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The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare
By Steven Mullaney The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-54763-3
CHAPTER 1
Affective Irony in The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and The Merchant of Venice
"He which will make me weepe," claims Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Minde in Generall, "must first weepe himselfe." With later help from Cicero as well as Horace, he goes on to argue that emotions felt (and well expressed) by an orator will also be felt by his audience. The speaker's passion resonates in his auditors with a kind of tonal sympathy, so that they are moved to imitate the emotion they witness and to experience it for themselves and in themselves.
Tears are complicated things, social as well as material, and this can make them difficult to understand: like the difference between a twitch and a wink, what we see on the face looks the same whether they are tears of joy, sorrow, or a sign that one has been chopping onions. Historical tears are even more problematic. These we encounter only indirectly, in one kind of archive or another — a treatise on the passions, a playscript, a lyric poem — and have to do our best to understand them, whether we have sufficient context or not.
But the social and transactional semiotics of crying, including the response of the person witnessing it, are complicated even when the tears are visible and tangible on the face and supplemented by the sound of laughing or crying. Tears can be feigned as well as truly felt, as Wright acknowledges. He is careful to stress that the orator should actually feel the passions he wants to stir in his audience. But the need for authenticity is not entirely transparent, since Wright does not assume or claim that only "real" or authentic tears can move auditors "to weep themselves." His own immediate cultural milieu, including as it did the popular and highly affective drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, argued otherwise. Elizabethan stage players, he acknowledges, can "act excellently" — so much so, that they can also move us to fear or anger or mirth or sadness. But they also "act fainedly" and do not genuinely feel the emotions they cause or induce or persuade us to feel:
and this the best may be marked in stage players, who act excellently; for as the profession of their exercise consisteth in imitation of others, so they that imitate best, act best. And in the substance of external action for most part orators and stage players agree: and only they differ in this, that these act fainedly, those really; these only to delight, those to stir up all sorts of passions according to the exigencie of the matter; these intermingle much levitie in their action to make men laugh, those use all gravity, grace, and authority to persuade: wherefore these are accounted ridiculous, those esteemed prudent. (179)
Left unclear is the affective nature of the tears wept by a theatrical audience, whose members are not pretending to feel what they feel. Are such emotions the same as everyday emotions? Do they feel or look the same? Do plays, it might be asked, make us dream real or theatrical tears?
Such questions have a long history in Western culture. From Plato to Augustine to Stephen Greenblatt, the relation between what an individual might feel at the performance of a play and what that same person might feel in response to similar "real-world" experiences has troubled theatergoers, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone else who has attempted to understand the affective experience of an audience. Most discomfiting are the moral incongruities that can haunt that experience. We take pleasure, in a sense, in watching and empathizing with tragic suffering. Why does it feel so good to feel so bad about Gloucester's blinding or Cordelia's death? Some modern explanations have turned to psychoanalytic theories of sadomasochism to explain why theatrical suffering can be so satisfying. Some have turned to the evident artificiality of theater, suggesting that the aesthetic realm provides a kind of quarantine from reality, a space that is safely and even comfortably walled off and protected from everyday concerns. Others yet, to theories of Winnicottian play or an atavistic need for the ritual release of a tragic catharsis. Wright's advice is more practical: since feigning is not honest, orators rather than actors should provide the model for right rhetorical feeling. If the orator himself feels the need for a mentor or model, then he should look to the preacher, who is the "glass for every orator" to imitate, rather than the Elizabethan actor, whose affective powers might be effective but are also, in the final analysis, "ridiculous" (179).
Wright assumes, and many — including myself — would agree, that the passions or emotions are social things, distributed across social bodies in many different forums that range from the family to the sermon or speech to the production of a play. However, Wright's oratorical model — his Ciceronian template for social emotions at work, in what he defines as their most exemplary setting — encourages him to frame his argument in terms of a mimetic dynamics of feeling, which are not, or so I would argue, always adequate to comprehend the social dynamics of emotions, which are more dialectical and recursive, interpersonal, intersubjective, and inherently transactional. These social dynamics are sometimes mimetic but not always or essentially so. Affective resonance or sympathy becomes a great deal more problematic, as I hope to show, when our paradigm shifts from the monological dynamics of the podium or pulpit (at least as framed by Cicero and Wright) to the dialogical dynamics of theatrical performance.
I
Before I can continue, however, there's a question that needs to be addressed. Where's Galen in this picture? Given the "humoral turn" of recent studies early modern affect, why have I so notably left humoral theory out of my initial overview and critique of Wright's views?
When discussing the affective work of the orator, the preacher, and the player, Wright does not turn to Galen or the Galenic theories of the humoral body. Indeed, humoral thought is largely absent from most of his treatise, with the exception of its two initial "books" or chapters. The structure of Wright's treatise is instructive in this regard. Its six chapters fall into three distinct groups. In the first section, focused on the physiological imbrications of the passions, Wright discusses the relationship between the humoral body and the passions of the mind — the relationship, I would stress, and not the identity. In this section, Wright makes it clear that humors are not the same as passions and, furthermore, he emphasizes that the relationship between the humoral and the emotional is ambiguous and multivalent in many senses. Sometimes passions engender humors or alter the humoral balance; sometimes humors engender passions. But there is not a consistent relationship between the two, neither a causal nor a catalytic one. The first section of the work could be read as a limited etiology of the passions, the equivalent of a modern hormonal or neurological explanation, if one keeps in mind the ambiguities of cause or catalysis that I have just noted. Wright provides an account of some aspects of the physiological production of emotions, but he does not equate or merge such aspects with the experiential, observable, or interactive operations of the passions — the phenomenology, as it were, of social emotions in everyday life.
In the central and longest section of Passions of the Minde, from the third through the fifth books, Wright addresses the social dimensions of the passions. They operate as a kind of language, made up of internal and variously embodied feelings and the words and gestures or outward signs that can accompany them, at varying degrees of intentional and involuntary expression, whether these signs of affect are visual, auditory, or verbal. Social emotions are in some sense innate, something we are born with, but they also develop and change from infancy to maturity, conditioned as they are by formal and informal kinds of social interaction. And of course, they are capable of being further refined and calibrated through explicit training and practice. In the final, third section of the treatise, where Wright considers the spiritual aspects of the passions, neither Galen nor Cicero is any longer relevant. Here, Augustine and scripture guide Wright's discussion — aptly and predictably so.
The somatic, the social, and the spiritual. My terms are meant to be heuristic. They correspond, roughly speaking, to the three distinct objects of Wright's inquiry: to the province of the humors; the province of the social, including feeling, language, rhetoric, expression, and a great deal else; and finally, the province of the soul. For Wright, as for most of his contemporaries, this sequence would be read as an ascending order, a rising progression from the material to the immaterial, from the flesh to the spirit. The passions are neither separate from nor identical to either extreme. They "stand betwixt these two extremes," as Wright tells us, "and border upon them both" (7), so that they "inhabit both the confines of sense and reason" (8). They are betwixt-and-between phenomena, according to Wright, grounded in the social mise en scène in ways that might recall Michelle Rosaldo's description of emotions as "embodied thoughts, thoughts steeped with the apprehension that 'I am involved.'" As I emphasized earlier, Rosaldo had the social body in mind and not merely the corporeal bodies of the Ilongot tribes she studied. She was very careful not to reduce affective embodiment to the somatic, and it seems to me that Thomas Wright — and Timothy Bright and a long list of other early modern explicators of the passions — shared her caution. "Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood, but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell." Not substances in the blood: in other words, neither humoral nor hormonal, even though humors and hormones have often been thought, at different historical moments and regimes of medicine, to play a role in the workings of the emotions.
In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster disagrees quite emphatically: "For early moderns, emotions flood the body not metaphorically but literally, as the humors course through the bloodstream carrying choler, melancholy, blood, and phlegm to the parts and as the animal spirits move like lightning from brain to muscle, from muscle to brain." In the traditional understanding that Paster means to correct, the humoral self was understood quite differently. It was fixed, rigid, and intransigent, characterized by obdurate temperaments that were caused by imbalances in the humors that could not be seen or measured in themselves. The temperament of any given individual was an observable symptom of an otherwise inaccessible and opaque inner state. Temperaments then and now were understood to be extremely resistant to change. In humoral medical practice, an overly dominant humor might be brought into balance by purging the appropriate fluid or substance or spirit from the body — by bleeding, administering laxatives or emetics, and so forth. Fevers, rashes, and other outward signs of illness could also be caused by temporary imbalances of the humoral system and were treated as such.
Paster recognizes that humoral theory "is often identified with typologies — the four temperaments, the four complexions," but in her "own reading of humoral discourse [she] finds a much greater emphasis on change and penetrability, on a way of inhabiting the body with keen attention to the winds and waters of its internal climate." Those winds and waters are to be understood, as she suggests above, not metaphorically but literally. The humoral self is pre-Cartesian, an epistemic distinction in Paster's terms. She suggests, for example, that our own distinctions between the figurative and the literal, the inner and the outer, as well as the body and the mind, are dichotomies of the modern, post-Cartesian age. They can make it hard to realize that early modern emotions are, properly understood, quite beyond our understanding. They will remain so, until we recognize the humoral flux of early modern emotions and realize how radically strange this makes the Elizabethan world in comparison to our own affective worlds:
The passions are like liquid states and forces of the natural world. But the passions — thanks to their close functional relation to the four bodily humors of blood, choler, black bile, and phlegm — had a more than analogical relation to liquid states and forces of nature. In an important sense, the passions actually were liquid forces of nature, because, in this cosmology, the stuff of the outside world and the stuff of the body were composed of the same elemental materials.
We move with ease from "close functional relation" to "more than analogical" to a heavily emphasized identity (passions "actually," passions "actually were," passions "actually were"). An identity is never directly asserted between the passions and the humors. However, we seem to move from passions that were like liquid states to passions that "actually were" liquid states — seeming identical, but only at an elemental level. The impression left, however, is that anything said about the humors in a Galenic text is implicitly yet literally being said of the passions, too.
I am wary of collapsing the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in this way. One of the things it obscures is the oscillation between literal and metaphoric, actual and virtual, real and imagined, that is basic to much of social life and essential in theatrical performance. Such fluidity of critical terms is crucial, however, if one wants, as Paster explicitly does, to use Galenic humors and many other kinds of liquids or spirits or waters or winds as a literal articulation of how it felt to be an Elizabethan. A proper understanding of the humoral system, she writes, will give us access to "the phenomenological character of early modern life."
Paster proposes an extreme and epistemic break between the humoral past and its post-Cartesian successors. This sense of what it means to historicize the emotions is not shared, it should be noted, by other key participants in the humoral turn. In their own readings of humoral theory and embodiment, such a strong relationship or identity between humors and emotions is not claimed. Indeed, a number of other humoral theorists are also wary of treating humors as a guide to emotions, as such. They focus instead on the undeniably strong relationship between fixed temperaments and humors. The geohumoral system brought to our attention by Mary Floyd-Wilson in English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama is an excellent example. Floyd-Wilson situates Galenic thought in a climatology and ecology that is indeed quite strange to us; she demonstrates, quite persuasively in my view, how pervasive this geohumoral system was in the construction of premodern racisms as well as premodern temperaments. But in her study, the ecology between the humoral self and its climatological environment locks the former in place, so that place determines temperament (in early modern terms) or ethnicity (in modern terms). The humoral self is remarkably fixed in this cosmology, set in affective concrete rather flux and flow. Climate was believed to a strong determinate of shared ethnic characteristics of entire peoples, producing fixed and hard-to-change ethno-environmental temperaments. Northerners' cold and wet climate explained why they were so brutish in body and mind and so lascivious; the hot and dry climate of southerners (meaning, e.g., tropical, sub-Saharan) produced hot and dry bodies rather than cold and wet ones, resulting in an overly intellectual temperament that was also slow to be aroused sexually or emotionally. "I think the sun where he was born," as Desdemona says when jealousy is first raised to explain Othello's behavior, "Drew all such humours from him" (3.4.29). The perfect balance of humors, the golden mean of innate character, was found only in people of a Mediterranean climate — unsurprisingly, since humoral theory and its Greek and Roman physicians were native to such a clime.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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