narrative – that is, I am not proposing an alternative scenario to Fineman’s, merely rejecting his. For an argument against such narrative readings, see Heather Dubrow, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 47 [1996]: 291–305). Cf. Jane Hedley’s insistence that the love celebrated in the young man sonnets is ‘narcissistic’ because it is ‘love by identification’ (‘Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism’, Style 28 [1994]: 1–30; 1). In its intrapsychic focus, Hedley’s analysis turns the others of the sonnets into an effect within the speaker’s mind – a beautiful image around which ‘he must be continually inventing and overcoming pretexts of estrangement or of difference between himself and it’ (2). In contrast, my analysis points to the estrangements and differences of the sonnets’ others as what signal to us the live, separate presences of the speaker and his beloveds. As Herbert Grabes explains, before the eighteenth century, the mirror metaphor hardly ever involves a passive mirror that simply has to show the image of the object before it (The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982] 111). Debora Shuger, ‘The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 22. Grabes 19. The metaphor’s vogue coincides with a fashion for actual mirrors between the late Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, for which the


33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

dominant impulse, according to Grabes, is probably the mass production of glass mirrors (Grabes 12, 118). At times satirical mirrors can seem to suggest a simple self-reflection, in which the ostensible subject (for instance, of a Looking-Glasse for Drunkards) is meant to perceive a negative image of himself. But even here, the image is actually of a type, and the upshot is meant to be not identification but alienation, rejection, and reform. Shuger 27. Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors, or The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or the Philosophers Stone to Make a Golden Temper. London: Iohn Dawson, 1639. Further references are cited in the text. Robert Greene, Penelope’s Web (London: Iohn Hodgets, 1601) my emphasis. Grabes 57–8, 76. This may sound similar to Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’, but there are important differences. In Lacan, the infant’s engagement – whether with an actual mirror or a mirroring other – is always about likeness and identification: ‘a situation experienced as undifferentiated’ (Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977] 13) As Anika Lemaire explains, ‘In the other, in the mirror image, in his mother, the child sees nothing but a fellow with whom he merges, with whom he identifies’ ( Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey [London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977] 78, original emphasis). This is not the kind of different perspective that I am pointing to in his chapter, and in Lacanian theory the other does not remain a live, ongoing force in relation to the self beyond the ‘mirror stage’. If we want a modern theory for this more active mirroring, the recent infant-development research that I discuss in the epilogue is more appropriate. Shuger 30. Shuger’s main point of reference for this modern self-reflexivity is Leibniz, and of course it is quite similar to that of Locke. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the radical difference between this self-reflexive self in Locke and the objectified selves of Renaissance usage. Shuger 36. Robert Weimann, ‘Society and the Individual in Shakespeare’s Conception of Character’ (Shakespeare Survey 34 [1981]: 23–31) 26. Weimann argues that Ulysses’s statements suggest the ‘idea of personal autonomy’ (in their references to man’s potential ‘to have that which he hath’ or feel ‘what he owes’), at the same time that they challenge that idea with ‘the experience of social relations’. But, he adds, it is the way these ‘poetic statements on character seem to be ironically counterpointed by what actually happens on stage’ that satisfies Shakespeare’s ‘immense sense of realism’ and allows him fully to show that ‘the outside world of society is inseparable from what a person’s character unfolds as his “belongings”’ (27). Carol Cook, ‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’ (Theatre Journal 38.1 [March 1986]: 34–52). In Cressida’s own formulation, the sense that some permanence should have been possible is expressed in terms that resemble those of the sonnets, and that question the ‘nobility’ of vision: ‘Ah poor our sex, this fault in us I find / The error of our eye directs our mind. / What error leads must err – O then conclude / Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude’ (5.1.109–12).


45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

Cassandra’s argument at the end represents again the inevitability of the view that identity must change over time – even Hector’s vows must not be kept in the face of changing circumstances. Cassandra’s is the voice of prophecy, and Shakespeare gives her the chance to condemn Hector’s stance: ‘Thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive’ (5.3.90). To know the future in this play is to credit the instability of identity, to understand selfhood as something that (problematically) must change. In Freudian theory, two kinds of internalization figure in the process of dealing with loss and separation. ‘Introjection’ and ‘identification’ are terms of art, the latter of which represents successful mourning, which results from having identified with cherished and important aspects of the lost other. The former reflects an incomplete separation, because the other is taken in in its entirety, unassimilated, and not yet fully objectified. In both cases, underlying this theory of mourning is a modern conception of healthy selfhood as an ideally autonomous and independent state – in Margaret Mahler’s phrase, the achievement of ‘separated individuation’. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols 1–24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. 14, 237–58. See also Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. (New York: Basic Books, 1975); J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973). More recently, object-relations theorists, though more interested in the relationship between self and other, still basically work with a similar conception of the importance of the internalized other in stable selfhood, rather than focusing on the continuing interpersonal field. See especially Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); W. R. D. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1952). On the economic imagery in Shakespeare’s sonnets, see also Thomas M. Greene, ‘Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Sonnets’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (NY and London: Methuen, 1985) 230–44. This is also apparent in line 1: ‘Thy bosom is endearèd with all hearts’. As Stephen Booth points out, since ‘bosom’ in Elizabethan usage can mean the place where money is carried (i.e., ‘pocket’), ‘endearèd’ also has an economic ring. Fineman 30. Fineman 267. Another example of the effects of this focus can be found in Michael C. Schoenfeldt’s analysis of sonnet 94, in which he reads an endorsement of an independent self – a Stoic effort to counter the permeability of humoral physiology (Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999] 74–95). But the self in question in this sonnet is not the speaker’s but the beloved’s. Though Schoenfeldt’s argument is often interesting, it addresses neither the way the sonnet represents an interaction nor the difference it makes to posit impermeability of the other rather than


51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

the self. Schoenfeldt’s conflation of the two selves obscures another instance of difference and asymmetry between the speaker and his beloveds. See also sonnet 113, in which the speaker concludes that ‘my most true mind thus maketh m’eyne untrue’. Duncan-Jones, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The New Arden Shakespeare (London and New York, Routledge, 1997) 153. Booth also finds that ‘the unity of the two lying lovers, whose syntactic independence wanes as the poem progresses, reaches a compensating completion in the triumphantly mutual pronouns, our and we’ (481). Such an idea is explicit, for instance, in sonnet 151: ‘For thou betraying me, I doe betray / My nobler part to my grose bodies treason, / My soule doth tell my body that he may, / Triumph in loue, flesh staies no farther reason. ...’ Schalkwyk 58, citing Nona Feinberg, ‘Erasing the Dark Lady: Sonnet 138 in the Sequence’, Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 4 (1987): 97–108 (108). Schalkwyk also points out that the young man never speaks in the sonnets either (55).

4 ‘Womans Constancy’: The Poetics of Consummation 1. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 3. Ricoeur opposes this to ‘ipse-identity’, or the self constituted in relation to otherness. 2. On the growing emphasis on female chastity in the Renaissance, see Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) 137–64. 3. Some defenses of women see the double standard as merely based on ‘custom’. As the authors of The Womens Sharpe Revenge (1640) complain, highly developed conventions allow society to attend selectively to the problem in women and not in men: ‘a Woman’s reputation is so poor that ... if it be once blemished or tainted, the stains and spots are of such a tincture that the dye ... will stick to her all her lifetime and to her Children after her. But for the man, he takes or assumes to himself such a loose liberty ... that though he be (as they call it) a Common Town Bull ... yet (by custom) his disgrace will be quickly worn out, and say it was but a trick of youth’ (Mary Tattle-well and Joan Hit-him-home [pseuds], The Womens Sharpe Revenge, reprinted in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985] 308–9). See also Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959): 195–216. 4. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in generall: A Reprint Based on the 1604 Edition (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1971) 40–41. 5. Christopher Newstead, An Apology for Women: or, Womens Defence (London, 1620) 11–12. 6. Juan Luis Vives, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Rychard Hyrde (London, 1540) sig. f2v. Further references are cited within the text.

198 Notes to Chapter 4 7. On the relation of female sexuality to the structures of patriarchal society, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 8. Psychoanalytic theory often refers to this process as ‘externalization’, considering it a defensive or self-protective maneuver that results in a narrower sense of self or identity. 9. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 3. 10. Other texts that expose the projection of inconstancy onto women include Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. Wroth’s Urania, of course, reverses the trope, identifying inconstancy as a male rather than female quality. 11. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 293, my emphasis. 12. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 228. Further references will be cited within the text. Greenblatt is especially concerned to challenge the notion of empathy as ‘an act of imaginative generosity, a sympathetic appreciation of the situation of the other fellow’ (227) with insight about its relation to power and especially about the way Renaissance culture mystified ‘manipulation as disinterested empathy’ (231). He notes that the role of empathy in the spread of Western power has been ‘creative as well as destructive’ but ‘scarcely ever wholly disinterested or benign’ (228). 13. Quotations of Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1997). 14. Greenblatt paraphrases the line in ways that also show this essential distinction between the two ‘I’s: ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago, because the ‘I’ always loves itself and the creature I know as Iago hates the Moor he serves or, alternatively, because as the Moor I would be other than I am now, free of the tormenting appetite and revulsion that characterize the servant’s relation to his master and that constitute my identity as Iago. I would be radically the same / I would be radically different’ (235–6). My point is that all the choices here entail distinguishing rather than conflating the two ‘I’s. 15. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987) 129, emphasis added. Further references will be cited within the text. 16. Cf. Katharine Eisaman Maus’s discussion of the epistemological problem of empathic projection in Othello (Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance [University of Chicago Press, 1996] 104–27). Maus argues that Othello always posits interpersonal transparency, including his own to others, and thus both misses Iago’s treachery and is quickly convinced of Desdemona’s secret guilt. She suggests that his problem is that he doesn’t recognize how complicated the problem of knowing others really is. At one point, however, she conflates empathy and projection, suggesting that ‘Othello suffers from a kind of empathetic excess, fatally accepting a European outlook when it is least in his interests, inappropriately applying to Desdemona the conditions by which he defines himself’ (123). 17. Relevant here is Greenblatt’s argument that Othello’s real problem is not the prospect of others’ but of his own sexual relationship with his wife – his underlying sense that he himself has committed adultery with her. Christian doctrine, he explains, had long held that a man could commit adultery with his own wife if he was ‘too ardent a lover’ with her. That lack of control interferes


18.

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20. 21.

22.

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25. 26.

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with reason and with one’s relationship with God, and is also, as Juan Luis Vives notes, ‘always mixed with frustration’ (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 248, 305). Interestingly, this suggests that if ‘adultery’ can happen within marriage, it is not the marriage that is being ‘adulterated’ by the illicit sex (i.e., corrupted by admixture of something baser), but the person. Stanley Cavell’s notion of the skeptic as one who wants to deny the existence of the other is in line with what I am identifying here as a paranoid model of selfhood. See Disowning Knowledge 125–42. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 183, 186. Sir John Suckling, ‘Against Fruition [II]’, emphasis added. The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Quoted in Kerrigan and Braden, 186. The Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) 3.11.44. Further references will be cited within the text. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) 72. Nohrnberg cites Frye’s Fables of Identity (New York, 1963) 86f. Othello follows a somewhat similar pattern: Iago first tries to disgrace Othello through his own transgression, but Othello’s fearlessness about how he will be judged helps him to prevail with the Venetian senate (as he tells Iago, ‘My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly’ [1.2.30–31]). But when her unfaithfulness to him is forged, his identity (or ‘occupation’) dissolves. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ 130. At one point, Nohrnberg suggests a specifically psychoanalytic model of projection, arguing that in this episode Redcrosse ‘has crossed the threshold into an allegory of the self, a place in which imaginative projections – anxieties and opinions – are part of the external world, and objective only in the sense of being the ob-jectum of the perceiving ego’ (122). Isabel MacCaffrey finds it ‘useless to talk about ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds in such a context’, since ‘the forces within the psyche complement each other and owe their being to the same source’ (Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976] 156). Nohrnberg implies also the indebtedness of this imaginative process to external forces when he explains that the ‘imagination, as a maker of images or idols, does the devil’s work. ... And, conversely, the devil has exploited the susceptibility of the imagination’ (Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ 129). All of these are roles critics have assigned to Archimago, whose general signification is usually interpreted as the vice of Hypocrisy. While Spenser identifies such forces primarily as opposition to the true faith, they also seem in this episode to involve cultural stereotypes of women. Here I am not claiming that Spenser consciously offers the latter analysis, but suggesting that the poem does admit of such an interpretation nonetheless, and that it can be seen as an important part of its meaning. The most prominent Renaissance examples of this plot are in Shakespeare, who uses it centrally in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline. These subtle slippages in the allocation of blame are related to the way that the Palmer, moralizing the episode, identifies love as ‘a monster fell’, one of the


29.

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31. 32.

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uncontrollable ‘affections’ that he says have brought Phedon to his current horrible state (2.4.35). Within the legend of temperance, this is only one of the many episodes that have to do with the problem of control – here, the story is of a man who loses control of himself over the idea that he doesn’t control his fiancée’s sexual behavior. The tone of this story’s conclusion fits with the notoriously rigorous tone of Book 2 as a whole; and yet the attitude toward women it embodies also resonates with other such moments in the poem. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory, 107, 109. Thomas Roche already sees a similar process taking place in Britomart’s encounter at Castle Joyous, which ‘forces her to an awareness of love in others and of herself as a love object’ (The Kindly Flame [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964] 70). William Kerrigan, ‘A Woman’s a Two-Face: Splitting in Shakespeare and His Age’, Ben Jonson Journal 1 (1994): 143. The Freudian scenario, as Kerrigan explains it, locates the source of splitting in Oedipal fantasies about the mother (131). The problem with this model is not simply the anachronistic application of a Freudian mental landscape to the very different imaginative landscape of Renaissance culture. Its inadequacy lies also in the way it confines the issue to one mind. In action, splitting is always part of an interaction, and the motivations for it have to do with that interaction as well. Such images of women are not simply held, but are acted on and used, often – as I go on to argue here in Spenser’s case – for purposes of control. The Freudian model of splitting also fails to take into account the sources and deployment of such images in culture. Although at one point Kerrigan says that Troilus and Cressida is ‘about how misogyny, like a disease, first passed into the body of language’ (137), he apparently doesn’t see the cultural process Shakespeare depicts as a source of splitting, but only as one way in which that universal tendency has been recounted. But Shakespeare’s play, as I argue in detail below, is about how the linguistic process is a cause, and not just an effect, of splitting and makes it possible by providing its terms and images. Kerrigan’s account of splitting doesn’t really do for Spenser either, since he is ultimately interested in representing the good female as a sexual object, though of an especially passive kind. Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Vnconstant Women (London, 1615) 30, 31. Further references are cited within the text. It also seems to have been common practice (as in Hic Mulier and Haec Vir) to write on both sides of the debate about women, with or without acknowledging the fact. But whether defending or attacking women, the categories of good and bad remain rigidly distinct. Anonymous, Hic Mulier, or the Mannish Woman, reprinted in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985) 265, 266. Cf. Sheila Cavanagh (‘Nightmares of Desire’) on the role of gender in Spenser’s use of ‘nightmare’ scenes. Cavanagh argues that there is ‘a powerful metaphoric code which encompasses many of the malevolent female characters in the epic’ (314–5), and that Spenser’s ‘insistence upon marking the sex and gender of these creatures allows a thread of misogyny to weave through denunciations of their behavior’, making such slurs ‘difficult to distinguish ... from those against women in general’ (335).

Notes to Chapter 4 201 35. Philippa Berry (Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. (London and NY: Routledge, 1989) argues that the ideal of chastity invoked by Elizabeth’s cult was actually something Spenser found problematic and sought to revise in The Faerie Queene. She cites an increasing anxiety in this period about the inability of Neoplatonic and Petrarchan love discourses used by Ralegh and other courtiers to ‘continue to define the female object of desire as a disposable mirror and signifier’ (138). What she gets at is the way that Elizabeth managed to transform her state of chastity from a mode of objectification through which her courtiers had hoped to control her, to a mode of (uncontrollable) subjective agency. Berry suggests that as a result Spenser deliberately represents two kinds of chastity, one useful for the courtier and one threatening – the former represented in Britomart and the latter in Belphoebe (who represents Elizabeth). Belphoebe’s ‘androgynous’ chastity is self-sufficient and thus actually threatens male identity, being ‘a sign which historical man cannot hope to decipher correctly’ (158). Spenser represents this in the ‘effect that the contradictory figure of Belphoebe has upon Arthur’s squire Timias’, which is ‘to jeopardize rather than assist his aspiration to knighthood, and eventually to disorder his reason’ (160). She suggests that ‘Belphoebe was to be book III’s chief protagonist’, but instead ‘Spenser used the quasi-historical heroine Britomart to articulate a definition of chastity ... more suited to the historical needs of the patriarchy than the version privileged by Elizabeth’s cult’ (158). Berry’s argument coincides with what I am interpreting in Spenser’s text as an emphasis on the form of chastity (i.e. chaste love) in which the female is both subjected to the male and immobilized as an ideal object. I would emphasize, though, that Spenser can still find even Belphoebe’s chastity useful for overcoming the threat of mutability that inheres in interaction with a subjective female, since he uses it to isolate her as mystical and exalted. 36. Cited in Hic Mulier 274–5. It may seem ironic for this pamphlet to cite a text that features a cross-dressed heroine. And yet it is fair to say that nothing in Spenser’s Britomart really contradicts the firm message of this passage. 37. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990) 216. 38. This passage in particular puts pressure on Krier’s claim that ‘shamefastness in Spenser’s poem ... is often a protective social habit that veils the private enclosed territory and secrecy of interiority’, which Krier thinks Spenser is interested in protecting (136). But as this passage shows, Spenser was not therefore incapable of applying the idea with its usual intent of severe control over women’s actions and options. 39. Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, sig.Gv. 40. Further, that required doubleness can itself be turned against women, incorporated into the general accusation of duplicity and inconstancy against which the principle of male stability can, by contrast, be asserted (a move that, as I will argue below, Shakespeare scrutinizes in Troilus and Cressida). 41. Written in 1405, Christine’s Livre de la Cité des Dames was circulated in manuscript in French. Brian Ansley’s 1521 English translation, The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, was printed in London.

202 Notes to Chapter 4 42. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism 105. Further references are cited in the text. 43. Christine de Pisan, The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes sig. Dd1v. 44. Cyte of Ladyes sigs.Bb1v, Dd3r–v. 45. Cyte of Ladyes sigs.Bb1v–Bb2v. 46. Ansley translates the word ‘Droiture’ as ‘Ryghtwysnesse’; ‘Rectitude’ is the choice in the modern English translation by Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982). 47. Cyte of Ladyes sig.Z3. 48. For instance, in 1559 John Aylmer ‘gave the hitherto decisive pronouncements of Paul a historical context and so denied their application to general situations’ ( Jordan 132). Jordan also recognizes that such defenses may be ‘feminist’ only up to a point and only in certain senses, as when she notes that in the mid-sixteenth-century political controversy in England over women’s rule, ‘gynecocracy is more easily justified by appeals to providence and divine right than by arguments for an equality of virtue’ (131). 49. Quoted in Jordan 123, from Agrippa, Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde, trans. Thomas Clapham (London, 1542) sig.D8v. 50. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1973) 354, 352. Further references are cited within the text. 51. See Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols 1–24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) v14, 136. 52. Freud discusses ‘projected jealousy’ in ‘Some Neurotic Symptoms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality’ (1922), Standard Edition,v13, 223–5. There is a Renaissance example of this idea in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: Ferdinand’s preoccupation with his sister’s sexual behavior does turn out to spring from his own apparent incestuous interest in her. But he still uses cultural stereotypes to constrain her behavior. 53. Thus, in this view, Iago does not ‘represent’ some part of Othello’s psyche, but realistically presents him with the stereotypes that he assigns to Desdemona. 54. Translated and quoted in Jordan, 189, from Claude de Taillemont’s Discours des champs faez à l’honneur et exaltation de l’amour et des dames (Lyon, 1551) sig. e5v. 55. Prodicogine Filarete, Difesa delle donne (Padua, 1588) sig. Bv-A4v, translated and quoted in Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (151). 56. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, new edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) 24. Stanley Fish makes a similar accusation about Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. Discussing the elegy ‘On His Mistress’, for instance, Fish claims that ‘once again a Donne poem presents a speaker who refuses to recognize himself in the indictment he makes of others.’ Fish does not credit Donne with intending or even knowing about the ‘transparency’ of his speaker’s statements: ‘The ploy is obvious: it will not be he, but the French and Italians ... who will force her; it is they who are changeable. ... But of course the ploy will not work; the activities he projects onto them are too transparently his own’ (‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in Soliciting Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990] 239, 233–4).

Notes to Chapter 4 203 57. Carey 16. 58. Quotations of Donne’s poetry are from John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1986). 59. Ronald J. Corthell, ‘Donne’s “Disparitie”: Inversion, Gender, and the Subject of Love in some Songs and Sonnets’, Exemplaria 1.1 (March 1989): 17–42; 22, 25. Corthell’s essay offers an illuminating discussion of how Donne’s paradoxical style produces an awareness of the ‘work’ of ideology in ‘The Indifferent’, ‘Confined Love’, and ‘Air and Angels’. 60. For a discussion of the possibility that the speaker is female, see Ilona Bell, ‘The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets’, SEL 23 (1983): 113–29. 61. OED, sense 7. 62. In this respect, what Donne portrays does accord with the idea of projection for certain psychoanalytic theorists who reject the underlying drive theory of Freud. For Harry Stack Sullivan, for instance, projection is an aspect of ‘all interpersonal relations’: ‘We attempt to foresee action; we foresee it as the activity of embodied others; and that in itself is projection’ (Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry [New York: W. W. Norton, 1953] 359). From this theoretical perspective, our understanding of others is always colored by elements that we contribute from our own conceptual framework, which in turn has been built up over time through interpersonal experience. Sullivan’s argument that ‘one need not fall back on drives to account for distortions of interpersonal reality’ was part of his effort to propose an interpersonal theory in place of the underlying drive theory that had dominated most psychoanalytic accounts of the person, and this interpersonal view has become increasingly mainstream in psychoanalytic thinking in the last half century. In Sullivan’s view, then, projection is part of an epistemological process, and may or may not entail dissociation or disavowal of aspects of oneself ( Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983] 406). And ultimately in this theory, self-knowledge is also a product of interaction: ‘That which is most deeply personal is often arrived at only through interaction. It was not there and revealed through mirroring; it was created through dialogue’ (Stephen A. Mitchell, ‘Contemporary Perspectives on Self: Toward an Integration’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives 1:2 [1991]: 121–48). This theory entails a different conception of the nature of personality than that of Freudian theory, one in which personality is seen as a ‘relatively enduring’ pattern of relating to others, produced through experience with others and subject to ongoing modification by such experience as well (Sullivan, 111). 63. ‘A Valediction: Of My Name in the Window’, ll. 11, 12; ‘His parting from her’, 70. 64. See the discussion of Neoplatonic visual epistemology in Chapter 3. 65. In ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’, a poem in many ways the opposite of this one, the image of the falling tear (now his tear, bearing her image) that figures their interpenetration again presents the threat of destruction, this time for both of them: ‘Fruits of much grief they [my tears] are, emblems of more, / When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, / So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore’ (ll. 7–9). But here it is their actual separation rather than their presence together at parting that figures their deaths.

204 Notes to Chapter 4 66. Even in a poem such as ‘The good morrow’, which presents an idealized version of lovers immersed in each other, there is an undercurrent of tension. ‘The good morrow’ is a sort of ‘Woman’s Constancy’ on the morning after, with the fears dispelled; yet behind the imagery of the lovers’ selfsufficient world there still lurks the idea of inconstancy – ‘And now good morrow to our waking souls, / Which watch not one another out of fear; / For love, all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room, an every where.’ The assertion of this self-sufficiency involves explicitly rejecting a number of newly available other possible worlds: ‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, / Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown, / Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.’ But even in this ‘one world’ assertion, the speaker inserts a complexity within each of the lovers – each is both subject and object, for a total of four worlds. 67. See, for instance, William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, ‘Petrarch Refracted: The Evolution of the English Love Lyric’, in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 157–89. 68. On the problem of genre and patriarchy, see, e.g., Susan Snyder, ‘All’s Well that Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object’, English Literary Renaissance 18:1 (Winter 1988): 66–77; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre, chapter 4; as well as Maus’s introduction to All’s Well that Ends Well in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (NY and London: W. W. Norton, 1997) 2002–27. 69. In a sense, Bertram’s earlier rejection of Helena was also a result of ‘knowing’ her. His stated objection to her social class is belied by his eagerness for Diana, who ranks no higher. What Shakespeare’s bed-tricks give the Petrarchan lover is the woman he would have gotten anyway had he slept with the one he wanted, for once he had slept with her, he would no longer want her. In other words, once he sleeps with her, Diana is Helena for him anyway: the virgin goddess is now the woman he knows. The same pattern applies to Angelo – once he thinks he has had Isabella, he treats her just as he had treated Marianna, reneging on his promise to her. 70. René Girard, ‘The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (New York and London: Methuen, 1985). 71. Constance Jordan also discusses the way that this issue of potential male impotence seems to inform antifeminist arguments about women’s behavior as well, in which female sexuality is anxiously perceived as a kind of power and ‘comes to represent the process by which women deplete the various kinds of reserves men have’ (Renaissance Feminism 87). 72. Carol Cook, ‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’, Theatre Journal 38.1 (March 1986): 34–52, 46. 73. Critics have sometimes recognized a process of projection in Troilus personally, particularly later in the play. For instance, in regard to his later repeated injunctions to Cressida to ‘be true’, Gayle Greene notes briefly that ‘it may be Troilus’s awareness of his own inauthenticity that accounts for his obsession with hers’ (‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: “A Kind of Self”’ in Lenz, Carolyn Ruth Swift, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (eds), The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983] 143). Indeed, at that point in the play (4.4), Cressida herself


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75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

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seems dimly aware of such a process behind Troilus’s fears of her unfaithfulness, which she reacts to as telling: ‘I true! How now! What wicked deem is this?’ (4.4.58). Kenneth Muir glosses this as an ‘indignant protest’ from Cressida, but it also seems to express alarm and possibly her own suspicion of what Troilus’s doubt means, which she later voices: ‘O heavens! You love me not!’ (81). For a related discussion of the fictional quality of this scene from the standpoint of Shakespeare’s use of multiple versions of the Troy legend, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 91–110. On a more subliminal level, a similarly projective process is also suggested by the apparent pun that, as Kenneth Muir points out, frames this episode. Both at the moment Cressida is escorted off to the Greeks, and immediately following Ulysses’s disparagement of her, a trumpet sound is accompanied by a shout: first Paris’s ‘Hark! Hector’s trumpet’ (4.4.137), and then a unison ‘The Trojan’s trumpet’ (4.5.64). The ‘(s)trumpet’ sound that Muir notes may or may not be intended as an allusion to Cressida is perhaps not just a pun offering a negative assessment of her, but a more general suggestion about the way the pronouncements of these scenes make Cressida into a ‘strumpet’. Greene 139. Further references to this essay will be cited within the text. For an overview of the history of interpretations of Cressida (both critical and in performance) see Claire M. Tylee, ‘The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek Camp Scene’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 63–76. Even Girard, although he reads the play as blaming Troilus, still doesn’t manage to read Cressida’s perspective. His analysis of the scene with Diomedes, for instance, assumes Troilus’s perspective of her situation, interpreting the inducement of jealousy in Troilus as the motive behind her actions with Diomedes (‘The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida’, 196–7). But Cressida doesn’t know Troilus is watching her. From her perspective, Diomedes is her only audience. Claire Tylee (‘The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader’) offers an interesting account of the way that some actresses playing Cressida have found themselves at odds with the usual interpretations of her as some form of coquette, complicit in the kind of ‘game’ that love amounts to for Pandarus and Ulysses, and have sensed that her character has much more substance and moral weight. Gayle Greene, ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida’ 135. See also Janet Adelman, who offers another version of this argument, in which she sees the ‘radical inconsistency’ of Cressida’s characterization as stemming from the fact that Shakespeare is dramatizing not her but Troilus’s ‘fantasy’ of her (‘“This Is and Is Not Cressid”: The Characterization of Cressida’ in The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985] 120). Cressida can be seen more positively than scholars (even those who defend her behavior as unwilled) have allowed, but it requires taking more than the dominant male perspective into account. In this I am mindful of Pamela Allen Brown’s argument that Shakespeare’s plays, like other popular texts,

206 Notes to Epilogue

81. 82.

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86.

87.

often appeal directly to women’s perspectives (see Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003] 85–6). I agree with Brown that it is crucial for feminist scholarship to resist what is still generally ‘a monolithic, one-sex model of drama and social power’ (88), to look for examples of ‘the counterhegemonic articulation that is sometimes audible in popular texts’ (90). She suggests, for instance, that ‘stage representations of the violently jealous husband, such as Leontes or Othello, seem tailor-made to engage women’s interest and contempt’ (95). Troilus is surely a similar case, and I would suggest that Cressida, when played sympathetically, can be enormously interesting to a female audience. For a detailed analysis of Cressida’s Act 1 soliloquy, see Chapter 1. Many Renaissance texts recognize and explore this problem of women’s necessary reticence. A powerful example is Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, both in the betrothal scene, where the Duchess has to maneuver Antonio into proposing, and after her death, when she is reduced to the role of Echo. It is significant that this text too focuses on her brothers’ projections about her sexual behavior, as noted above. The typically dense and difficult logic of Cressida’s lines is noted by most editors. Muir’s suggestion to take ‘or else’ to mean ‘in other words’ seems most helpful. As James O’Rourke has pointed out, Diomedes ‘holds off’ in this scene too – threatening to leave in ways that force Cressida to try to hold him by giving him what he wants. But Thersites makes no judgment of Diomedes (‘“Rule in Unity” and Otherwise: Love and Sex in Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43:2 [summer 1992]: 139–58, 154). O’Rourke claims that since Cressida does not blame Troilus, neither should we (140). But Cressida’s self-blame belongs to her habit of accommodation – a self-chastising that, though the comparison may seem odd, is not unlike the psychological position of female chastity encountered above in Britomart. Janet Adelman, ‘“This is and is not Cressid”: The Characterization of Cressida’, in The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 138. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism 20.

Epilogue: Subjects, Objects, and Contemporary Theory 1. Gilligan and Chodorow among others have argued that women’s selfexperience tends to be more ‘relational’ than the dominant twentiethcentury theories of selfhood could comprehend. Their work coincides with developing trends in anthropology, infant-development research, and more mainstream psychoanalytic theory that have also moved increasingly toward this kind of ‘relational’ understanding of self. See, for instance, Nancy J. Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge,

Notes to Epilogue 207

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995). Chodorow 103. Further references are cited in the text. ‘The Ecstasy’ l. 36. See the discussion of this poem in the Introduction. These are also possible stances in Renaissance representations, as we saw, for example, in texts of Petrarch (in Chapter 3) and of Spenser (in Chapter 4) Fonagy, Peter, György Gergely, Eliot L. Jurist, and Mary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self (New York: Other Press, 2002) 4. In this respect the Fonagy study corresponds quite well with my arguments about Renaissance conceptions of interpersonal mirroring in Chapter 3. See especially their discussion of ‘intersubjectivist’ arguments about the development of selfhood, which presuppose the infant’s innate subjective mental states from the beginning of life (203–52). In contrast, they argue that ‘subjectivity in the infant cannot be assumed but, rather, must be considered as acquired in the process of interaction’ (218). Antonio Damasio’s work is another example of recent research that places itself in opposition to Descartes. See his Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Macmillan, 1994). A final note on usage: What I am calling ‘objectification’ in the larger sense might also be termed representation – i.e., one might speak of the represented self rather than the objectified self, though I find it a more cumbersome and less flexible term. The interpersonal psychoanalytic theorist Harry Stack Sullivan spoke of ‘personifications’, which would also be a good choice except that it is already a literary term meaning something quite different. In the absence of a better term, I continue to find ‘objectification’ the best choice for the broad category of interpersonally perceived selfhood. Echoes of this Renaissance thinking can be heard today in some of the more radically relational theories that stress the ongoing formation of self-experience in the encounter with the other. This is the thrust of Carol Gilligan’s recent book, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (New York: Random House, 2002), which looks frequently to Shakespeare and other premodern texts for corroboration of what she calls a ‘new map’ of relationships. However, this recent work too focuses primarily on female subjectivity.

Index Entries in inverted commas refer to discussions of the word’s use or history. abjection, 114–15, 118, 190n75 Adelman, Janet, 158, 205n79 Aers, David, 189n57 Agacinski, Sylviane, 12, 170n22 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 16, 34, 181n93 Althusser, Louis, 12–13, 20, 171n38 Anderson, Judith, 183n5 autonomy, 3, 7, 12, 37–8, 45–6, 51, 57–8, 60, 69–70, 75–83, 87–8, 97, 99–100, 105, 109, 118, 121–2, 125–6, 166–7, 177n43, 190n77, 196n45 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3–4, 15, 59, 60, 80–1, 126, 171n38, 184n16, 189n59 Barber, C. L., 192n8 Barker, Francis, 14, 16, 171n35 Barnfield, Richard, 26–7 Beaumont, Sir John, 26 Bell, Ilona, 183n3, 203n60 Belsey, Catherine, 13–14, 171n36 Benjamin, Jessica, 162 Berry, Philippa, 136, 201n35 Booth, Stephen, 35, 100, 119 Braden, Gordon, 128, 171n36, 193n18 Brathwait, Richard, 39 Breitenberg, Mark, 185n21 Bright, Timothy, 185n19, 187n33 Brown, Pamela Allen, 205n80 Browne, Thomas, 58 Buber, Martin, 168n5 Burckhardt, Jacob, 7, 12 Burns, Edward, 44, 181n94 Burton, Robert, 58, 61, 184n12 Carey, John, 48, 57, 59, 74, 87, 142–3, 189n61 Castiglione, Baldasarre, 97–8, 111, 122, 125, 193n21

Cavanagh, Sheila, 200n34 Cavell, Stanley, 127, 187n37, 199n18 Cawdrey, Robert, 39 ‘character’ modern vs. pre-modern senses of, 3, 18, 42–5, 55 and reification, 43, 45 relational senses of, 43–4 theatrical sense of, 181n95 characterization and Shakespeare’s Cressida, 51–2, 156–9, 205n78, 205n79 Charnes, Linda, 182n106, 182n108 chastity, 124, 129, 131–4, 136–8, 197n2, 201n35 see also constancy, sexual Chodorow, Nancy, 162–3, 164, 206n1 Cockeram, Henry, 39 Congreve, William, 179n64 constancy and chivalry, 54, 153 compared to ‘identity’, 40–1, 123 and cultural projection, 139–40, 152–61 interpersonal conception of, 145 and selfhood, 123–8, 146–7, 150–1, 160–1 sexual, 123–61 and truth, 158–9 see also chastity consummation, 120, 127–9, 150–2 and subjective authority, 128–9 Cook, Carol, 52, 158, 183n109 Corthell, Ronald J, 144, 189n53, 203n59 Cotgrave, Randle, 39, 185n22 Cowley, Abraham, 40 Crane, Mary Thomas, 6, 15, 65–6, 168n2, 187n33, 187n34 Danson, Lawrence, 69, 73, 188n46 Davies, John, Sir, 174n16, 193n13

208

Index 209 de Grazia, Margreta, 6, 92 Derrida, Jacques, 12 Descartes, René, 58, 96, 104, 165–6, 207n8 detumescence and Petrarchan lyric, 128 and projection, 128, 152–3 developmental theory, 10, 162–5, 195n38 dialogized consciousness, 56, 68, 74, 80–1, 91, 92, 107–8, 126, 147, 192n4 Donne, John ‘Air and Angels’, 86 and autonomy, 7, 57–8, 75–83, 87–8 ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’, 203n65 ‘Batter my heart’, 59–60, 84–6 ‘Change’, 75, 145–7 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’, 7, 81–4, 87, 189n63 ‘egotism’ of, 57, 83–5 Essays in Divinity, 83–4 The First Anniversary, 191n82 and gender, 185n21, 189n63 ‘Good Friday’, 86 and humoralism, 59, 76–88, 189n56 letter to Sir Henry Goodyer, 4 love poetry of, 60, 77, 142–51, 164, 188n52 materialism of, 57, 87, 191n84 ‘Oh, let me not serve so’, 147–8 ‘Oh to vex me’, 78–80 physical imagery in, 74–88 and projection, 125, 142–8, 150 ‘Sappho to Philaenis’, 76 Satire I, 76, 188n53 Sermons, 57, 81, 83, 84, 87, 190n64, 190n69, 190n78, 191n84 ‘The Ecstasy’, 4–5, 75, 86, 147, 164 ‘The Good Morrow’, 204n66 ‘The Legacy’, 46–8, 75 Verse letter to Sir Henry Wotton, 56, 76–7 ‘Witchcraft by a Picture’, 148–9 ‘Womans Constancy’, 124, 144–5, 147, 149–50 Dryden, John, 26

Dubrow, Heather, 194n28 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 118 Eagleton, Terry, 172n50 Elizabeth I, 35 Elyot, Thomas, 35 empathy, 10, 16, 126–8, 165, 198n12 see also identification epistemology, visual, 92–6, 99 faculty psychology, 3, 19, 75, 94–8 Feinberg, Nona, 197n55 Ficino, Marsilio, 96, 184n13 Fineman, Joel, 100, 114, 115, 116, 192n9 Fish, Stanley, 78–9, 202n56 Fonagy, Peter, 10, 164–6, 207n7 Ford, John, 198n10 Foucault, Michel, 12 Freccero, John, 193n18 Freud, Sigmund, see psychoanalytic theory, Freudian Frontain, Raymond-Jean, 191n80 Galenism (see humoralism) Gallese, Vittorio, 10 gender and humoralism, 185n21 and mirroring, 106–7 and Neoplatonism, 98, 110, 193n22 and objectification, 9, 27, 50–2, 91, 97, 133–4, 138, 201n35, 201n40 and projection, 124–5, 130, 139–41, 144–5, 147–8, 152–8, 198n10 Gilligan, Carol, 162, 166, 206n1, 207n11 Girard, Rene, 152–3 Grabes, Herbert, 102, 194n30 Greenberg, Jay, 196n45, 203n62 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2–3, 126, 168n6, 176n32, 198n12, 198n14, 198n17 Greene, Gayle, 51–2, 155, 182n104, 204n73 Greene, Robert, 103 Greene, Thomas, 70, 71, 178n43, 196n46 Hammond, William, 39 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 184n10

210 Index Haynes, Jonathan, 71, 185n23, 189n53 ‘heart’ as locus of sense impressions, 31, 99, 132–3 in exchange trope, 36, 39, 47, 100 Hedley, Jane, 194n29 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, 35–6, 178n53 Hic Mulier, 135–6, 137, 200n32 Hillman, David, 67, 186n31, 187n37 Hirsch, David A Hedrich, 87 historicity of language, 169n14, 172n2 history, model of, 6–7, 169n16, 192n9 Hobbes, Thomas, 176n32 Hodgson, Elizabeth, 85 Hooker, Deborah, 182n104 Hulse, Clark, 98 ‘humor’ in popular discourse, 56, 62–4, 70 shift in meaning of, 18, 40–2 humoral body interpersonal facets of, 60–74 as model for selfhood, 3, 18, 41, 57–62, 76–9 permeability of, 57–8 as social object, 57, 59, 61–2, 63–5, 71 humoral consciousness, 81–3 humoralism, 41, 56–88 assimilation in, 58–9, 88 compared to Paracelsian medicine, 76–7, 189n56 compared to germ theory, 58 and essentialism, 61–2 and gender, 185n21 mind-body integration in, 27, 41, 58–9, 61, 64, 185n19 and performative selfhood, 18–9, 63–71, 78–9, 85–6, 127, 186n28 and subjectivity, 60–1 humors character, 60, 64, 70–3 identification empathic, 16, 127, 160, 188n52 of poetic subject and object, 100–1, 113–14, 194n29, 195n38

identity interpersonal, 1–2, 4–6, 36–9, 50–3, 68–9, 79, 92–4, 102–5, 121–2, 123, 150, 195n44 Renaissance terms for, 40–2, 45 social construction of, 2, 37–8, 52–4, 92–4, 107–10 ‘identity’ interpersonal vs. individual senses of, 18, 39–40, 179n68 in Locke, 29, 40, 175n31, 179n72 objectified sense of, 40–2 in religious discourse, 40 as self-sameness, 123 ‘individual’ history of, 38–9, 45–6, 179n64 interpersonal senses of, 38, 179n61, 179n64, 191n81 interiority abstract, 31, 41, 45 and proprietary selfhood, 45–6 and reification, 18, 30, 43 see also inwardness internalization, of objects, 97, 101, 111–13, 117, 118, 125, 177n40, 196n45 intersubjectivity, 11, 36, 164, 167, 207n7 inwardness and humoralism, 27, 41, 62, 186n31 as epistemological problem, 34 interpersonally constituted, 31 reified, 45 social deployment of, 16–17, 63, 65 visibility of, 27, 30–2, 62 James, Heather, 155, 182n106, 205n74 Johnson, Samuel, 29, 40, 179n64, 180n76 Jonson, Ben and autonomy, 69–70, 177n43 Cataline, 27 Discoveries, 56, 66, 69–70, 80 ‘Elegy on my muse’, 43–4, 181n90 ‘Epigram 98’, 69–70, 177n43 Every Man Out of his Humour, 70–4 ‘To Penshurst’, 42 Volpone, 188n49

Index 211 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 193n22 Jordan, Constance, 139, 140, 160, 202n48, 204n71 Kelly-Gadol, Joan, 197n2 Kerrigan, William, 128, 134, 171n36, 193n18, 200n30 Krier, Theresa, 137–8, 201n38 Lacan, Jacques, 109, 195n38 language, history of, 169n13, 169n14, 174n13 la Primaudaye, Pierre de, 95, 193n13 Lemaire, Anika, 195n38 Lemnius, Levinus, 58, 61, 62, 184n9 Locke, John, 21, 25, 28–30, 40, 45–6, 96, 175n31, 176n32, 177n33, 177n34, 179n72, 195n40 lyric voice, dialogized, 89–92, 117–21, 192n4 MacCaffrey, Isabel, 133–4, 199n24 Maclean, Ian, 185n21 MacPherson, C. B., 176n32 Magnusson, Lynne, 15, 91, 114–15, 120, 192n5 Mahler, Margaret, 196n45 Markham, Gervase, 30 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II, 37 Marshall, Cynthia, 169n12 Masten, Jeffrey, 168n2, 172n43, 173n2, 178n49, 179n61 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 31, 34, 64, 171n34, 175n25, 177n38, 198n16, 204n68 Melchiori, Georgio, 192n10 Middleton, Thomas, 26, 198n10 Milton, John, 179n61 Mintz, Susannah B, 188n52 ‘mirror’ figures active, 102–5, 194n30 didactic, 103, 105–8 magical, 103 prospective, 105 satirical, 195n33 mirroring interpersonal, 92–4, 100, 105, 106–9, 194n26, 207n6

pre-modern conceptions of, 86, 89, 102–5 see also ‘mirror’ figures mirror neurons, 9 ‘mirror’ texts, 102–3 Mitchell, Stephen, 196n45, 203n62 Montaigne, Michel de, 37 Muir, Kenneth, 205n73, 205n75 mutability, and selfhood, 19, 52, 62, 72, 74–9, 123, 129 135, 150–1, 153, 159–61 see also constancy narcissism, 101, 194n29 Neoplatonism and autonomous selfhood, 94–7, 111, 122, 125, 177n40, 190n77 and Donne, 147, 149 dualism of, 95–7 and gender, 98, 110, 193n22 and internalization, 98, 101, 111, 177n40 and Petrarchan lyric, 97–9 and Shakespeare, 19, 99–102, 110–11, 121, 197n51 and Sidney, 98 and Spenser, 133, 135, 177n40 and transcendence of materiality, 89, 95, 121, 194n22 and vision, 94–7, 135 see also epistemology, visual Newman, Karen, 168n6 Newstead, Christopher, 124 Nohrnberg, James, 129, 130, 199n23, 199n24 objectification defined, 8, 207n9 in feminist theory, 8, 51, 91, 140, 163, 166–7 and gender, 8–9, 27, 91, 97, 133–4, 138, 140, 163, 201n35, 201n40 and humoralism, 57, 61–3, 79–80 interpersonal, 8–9, 17–18, 85, 87, 91, 104, 117–18, 121, 163–7 in Locke, 177n33 priority of, 8, 23, 162, 165 in psychoanalytic theory, 9–10, 163–5, 170n23, 207n9

212 Index objectification (Continued) and subjective other, 15–16, 121, 163, 167 see also ‘self’, as object objectified self see objectification; ‘self’, as object object-relations theory, 196n45 O’Rourke, James, 206n84, 206n85 other-self trope, 5–6, 21–2, 34–8, 46–8, 49, 113–14, 178n51 see also ‘self’, transferred Overburian Characters, The, 44, 180n83, 181n91, 181n92 Overton, Richard, 45–6 Paracelsus; Paracelsian medicine, 76–7, 184n10, 189n54, 189n56 Paster, Gail Kern, 57–8, 61, 63, 65, 168n7, 185n21 Pateman, Carole, 198n7 Pater, Walter, 75 Patterson, Annabel, 183n6 ‘person’, 23–4, 27–31, 176n32 abstract senses of, 28–30 in Hobbes, 176n32 in Locke, 28–30, 175n31 in modern usage, 28 in pre-modern usage, 11, 23–4, 27–8, 36 physical senses of, 27–8 social senses of, 23, 28 theatrical senses of, 176n32 theological senses of, 40, 175n26 perspectives, multiplicity of, 3–4, 8–9, 37, 50–1, 79, 89–122, 126, 139–40, 143, 145–6, 151, 156 Petrarch, Francesco, Petrachan tradition, 89, 91, 101, 114, 192n20 and autonomy, 97, 150–1 and consummation, 128 and subjectivity, 97, 128 frustration of desire in, 97, 98, 102, 114, 151–2 subject-object dichotomy in, 97, 135, 166 Pisan, Christine de, 19, 125, 139–140, 143, 162

and objectification, 140 and projection, 139 Plato, 96–7, 193n12 projection as anticipation, 126, 143, 146–7, 159–61 cultural, 130, 152–5, 205n75 as defensive strategy, 124–5, 131, 140–1, 142, 153–4, 159 and female constancy, 124–5, 130–2, 139–41, 144–5, 147–8, 152–8, 198n10 in Freudian theory, 141–2 ideological interpretations of, 139–41 and selfhood, 125, 142–8 psychoanalytic theory Freudian, 141, 196n45, 200n30, 202n52 interpersonal, 9, 162, 167, 170n23, 170n24, 203n62, 207n9 Lacanian, 195n38 object-relations, 196n45 Rambuss, Richard, 84, 183n3, 190n75 reflection materiality of, 109 and self-knowledge, 93–6, 102–5 see also mirroring Reid, Robert L, 185n26 reification, 30, 43, 46 and proprietary selfhood, 45–7 Ricoeur, Paul, 123, 197n1 Roach, Joseph, 64, 186n28, 188n41 Roche, Thomas, 200n29 Robinson, Forrest, 95–6 Rowe, Katherine, 180n78, 186n30 Scarry, Elaine, 57, 80 Schalkwyk, David, 15, 90, 120, 169n15, 187n32, 192n5, 197n55 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 27, 60, 189n56, 196n50 ‘self’ abstract, 30, 122 contextualized, 26, 40, 52–3 essential, 25, 40

Index 213 ‘self’ (Continued) inward, 27, 31–4 in Locke, 28–30 in modern usage, 11, 12, 21, 23, 25, 31, 33 as object: 8, 22, 23–8, 30, 31, 32, 36–7, 40, 49–54 and OED, 174n13 physical, 26–8, 32 proprietary, 34, 37–8, 45–6 as subject, 8, 25, 28–9, 32 substantive senses of, 21–38, 45–9, 173n3, 173n4, 173n7 transferred, 5–6, 21–2, 34–8, 46–8, 49, 113–14, 178n51 see also objectification, other-self trope, selfhood, subjectivity self-consciousness compared to objectification, 29–30, 104–5 self-fashioning, 2–3, 97–8 selfhood adulterate, 128, 151–61, 199n17 contingent, 3, 16, 18, 25, 41, 47, 53, 61–2, 68–9, 80, 88, 110, 125–6, 142, 144, 150, 159, 161 dependent, 101, 111, 113, 118, 160 ethics of, 7, 23, 93, 111–22, 162–4, 166 in feminist theory, 51–2, 162–4 interpersonal: defined, 11 and materiality, 90–1, 119 paranoid, 127, 187n37 performative, 17–19, 56, 63–4, 69, 70–1, 76, 78–9, 85, 86, 186n27 social, 73–4 two-person model of, 9, 80, 104, 163, 167 self-knowledge, see under reflection Shakespeare, William All’s Well that Ends Well, 21, 151–2, 204n69 Antony and Cleopatra, 152, 173n4 As You Like It, 151 and autonomy, 37–8, 51, 99–100, 109, 118, 121–2, 182n104 Comedy of Errors, 35, 36 and constancy, 152–61

Hamlet, 1, 16–18, 30, 57, 65–9, 106–7, 151–2 Henry IV Part One, 8, 23–4, 27, 49–50, 64, 174n12 Henry IV Part Two, 23–4 Henry V, 62–4, 65 and humoralism, 64–9 Julius Caesar, 108–9 King Lear, 152 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 194n26 and mirroring, 105–110 Measure for Measure, 151–2, 190n72, 204n69 Merry Wives of Windsor, 62–3 Much Ado About Nothing, 42 and Neoplatonism, 19, 99–102, 110–11, 121, 197n51 Othello, 126–8, 141, 152, 198n14, 198n16, 199n22, 202n53 and projection, 125, 152–5, 204n73, 205n75 Richard II, 175n27 Sonnets, 9, 91–2, 99–102, 111–22, 134, 150–1, 160, 163, 196n47, 196n50, 197n51, 197n54 Troilus and Cressida, 1–2, 37–8, 49–55, 92–4, 104, 107–10, 123, 151–2, 195–6n44, 204n73, The Phoenix and Turtle, 48–9, 182n101 The Winter’s Tale, 105 Twelfth Night, 43, 71, 151 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 5, 37, 173n7 Venus and Adonis, 194n26 Shannon, Laurie, 35, 37, 179n59 Shuger, Debora Kuller, 85–6, 102, 103, 104, 174n16, 176n32, 190n77, 190n78, 195n40, Sidney, Philip, Sir Arcadia, 36, 41 Astrophil and Stella, 31–2, 34, 98–9 Defense of Poesie, 31 and Neoplatonism, 98–9 Sinfield, Alan, 51 Siraisi, Nancy, 58, 184n9 Smith, Bruce, 191n1 Snyder, Susan, 204n68

214 Index ‘soul’, 24, 32, 96, 174n10 Spenser, Edmund Amoretti, 26, 32–3 The Faerie Queene, 27, 28, 33–4, 43, 63, 125, 128–39, 175n22, 199n25, 199n26, 199n28, 201n35 spirit, 64–5, 95, 184n13, 186n28 splitting, and subjectivity, 134–8, 200n30 Stallybrass, Peter, 14–15, 38, 45, 59, 184n16 Stern, Daniel, 10 Strier, Richard, 183n6 ‘subject’ philosophical, 12–13, 25, 171n33 political, 23–13, 14–15 post-structural, 7, 11–14, 171n38 subjective authority, 91, 98, 102, 121, 128, 140, 151, 156, 165 subjective other, 90, 91, 98, 104, 110, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120–2, 128, 151–2, 160, 164, 167, 201n35 subjective self see ‘self’, as subject; subjectivity subjectivism, 97, 100, 104 subjectivity in Althussser, 13, 14 of lyric speaker, 89–91, 97 as one mode of selfhood, 16 in post-structural theory, 11–15, 116, 121–2, 166 as strategy, 16, 54–5, 187n36 substantive self see ‘self’, substantive senses of

Suckling, John, Sir, 128 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 170n23, 203n62, 207n9 Swetnam, Joseph, 135, Targoff, Ramie, 168n2, 172n51, 186n27, 190n69 Taylor, Charles, 177n33 Thomas, Keith, 197n3 Tofte, Robert, 27 Traherne, Thomas, 174n14 transferred self see ‘self’, transferred Tylee, Claire M, 182n104, 205n78 Vendler, Helen, 90, 192n4 Vickers, Nancy, 192n6 vision and male subjectivity, 97–8, 116–7, 121, 133 tropes of, 19, 89, 92–4, 99–100, 108 visual epistemology see epistemology, visual Vives, Juan Luis, 124, 129, 137 Walkington, Thomas, 103 Webster, John, 125, 202n52, 206n82 Weimann, Robert, 108, 187n35, 195n42 Willard, Thomas, 76, 189n54 Williams, Raymond, 174n13 The Womens Sharpe Revenge, 197n3 Wroth, Mary, 198n10 Wright, Thomas, 34, 124, 185n19

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