Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England [1 ed.] 0754666751, 9780754666752

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 “Divers paces with divers persons” : Timing the Self in Early Modern England
2 “The accident of an instant” : Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney’s Old Arcadia
3 “Very Now” : Time and the Intersubjective in Othello
4 “Not a jar o’ th’ clock” : Time and Narrative in The Winter’s Tale
5 “Spirit of phrenzie” : Narrative Temporality in Samson Agonistes
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

David Houston Wood

Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity Series editors: Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, USA Henry Turner, Rutgers University, USA This series provides a forum for groundbreaking work on the relations between literary and scientific discourses in Europe, during a period when both fields were in a crucial moment of historical formation. We welcome proposals for books that address the many overlaps between modes of imaginative writing typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – poetics, rhetoric, prose narrative, dramatic production, utopia – and the vocabularies, conceptual models, and intellectual methods of newly emergent “scientific” fields such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, psychology, mapping, mathematics, or natural history. In order to reflect the nature of intellectual inquiry during the period, the series is interdisciplinary in orientation and publishes monographs, edited collections, and selected critical editions of primary texts relevant to an understanding of the mutual implication of literary and scientific epistemologies.

Other titles in the series: Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 Rebecca Laroche Psychosomatic Disorders in Seventeenth-Century French Literature Bernadette Höfer Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture Leah Knight Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge Kevin Killeen

Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

David Houston Wood Northern Michigan University, USA

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2009 David Houston Wood David Houston Wood has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wood, David Houston. Time, Narrative and Emotion in Early Modern England. -- (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity) 1. Literature and medicine – England – History – 16th century. 2. Literature and medicine – England – History – 17th century. 3. Life cycle, Human, in literature. 4. Time in literature. 5. English literature--Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. I. Title II. Series 820.9’354’09031–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, David Houston. Time, narrative, and emotion in early modern England / by David Houston Wood. p. cm. – (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English prose literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Time in literature. 3. Literature and medicine – Great Britain – History – 16th century. 4. Literature and medicine – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 5. Self in literature. 6. Emotions in literature. I. Title. PR767.W66 2010 820.9’33–dc22 2009027379 ISBN 9780754666752 (hbk) ISBN 9781315550930 (ebk)

For Vicki

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Contents Acknowledgments  

ix

1

“Divers paces with divers persons”: Timing the Self in Early Modern England  

2

“The accident of an instant”:Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney’s Old Arcadia  

47

3

“Very Now”: Time and the Intersubjective in Othello  

77

4

“Not a jar o’ th’ clock”: Time and Narrative in The Winter’s Tale   103

5

“Spirit of phrenzie”: Narrative Temporality in Samson Agonistes   139

Conclusion   Bibliography   Index  

1

171 181 195

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Acknowledgments Foremost I want to thank Terry Reilly for his role as friend and mentor from the earliest stages of this project, north of Denali, right through to the end: grazie. My debt to Charlie Ross, Paul White, Angelica Duran, and Ann Astell, who oversaw this project as it took shape as my dissertation at Purdue University, is tremendous: each contributed invaluably constructive feedback throughout the research and revision processes; for the rigorous yet convivial experience they afforded me along the banks of the muddy Wabash, I extend my most grateful thanks. To Murray Levith and Kate Greenspan, in Saratoga Springs, for inciting a recalcitrant teenager to pursue the life of a scholar— and for sending me off to live, learn, and teach in Qufu, China: xie xie ni. To my wonderful editor, Erika Gaffney, my anonymous readers at Ashgate Publishing, and for feedback drawn from the many readers of various segments of this project, including the late Douglas Brooks, Lalita Pandit, Allison Hobgood, Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Rebecca Lemon, Gina Bloom, Michelle Parkinson, Mardy Philippian, Neil Migan, and Ty Buckman: many, many thanks. To former colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, especially Lalita Pandit, Dick Gappa, Dick Sullivan, Susan Crutchfield, and the late Ray Schoen, and students Jon Templin and Rob Topinka; and to new colleagues on the glorious shores of Lake Superior at Northern Michigan University, especially Rob Whalen, Stephen Burn, Austin Hummel, Ray Ventre, Lesley Larkin, and Amy Hamilton: my warmest appreciation. I also extend gratitude to Irwin “Bud” Weiser, who as Purdue’s English Department Head granted me an invaluable Presidential Research Dissertation Fellowship; and to Dick Sullivan, Department Head at the University of WisconsinLa Crosse, who engineered a timely Faculty Research Grant. The holdings at the Newberry Library and the Interlibrary Loan programs at the Purdue and Northern Michigan University Libraries were invaluable. Thanks as well to the editors and anonymous readers at the journals Shakespeare Yearbook, Prose Studies, Interfaces, and Renaissance Drama, where versions of these essays first appeared. Chapter 2 profited, as well, from feedback from participants, especially Achsah Guibbory, at the Renaissance Prose Conference, held at Purdue University in 2003; Chapter 3 from two Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) sessions, held in New Orleans in 2004 and Dallas in 2008 respectively; and Chapter 5 from participants at the Seventh International Milton Symposium, in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 2002—particularly John Shawcross, Joseph Wittreich, and, especially, Karen Edwards, who chaired my session on Samson and melancholia. Special thanks, as well, to all the participants in the “Disabled Shakespeare” seminar at the 2009 SAA, held in Washington, D.C., which I co-chaired with Allison Hobgood.



Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

Above all, I want to thank for their unfailing support those who have tolerated this project in more personal ways for just about as long as I have—Robert and Nancy Wood; Mike and Judy Scala; Geoff and Barrett Stewart; and Jerry and Dedee Rigg—as well as that of the Trustees and Boardmembers of the Tyler Rigg Foundation, who have rechanneled devastating heartache into heartfelt social activism. Very special thanks always to the right gentlemen Eric Rich, Johnny Musto, Mardy Philippian, Matthew Vollmer, and Ben Kostival: and to Jeff Loehmann for his apposite cover image, an ideal representation (to my mind) of humoral adustion. Finally, and most significantly, my family works every day and always to generate an extraordinary life of light in this dark world and wide: to my daughter, Madeleine Rose, my sons, Henry Tyler and Nathaniel James, and most especially to my extraordinary Vicki: all of my love. My debt to them most of all is unlimited. This book is dedicated in loving memory of Tyler Linfert Rigg, 1972–1996. David Houston Wood Marquette, Michigan May 27, 2009 Please Note: I want to thank a number of academic journals and their respective editors for permitting me to reprint the following articles in heavily altered forms. First, I want to thank Routledge Press, The Taylor and Francis Group, for permission to use “‘[A] deathful suck’: Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney’s Old Arcadia,” from Prose Studies 28.2 (August 2006), edited by Charles Ross and Victoria Scala Wood [see informaworld.com]; second, I want to thank the Edwin Mellen Press for permission to use “‘Very now’: Time and the Intersubjective in Othello,” from Shakespeare Yearbook (Fall 2009), edited by Douglas Brooks and Shirley Sharon-Zisser; third, I want to thank The College of the Holy Cross for permission to use “‘A fountain stirred’: Caravaggio, Shakespeare, and the Myth of Narcissus,” from Interfaces 25 (2005–06), edited by Helen Whall; and finally I want to thank Northwestern University Press for permission to use “‘He something seems unsettled’: Melancholy, Jealousy, and Subjective Temporality in The Winter’s Tale,” from Renaissance Drama 31 (2002), edited by Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall. My cover image is by San Francisco artist Jeff Loehmann, and is entitled “#1.” Burnt paper.

Chapter 1

“Divers paces with divers persons”: Timing the Self in Early Modern England Time, Self, and the New Historicism Benvolio Good morrow, cousin. Romeo Is the day so young? Benvolio But new strook nine. Romeo Ay me, sad hours seem long…. Benvolio … What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours? Romeo Not having that which, having, makes them short. —Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.160–64

Nothing is more chaungeable than time: and therefore no thing is more perillous to the body. For as Hippocrates sayeth: The chaunging of time gendereth most euills. For sodayne chaunging of colde into heate, chaungeth and appayreth [wastes] bodyes: and that is, for that kinde suffereth not sodayne chaungings, as he sayth. Therefore ofte sodaine chaunging of time, is cause of sicknesse. —Batman uppon Bartholome, 9.2

The elastic sense of time Romeo expresses to Benvolio in my first epigraph is one we might recognize as both transcultural and transhistoric, a subjective emotional truism. Romeo, here a stereotype of the pining Petrarchan lover, presents an impression of the languorous way in which time itself can seem to unfold based on the passion he projects toward the absence that signifies his heart’s desire. And so it does; as individuals boasting our own respective agencies, wishes, and desires, we postmoderns, too, as the social sciences confirm, are inherently familiar with our own subjective impressions of time and temporal experience across a range of our daily activities and affective states. The works of William Shakespeare, of    See As You Like It (3.2.282–83). Except where explicitly noted, all quotations of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, (ed.) 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).    See, for example, from a sociological perspective, Michael G. Flaherty, The Watched Pot: How we experience time (New York: New York UP, 1999), esp. 9, 23–24; from an anthropological, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983); and from a psychoanalytic, Jacob A. Arlow, in



Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

course, are crammed full with just such similarly emotionally inflected, subjective representations of time: whether in Juliet’s insistence, for example, that, given the right emotional footing, “in a minute there are many days”; to Dromio of Syracuse’s suggestion that Father Time can certainly muster “reason to turn back an hour in a day”; or, further still, in Rosalind’s assertion that “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.” Ironically enough, much of the timeless attraction of Shakespeare’s works surely lies in these psychologically satisfying, cogent comments relating both to character and to time. Yet, on closer inspection, the particular emotion Romeo reveals in this passage for the beautified Rosaline, and the sentiment he relates regarding his subjective temporal experience, undermines implicitly the very transcultural, transhistoric quality we may seek to perceive in such passion. After all, the peculiar quality of Romeo’s behaviors in Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet has led his father, Montague, to suspect Romeo’s status as the sufferer of a disease uniquely attuned to the early modern English cultural moment: melancholy. In what he terms the “psychopathology of everyday time experience,” in “Psychoanalysis and Time,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 34 (1986): 508.    See Romeo and Juliet (3.5.45); The Comedy of Errors (4.2.62); and As You Like It (3.2.282–83). Also note, for example, the Friar in Much Ado About Nothing: “this weddingday / Perhaps is but prolong’d, have patience and endure” (4.1.253–54); and 1.2 of 1 Henry IV, in which Hal links specific forms of character with specific forms of time, demanding of Falstaff: “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day? unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-color’d taffeta; I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day” (6–12).    There are a number of excellent secondary studies that engage the topic of early modern melancholy. For exhaustive overviews of the subject across Europe, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964; reprint, Liechtenstein: Klaus, 1979), and Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1991). Classic studies with a focus on English representations of melancholy include Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1951); Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England, (New York: Norton, 1971); and Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). For a specific focus upon concepts of lovesickness, see Trevor, “Love, Humoralism, and ‘Soft’ Psychoanalysis,” Shaksepeare Studies 33(2005) 87–94, and Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: the Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990). For a specific view of the disease in the context of gender studies, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); for a psychoanalytic analysis of such gendered forms of the disease, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1992). Finally, for a truly remarkable study of the relationship between melancholy and madness during the period,

Timing the Self in Early Modern England



making this judgment, Montague notably cites what he identifies as his son’s “humor” to be “Black and portendous” (1.1.141), alluding to Romeo’s inward, bodily dominance by the black bile of the melancholy humor. Moreover, given Montague’s relation of the “tears” (132) his son has been rumored to have shed, in addition to his “deep sighs” (133), solitary lurking in the woods, and self-created world of “artificial night” (141)—all central features of this disease as evidenced in early modern medical texts—Montague’s diagnosis appears singularly accurate in this context. Relating both to inward cause and outward symptomatology, the observations that both Montague and Benvolio establish for Romeo—in addition to the “Griefs” Romeo identifies within himself (1.1.186–189)—reflect in fact a specific form of this particular infirmity; identified as love-melancholy in contemporary medical treatises, this malady thrived as a cultural construction of both medical disease and social affectation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England for a host of psycho-socio-theological reasons. Romeo’s reflection on the emotionally inflected subjective experience of time in this passage tellingly correlates with other characters similarly affected by forms of love-melancholy in Western European Renaissance literature: from the Italians, in works by Petrarch and Alberti; from the French, in works by Ronsard and Du Bellay; and drawn as well from the numerous characters troubled with the disease across English literary writing from the period such as Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona, F.J. in George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J., and Musidorus in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia. Like Romeo, these characters insistently complain of a dilatory loss of time that accompanies the emotion. Early modern medical theorists confirm such experiences and caution against such prodigality with one’s time. But the black bile whose excess was understood to produce the humoral melancholic disposition was itself portrayed by such theorists as the material I strongly recommend Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004).    See, for example, Burton 1.3.1.4, 1.3.3. All quotations of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Henry Cripps, 1628) will be numbered as he himself divided his work: first, by Partition; second, by Section; third, by Member; and, fourth, by Subsection. The first edition of the Anatomy was published in 1621.    Note Proteus’ comment that “Thou Julia, thou hast metamorphis’d me / Made me neglect my studies, lose my time, / War with good counsel, set the world at nought ”, (Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.1.66–68; see also 1.3.19); F.J.’s, that “it seemed that whereas you went about in time to try him you did altogether lose time which can never be recovered, and not only lost your own time … but also compelled him to leese his time which he might … have bestowed in some other worthy place”, (George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J. in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Paul Salzman, (ed.) [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998: 57]); and Musidorus’s caution that in pursuing Philoclea, Pyrocles has “divert[ed his ] thoughts from the way of goodness to lose, nay abuse, [his] time”, (Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia [The Old Arcadia], Katharine Duncan-Jones, (ed.) [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999: 17]). In addition, see Love’s Labor’s Lost, 5.2.755.



Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

cause for a wide range of depressive ailments during the early modern period— not simply as faddish love-melancholy or social malcontentedness, but across a pervasive and ubiquitous taxonomy of grieving. As Timothy Bright (1586), Thomas Wright (1604), and Robert Burton (1621) illustrate in conspicuous detail, among other early modern humoral theorists, this taxonomy encompasses states ranging from love-melancholy to religious melancholy; from head-melancholy to windy, or hypochondriachal, melancholy; and and from genial to dangerous forms of the disease that lead from sexual jealousy to states that contemporary theorists identify as “melancholy madness.” According to a range of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance traditions, the naturally cool, dense quality of black bile was understood to be terrifically susceptible to “adustion,” sudden caloric increases that scorched the humors, producing, along with resultant crudities and vapors, the catastrophic emotional volatility associated with intense fury and rage. As Thomas Elyot explains, for example, in The Castel of Helth (1541): “Melancholy is of two sorts. The one is called natural, which is only cold and dry; the other is called adust or burned …. [A]ll adust melacholy annoyeth the wit and judgment of man, for whan that humor is hot it maketh men mad.” Significantly, contemporary humoral theorists link this fury and rage with correlatively feverish forms of subjective temporal experience. Burton’s caution, for example, that melancholy adust foments inward “violence and speedy alterations in this our microcosm” (1.2.3.1) which lead to a “sudden madness” (1.2.3.5), or Bright’s observation that melancholy adust “urgeth [rage] with most vehemencie” (109), or Wright’s loaded humoral reference to a “gunpowdred minde” that “of a sudden bee inflamed” (6), among myriad such cautions expressed in contemporary medical texts, indicate that the relationship between historicized forms of time as they pertain to melancholy are apparently neither as simple nor as limited to time’s elasticity as the smitten Romeo’s words might make the case first appear. The protracted depression and sudden violence that infuses so much early modern literary artwork— precipitated in The Winter’s Tale, for example, by Leontes’ explanatory exclamation relating to the firing of his melancholy humor: “Too hot! Too hot!” [1.2.108]—frequently reflect the dangerous humoral imbalances that threaten health and emotion within this dynamic theory of medical interpretation. Such instability centers on the bifurcation of temporalities that serve as both    See Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie: Contayning the Causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies . . . . (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586) 2.    Sir Thomas Elyot, from “The Division of Melancholy and the Diet of Persons Melancholic” The Castel of Helth. The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatc Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century (1541). Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, (eds) (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1954): 118–20.    See Bright, and Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: 1604).

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dilatory and explosive facilitators for the palpably volatile emotional paradigm that constitutes humoralism itself. ******* The central premise of this book is that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced characteristics of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Since the human comprehension of time is not a transcultural phenomenon, one which we twenty-first-century postmoderns can necessarily be understood to share with those who live in the early modern English, or any other, cultural moment, this failure has significantly impeded our understanding both of time’s representation in early modern concepts of selfhood, as well as in time’s deployment in early modern literary narratives.10 In order to address this omission, this study looks to a specific form of temporal experience unique to early modern concepts of time, one that finds explicit embodiment in the humoral self of early modern English medical interpretation. My focus upon the way in which time shapes the concept of the self within early modern discourses related to health and emotion serves as the groundwork for analysis of how early modern writers employ such depictions in the narrative structuring of their literary works. In doing so, I engage both early modern and current theories related to the timing of the self, all of which center on the subjective temporality these theories associate with the literary representations that I explore within the context of the critical modes of narratology and psychoanalysis. Drawing especially on the dangerous role early modern medical theorists ascribe to suddenness—that is, volatility—within humoral representations of varying affective states, this study explores the ways in which early modern artists utilize such volatility in what Peter Brooks identifies as the “textual erotics” of their narratives. Though examples abound in the literature of the period, I demonstrate the cogency of such analysis by working with four canonical, early modern texts notorious for their narrative, or temporal, difficulties. These texts range across generic and authorial boundaries, from the prose romance of Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia, to the staged dramas of William Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale, to John Milton’s stubborn reliance on humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. I thus trace these problematic literary forms from the England of the 1570s as they extend through to the 1670s, revealing that the early modern recognition of the self as a volatile entity, viewed within the medical tenets of a resurgent humoralism expressed in a spate of contemporary

  For a postmodern literary perspective on this issue, see Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003); Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997; and for an anthropological perspective, see Fabian. 10



Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

medical treatises, enabled an artistic overhaul of the realistic portrayal of literary characters that pushed early modern English narrative forms to their very limits. As a category of analysis in early modern studies, critical interest in time itself has waxed and waned in correlation with what can only be perceived as the vagaries of critical fashion. How else to explain the scholarly interest that saw fit to publish numerous books and essays on the topic of time in the middle of the twentieth century, for example, in relation to the relative silence on the topic in early modern scholarship of the last 30 years? Tellingly, this relative silence coincides with the genesis of the historicist turn in early modern studies in the early 1980s. Scholarship beholden to this turn—toward what has since become the critical hegemony in early modern literary study identified as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism—has by and large abjured the topic of things temporal in favor of things spatial. And why not? From its basis in the work of theorists Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson, the New Historicism’s interest in providing local habitation and a name, through analysis of localized manifestations of power, has come largely at the expense of evaluating what has been perceived as the more formalist, or structural, concerns relating to time. A cause for this relative silence arguably hinges on New Historicism’s explicitly reactionary posture to earlier traditions of scholarship, traditions which do in fact demonstrate explicit interest in the topic. Indeed, in addition to the ideological myopia with which New Historicism charged old historicism, new criticism, and essentialist character criticism, the central plank it leveled at psychoanalysis, especially, centered on its fundamental belatedness and anachronism, even as New Historicism tuned itself to political questions of power and its deployments through the prism of its handmaids: race, class, and gender.11 But something happened, or has failed to, in the deployment of this New Historical methodology: it has failed to keep time with the times. Across the Humanities over the last few years, time has become a renewed theoretical focus, though the kinds of time that theorists and scholars alike are uncovering involve postmodern formulations, the likes of which these older traditions of scholarship would find largely unrecognizable. Indeed, where early modern scholarly interests in time centered in the 1970s generally found purchase in modes of historical analysis, genre analysis, Christian eschatology, the humanistic manipulation of a 11   For an overview of the issue, see especially Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, (eds) Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986), Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), Tracey Sedinger, “Historicism and Renaissance Culture,” Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Culture (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998) 117–38, Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, “Dreams of History: An Introduction,” Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins P, 2003).

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personified “Time” acting as either “Revealer” or “Destroyer,” or of rival dramatic clocks at works within plays, such explorations of time tend to read it transculturally as both a transparent medium and one essentially apolitical in application. It is this apolitical reading of what I will demonstrate to be an anything-but-apolitical medium that New Historical critical strategies relating to power can help reposition and clarify in the uses made of time in early modern literary works. To put it bluntly: this book demonstrates that the time is right to reclaim time as a mode of inquiry in early modern topics. I do so as both a reaction to and an extension of both historicist and formalist methodologies, and thus analyze time, as Jonathan Gil Harris has explained in a recent essay, not merely as a transparent dimension, but rather as an overtly “political animal.”12 In short, I argue that we must train ourselves to the ways that early modern artists and, perhaps just as importantly, we ourselves mean through, and by, time. The current explorations of time in critical temporal studies across the Humanities involve foregrounding just this issue. Postmodern scholarship, to this very cultural moment, is busy exploring concepts of time that can be both intellectually jarring and theoretically complex. The perceptual oddity of many of these postmodern temporal analyses—involving such frequently paradoxical and overtly political concepts as chronotopes, chronotypes, multiple temporalities, bifurcating times, anachronism, belatedness, nostalgia, chronometrics, heterochrony, polychrony, intersubjectivities, affective temporalities, gendered-, hetero-, and homo-temporalities, and shattered time, among many others— however, finds a fascinating home in much early modern literary art. As I demonstrate, the study of time and its deployments in the early modern period uniquely affords a more careful and artful reflection on this theoretical move into the fourth dimension in postmodern studies. If, for example, we are to take at face value the title of Ricardo Quinones’ 1972 study, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, we must sense that the early modern period, and, specifically, early modern literary art, for chronological reasons if not originary, can serve as fundamental, even ineluctable, to such investigations into twenty-first-century time-theory. Perhaps foremost in scope among these traditional scholars, Quinones observes in the Renaissance “discovery” of time the artistic preoccupation with this subject between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. His focus on the literature of Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton analyzes the dramatic changes in the ways in which writers of this period and geographical sweep conceived of time as it impacted their lives and art. Throughout, he is interested, as is Inga-Stina Ewbank in her 1964 work on time in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, suitably titled “The Triumph of Time,”, in the implementation of time’s recognition as tempus edax rerum, time which devours things. With its roots in classical and medieval   See Jonathan Gil Harris, “Untimely Mediations.” Early Modern Culture. Online. 6 (2007). . Do note as well the discussion of this issue between Harris and Linda Charnes at and . 12

Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England



writers such as Ovid, Virgil, Lucretius, and Petrarch, this formulation came to serve as an increasing artistic obsession reflected in the Renaissance. Certainly, Quinones’ related stress on the development of the significance of what he identifies as “temporal urgency” during this period remains an important contribution to understanding the evolution of the Western tradition of thought, and, consequently, of literary artistry.13 Quinones’ book is the most comprehensive of a number of studies on the subject of time in the Renaissance in the twentieth century.14 All of them, however, as Harris observes, fail to question the assumptions—ideological and otherwise—that lie behind their treatments of the time. And, indeed, for my purposes none extend their interest to the way time functions within early modern concepts of embodiment and emotion.15 The resurgent postmodern engagement with time and temporality currently being staged in critical temporal studies and across the Humanities, on the other hand, draws on a heady array of philosophical influences. These engagements relate to a range of epistemological backgrounds and showcase an ongoing explosion of thought on the subject. In their variety, these works demonstrate the non-universality of human temporal comprehension. Even a brief overview of such concepts of time and temporality16 as they are being discussed in scholarly circles today involves a range of ideas, from classic encounters with time in pure philosophy pursued by Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, and Alfred Whitehead; to those demonstrated by structuralist and   Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972). See especially 3–27. 14   See, for example, Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time (New York: Seabury Press, 1976); Gary F. Waller, The Strong Necessity of Time (The Hague: Mouton, 1976); and David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, New Hampshire: UP of New England, 1982). The following studies, though they precede Quinones’, complement his work: Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Mable Buland, The Presentation of Time in the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Haskell House, 1966); and Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time,” Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, Kenneth Muir, (ed.) (London: Macmillan and Co. 1968) 98–115. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Kastan argues that subjective time needs to be avoided as a concept in explicating Shakespeare’s work (79). 15   While Sypher does engage the concept of subjective temporality, he does so through the lens of various philosophical and psychological studies, such as Heidegger’s concept of the “Mitwelt” and the “Umwelt” in his exploration of measuring various concepts of psychological time. While his reading of Shakespeare is enlightening, its avoidance of the temporalities associated with embodied emotion veers away drastically from my own. 16   In its definition of time, the OED offers at 1a.:: “A limited stretch or space of continued existence, as the interval between two successive events or acts, or the period through which an action, condition, or state continues; a finite portion of ‘time’ … in its infinite sense.”As for temporality , the OED offers at 3:“… relation to time”; perhaps more useful is the way in which Jeffrey J. Cohen defines it: “the nature and and working of time” (Medieval Identity Machines, Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P) 2. 13

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poststructuralist methodologies engaged by M.M. Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Peter Brooks, Frank Kermode, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari; to gender and queer theory, such as those undertaken by Julia Kristeva, Cathy Yandell, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, Jonathan Goldberg, Madhavi Menon, and Carla Freccero; to intellectual histories, as in that of Francois Lyotard; to postcolonial theory, as in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty; to actor-network theory, especially as formulated and engaged by Michel Serres and Bruno Latour; and finally to psychoanalytic theories of time and temporality, especially those of Jacques Lacan, perhaps best elucidated by John Forrester.17 Such engagements amount to a resurgence, indeed. But this revolution in the matter of time and temporalities has not altogether escaped recent early modern scholarship. A 2007 forum on the topic, for example, published by the online journal Early Modern Culture, offers four careful literary readings on time, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris, which draw productively upon upon many of the time-theorists identified above. These essays signal a new direction in early modern studies in their creative exploration of the ways postmodern theories of time can help cclarify how time is engaged by early modern literary art.18 Such work is immensely promising in the way it demonstrates the fecundity 17   For a general overview of the issue, one might consider, for example, the following works: Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of inner time-consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1964); Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for All and None, Walter Kaufman, trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1995); Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001); Alfred Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1964); M.M. Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holmquist, (trans. and ed.) (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981); Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative volumes 1–3 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988); Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Knopf. 1984); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Jacques Derrida, Given Time. 1 Counterfeit Money (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, (trans.) (New York: Columbia UP, 1990); Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York UP, 2005); Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120 (2005):1608–17; Carla Freccero, Queer /Early Modern (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006); Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1984); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000); Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Roxanne Lapidus, (trans.) (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995); and John Forrester, “Dead on Time”, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 168–218. 18   See Jonathan Gil Harris’s editorship of edition 6 of the online journal Early Modern Culture, including essays by Huw Griffiths, “The Sonnet in Ruins: Time and the Nation in 1599,” ; Shakar Raman, “Marvell’s Now,”

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of early modern interactions with the topic. But a reader in search of early modern scholarship on time and temporality over the whole of the last three decades must rely upon a relatively scant few efforts, which involve, in monograph form, the work of Michael Bristol, Angus Fletcher, Jonathan Gil Harris, Agnes Heller, and Cathy Yandel, Agnes Heller, and Jonathan Gil Harris.19 These studies, combined with a number of related essays that have come out over the last three decades, draw on a range of methodologies, from historicist to poststructural, and from rhetorical to gender theories, in their attention to time’s integration within early modern literature. Among them, I have found most helpful in my work Bristol and Yandell’s stress on the role time plays within the historical and literary record of representing early modern selves. Bristol’s 1996 study, Big-Time Shakespeare, for example, traces competing concepts of fame from a cultural studies perspective across what he presents as the longue durée of historical time, which he contrasts with the various social uses made of time within Shakespearean drama and early modern culture more generally, particularly as they relate to Bakhtin’s theory of holiday-time and of the carnivalesque. With a more narrow focus on gender, Yandell’s 2000 work, Carpe Corpus, explores the gendered ways in which early modern female French authors such as Pernette du Guillet, Louise Labé, Anne de Marquets, Nicole Estienne, and Cathy des Roches, complicate the masculine ; Linda Charnes, “Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-periods from the Future,” ; and Sadia Abbas, “Other People’s History: Contemporary Islam and Figures of Early Modern European Dissent, . See also Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), in which Gordon McMullan traces the “discourse of lateness” in Shakespeare’s final plays as it shapes projections of creative selfhood from the eighteenth century through to the present. 19   See, for example, Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996); Angus Fletcher, Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007); Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009); Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Cathy Yandell, Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000); and, to a lesser extent, Don Le Pan, The Cognitive Revolution in Western Culture: Vol. 1: The Birth of Expectation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). A series of essays, too, play a critical role in this study: see Lowell Gallagher, “‘This Seal’d-Up Oracle’: Ambivalent Nostalgia in The Winter’s Tale,” Exemplaria 7.2 (1995) 465-98; Luke Wilson, “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) 121–45; Timothy Hampton, “Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from Galen to Rabelais,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary FloydWilson, (eds) (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P) 272–93; and three essays by Patricia Parker, including “Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices,” Poetics Today 5.3 (1984) 519–35; “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,”; and “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman,” Representations 44 (Autumn, 1993) 60–95.

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carpe diem and exegi monumentum literary traditions that come down from the classical period to influence Petrarch, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Montaigne through what she identifies as the “subjective secularization of time” (27). Among those articles with a focus on the topic, I have found the work of three scholars especially insightful. Patricia Parker’s series of essays on dilation and delay are classics in the field, each of which explores the rhetorical uses Shakespeare makes of delay in his drama, which impacts my project as a whole to a marked degree. Luke Wilson’s “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” comes at the topic of temporality from a legal position, exploring the ways in which English law distinguished premeditated forms of murder from unpremeditated homicides. Wilson suggests that frequently the latter involve weapons that are generally working tools used in a murderous fashion, which suggests that the killing had been performed out of passion; in this way, “working time,” the time associated with work, had yielded swiftly to “killing time.” A premeditated murder, on the other hand, would likely involve a suitable weapon used exclusively in “killing time.” This concept will be especially applicable in Chapter 2, on the Old Arcadia. Finally, Chapter 5, on Samson Agonistes. Finally, Timothy Hampton’s, “Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from Galen to Rabelais,” is of special significance in that it looks to early modern concepts of Galenic medical knowledge for the way in which early modern writers treat the concept of alteration, or, as Hampton puts it, “how an essentially neutral term of Galenic medicine becomes inflected in the Renaissance with various valences— both positive and negative—that lend it central importance in describing the passions” (275). In doing so, Hampton makes an important link between the medical and the literary, observing “the way in which the linguistic and formal complexities of literature make available certain resources for marshalling and responding to the crises of selfhood signaled by the shifting fortunes of Galenic alteration” (275). Another way in which analysis of time in the early modern period has helped me conceive of this project has come through resurgent critical attention to narrative structure and form. And, indeed, formalism— new, improved—is staging a renaissance of sorts in early modern literary studies. But don’t call it a comeback. Surely, any practitioner of literary analysis knows that formalism has never truly been squelched; for the last few decades it has merely been simpering in abeyance, like Spenser’s Blatant Beast. As the titles of two recent collections make evident, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism and Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, the topic, reinvigorated, is functioning anew in early modern studies. The defensive nature and tone within these two works, however, is worth considering.20 Where Douglas Bruster observes the manner in which the current methodological climate has derided practitioners of early modern 20   See Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, Stephen Cohen, (ed.) (Aldershot, England: Ashgate P, 2007), and Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, Mark David Rasmussen, (ed.) (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

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formalism as theoretically unsophisticated and generally inept in their engagement with early modern texts (31), Richard Strier has likewise cringed at early modern scholarship’s handling of formalism as a “dirty word.”21 Stephen Cohen, too, while observing what he calls the “agonistic oscillations between … form and history” (1) that have defined literary studies over the past century, points out that although Stephen Greenblatt had originally expressed the desire that New Historical critical methodology account for form, such a desire remains “largely unfulfilled”; Cohen concurs, observing that “New Historicism has never systematically or consistently engaged the complex question of form” (2).22 Consequently, as Cohen sees it, New Historicism “has ceased to be a source of theoretical innovation in literary studies” (2). Where he points out that the scholarship associated with the political right has retreated to aesthetics, and that of the political left to what he calls a “utopian formalism” that propounds a “single politico-cultural function for literary form” (2), Cohen attempts in his collection to negotiate a third way, a formalism that “seeks not to set aside but to capitalize upon the theoretical and methodological gains of New Historicism” (3). What these two volumes on historical formalism demonstrate most successfully is the way in which literary form itself is historically constituted. Cohen, for example, notes that historical formalism seeks to avoid “both the programmatic and the effective exclusion of either form or history that has characterized most formalisms and historicisms …” (3); that is, he wants to use the methods of historical formalism as a way in which to “reinvigorate New Historicism” (14). As Bruster offers in his polemical stance: “Form matters” (45); “Form is material in many ways” (45, italics in original); and there is a “meaning overlap between matter and form” (33). My attention in this work to classic works of narratology, such as those by Frank Kermode, Peter Brooks, and Paul Ricoeur extends to the contemporary work of Hilary P. Dannenberg, confirming my efforts here as of a piece with this burgeoning motion of historical formalism. My goal is to situate early modern explorations of time and narrative within the context of the recent turn in early modern studies toward historicized forms of emotion. Before I do so, I would like to acknowledge another impetus for me in writing this book, Jeffrey J. Cohen’s Medieval Identity Machines, which offers a remarkably cogent overview of time and temporality as it is currently being applied in literary studies in general, and medieval studies, in particular. The methodology upon which Cohen settles, however, involves the anti-subjectifying, deterritorializing impulse of both the subject and of temporality inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari. Quite simply, my work does not. While I find Deleuze 21

  See Douglas Bruster, “Shakespeare and the Composite Text,” and Richard Strier, “Afterword: How Formalism Became a Dirty Word and Why We Can’t Do Without It,” in Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, Mark David Rasmussen (ed.) (New York: Palgrave, 2002): 43–66, 207–15. 22   We should note Stephen Greenblatt’s editorship of a collection of essays entitled The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982).

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and Guittari conceptually fascinating, as well as the work it has helped to inform theoretically, I do not engage these theories directly in my book, and this would likely be a good place to begin to situate my methodology. As tempting as it is to explore the porous concept of the humoral self within the context of the “Body without Organs” (BwO), or the environmental situatedness of that early modern self within Deleuze and Guittari’s social field, which they famously claim to be possessed exclusively of the two facts of “desire and the social, and nothing else,”23 or concepts of Deleuzian temporality, such as that of the relationship of chronos to aion in the context of the “vitalistic yet anti-essentialist”24 mode of becoming, my methodology works from a baseline, such as it will prove itself to be, rooted in, but not limited to, the historicized concept of the passionate early modern subject as such. I frequently stray from this baseline, however, in order to utilize contemporary conceptualizations of subjective temporality in two specific and narrowly defined ways: narratology and psychoanalysis. Strict historicist scholars who fetishize Renaissance alterity will undoubtedly chafe at my imbricated methodological approach. But the recent output of rather programmatic New Historicist early modern scholarship suggests broadening our methodological lens to be a timely enterprise, and what more productive way to do so than with recourse to theories of time and corporeality? Drawing on Linda Charnes’ insightful list of “first [methodological] principles”25 in Notorious Identity, I acknowledge that, counter to essentialist, humanist concepts of the self, identity is socially constructed, and that as such it is marked accordingly in political ways—ways, I insist, that early modern medical theories make manifest; further, however, while I observe that the early modern English social field ultimately structures early modern intrapsychic structures, I argue that the very models for these structures and the vocabulary that psychoanalytic theories of time and temporality specifically grant us in discussing early modern topics has been made abundantly clear both in early modern literary and cultural contexts, and in a number of secondary works.26 I thus follow Charnes, who notes that “Too many scholars of Renaissance 23   See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans.) Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983): 29. 24   See Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). 25   See Charnes, Notorious Identity 14. 26   The recent movement in early modern studies toward an imbricated methodology involving both historicized and psychoanalytic critical strategies has been particularly fruitful. For an overview of the issues involved, see especially Mazzio and Trevor, “Dreams of History,” Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, (eds) Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986); and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Desires and Disavowals: Speculations on the Aftermath of Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’”. Other

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culture read, in the important injunction to ‘always historicize,’ an injunction to only historicize …. Historicism, as its best practitioners understand, is never unmediated by ideology …. Historicism— ‘new’ or otherwise— offers responsive and responsible speculations only if it remembers that its own practices are neither epistemologically ‘authoritative’ nor reiterably secure” (15). My investigation of early modern concepts of time—historicizing the early modern temporal self— thus seeks it out within the structural fields of the social, the intrapsychic, and the narratological. My reliance upon these and the wide range of work that has been undertaken on the humoral concept of the self and its emotions provides me with the groundwork to say what this work is not: it is not a book “about” melancholy any more than it is about the phlegmatic, sanguine, or choleric temperaments. It is about time, about volatility, and the way that the psycho-physiological structuring of the early modern self takes shape in literary narrative structures that themselves reflect historicized elements of that psycho-physiological self. This introductory chapter will lay out the basis for my study in a series of stages: “Part 1: Historicizing Time and Emotion” engages the specific ways in which early modern medical theorists conceived of time’s role within the psychosomatic construct of the humoral self; “Part 2: Time, Temperature, and the Humoral Theory” develops this analysis to explore the specific ways in which time and corporeal variables such as relative temperature and moisture were understood to impact the emotional volatility that defines the humoral self; “Part 3: Time and Environment in Humoral Theory” details the way in which the environmental situatedness of implicitly porous humoral selves made them terrifically susceptible to extracorporeal influences (such as the Galenic “non-naturals”), a susceptibility I show with direct impact upon subjective forms of temporality; and “Part 4: Time, Narrative, and the Self,” directly engages current theory relating to embodied forms of subjective temporality, especially insofar as such theories stress the way in which such forms of time relate to narratives I situate within psychoanalytic strategies for exploring the nature of time and the self.

helpful works, in a list by no means exhaustive: Breitenberg; Trevor, “Love, Humoralism, and ‘Soft’ Psychoanalysis,” Charnes, Notorious Identity; Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literature Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), and Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); and Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia.

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Part 1: Historicizing Time and Emotion Recent scholarship on emotion in the early modern period frequently focuses upon contemporary literary representations of inwardness read against a backdrop of applicable medical and philosophical texts drawn from the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. The material fabric of the humoral body consequently comes to play a crucial role in such analyses due to the ways in which it ostensibly clarifies representations of emotion within this largely material framework. Indeed, since the inherited tradition involving taxonomies of emotion vary significantly in their treatment of the topic (Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, 2), drawn from the various faculty psychologies of Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas, for example, recent scholarly engagement with the humoral theory has been particularly fruitful, linked as it is with the ongoing scholarly interest in the human body across literary studies based largely upon the theoretical work of M.M. Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. This scholarly engagement has sought to clarify how an individual living in early modern England might feel emotions such as joy, sadness, or rage, in an attempt to explore the ways that such representations of emotion illuminate affected, contemporary literary characters. In this process, scholars have identified two principal questions that come to the fore in any such discussion of early modern emotion: first, what is the proper lexicon to employ in discussing concepts related to emotion in general, from whatever time and place?; and second, what is the proper way to handle the four-hundred-year divide that separates current, largely Anglo-American, conceptualizations of emotion with those of early modern England? The vagueness of the answers to such questions is humbling. In the leading collection of essays on the subject of the early modern passions, for example, editors Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson ask frankly if it is possible to discuss early modern passions, as actual material fact, in any sense at all (1). They proceed to concede that when it comes to the emotions, a working vocabulary common to the disciplines involved in their study has yet to develop. There is little agreement on what constitutes the cardinal or core emotions, on how to rank emotions on a scale of complexity, on which creatures experience them, or on whether emotions are more pan-cultural than they are local and culturally specific(3). Such an intellectual gap in something so fundamental to human thought and behavior presents itself as an absence that their book productively attempts to redress. Likewise, the editors demonstrate that historicizing of emotion is equally vexed due to the tendency scholars have, willfully or not, of reading emotion from whatever period tendentiously, through their own intellectual paradigms. Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson suggest that “Scholars interested in reading emotions transhistorically need to question the match between their own normative scripts for emotion and those of the cultures which they explore” (11). Akin to anthropological fears relating to ethnocentrism, the problem is an important one, as the misperception of emotion in early modern art, literary and otherwise,

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has haunted its criticism. Timothy Hampton observes that this tendency extends fundamentally to contemporary comprehension of all early modern representations of the psyche. Any audience, he suggests, commonly perceives emotional content that coincides with its own understanding of human psychology, not with likely early modern conceptions of it. He concludes that: modern readers tend to understand early modern psychic life in ways that are quite different from how they approach the life of the early modern body. That is, early modern poems, plays, and tales present themselves to us as accessible. They stage emotional and moral crises—‘psychological’ crises, if you will—that seem familiar and current. Yet these dramas constantly draw upon understandings of how the early modern body works that are radically alien and barely comprehensible to modern readers. (275)

Anyone who has witnessed undergraduate students struggle to come to terms with the medically oriented footnotes in any introductory Shakespeare course, for example, knows full well whereof Hampton speaks. To broaden the discussion a bit, the central difficulty that we face in making sense of any pre-modern engagement with the topic of human emotion centers upon two fundamental issues. First, our current, post-Cartesian intellectual framework is one that tends to make a mind/body binary out of the ostensibly unitary perception of the early modern, humoral conception of the self; and second, this post-Cartesian framework tends to enable us to view the self as largely divorced from its environmental circumstances. The transhistorical tendency of reading early modern selves through our own paradigms, accordingly, is perhaps our most difficult hurdle in attempting any engagement with early modern medical and emotional theory; it is an impediment, however, that numerous philosophers of mind have recently engaged. Charles Taylor, for example, observes that the concepts of mind presented by Calvin, Descartes, and Locke characterize themselves by their efforts to binarize the human into tidy categories that distinguish mind from body, and reason from passion. Such models present what Taylor shows to be a ready break with the more unified model offered in the humoral system, and this “modern dualism,” he observes, is hence one we “easily fall into.”27 John Sutton, similarly, highlights the seventeenth-century shift from the porous, unitary model of the self offered by humoralism, to the discrete, mind/ body model, but simultaneously stresses the self’s incipient identification as a discrete apparatus, largely closed to outside influence. As Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson observe, the body that “earlier [humoral] theorists described as a porous, labile arena of contesting fluids” (15) began during the Enlightenment to be reconstituted as what Sutton calls “a static, solid container, only barely breached, in principle autonomous from culture and environment, tampered with only by 27   Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989), 189.

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diseases and experts.” 28 Sutton acknowledges, however, the latent humoralism that informs Cartesian thought; indeed, the nature of this conceptual break from humoral to Cartesian phenomenology is perhaps best conceived through the “counter-currents” that Michel Serres suggests arise in the temporal “lag between philosophical debate and scientific information” in such a shift in paradigms.29 Further, the tenacity of the humoral theory, as Paster has noted elsewhere, hinges to some degree on the idea that ill health can be experienced and discussed only “in terms of culturally available discourses,” whether or not these terms are, in any sense, accurate.30 As my book will demonstrate, the problem posed by conceiving of the human as a unitary model versus that of a mind/body binary is still more vexed than it appears. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, perhaps lays out most clearly an overview of humoralism in all its contradictory and shifting complexity (1.1.2.2–8, 1.1.3.3). He charts the integrated relationships between the bodily organs and humors within the body as they interact with the intangible impress of the soul through the mediating influences that race about between them. These mediating influences are the animal spirits, which he observes are either facilitated or hindered in their efforts by the roles that relative moisture and relative temperature play within the body. Of particular significance, the spirits transfer meaning between the body and soul and do so instantaneously. In other words, the dynamism, or focus on change and alteration, that constitutes the nature of the self within the humoral model speaks to the pre-Cartesian concept of the self by de-emphasizing explicitly the mind/body dichotomy while foregrounding the relative unity, but implicit volatility, of the self. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding relating to the humoral theory is that it is static, that it offers up determined categories of what amount to nothing more than a taxonomy of personality types. On the contrary, as recent studies by Carol Thomas Neely, Garrett Sullivan, and Floyd-Wilson have clarified, working off those by Paster, Mark Breitenberg, and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, early modern medical texts and literary narratives demonstrate that the early modern passions presume a concept of embodiment that is far more given to dynamism and flux than we might suppose.31 Time and the unique processes through which it means   Qtd. in Paster, Humoring the Body, 15. But for a discussion of the complex ways in which humoralism blends into Cartesian ways of conceiving the self, see John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) esp. 39–41. For a discussion of Cartesian concepts of memory, see esp. 50–113. 29   See Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, (trans.) Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995), 45. 30   See Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 4. 31   See especially Neely, Distracted Subjects; Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Basingstoke, 2007); Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds) Renaissance 28

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therefore ought to play a crucial role in all discussions involving medical models of early modern selves within the corporeal and intrapsychic processes related to humoralism. And as we might suspect, reflection upon time in the context of early modern health does indeed manifest itself in contemporary humoral treatises, whether theorists deal with the impact of the annual season upon individual health and well-being, with the impact of diurnal aspects, such as the time of day or the weather, or in the potentially fraught space of a bare, sudden moment.32 This emphasis is one Cathy Yandell identifies as the “secular subjectivization of time” (27), which she observes as the shift in artistic interest in time from abundant and communal during the medieval period, to personal in its application to the human form in the Renaissance. She characterizes this shift as moving from an interest in tempus rerum, as she calls it, to one centered upon tempus corporis, arguing that Petrarch’s Canzoniere instituted this humanist focus, and tracing the corporeal drama it offers down through the period into the Italian and French works of writers such as Alberti (who notes that the three most precious items we possess are the soul, the body, and time[28]), and Montaigne (“J’ay un dictionaire tout à part moy; je passé le temps, quand il est mauvais et incommode; quand il est bon je ne le veux pas passer, je le retaste, je m’y tiens” [I have a vocabulary all my own. I ‘pass the time’ when it is rainy or disagreeable; when it is good, I do not want to pass it—I savor it, I cling to it]).33 Romeo’s dilatory sentiment at the outset of this chapter serves as a good example of a similarly subjective expression of temporal awareness. But as demonstrable as this thesis appears through the classical and medieval periods, the medical texts anticipate this shift well before Petrarch. In fact, the entire humoral model is itself grounded in the forms of time and temporal processes that mark both an internal negotiation—a secular subjectivization of time, by any other name—within the humoral body, and one that extends notably to its environmental circumstances. Accordingly, the medical treatises I survey in this study, and the contemporary literature that reflects their assumptions, illustrate processes with which we, given our current medical paradigm, tend to be wholly ignorant. As we shall see, issues pertaining to time directly impact any discussion of early modern selfhood: from the social and intellectual environments in which early modern selves identify themselves, to the fictive characters who take shape as mimetic representations of early modern selves in health, in illness, and through all the vagaries of human emotion.

Drama XXXV (Northwestern UP, 2006); Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. ; and Paster, The Body Embarrased. 32   See Burton, 1.3.1.4, and Bright 7, 30, 35, 54. 33   Qtd. in Yandell, 29. Translated from the French by Yandell.

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Part 2: Time, Temperature, and the Humoral Theory Which brings us back to where we began, to Romeo and his ailment. As a disease encompassing a variety of characteristic qualities, the term melancholy itself, and the suggestion Romeo’s father, Montague, offers of its supposed origin in excesses of black bile, derives explicitly from the humoral paradigm of medical interpretation, which for purposes of this study deserves a careful overview. Originating with the Pythagoreans and Hippocrates from the sixth century B.C., reworked by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., overhauled by Galen in the second century A.D., and practiced in varying forms throughout the medieval and early modern periods in Europe and the Middle East, the humoral theory enjoyed an extraordinary duration as a clinical indicator of health; with relatively little refinement, this method of medical analysis was to stand as the principle focus of medicinal knowledge in Europe well into the seventeenth century.34 Proper health and character within the humoral system were understood to revolve around an ideal corporeal equipoise of the four humors (sanguinity, phlegm, choler, and melancholy), whereas illness and disturbances in character were understood to be a result of the improper alignment of these humors, or the bodily dominance of a specific humor. The causes of such imbalances are manifold.35 From Hippocrates and Galen, early modern medical theorists inherited a tradition that understood the caloric to be a central determinant in defining health and disease. Basic corporeal temperature—which Galen identifies as vital or radical heat—is understood to derive principally from digestive processes, wherein the stomach breaks down, or decocts, food in order to produce the material that formulates nourishment, waste, and the humors. Galen calls this process change or alteration. As Timothy Hampton defines it, alteration (from Gk. Alloiousthai; Lat. alteratio— “the changing of one kind of matter into another”)36 is “simply a change, temporary or permanent, in the nature or character of something.” But he goes on to note that “the word is also a technical term in Galenic medicine, and a key element both in Renaissance discourses on the body and in the literary representation of passion” (275). The causes for such alteration are wide ranging: in addition to diet, other environmental influences (the Galenic non-naturals of “air, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, food and drink, [and] repletion and excretion”37), too, can radically alter the health and emotional status of the

34

  See Stanley W. Jackson, “Melancholia and the Waning of the Humoral Theory,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 33 (1978) 367–70. 35   For early modern overviews, see Burton 1.2.3.1; Bright 64; and Thomas Walkington, Optick Glass of Humours, (London, 1607) 96–100. For secondary overviews, see Neely, Paster, Breitenberg, Schoenfeld, Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, and Sullivan and FloydWilson. 36   See Hampton, 276. 37   See Paster, et al., Reading, 18.

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individual. Of all the bodily organs, the stomach engages alteration most directly; but others are implicated, as well: Those parts of a given food which are not altered sufficiently are taken into the spleen as black bile and later circulated to help thicken the blood as needed. The parts which have been cooked adequately become yellow bile (“thin, moist, and fluid”), and are carried all over the body. Those which are overcooked (“having been roasted to an excessive degree”) are considered “abnormal” and are often described as “corrosive” to the body. The key element of health thus becomes maintenance of the proper level of heat in the body. In this way alteration is not excessive and the movement of the humors does not get out of balance. (277)

Thus in the process of alteration, digestive matter produces humors in the body which ideally balance the humors through the regulation of corporeal heat. Fluctuations in corporeal heat or cold thus come to function as causes that led to symptoms associated either with health or illness and a range of cultural significations. Since each bodily organ has its own innate character, and all the humors are contained at once within the body38, what is at stake, then, is that changes in the caloric can lead to the temporary imbalance of the humors, and thus to the psycho-physiology of health. This focus on imbalance and alteration is a crucial one involving concepts of health and emotion in a range of early modern medical texts. But the quality of the humors can matter more than the quantity. In other words, variables associated with relative heat or cold, or dryness or moisture, frequently matter more than the amount of humor within the body or affected body part.39 Indeed, Galen cites Hippocrates on the dangers of such shifts: Pains occur when the nature of anything is changed and corrupted. Everything has its nature changed or corrupted when it is heated, cooled, dried, or moistened, or released from a set pattern. So in uneven bad temperaments the primary cause of change is heat and cold, since these qualities are extremely powerful ….40

Working from this doctrine regarding the centrality of the caloric, early modern medical texts complicate their diagnoses by separating each of the humors into what they present as two simple states, either the “natural” or the “unnatural.”41 In   See Galen, On Black Bile. Galen on Food and Diet. Mark Grant, (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2000) 31. 39   See Mark Grant, Galen on Food and Diet (London: Routledge, 2000) 11. 40   See Galen, On Uneven Bad Temperament. Galen on Food and Diet. Mark Grant, (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2000): 39–40. 41   In an early modern English context, Robert Burton popularized the use of the terms “natural” and “unnatural” in The Anatomy of Melancholy; Timothy Bright uses the terms “kindly” and “unkindly” for precisely the same meaning, in A Treatise of Melancholie. 38

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their natural states, the humors demonstrate a relative ease regarding internal cause and outward effect in aiding the physician in diagnosing imbalances: dominance by blood was understood to lead to a sanguine bearing (an individual outwardly flushed and in behavior, cheerful and amorous); by phlegm to a phlegmatic (pasty, timid); yellow bile to a choleric (overheated, vengeful); and black bile to a melancholy (sallow, depressive). Theorists caution, however, that these natural humoral states were terrifically susceptible to a variety of jarring influences that could swiftly and dangerously lead to a range of unnatural humoral states, in which the relative decipherability of the causes of physical and emotional health became less and less easy to determine. Indeed, since early modern selves were understood, in Paster’s fine phrase, as “semipermeable, irrigated container[s],” 42 the role the humors were understood to play within these porous bodies ensured that certain variables—including salient qualities relating to inward emotion and external environment—could complicate the physician’s effort at diagnosis. For early modern medical theorists, as we have seen, central among these variables is the swiftness of changes in corporeal heat. As Thomas Wright observes in 1604, “Animi mores corporis temperaturam sequuntur, the manners of the soule follow the temperature of the body …” (38). And true to form, humoral theorists observe that each humor in its natural state tends inherently toward a specific caloric equilibrium within the human body— sanguinity and choler toward the hot, phlegm and melancholy toward the cool.43 If an individual’s ideal caloric temperature becomes altered for any reason, due to diet, the non-naturals, or to an emotional trauma, thereby shifting the humors out of their delicate balance, then the individual’s health and outward bearing, correspondingly, are understood to transform in a similar fashion. In particular, if a humor which, in its natural state, tends toward the cool (phlegm or melancholy), turns suddenly adust—that is, scorched by inwardly derived or environmental heat producing an unnatural humor—then a profound altering in the health and character of the affected individual is understood to result. The shift from natural to unnatural humoral forms within the body produce material humoral byproducts called excrements and crudities, as well as noxious vapors and fumes which, rising to the brain, transform individuals either by suddenly or progressively leading them into a variety of dangerous, affective states. The inward trauma of a scorched humor, accordingly, is thus manifested outwardly through commensurately traumatic effects in that person’s behaviors, or outward show of character. Early modern writers suggest that the material imbalance and swiftness of these shifts within the body lead to behavioral changes charged with both moral and temporal connotations. Indeed, physician and divine Timothy Bright observes: “Inordinate passion either prevent reason, or are stirred up by a corrupt iudjment, and therefore neither observe time nor place: but upon every occasion   See Paster, Body Embarrassed, 8.   Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (1964; reprint, Liechtenstein: Klaus, 1979) 10–11. 42

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would be leaping into action, importuning execution.” He continues: “Let a man fall a praying or studying, or be busie in any negotiation importance, and very often he shall feele a headless passion to rush in upon him, importuning him even then to leave all, and prosecute revenge, lust, gluttonie, or some other unbrideled desire” (72–73). This volatile quality of psychosomatic processes conceived within the humoral paradigm thus has far-reaching behavioral implications. The material volatility of the humoral body thus becomes the central determinant for issues that directly impact concepts of individual self-definition. For example, models of race, class, and gender depend upon medical theorizing that frequently derives from caloric alteration of the humors.44 These concepts extend to gender identities, as well: as the countless, nervous jokes of the patriarchal early modern English literature that have come down to us amply attest, corporeal coolness itself is commonly perceived to be not only the natural disposition of all women and aged men, but of depressed and, hence, effeminized younger men.45 Through such reasoning, categories of gender themselves came to be perceived as a continuum hinging upon functions of bodily temperature leading dilatory time to be conceived as emasculating, as Hamlet evokes famously, when “like a whore,” rather than revenge he “unpacks [his] heart with words” (2.2.585). Indeed, as Robert Burton notes: the cooling effect of melancholy can physiologically overmaster gender itself and, ultimately, “turneth a man into a woman” (3.2). Montague’s concern over his son’s melancholic, effeminized disposition at the outset of Romeo and Juliet thus begins to take on some significant value.46 ******* We would do well, accordingly, to note carefully the relationship that the early modern humoral model identifies in the shared etymology of the terms time, temperature, and humor. Each derives from the Latin tempus, which generally signifies, of course, time or season. The correlative Latin terms run, then: tempus, temperatura, and temperamentum (temperament). According to the OED, the series of definitions for the three terms charts the relationship between time and the concepts of humoral mixture and balance. It is particularly notable the extent to which the relationship between humoral temperature and temperament cuts across the microcosm of the self to the macrocosm of its environment. While this point has been made clear in a series of recent studies,47 the link is one worth exploring and involves the embeddedness of these qualities with time (tempus)   See Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). 45   See Breitenberg, esp. 1–25. 46   See Breitenberg, esp. 35–68. 47   See the essays collected in Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), and Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, Sullivan and Floyd-Wilson (eds), noted earlier, in addition to Reading the Early Modern Passions, Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson (eds). 44

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and the embodied medical sense in which early modern theorists explore time’s relevance to emotion and affectivity. The OED suggests that the second term, “temperature,” Lat. temperatura, derives from the Lat. verb temperare. The keenest definitions include 1.a.obs. “The action or process of tempering … mixing”; and 2.obs. “The fact or state of being tempered or mixed, mixture; also, the condition resulting from the mixture or combination in various proportions of ingredients or elements; the composition, consistence, or complexion, so produced”; ; 4.“The character or nature of a substance as supposed to be determined by the proportions of the four qualities (hot or cold, and dry or moist)”; and, finally, Definition 7.a.: The state of a substance or body with regard to sensible warmth or coldness, referred to some standard of comparison; spec. that quality or condition of a body which in degree varies directly with the amount of heat contained in the body, and inversely with its heat-capacity; commonly manifested by its imparting heat to, or receiving it from, contiguous bodies, and usually measured by means of a thermometer or similar instrument. (Now the ordinary sense.)

This “ordinary sense,” which infers the caloric, hot and cold, is in use by 1670, when Robert Boyle publishes Of the Temperature of the Submarine Regions as to Heat and Cold. The third term, “temperament” comes from Lat. temperamentum. The OED’s Definition 1 suggests “A moderate and proportionable mixture of elements in a compound; the condition in which elements are combined in their due proportions”; 4. “The condition of the weather or climate as resulting from the different combinations of the qualities, heat or cold, dryness or humidity; climate. Obs. or arch.”; 5. “Condition with regard to warmth or coldness”; and 6. “In mediæval physiology: The combination of the four cardinal humours … of the body, by the relative proportion of which the physical and mental constitution were held to be determined.” This synthesizing of microcosm and macrocosm, of self and environment, has implicitly temporal connotations. Tracing the quality of the humors from their natural to their unnatural states brings to the fore a host of issues which revolve around the concept time plays in the context of the humoral self; doing so clarifies the mimetic, literary interest early modern artists identified in both the internal drama and the behavioral explanation attendant on such matters. In its natural state, for example, dominance by melancholy was understood to lead to a lethargic despondency characterized by an elastic subjective temporal experience, such as we have seen in Romeo’s. Timothy Bright observes the “slownesse of the humour” (177) of melancholy, as do a range of other early modern theorists including Levinus Lemnius, who elaborates that melancholy “taketh away from a man his sharpenes of witte and vnderstanding, his assured hope and confidence, and all his manlye strengthe and courage … for such be doltish, dull, slow, and lumpishe.”48   See Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (London, 1576) 148.

48

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More recently, Lawrence Babb has noted that “Because it cools and deadens the spirits, melancholy produces a physical torpor; a sensory and mental dullness … and a heavy, despondent lassitude in which the patient finds the world and his own life wearisome and distasteful.”(105) Such “lassitude” and “dullness” carries implicit temporal qualities that, as Lemnius points out and Romeo’s experience confirms, lead to a process of thought characterized by its dilatory qualities. The sluggish material quality of the black bile of melancholy thus manifests a correlatively molasses-like, lugubrious quality of mind, which explains its associated outward behaviors. Iago, too, at his plotting, famously confirms this link between chilled temperature and temporal dilation, observing he ought “Dull not device by coldness and delay” (Othello 3.3.388). But humoral melancholy shields a latent volatility that makes it dangerous—and thus dramatically useful. The palpable shift in the quality of the cool humors from their natural to unnatural states, from cold and sluggish to enflamed and explosive, thus carries with it a medically prescribed shift in the subjective experience of time. The swiftness of vapors rising from affected organs through the corruption of the humors, or the ill report carried by the animal spirits between the body and the soul, via what Thomas Wright identifies as “secret channels” (45), explains the causes of the vehement emotions within the humoral paradigm. This swift process of violence within the volatile humoral body, as conceived in the early modern period, that is, carried with it corresponding qualities of behavioral volatility. For example, as Thomas Walkington explains, “If the lower passage [of the ‘duodenum’] be dam’d up with the thick sediments of gross choler,” then the “humour infects the veins, stirs up sudden anger, generates a consumption with his heat, shortens up the life by drying up the radical moisture” (102). Burton confirms that it is owing primarily to the role of the suddenness of such shifts in the humoral qualities of the individual that the humors were understood to pose the gravest of dangers to human subjects. These volatile shifts and explosive transformations were thought to unleash a range of hazardous forms of disorder upon human minds, bodies, and, with them, human souls: “[T]his thunder and lightning of perturbation,” as Burton observes, causeth such violence and speedy alterations in this our Microcosm, and many times subverts the good estate and temperature of it. For as the body works upon the mind, by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into the brain, and so disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it … with fear, sorrow, &c., which are ordinary symptoms of the disease [of melancholy]: so, on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations…. (1.2.3.1)

Here Burton presents a complex dynamic of humoral interaction, one which suggests that suddenness facilitates “perturbation” within the individual’s mind, body, and soul. Faced with such admirably totalizing explanations for individual

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health, it becomes crucial that we observe that just as we ought not to comprehend the humoral paradigm of medical interpretation as neither naively essentialist nor fundamentally unsophisticated, but rather as a complex theory deeply infused with concepts of gender, class, and race, so, too, ought we to consider such medical interpretation as in no way static but rather as fundamentally, even radically, dynamic, transformative, and therefore temporalized. We see this attention to humoral volatility—to time, temperature, and the humors, or tempus, temperatura, and temperamentum—as it impacts the self throughout the medical treatises of the period, but this internal drama extends beyond discussion of the humors to the animal spirits, as well, which convey impulses with absolute immediacy. According to Bright: “the spirit is quicke, nimble, and of marvelous celerity of motion; the body, slow, dull, and given to reste of it selfe: the spirit the verie hand of the soule: the body & bodily members like flailes, sawes, or axes in the hand of him that useth them” (64). This focus on swiftness, regardless of the shifting association of the terminology, is fundamental to this comprehension of the role time plays within the humoral paradigm. It is especially crucial in expressions of the vehement passions, such as anger and hate, so instrumental to that most popular Renaissance literary obsession, revenge. While Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Aquinas offer complex genealogies for the term, the humoral system handles such emotions through the material paradigm of heat and the corrosive effects its sudden escalation has upon the humors. As Burton observes, “In hot cholerick bodies, nothing so soon causeth madness as this passion of anger …. It diminishes blood, it increases bile …” (1.2.3.9). Bright traces the swiftness of this emotionally damaging content throughout the psychosomatic construct of the humoral body: the spirite of the humour being subtiler, thinner, and hoter than is meete, maketh the apprehension quicker then it should be, and the discretion more hasty, then is meete for the upright deliuery to the hart …: this causeth proneness to anger …. If the humour also with his spirite possess the brayne, then are these passions of longer continuance …. This appeareth plaine in Cholericke persons, or such as are offended where they have no cause in truth, but by mistaking: and where they have cause the vehemency of the apprehension, and the suddenness of the report from the brayne unto the seate of perturbation, inforceth double passion: … then raungeth it into all extremity.(94)

Indeed, as Bright continues, such rage is not limited to choleric persons; twice in one page he stresses that it is through the “processe of time” (103) that melancholy vapors rise from spleen to produce a “spleneticke fogge,” (110–16) which leads within the brain of the affected individual to “an habite of depraved conceit, whereby it fancieth not according to truth: but as the nature of that humour leadeth it, altogether gastely and fearefull” (109). Once manifest, melancholy adust leads “rage, reuenge, and furie, [to] possesse both hart and head, and the whole bodie is caried with that storm” (112), to devastating results. According to Bright, such

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processes lead to hallucinations of various frightful sorts, linking the violence of the humoral drama within the psychosomatic construct of the self to commensurate behaviors without. Burton, too, makes incisive comment on the relationship between time, temperature, and the humors in the context of strong emotion. Of those under the sway of fear, he suggests: “Many lamentable effects this fear causeth in men, as to be red, pale, tremble, sweat, it makes sudden cold and heat to come over all the body, palpitation of the heart, syncope, &c.” (1.2.3.5) and that “It causeth oftentimes sudden madness, and almost all manner of diseases ….” (1.2.3.5). Anger, too, has distinct temporal ramifications, as it “carries the spirits outwards, preparing the body to melancholy, and madness itself: anger is temporary madness …” (1.2.3.9). He continues, tracing the nexus of time, temperature and the humors: “[Rage] over-heats their bodies”; “From a disposition they proceed to an habit, for there is no difference betwixt a madman and an angry man in the time of his fit”; “They are void of reason, inexorable, blind, like beasts & monsters for the time …”; and “If these fits be immoderate, continue long, or be frequent, without doubt they provoke [a protracted or permanent] madness” (1.2.3.9). Tracing the impact of caloric economies as they constitute forms of time within the humoral self, however, suggests the imbricated relationship the humors share as they extend beyond the human form to its environmental circumstances. Part 3: Time and Environment in Humoral Theory Early modern medical theorists confirm that the environmental situation of the humoral subject is always a central concern in analyses of health.49 According to Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, after all, the passions are not mere states of being or ‘internal objects’, rather they comprise, instead, an ecology or a transaction. [The] passions characterize the microcosm’s shifting interaction with a continuously changing macrocosm. Indeed, the liminality of early modern emotions (literal and metaphorical; internal and external) seems evident in the in-between status they possess in certain taxonomies. Not only are they categorized as one of the predominantly environmental [Galenic] ‘non-naturals’ (which include air, exercise and rest, sleep and waking, food and drink, repletion and excretion), but they also act as internal messengers or porters—vehicles that transverse the Cartesian division between physiology and psychology. (18)

Buried in the language of this passage, of course, and of all language of dynamism, is that of time. Terminology such as “Transaction,” “shifting,” 49   From the Avicennian perspective, see, too, Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003) 231–32.

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“changing,” “messengers,” “porters,” “vehicles,” and “transverse” each work as both socially and internally constructed markers of temporalities within the humoral paradigm implicitly alien to us in our post-Cartesian philosophical tradition. Humoral theorists, however, make both metaphorical and literal use of this relationship between self and environment. Thomas Wright, for example, confirms the relationship between time and affect, rhetorically extending the treatment of the subject to the mineral world. He does so by employing a gunpowder metaphor that clarifies in miniature the role suddennesses play within early modern humoralism.50 Drawing upon the metaphor twice, he suggests that: An angry man raiseth brawles, but a patient man appeaseth them after they be raised. And therefore how ungratefull must his company seeme, whose passions over-rule him? and a man had need of an Astrolabe always, to see in what height or elevation his affections are, lest, by casting forth a spark of fire, his gunpowdred minde of a sudden bee inflamed.(6)

The representation of suddenness here indicates not so much a focused interest in the inward drama of spirits and vapors within the humorally constituted individual; rather, the representation is simply the dangerous role kinds of suddenness play upon such selves. That it is done within a narrative framework is telling, in that it reflects so much upon the literary ways in which this model finds homes across a range of narrative generic forms. He continues, drawing on a series of mineral metaphors for human emotion: … here we may deduce a conclusion most certain and profitable, that according to the disposition of the heart, humors, and body, divers sorts of persons be subject to divers sorts of passions, and the same passion affecteth divers persons in divers manners: for, as we see fire applied to drie wood, to yron, to flaxe and gunpowder, worketh divers ways; for in wood it kindleth with some difficultie…; but in gunpowder it is kindeled in a moment, and never can bee quenched till the powder be consumed. Some men you shall see, not so soone angrie … be commonly called flegmatike persons; others you have, soone angrie, soone friended, as those of sanguine complexion, and therefore are commonly called goodfellowes: others be hardly offended, and afterward, with extreame difficulty reconciled, as melancholy men: others are all fiery, and in a moment, at every trifle they are inflamed, and till their hearts be consumed (almost) with choler, they never cease, except they by revenged. (37)

50   Paster has explored the passage for its use of class as a marker in humoral categories against Wright’s stated purpose to explain to Englishmen how to master their passions (Humoring 189–95).

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This rhetorical use Wright employs draws on the mineral world as metaphorical material to describe the passionate world of humans, drawing upon Stoic and Neostoic traditions at work in early modern scientific theory. 51 However, the relationship between the humoral self and its environments is critical in a literal sense, too. The link between the macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of the human is one we see repeatedly in early modern medical texts. The issue has played a central component in what has been called the “Ecology of the Early Modern Passions” in a recent meeting of the SAA,52 and capitalizes on the implicit volatility of the humoral subject. A range of such influences is involved here, such as the influences of sound, color, air, and alcohol. As Sutton observes, “The state of the [Galenic] naturals, the humours and spirits, depended directly on the influences picked up, usually through the blood but also directly through the skin, from climate, environment, nutrition, and emotion” (39). Given the centrality of the caloric to my discussion, I will draw specific focus to such issues. Relating to the dangers posed to human health by the seasons, Stephen Batman’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (1582), a thirteenth-century encyclopedic compendium, directly engages this concept of time, temperature, and the humors. In doing so, he moves quickly from discussion of tempus rerum to tempus corporis, from the assertion that “Nothing is more uncertaine than time” to one he draws from Isidore of Seville, that “Nothing is more changeable than time: and therefore no thing is more perilous to the body.” This focus on time and its impact upon the individual expands this link in a remarkable passage, my second epigraph for this chapter, in which he cites Hippocrates on the effects caloric and temporal volatility causes within bodies. While this discussion evidently conceives of time as seasonal change, thestress in this passage on the unique dangers that the suddenness of caloric increases poses to humoral bodies is made plain: The chaunging of time gendereth most euills. For sodayne chaunging of cold into heate, chaungeth and appayreth [wastes] bodyes: and that is, for that kinde suffereth not sodayne chaungings, as he sayth. Therefore ofte sodaine chaunging of time is cause of sicknesse. Also nothing is more healthfull to the bodye, then is time that is temperate in his qualyties…. If times be in good temperature, as the time asketh, then be good states: and sicknesse come most to good ende in such times.(9.2)

51   I am indebted here to Lara Bovilsky, whose unpublished paper, entitled “‘Stones of Rome’: Political Action and the Mineral Heart in Julius Caesar,” was presented at the 2008 Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Dallas, TX. 52   The session was held in New Orleans and was co-chaired by Sullivan and FloydWilson, with Carla Mazzio as invited respondent. Two collections of essays have come from this seminar: Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), Sullivan and Floyd-Wilson (eds); and Environment and Embodiment, Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan (eds).

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This linkage confirms the crucial nexus that time, temperature, and the humors signifies in early modern humoral theory; it also suggests that the extent to which environmental influences impact this nexus is one worth exploring in some detail. In pre-Cartesian humoral theory, the porous conceptualization of the self that early modern humoral theory propounded suggested that the environment posed stark hazards to health. Galen, for example, cautions on the dangers certain forms of air can pose to corporeal health (17,41). Similarly, in an early modern context, Ambroise Paré, in his Introduction à la chirurgie, notes that “‘If the air is excessively hot, cold, humid, or dry, it alters and changes [altere et change] the temperature of the body itself’.”53 Thomas Walkington, too, observes that qualities of the air can threaten individual health. He notes that the Infection of the Air, as in the extinguishing of some blazing Comet, the eructation of noysom Vapours from the bosom of the Earth, the disastrous constellation, or bad aspect of some malevolent Planet, the damping fumes, that the Sun elevates from bogs, and fennish grounds, the inflammation of the Air by the intense heat of the Sun … this infection causeth our Bodies first to be badly qualified, and tainted with a spice of Corruption, and so consequent our very Souls to be ill-affected.(28)

This figure of bad air acting upon the health of early modern selves is, of course, a commonplace in early modern literature, from Hamlet to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But Walkington’s caution on the dangers heated air poses to such selves continues in a passage in which he explains “how the Mind can be affected with the Air,” observing that it can cause certain habits of mind due to its effects: they are dull-witted, especially by the vehement Heat, which is included in their bodies, which doth inflame their Spirits, thicken their Blood, and thereby is cause of a new gross, more then airy substance, conjoined with the Spirits. For extreme Heat doth generate a gross, adust Choler, which comes to be mixed with Blood in the veins, and that brings a condensation, and a coagulation to the Blood. For their extraordinary Heat, it is apparent by their speedy Concoction … (30)

This attention to caloric economies within an environmental context extends to the suddennesses alcohol poses to such volatile selves, and, perhaps most significantly, to the effects of wine. To read humoral treatises on the effects of wine upon humoral selves is to view the wine we think we know as virtually unrecognizable. Its effects upon humoral bodies were understood to be demonstrably different than we perceive them today, unsurprisingly. While early modern theorists generally agree that wine does have its place in a healthy diet for people of certain humoral dispositions, 53

  Qtd. in Hampton, 278.

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and even can be beneficial, it is helpful to ascertain specifically why and how such writers caution against its use by others of different dispositions. From Aristotle down though the early modern period, medical treatment of wine within the humoral paradigm is thus decidedly complex. In early modern England this complexity stems from the array of ways in which it is freighted with significations simultaneously theological, political, moral, and medical. As an imported item for the early modern English, wine becomes caught up in a host of these and related issues. Theologically, for example, due to its sacramental role in Catholic ritual; politically, from its derivation largely from the Catholic nations of Italy, France, and Spain; morally and medically, its tendency to abuse suggests that it be avoided by (as the Elizabethan “Homily on Gluttony and Drunkenness” indicates) all serve as possible detriments to its deployment in early modern English writing. But for humoral theorists, especially, wine is a special environmental case that poses a unique challenge in the salubrious regulation of the body by the early modern subject, especially due to red wine’s physical resemblance to blood and the humors. Among medical writers, the largest concern at issue in such discussions is the relationship wine plays within the context of time, temperature, and the humors. The jarring influences of the heat and vapors of wines and other alcohols were understood to destabilize the humoral subject in ways that could be uniquely catastrophic.54 As Sutton observes, the “Animal spirits were … susceptible to the spirits of wine, and the aerial spirits which carry melody, thus explaining physiological responses to alcohol and to music” (36). So while there are ample cautions relating to abuse, such as Walkington’s, that “For drinks, we must not like Bowzers carouse Bowl after Bowl to Bachus his Deity, like the Graecians, not use smaller Cups in the beginning of our Banquet, more large and capacious Bowls at the later end. We must not, like Lapithes, drink our selves horn-mad” (47),55 other cautions are more pointed, related specifically to the disposition (age, character) of the drinker. Indeed, due to the innate heat associated with youthful males, Walkington suggests that “a young man in the hot Meridian of his age ought to be abstemious” (49). While wine can while away cares and lead to creative literary ability (51–52), its tendency to abuse leads it to be avoided by all of hot temperaments: “as for a Cholerick man to abstain from all salt, scorched dry meats, from mustard, and 54

  The following works deal with early modern representations and significations of alcohol to varying degrees: Joan Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002); Lynn A. Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); and A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, (ed.) Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Note that none of these deals explicitly with the medical traditions and corporeal drama associated with alcohol’s volatile effect upon humoral selves, which I attempt to convey throughout this study using primary sources. 55   This reference to Ovid’s treatment of the drunken Lapiths in the Metamorphoses.

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such like things, as will aggravate his malignant Humor, all hot drinks & enflaming Wines” (60). In contrast to that of the air—whose deleterious effects move from the macroto the microcosm— the environmental influence of wine extends frequently enough in a recursive process from the macrocosm to the microcosm and back to the macrocosm. Indeed, this pattern is one we shall see throughout this study, especially as it serves as causative for the drunken rebellion of the Phagonians in The Old Arcadia, to be discussed in Chapter 2; in the alcoholic “infirmity” (3.2.41) Michael Cassio demonstrates, and in its relationship to political insurrection in Othello, to be explored in Chapter 3; and the violent struggle between the abstemious Samson and the drunken Philistines in Samson Agonistes, for example, as I shall discuss in Chapter 5. Each depicts the rashness and affected status of groups of individuals as drunkenly motivated, reworking the well-worn connection between the body and body politic. Whatever the means, caloric increases lead to affect in the psycho-physiological apparatus of the humorally constituted body (corporate or individual), leading to corruption within and drastic behavioral effects without. The principle mechanism in each case centers on the processes of time engaged as each of these authors draws on these affections to structural purposes. Burton observes this process of humoral influence as it leads from the individual to the corporate levels: “Look into our Histories, and you shall almost meet with no other subject, but what a company of hare-brains have done in their rage!” (1.2.3.9). Bright, too, observes that triumphant soldiers frequently overstep their bounds and “leese in a moment all they wonne with extreame losse and labour” (73). Time’s role in humoral theory, either as elastic in formulation or as sudden, plays a crucial role in the development of an understanding of how early modern artists pushed beyond the inclusion of mere humoral types in their artistry into an incorporation of the temporal qualities inherent to the humoral self. Representations of such qualities offer mimetic representation of early modern emotional, and hence temporalized, selves, and in doing so, promote narrative interest that is ostensibly realistic to early modern audiences. Following the recent work that demonstrates the inherent construction of the early modern emotions as gendered, classed, and raced, the early modern emotions must also and always be understood as fundamentally and implicitly temporalized, especially as pertains to the subjectivity of temporal experience based upon affective states. Such an understanding brings us back to Romeo’s words in the passage with which we began; for it is within this framework that Romeo’s sentiment can be seen to present a more historically situated view of temporal subjectivity than might at first appear. The very volatility of the wide-ranging signification of the melancholy humor, which both Romeo’s and Leontes’ representations come to exploit—from elastic qualities of temporal experience facilitated by melancholy’s natural form, to the explosive qualities facilitated by its unnatural form—offer early modern artists such as Shakespeare the medically viable psycho-physicality to compose their characters as cogent emotional beings.

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Part 4: Time, Narrative, and the Self The embodied unitary model by which humoral theory conceives of the individual, intriguingly enough, shares an uncanny correspondence with current psychological theories relating to time and the temporality of what they propose as the unitary self. Countering traditional philosophical views which analyze time abstractly within a generally mind-centered, Cartesian construction, contemporary theories propound a view of time that imbricates such explorations of psychic time with, and within, the body. Indeed, counter to William James’ concept of the “specious present,” for example, that time constitutes an endless number of psychic “now”s ranging from 6 to 12 seconds in length, current thinking about memory, especially, positions the self—in terms of the unitary formulation of mind/body—as “inherently temporal.”56 While Heraclitus and Aristotle, among others, observed long ago that time is simply the measure of change, which the medieval and early modern periods have echoed down through the ages, recent theory on subjective temporality explicitly links time and temporal comprehension within the fact of human embodiment. This attention to the human form creates a fundamental, yet productive, ostensible paradox: while change serves as a hallmark of the entropic unfolding of time, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics certainly confirms, constancy—bodily and affective—too, must play a crucial role in the individual’s phenomenological development of the sense of self (213). William Meissner has recently argued that this apparent disjunction is not a paradox at all, for constancy and inconstancy shift and alter in time: one knows oneself as oneself through and within the very processes of time, that is, through the simultaneous constancy and inconstancy of the self. This concept is the hallmark of subjective temporality. Meissner consequently maintains that “the embodied self is the self,” in that “the self endures through time, and … this phenomenon, as we experience it subjectively, provides one of the foundations for the sense of self-continuity and change—our common experience is that bodies both move (change) and endure through time.”(220) Against the varying ways in which philosophers engage the term subjective temporality, from Immanuel Kant through to such twentieth-century thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Edmund Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Alfred Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell, who, while disagreeing profoundly on the matter, tend to consider human temporal consciousness within the context of the objective arrow of time,57 Meissner suggests that the embodied self, in this sense, is implicitly and fundamentally unitary, in that the construct of mind/body mutually formulates a concept of the self that identifies itself within the processes of past, present, and future as a unified entity. Meissner notes that, accordingly, the “temporal experience of the self is not only tied to the body, but the temporality of 56   See William J. Meissner, Time, Self, and Psychoanalysis (Lanham: Jason Aronson, 2007) 40, 220. 57   See Meissner, 11–13.

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the self is the temporality of the body—they are one and the same” (239, italics in original). Jacob A. Arlow, too, observes the unified nature of the self’s relationship to time. In demarcating objective time from subjective, he observes that The self is a time-bound concept. It is the self that is enduring and yet continuously changing. Events in the external world are ordered in terms of sequence and continuity relative to the constancy of the self. The self has a history and it is the self that has a past, present, and future. Time is what we live in. It is the container of our existence … (141).58

This discussion directly raises the issue of the role human memory plays in the subjective experience of time, which for Aristotle and Augustine indicates, simply enough, the recall of items from the past.59 Against the backdrop of change that signifies the unfolding of objective time, in other words, memory comes to serve as a kind of subjective bulwark.60 But the use of such a term, of course, raises what Linda Charnes refers to as the “hoary specter of essentialism” (10). Here we confront the difficulty of discussing time and the self without adopting wholly either the liberal humanist, essentialist model of the self, or a concept of time and the self closer in formulation to what Deleuze and Guittari identify as radically anti-subjective and deterritorialized concept of “becoming.” Intriguingly, the temporal flux and porous embodiment of that self—emotional and otherwise—corresponds in many ways more strongly with the essentialist self Meissner evokes in his examination of subjective temporality than that of Deleuze and Guittari. In a recent work of historicism entitled Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, Garrett Sullivan stresses the embodied nature of both the memory and of forgetting for humoral selves of the early modern period. He suggests, further, that memory takes cues from environmental situatedness. Indeed, he stresses that “memory should be thought of as a fully embodied process that presupposes involvement with the environment” (7), and that “humoral physiology assumes that memory operates in conjunction with, and is affected by, a range of other somatic phenomena” (8). This porous conceptualization of identity means 58   J.A. Arlow, “Emotion, Time, and the Self.” Emotion: Theory, research, and experience. Vol. 5: Emotion, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. (eds) R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990): 133–46. 59   See Meissner, 44. Note as well Meissner’s suggestion that “The argument that the integration of the self is achieved in and through a narrative process implies that the sense of personal continuity involves locating oneself in relation to the past on one hand and to the future on the other. The self-narrative accomplishes this by organizing experience into a continuous history linking the past to the present, and thus providing the basis for anticipation of a foreseeable future” (218–19). 60   Here I tread the well-worn path between a strict historicism, voiced most successfully in Garrett Sullivan’s recent study, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Philadelphia: U Penn P, 2005), and a broader approach to the subject.

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that “memory is both internal and external, cerebral and bodily. In addition, it is a kind of action, one that occurs across body and environment” (11). These concepts raise for me the following issues: can Meissner’s generally essentialist, embodied temporality be compared with the volatile temporalities conceived in humoral psycho-physiology? What is time to the essentialist self? What is the relationship between the essentialist and the humoral self? Can they be reconciled? What might be the process for determining the relationship? Ultimately, the answer to such questions comes down to processes of narrative, and, more specifically, to processes of self-narrative. The uncanny nature of the embodied self as perceived within either a current essentialist or an early modern humoral model centers upon what each model conceives as temporal embodiment, insofar as each relies upon self-narrative to situate the self in time. Here it will be helpful to re-engage Romeo and what I have presented as his historically determined and manifestly embodied representation of both his sadness and associated dilatory temporality. Certainly, any effort to chart representations of affect and their contribution to early modern concepts of time unavoidably raises this issue of essentialism, which has haunted criticism as a byword since the rise of the New Historicism. But where the charge of essentialism has traditionally signified certain kinds of naively unhistoricized treatment of early modern literary characters as real people (“How many children had Lady Macbeth?” as L.C. Knights mocks A.C. Bradley’s brand of essentialist, character-based criticism, in 1933), the definition of essentialism in early modern criticism itself appears to be changing. Indeed, essentialism, as I conceive it, is in the process of coming to mean something quite different based upon analyses of the dynamic unity of the self within the humoral paradigm. In other words, essentialism can mean—is coming to mean—something different than it has in the past, because the very essence that we are uncovering of what an early modern self is in the period is changing. As Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson observe: “the early modern body that grounds social facts is radically labile, prone to biological alterations and lapses from the temperate mean of civility. In this respect it lacks the certain fixedness we are used to in essentialist appeals” (16). In foregrounding the dynamism of humoral theory but coupling it with the dynamism of current conceptualizations of subjective temporality in an ostensibly more stable essentialist framework, we help achieve a more precise understanding of what an early modern self is, and how reading time historically can contribute to that understanding. Fundamental to such representations—both for these literary characters and for actual selves—is the role of self-narrative, the way in which selves formulate and integrate themselves into their lives within the malleable life-stories they create, as John Sutton, David Carr, and Calvin Schrag have observed.61 In order to clarify this concept, for example, Schrag formulates two forms of identity: idem61   See Sutton; David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991); and Calvin Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997).

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identity and ipse-identity. Where idem-identity refers to the self as it moves in time objectively, ipse-identity refers to the self as it interacts with the world subjectively through the maintenance of such a self-narrative. Indeed, “The temporality at issue in the ipse-identity is more like an overlapping of past and future with the present than a serial succession of nows” (Schrag, 36). Conceiving of time in this way, as a narrative temporality, squares the role narrative plays in the situating of the self in time, one that ultimately correlates with Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that story (for Aristotle, of course, dramatic tragedy) poses a beginning, middle, and end. Schrag notes as much when he suggests that Narrative temporality enables the emplotment of the history of the self as a dynamic coming from a past and moving into a future in such a wise that the past and the future figure as indigenous figures of the story of self as it unfolds. And the identity of self in all this consists in the degree to which the self is able to unify its past accomplishments and its future prospects (36–37).

He continues, stressing the fundamental role time plays to narrative, and the role narrative plays in concepts of human time: The self exists as temporalized. Temporality enters into the very constitution of who the self is. Temporality thus need no longer be viewed as an external threat to self-identity, as a coefficient of adversity, as that which ruptures the unity of self by pulverizing it into a flux of changing multiplicities. Narrative temporality enriches rather than impoverishes the self, and the identity of such a temporalized self is not to be mistaken for the abstract and objectivizing identity that equates identity with permanence outside of time. The story of the self is a developing story, a story subject to a creative advance, wherein the past is never simply a series of nows that have lapsed into nonbeing, but a text, an inscription of events and experiences, that stands open to new interpretations and new perspectives of meaning. Correspondingly, the future is not a series of nows that has not yet come into being. The future of narrative time is the self as possibility, as the power to be able to provide new readings of the script that has already been inscribed and to mark out new inscriptions of a script in the making (Schrag, 37, italics in original).62

The integrated way in which concepts of subjective temporality and narrative both produce the self and facilitate the integration of that self within the world, is one made even more explicit in literary forms. This link between the self and narrative is a critical one, in that it ultimately frames subjective forms of temporality within narrative frameworks or structures that correlate human experience with that of narrative fiction. This link is not new: as Frank Kermode wryly observes, “it is 62   This passage is also qtd. in Meissner, 218. Schrag’s analysis on this matter is indispensible, however.

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one of the great charms of books that they have to end” (23); which is true enough. Analogously, of course, all people too must face their own promised ends, and the closing of a narrative system within the context of literary narratives offers itself as far more delightfully conducive to analysis of such emplotments: to precisely what we mean by the end. In a related way, the human experience of time within the construct of narrative is one that centrally involves the role of affective states, as well. As Meissner observes, “We all experience change in our time experience, for the most part in relation to affective states” (38). While he notes the dilation of temporal experience in boredom, and the “distortion of time experience … in states of intense love, fear, or grief” (38, 48), this area is of growing interest in the social sciences. For example, in The Watched Pot, Michael G. Flaherty suggests that affective states consistently manipulate temporal experience. Such temporally inflected emotional states indicate the role concepts of time distortion play in the structure of selfnarratives (for actual people) or for narrative temporality (in literary fictions). Meissner stresses this fundamental role of narrative, suggesting that “Hatred and revenge … in that they require organization of experience on a time or plot line with a beginning, a middle, and an end, that is, [function] on a timeline consisting of past, present, and future” (48). In this way, right out of Aristotle’s Poetics, the incorporation of subjective emotion within self-narrative comes to be directly analogous to the incorporation of emotion within the narrative temporality of literary narratives. The way in which narrative temporality, as Schrag conceives of it, thus distinguishes the nature of subjective temporality among both living individuals (through whatever medical or philosophical paradigm they view themselves) and literary characters is in itself a crucial concept. While this link is surely not new, the historicist reflection it enables as to the various ways in which selves have conceived of themselves in relation to time opens the door to reflection on subjective time as it impacts kinds of early modern narrative. Owing to the ways in which affective forms of subjective temporality find themselves spatialized into narrative forms, it will be worthwhile to pause and consider the roots of this phenomenon,63 which Paul Ricoeur pursues in Time and Narrative, taking as his foundation the ruminations of Augustine and Aristotle. ******* Though a scholarly commonplace in nearly every study of time over the last 1,500 years, Augustine’s famous query in Book 11 of the Confessions is simply unavoidable: “Quid est enim tempus?” [What, then, is time?]. “I know well enough what it is,” he concedes, “provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it

63

  See, for example, Kastan, 7–12, and Meissner, 6.

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is and try to explain, I am baffled.”64 The answer he formulates for this question, and the concept of subjective temporality he methodically introduces, opens a new way of grappling with issues related to time and temporal processes and its impact upon the individual. In his attempt to come to grips with this thing that he is certain exists and yet finds inexpressible, Augustine establishes a way of confronting time and temporal issues which helps clarify questions of temporal unfolding as it relates to the self. In contrast to the Aristotelian concept of time expressed in the Physics, for example, that secular, sublunary time derives from the motion of the bodies in the heavens, and that time is simply the “measure of motion,”65 or of change, as I have discussed above, Augustine counters from biblical and reasoned precedent that even without motion in the heavens, time itself can be seen to flow ineluctably forward (11:23). He establishes this conclusion by formulating a way of discussing time that, in denying the objective existence of past, present, and future of tensed time, foregrounds the role of the individual perceiver in comprehending temporal processes, rather than relying on the motion of outside bodies. In the place of an objective past, present, and future, for example, Augustine offers what he calls three specific forms of subjective time: a “present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times exist in the mind,” he continues, “but nowhere else that I can see” (11:20). This position enables him to assert “I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective,” and finally to conclude that time is ultimately a subjective formation housed in the individual mind alone: “It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time” (11:27). As a response to Aristotle’s Physics, Augustine’s location of time and temporal processes within human consciousness, interestingly enough, actually repositions temporal unfolding as “movement” of a different sort. Augustine muses that temporal unfolding is itself a kind of self-projection, or an extension of the self: “I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself” (11:26), he writes, concluding that all that exists of time revolves around the mind’s cognizance of memory (past), attention (present), and expectation (future), which he identifies as the three-fold present. It is this concept of time that Augustine proposes as the distentio animi, or the extension in time of the mind or soul itself. The existential process of being in time that Augustine outlines is one that narrative theorist Ricoeur characterizes as a fundamental narrative discordance. In Ricoeur’s estimation, such discordance stems from the distance between the desire Augustine invests in his love for the God inhabiting eternity, and Augustine’s temporal estrangement from Him in the network of fallen time that is worldly change. This estrangement has its limit in the eternity Augustine positions as the eternal present, and presence, of God. It is against this discordance of subjective 64   Saint Augustine, Confessions. R.S. Pine-Coffin, (trans.) (New York: Penguin, 1961) Book 11, section 14. 65   Aristotle, De Physica, 5.12, 295. The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, (ed.) (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

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temporality, this distentio animi, that Ricoeur contrasts the presentation of “concordance” which Aristotle propounds in the Poetics in his discussion of the centrality and coherence of plot to the act of poetic creation. As Ricoeur insists, “speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which narrative activity alone can respond.”66 And, indeed, this stress on the significance of coherent narrativity to the discordance of subjective temporality presented by Augustine leads him to assert that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal experience” (Ricoeur, 52; emphasis in original). This insistence on the complementarity of time to narrative, according to Ricoeur, is essential for coming to grips with how humans experience time. He continues: Augustine’s inestimable discovery is, by reducing the extension of time to the distention of the soul, to have tied this distention to the slippage that never ceases to find its way into the heart of the threefold present— between the present of the future, the present of the past, and the present of the present. In this way he sees discordance emerge again and again out of the very concordance of the intention of expectation, attention, and memory. It is to this enigma of the speculation on time that the poetic act of emplotment replies. But Aristotle’s Poetics does not resolve the enigma on the speculative level…. It puts it to work— poetically…. (Ricoeur, 21).

For Aristotle, the composition of the tragic action is of course the pre-eminent poetic activity, with plot (mythos) hierarchically situated, respectively, over character (ethos), thought, diction, spectacle, and music. Here again, there would appear to be tension between Augustine’s discordant exploration on time and the individual, or character in Aristotle’s rubric, and on the concordance Aristotle invests in the emplotment of the poetic act. While the ordering of the poem, the “emplotment,” or mythos, surely takes precedence over character for Aristotle, the plot itself—the unfolding in time of character and event—is to be so composed that it presents the complexity Aristotle outlines in the Poetics, including the temporal narrative features of plot: such as the peripeteia (sudden reversal), which Frank Kermode acknowledges as the falsification of expectation, and the anagnorisis (moment of insight), which Hilary P. Dannenberg identifies as the scene of recognition. The subjective discordance that typifies Augustine’s view of time and temporality thus finds a way in literature of infusing itself within Aristotle’s. These classical models serve as a basis in this study for discussions of subjective time and subjective temporal processes as narrativized in a way that propels us inward to the psyche to facilitate the deployment of time in early modern texts. From 66   Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, (trans.) Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 6.

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Peter Brooks’ concept of “narrative desire,” to Kermode’s “sense of an ending,” to Dannenberg’s “coincidence and counterfactuality,” Aristotle’s concepts of emplotment are thus critical to concepts of narrative in the way in which they grant us a vocabulary to discuss the emplotment in all literary works—and points us back, as well, to the social sciences. For emplotment—time and narrative— finds a crucial home in more than just examples of literary fictions. Indeed, it also structures that integrated arena which relies so heavily upon both self-narrative and narrative temporality: psychoanalysis. ******* Jacques Lacan once reportedly acknowledged the “need” or “exigency” that led him to the formulation of objet a as object / cause of desire. His answer: it is about time. As Jason B. Jones observes, “This witty response discloses an important insight into Lacan’s re-reading of Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis, in its metapsychology and its clinical orientation, is fundamentally a theory of temporality and history.”(1)67 A number of recent studies have drawn focus to the way in which psychoanalysis handles these matters, which generally stress time’s pervasive complexity in the work of Sigmund Freud and of Lacan.68 Such studies engage time as it shapes the self through a range of ways that ultimately highlight, for Freud, his elucidation of time’s synchronic representation in dreams early in his career; his developmental theories of the libido and related concepts of fixation and regression; the deferred action of Nachträglichkeit; the influence of primal fantasies in ordering experience; and in repression and repetition compulsion. For Lacan, time impacts the ordering of psychic experience and the scansion of the analytic session, placing greatest emphasis, as we shall see, on what he calls “punctuation” and the logic of the “moment of concluding.” While both Freud’s and Lacan’s theories generally attempt to engage aspects of temporality through clarification of the nature of time experience and its implications for the functioning of the self, the narrative implications of Lacan’s interest in the subject is one that I perceive to be most fruitful for this study. Lacan’s “return to Freud,” however, centering as it does on a specific feature of Freud’s engagement with the topic of time and temporality, necessitates clarification of the precise nature of Freud’s groundwork on the topic. Freud’s axiomatic assertion, for example, that the “unconscious knows nothing of death, and that the unconscious knows no time, is timeless” (Forrester, 174–75) seems 67

  See Jason B. Jones, “The Time of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis and the Past.” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism. 14.3 (May 2004). 68   See André Green, Time in Psychoanalsyis: Some Contradictory Aspects. Andrew Weller, (trans.) (London: Free Association Books, 2002); Meissner; Jones; Arlow; and Forrester.

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paradoxical, even nonsensical, at first blush. When Jones stresses, for example, that “the time of psychoanalysis is neither developmental nor experiential, but retroactive” (5), he zeroes in on Freud’s formulation of the term Nachträglichkeit, the ‘deferred action’ that signifies the relationship of past events to the present. This model of Nachträglichkeit comes to dictate that the work of analysis is the retroactive exploration of traumata already completed: a recursive process that clarifies the status of the self at present from events drawn from the past. In this retroactivity, Freud’s interest in time may be seen to lie in the way the psyche draws on the past in order to make sense of the present. Fundamental to such a retroactive temporal move is the a posteriori nature of truth, wherein, as André Green puts it, “The truth has to be constructed even more than reconstructed” (31) and serves as a “reticulate relation” (36). What is particularly significant in these matters is the recognition that, for Freud, there can be no such thing as purely subjective time, since individual experience is implicitly illusory. Ultimately, as Green explains, for Freud “The super-ego is an orientator of time.” Indeed: The temporal organization of the super-ego is amongst the most complex, since it is rooted in that of the id (itself impregnated with time that is unlinked to individual experience by means of supposed hereditary factors) and results from a split in the ego. The structure of the super-ego is a vehicle for influences which ensure the transmission of cultural traditions and religions. In short it can be said that individual history is dominated at the heart of the ego by the twin determinisms of the biological heredity of the id and the cultural heredity of the super-ego. All this goes to show that it was impossible for Freud to accept the idea of temporality linked to individual experience alone; and, even less, that the idea the latter could be homogenous in nature, since it has to dialectise the combined effects of nature and culture (24).

We would do well to note that the Freudian temporal drama of the self Green posits here involves a structuring of time that is entirely a mind-centered history. While concepts I shall discuss subsequently, especially in Chapter 4 on The Winter’s Tale, such as nostalgia and repetition compulsion, draw upon this model of temporality, it is crucial to observe the ways in which this model of temporality yields to a more complicated vision for Freud over the course of the twentieth century, as he considers the roles of developmentalism and process. Like so much of Freud’s thought, in other words, the concept of the timelessness of the unconscious shifts, alters, and changes in time.69 69

  Meissner ably traces the evolution of Freud’s views on time and the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), for example, Freud observes that unconscious mental processes are timeless: “This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (qtd. in Meissner 231). Meissner traces the origin of this concept (via P.J. Boschan)

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The principal shift in Freud’s perception of how time structures the self involves that moment in which his focus on dreams led to his interest in the developmental theory of sexuality. Where his work in the 1890s, for example, positions the timeless reservoir of the unconscious, the subsequent developmental theory to which Freud turns his attention has its focus in the domain of sexuality, along with its traditional ordering of time. As Green puts it, this theory “follow[s] the curve of the life-cycle …” (13)—similar in some respects to Jacques’s Seven Ages speech in As You Like It—involving birth, maturation, life, senescence, and death. This emphasis on the body—and its “embodied ego”—is a significant departure from the view that typifies Freud’s earlier work. Such a concept is productively adopted by other theorists, notably by Melanie Klein, who identifies a range of ways of thinking about nursing, weaning, and the breast that involve the principle of delayed gratification. This concept locates modes of periodicity with desire in the relationship between the infant and the mother’s breast, which, as Meissner puts it, involves the “shift from intrauterine to extrauterine conditions as the prototype of periodicity” (20). But it is to the unconscious that psychoanalysis seems to be repeatedly drawn. Green, for example, draws on the term heterochrony to discuss the drama Freud envisions between time and the psyche, in that the heterogeneous and diachronic temporality of the psyche reflects the simultaneous flux of cathexes back and forth from the temporality of consciousness and the timelessness of the unconscious (162). While Green posits this alternatively as a “tree of time” and as “fragmented time,” its usefulness as a model for explicating the self will be made clear in Chapter 4, on The Winter’s Tale. Equally helpful in this chapter will be the nostalgic temporality associated with repetition compulsion. For Lacan, on the other hand, time is still more complex in either of its symbolic or imaginary functions, and in his application of temporality to the analytic session. Lacan, after all, departed from the International Psycho-Analytic Association (IPA) in 1963 over his use of variable-length analytic sessions; in doing so, he fundamentally left over the issue of time. He addresses the topic explicitly in two papers, entitled “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certitude” (1945) and “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), both of which locate concerns related to time and temporality firmly at the center of his practice.70 In the first, Lacan formulates a sophism I discuss in full in Chapter 3, on Othello, in which he identifies in punctuation, in waiting, and the act—in the back to Freud’s Draft M, written in 1897, and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), where Freud asserts, in a footnote added in 1907, that “The unconscious is quite timeless.” But Freud eventually comes to doubt the assertion. By 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties, he refers to “the vicissitudes of the repressed” that he “suspect[s]” do not remain “unaltered” (qtd. in Meissner 231). 70   See “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” Écrits (trans.) Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006) 197–268.

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instant of the glance, the time for understanding, and the moment of concluding—a range of ways of engaging the textures of subjective temporality, the Heideggerian being-in-time.71 In the second, he applies these concepts of time to the analytic session. While Freud identifies the significance of time (especially of lateness, and of missed appointments) to the analytic setting, Lacan’s exploration of time and its meaning within psychoanalysis is central. His formulation of and justification for the abbreviated analytic session, for example, remains a highly charged issue in psychoanalytic circles. For Lacan, the practice developed as a method of distinguishing between logical time, which reflects that of the unconscious, and chronological time, which, as driven by the clock, is implicitly “incongruent” with the “logic of the unconscious.”72 Lacan theorizes that preventing the analysand from knowing the termination limit of the session denies him or her the ability to exert control over the narrative displayed in the session. Lacan felt the rush to termination, in other words, to be ultimately a hindrance to the productivity of the session: hence the seemingly random, abrupt termination of the session by the analyst. The severe manner in which he sometimes engaged these abbreviated sessions—in which, toward the end of his career, the sessions apparently lasted bare minutes in length, and at least one time in which he was receiving a haircut— clearly continues to ruffle feathers. Meissner, for example, is disgusted by them: he insists that simply because the idea is provocative “that does not seem to be a good reason for jettisoning standard practices arbitrarily or without counting consequences” (84, n.13). He suggests that the variability of the termination point in the abbreviated session results in, or at least tempts, a drama of transference and countertransference between analyst and analysand. Such manipulation of time and temporality thus has its own reasons for integration in interpersonal relationships, as we shall see in Chapter 3, on Othello. While acknowledging these transference issues, John Forrester suggests that the “Lacanian period of waiting deprives the clock of its senselessly objective tyranny” (170). The privileging Lacan grants the experience of time, the freeing of discourse from the artificial structuring of the clock, facilitates the antidevelopmentalism he perceives at the root of Freud’s concept of temporality in psychoanalysis. As Forrester suggests, for Lacan, there is no process (204), and there is no preordainment (205). In other words, the timelessness of the unconscious finds representation in discourse that is not bound by the developmental, nor in any sense possessed by a teleological end. The control that the analyst enforces in shaping the end, just like that of the artist, we might add, creates distinct narrative results. To that end, psychoanalytic strategies can be employed fruitfully in this regard. Early modern selves, after all, to historicize Calvin Schrag’s position, too, are temporal constructs. Unitary, mind/body concepts that these selves are, 71   For a solid discussion of these issues, see especially John Forrester, “Dead on Time” The Seduction of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 168–218. 72   See Meissner, 83, note 13.

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we would do well to engage them with the tools at hand. The readings I offer in this study each engage historicized modes of early modern time, which the humoral paradigm of emotional and medical knowledge imbricates and, hence, narrativizes, through attention to the salient features in humoral theory relating to time and its caloric economies. But that is only my baseline, as I have suggested. The mimetic representations of the vehement passions in early modern literary characters draws upon a volatility that early modern writers found dramatically useful, and consequently employed in shaping their correlatively mimetic literary narratives. Indeed, as we shall see, early modern literature captures these moments quite vividly. Overview I have chosen the works I engage in this study for a few key reasons: first, they are widely familiar to readers with an interest in early modern English literary culture; second, each has been singled out over the centuries for the problematic nature of its narrative design. I pursue these works, then, in an attempt to throw new light on canonical works. Chapter 2, for example, “‘The accident of an instant’: Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney’s Old Arcadia,” explores a tremendously influential prose romance of the 1580s in what amounts to its only complete form. The chapter unpacks Sidney’s central trope, reason vs. passion, and in doing so examines the relationship between caloric economies in the work and subjective forms of temporal experience. Drawing on Hilary P. Dannenberg, among other theorists of narrative, I argue that beyond these forms of subjective character temporalities, Sidney imparts narrative retroactivity in the complicated narrative effects Gynecia’s potion brings about, linking them with the passionate volatility of the poisons in the work and the fraught representation of the melancholy female in early modern prose romance. Drawing upon Luke Wilson’s concept of “use-against-design” in the adaptive weaponry of the Phagonian rebels, I extend Wilson’s legal concept to potion with which she kills Basilius, the potion whose history as a gendered gift from Gynecia’s female family line is revealed in a sudden reversal in the work’s rush to termination. The gendering of this gift signifies it as crucial to the competing claims for identity that facilitate the relationship of the text within the topical scenario of the political rustication under which Sidney wrote the work. This focus on narrative retroactivity in Chapter 2, and the rush to termination that precipitates The Old Arcadia’s denouement, leads to my next literary engagement in Chapter 3, entitled “‘Very now’: Time and the Intersubjective in Othello.” My analysis squares Iago’s horrific achievement in the play as one that hinges upon his manipulation of narrative time in the passionate realm of the volatility, rousing, and rupture he effects among its male characters. The chapter begins with analysis of the “double time” conundrum that has haunted discussions of the play’s structure for three centuries, identifying in Iago’s stagemanaging of patience and action in

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the context of the humoral temporal dynamics at work in the play a remarkable correlation with Lacan’s concept of waiting and the act, which I engage through a careful reading of his explanation of logical time and intersubjectivity in his 1945 essay, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” Similarly, Chapter 4, “‘Not a jar o’th’ clock’: Time and Narrative in The Winter’s Tale,” engages Lacan’s concept of the temporal ramifications of subject-formation as a “breach in discourse” insofar as it helps explain the unique narrative structuring of the play itself. Contrary to scholars who insist Leontes’ affected state is instantaneous and thus unworthy of analysis, my study explores the way in which the outwardly competitive social interaction between Leontes and Polixenes in 1.2 is sustained, through the use of humoral vocabularies, in the equally competitive emotional interaction between the two. By locating the explosive properties of the melancholy humor within a narrative time that structures the unique narrative design of the play itself, Shakespeare represents Leontes’ rage as a temporalized event with catastrophic results for that structure as a whole. Turning from the early Jacobean period in Chapters 3 and 4, my final chapter engages John Milton’s exploration of depression and explosive affectivity in his work, Samson Agonistes. Chapter 5, “‘Spirit of phrenzie’: Time/ Narrative Temporality in Samson Agonistes,” interrogates the much-debated “rousing motions” Samson articulates at the close of this brief epic (closet drama), exploring the way in which these motions signify material processes that implicitly question but fail to foreclose upon the renovated status of the hero in his final act: his suicidal slaughter of the Philistines. Drawing on the “like against like,” purgative patterning Milton foregrounds in his play’s preface, I show that Samson’s crescendo of what his father Manoa calls “revenge” against the Philistines is paralleled by the most extreme of the Philistines’ comparably drawn desire to perform the same acts against him; by exploiting a humoral lexicon that subtly pairs Samson’s motions with the corporeal effects of the Philistines’ drunken frenzy, Milton ultimately scrutinizes the moral value of Samson’s final act. Examination of Milton’s refusal to abjure humoralism as it shapes both plot and character in this poem, published in 1671, serves as a way to conclude this study. The waning of the humoral theory as serious science in England is of course well under way by this time, with William Harvey’s publication of the revolutionary Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628), translated into English as On the Circulation of the Blood (1649), which was a critical nail in the coffin for the humoral theory. What I demonstrate, however, is that Milton relies on the humoral theory to a marked degree in his representation of the classical tradition of the melancholy hero. But more than this, I suggest that Milton’s incorporation of humoral explosiveness in Samson Agonistes permits him to construct a classical narrative structure for the poem that relies upon such volatility even as humoralism itself outlives its medical usefulness and explanatory power. As the Royal Society takes precedence in the Restoration Age, Milton finds himself in some ways a literary dinosaur even as he becomes, symbolically at least, a central figure in what would come to be called the new science.

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Surely this explanation of what I have chosen to include in this study does not begin to explain those texts which I do not. While forms of emotional crisis and intriguing narrative structures pervade the city comedies of Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, and others; in addition to the epic poetry of the Faerie Queene, of Paradise Lost, and of Paradise Regained among other works; and numerous examples of Renaissance drama—in Shakespearean drama alone certainly ranging from The Merchant of Venice to Richard II, and from Macbeth, perhaps most glaringly, to Hamlet—again and again, however, I have returned to the works I do for the exemplary ways in which they engage this topic. In other words, while my argument can be extended in various ways, these chapters offer new ways of making sense of the role of the relationship between temporality and affect in early modern English literature. The arc of this study moves from works I trace with a demonstrable interest in humoralism from the 1570s and ends with the fading of the applicability of humoralism to medical and character composition in the 1670s, affected by the development of observation-driven science within a post-Cartesian intellectual climate, and the ultimate rise, in the literary sphere, of the novel.

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Chapter 2

“The accident of an instant”:Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney’s Old Arcadia

Let him drink this, whom long in arms to fold Thou dost desire, and with free pow’r to hold.

Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia serves as a sustained examination of the vicissitudes of human emotion in the context of a prose romance. The manner in which these emotions manifest themselves in Sidney’s various literary characters—affected as they are with a range of full-blown emotional states such as desire and guilt, love and jealousy, joy and sadness—centers to a remarkable degree upon the thermal. In starkly material terms, Sidney’s creative fictions draw upon sudden escalations in corporeal temperature as the cause for a host of emotional significations demonstrated by his richly affected characters. Grounded as a commonplace in the classical and medieval periods, and certainly a poetic cliché in the literary traditions established by writers such as Ovid, Virgil, and Petrarch, on the one hand, and as serious science in the medical traditions associated with early modern humoral theory on the other, this link between emotion and caloric economies pervades Sidney’s literary works. Sonnet 16 of Astrophil and Stella, for example,   Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia). Katherine Duncan Jones, (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 204. The Old Arcadia is the name officially given to the five-Book text Sidney completed in 1580, which circulated in manuscript and was first published in 1926. The New Arcadia, first published in 1590, consists of Sidney’s elaborate revision of the Old Arcadia, a revision which he ceased working on, mid-sentence, well into Book 3. This revised portion of the text was subsequently yoked with the ending of the last three Books of the Old Arcadia, and published as one text in 1593. In 1598, a composite text of the Arcadia was published, in which character names were standardized to maintain consistency between the two versions, and this text remains in print under the title The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Maurice Evans, (ed.) (London: Penguin Group, 1987). This chapter primarily grapples with the Old Arcadia, fundamentally because it alone offers what amounts to a complete text of Sidney’s tale. As will become apparent, I do, however, gesture toward elements of the New Arcadia for clarity, as the need arises. For a contrast between the Old and New Arcadias, see Robert Eril Levine, A Comparison of Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974).    See Sidney, Old Arcadia 197. 

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presents a speaker who, in pondering his unrequited love, refers to a hypothesized lover’s “boiling sprites” (3) and “restless flames” (5), then comes to the witty conclusion that love works in the speaker still more fervently as a poison: “I now have learn’d Love right, and learn’d even so, / As who by being poisond doth poison know” (13–14). Similarly, sonnet 56, too, confronts desire in an explicitly humoral context, in which the speaker denounces in an apostrophe the dilatory, “lead’n counsels” (7) of “Patience” (1): What, dost thou thinke I could ever take In thy cold stuffe a flegmatike delight? No, Patience, if thou wilt my good, then make Her come, and heare with patience my desire, And then with patience bid me beare my fire.

(10–14)

In contrast to the elastic nature of the subjective temporal experience he associates with unrequited love, the speaker pleads to a personified Patience for immediate access to his lover. Here the speaker situates such desire as an unfortunate caloric discrepancy, seeking as he does to sate the fire of his longing by countering the chillness and delay he associates both with patience and the phlegmatic humor. While such wit surely relies upon the banality of love as firing the passions, and upon delay as emotionally depressive and cooling, Sidney’s integration of corresponding temporalities within this caloric economy is one he adopts in his later works to narratological ends. The Old Arcadia, for example, consistently characterizes love by imbricating these caloric and temporal elements, which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, play such a critical role within the humoral paradigm. Sidney explicitly sets his fiction in an environment conducive to extremes of emotion, in a geographical context he typifies as “those hot countries,” where amorous passion rules through “flames of love” generated through “hot desire,” “envenomed heat,” “poisonous heats,” the “tyrannical fire of lust,” and emotions “kindled with an unwonted fire” (OA 42, 83, 81, 107, 97, 265, 41). The suddenness of these emotions is notable too in that love repeatedly strikes Sidney’s characters as a “sudden motion,” with a “sudden violence,” and as a “sudden fit” (OA 16, 37, 83). In the throes of her protracted jealousy, rage, and guilt, Gynecia, especially, as wife to Duke Basilius, evinces an array of early modern symptoms typified by these sudden rousings in what Cleophila notes as the “boiling mind of Gynecia,” in her “perplexed mind,” through the “kindl[ing of] the violent coals of her passion,” and the “fiery hells” of her illness (OA 81); upon first viewing Cleophila, Gynecia reveals, as well, a “sudden astonishment,” “sudden sickness,” and a “sudden fit” (OA 82, 83). Such psycho-physiological manifestations of desire, linking thermal escalations with temporal instaneity, thus suffuse the work. But these representations of the vehement passions in women are especially fraught in early modern culture.

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Gwynne Kennedy explores such representations of the passions in early modern females. Her study, Just Anger, pursues the topic across a range of texts—medical, lexicographic, theological, and philosophical—that contrast depictions of female emotion with the male. She cites Thomas Wilson, for example, who writes in The Art of Rhetorique: “When we heare one saie such a man swelled, seeing a thing against his minde, we gather that he was then more then halfe angry. Again, when we heare one say, such a woman spites fire, we gather straight that she is a devil.” In her analysis of such a position, Kennedy suggests that the discrepancy Wilson and other writers posit in explaining anger’s connotations for men and for women hinges, first, on whom early modern (male) theorists entitle to feel certain kinds of emotion; and second, upon whom these theorists permit to control interpretation of such displays. In each case, it is the political subjugation of early modern women that guides representations of their emotion. As Helkiah Crooke observes, among a host of other theorists she cites on the matter: “[T]he passion of Anger, we many of us know by woefull experience to bee quicker and more vigorous in woman then in man, for they are easily heated and upon very sleight causes” (272). Indeed, where theorists such as Crooke masculinize, and, hence, ennoble rage, they feminize, and, hence, diminish the worth of anger (276). The gendering of the vehement passions in the period consequently tends to center on the male derision of female emotion, in which male discussion of female “Anger is a constant reminder of women’s presumed inferiority with repercussions beyond the emotional realm, for it also reinforces assumptions about moral, physical, and intellectual limitations” (Kennedy, 4). As I shall detail below, this concept dovetails with Juliana Schiesari’s analysis of the gendering of melancholia during the period: Schiesari details the way in which depressed men are ennobled while women with similar symptoms are diagnosed as merely either hysterical or depressed. While The Old Arcadia is notably not immune to such characterizations of female emotion (Philanax notes of suspicion, for example, that we should “Leave women’s minds, the most tuned that way of any …” [7]), the gender indeterminacy that pervades characterization in The Old Arcadia makes the issue far more complex. Amid the cross-dressing antics of effeminized males, the martial valor of pseudo-Amazon warriors, and the sexual pursuits of a randy old man played off the tender earnestness of virginal young maidens—one of whom in frustration pleads to her cross-dressing lover: “is there some third sex left you into which you can transform yourself?” (206)—Gynecia’s exquisite passion stands out, perhaps paradoxically, in The Old Arcadia as uniquely vexing and vexed. Ranging from the bitter jealousy and anger she displays at her inability to secure the affections of Pyrocles (Cleophila) over his desire for her daughter, Philoclea, to the suicidal   Qtd. in Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2000), 4.    See Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia:a Description of the Body of Man, Together with the Controversies and Figures Thereto Belonging, (London: W. Iaggard, 1616). 

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expressions of guilt Gynecia relates to her apparent agency in the “death” of her husband, her passion is indeed marked to the extreme. In locating these passions within this 35-year-old woman, however, Sidney offers in Gynecia a uniquely powerful, though consequently problematic, example of female melancholia in early modern literature; this melancholic subjectivity is equally bound up with competing claims to identity that ultimately center on the role and function of the passions themselves within a world governed by an ethical ideal Sidney identifies in the Defense as “well doing and not of well knowing onely.” Sidney’s intimate association of Gynecia with her sleeping potion, I argue, permits him to stress her role as the character at the heart of the work. The rival histories the narrator offers for this potion (given in contradictory accounts) traces back either through her father to the kings of Cyprus, or through three generations of her female family line—connecting in the latter tradition, at least, what the text presents as aggressive female pursuit of sexual power with the destabilization of male political strength. Just as the ambiguous words of Apollo’s oracle early in the romance ultimately prove themselves true, the words on the potion’s bottle, likewise, prophetically demonstrate the facility with which the fluid will work upon Basilius; in doing so, the potion comes to play a central role in framing the plot of the work. Adapted directly from Aristotle’s concept of mythos, Sidney’s strategy of emplotment squares the potion’s utility within the legal concept of suddenness that Luke Wilson has identified in early modern courts of assize, which distinguish cases of premeditated murder from unpremeditated homicide by analysis of the weapons used to commit such killings. This chapter will draw on Wilson’s discussion of the use of inapt weaponry in The Old Arcadia to help situate the literary uses to which Sidney applies this potion. Accordingly, it will explore the way in which Sidney’s representation of Gynecia comes to embody a crucial function in the work: in her various roles as wife, daughter, and mother, and, in a narrative sense, by means of the sleeping potion she wields which precipitates what I demonstrate to be a crisis of genre for The Old Arcadia as a whole. Early Modern Potions Perhaps the central event in the plot of The Old Arcadia involves Gynecia handing to her husband, Basilius, the potion that he drinks off at a gulp, swooning swiftly to what appears to be his death. Over his wife’s objections, Basilius tastes the liquid, finding it “not unpleasant to his palate …. But within a while that from   See Sidney, Defense, 92. Sidney remarks that “the ending end of all earthly learning being vertuous action” (92), the poet offers, as it were, a “medicine of Cherries” to inculcate that goodness in the reader (102).    See Luke Wilson, “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, (eds) (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 

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his stomach the drink had delivered to his principal veins his noisome vapours … [his knees buckled, and] with pang-like groans and ghastly turning of his eyes, immediately all his limbs stiffened and his eyes fixed.” (OA 241–42) Having failed to anticipate the potion’s “sudden overthrow” (242) of Basilius’ constitution, Gynecia’s response at witnessing the death of her husband is fear, sorrow, and a guilty desire for her own death. We had first learned of this potion only some 40 pages before, where Sidney’s narrative offers a history for it that claims its possession by “the kings of Cyprus as a thing of rare virtue” (197). Gynecia, it seems, had been carrying the liquor home after the bed trick in which she had been duped by the Amazon Cleophila into sleeping with her own husband, even as her husband had been deceived into sleeping with her (OA 194–96). Preparing for her much-anticipated, late-night rendezvous with Cleophila, Gynecia had earlier that night procured from her closet a bottle of gold, upon which down along were graved these verses: ‘Let him drink this whom long in arms to fold / Thou dost desire, and with free pow’r to hold.’ [The bottle] had been … given to her by her mother when she being very young married to her husband of much greater age, her mother (persuaded it was of property to force love with love’s effects) had made a precious present of it to this her well beloved child. [Gynecia] took most part of this liquor, putting it into a fair cup all set with diamonds— for what dare not love undertake, armed with the night and provoked with lust? (OA 197)

The stated effects of this “precious present” upon an aged man—to “force love with love’s effects”—obliquely suggests at this point in the narrative that we treat the potion as a sort of early modern form of the erectile-enhancing drug Viagra, similar to the “ypocras, clarree, and vernage / Of spices hoote” which Geoffrey Chaucer’s aged January quaffs on his wedding night in The Merchant’s Tale, “t’encreessen his corage.” But the drink Basilius imbibes, Sidney’s narrator insists, is one whose history, mysterious as it may be in the rival histories the narrator eventually comes to offer, accounts it a distilled essence of the power and efficacy of female desire: “Let him drink this,” the words engraved on the bottle say, “whom long in arms to fold / Thou dost desire, and with free pow’r to hold.” Stephanie Chamberlain shrewdly observes that Gynecia had evidently seen no need “to use the substance earlier in their marriage,” which “would seem to undercut any notion that Gynecia ever actively seeks Basilius’s affection.” The circumstances in which Gynecia   See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale. The Riverside Chaucer. Larry D. Benson, (ed.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 153–68.    Indeed, it is an “unknown potion,” whose effects “had been received rather by tradition to have such a quality than by any approved experiment” (OA, 197).    See Stephanie Chamberlain, “Wife and Widow in Arcadia: Re-Envisioning the Ideal,” College Literature 29.2 (2002) 93. Note, as well, Robert Burton’s caution on the 

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reluctantly gives her husband the potion involves her explanation, the narrator insists, of what she understands the properties of the potion truly to be (242). Accordingly, Basilius’ swoon as a result of drinking this “unknown potion” (242) may perhaps best be understood as the result of an explosive amorous agent upon his dangerously volatile, aged male body. The point is that the reader, pharmacologically speaking, does not yet—cannot yet—recognize it is a sleeping potion. Basilius’ “death,” at this point in the narrative, thus appears to derive in a sense from the effects too much too suddenly of an ostensibly good thing. Potions and poisons of various sorts, to be sure, play a critical role throughout the literature of early modern England. The term potion in the period tends to denote any liquid or liquor used to bring about various psychosomatic effects, either to an affected individual or to an affected group. Such fluids might better be understood as distilled versions of environmental contaminants, and are often stored handily in vials or bottles and administered with due volition by one body to, or into, another. The literature of the period, of course, runs rife with some notable examples of potions: from the “leprous distilment” 10 Claudius pours in his brother Hamlet’s ear to usurp him of life, wife, and crown in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to the liquor stored in a bottle mysteriously marked with the letter M that facilitates the virginity test in Thomas Middleton and John Rowley’s The Changeling; from Barabas’ “poppy and cold mandrake juice” (5.1.82) in Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, perhaps even to the wine that enables the drunken, religious frenzy of the Philistines in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Among sleeping potions—which of course play such central roles in Sidney’s work—we can observe the roles they play in a range of contemporary drama: in Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire; John Day’s Law Tricks; John Dekker’s Match Me in London; Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; and, of course, perhaps most famously in his Romeo and Juliet.11 It is quite evident too, however, that we can run into trouble when we try to refine too narrow a definition for the term Renaissance potion. As in these examples, Sidney’s Old Arcadia suggests that an important distinction would appear to lie in attempting to distinguish the magical potion from the everyday. Indeed, the seemingly fantastical properties accorded to everyday potions in the early modern period stem from the specific effects potions were understood to inflict upon volatile, humoral selves as perceived by contemporary medical theorists. These potions, in other words, frequently enough subject of marriages between younger wives and older husbands: “For this cause is most evident in old men, that are cold and dry by nature, and married to those full of juice, to young wanton wives[…]. How should it otherwise be? Old age is a disease of itself, loathsome, full of suspicion and fear […]. All women are slippery, often unfaithful to their husbands […] but to old men most treacherous” (3.3.1.2) 10   From Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.64. 11   For an intriguing discussion of this issue, and this list of works, in Renaissance drama, see Tanya Pollard, “A Thing Like Death: Shakespeare’s Narcotic Theater,” in Drugs and Theater In Early Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).

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effect transformations to the passions that tap directly into medical theories of the period. As we saw in Chapter 1, the effects that alcohol was understood to have on the body and the emotions in the period are complicated at best. Indeed, the influence that certain kinds of alcohol were understood to effect upon early modern selves within this system is a jarring one, which stems from the sudden influence the heat associated with such alcohols was understood to impress upon humors that were themselves conceived to be terrifically susceptible to caloric increases. Such heat was understood to corrupt the humors, producing vapors that ascended to the brain, producing drunkenness.12 The dangers these drinks pose to human subjects hinge largely on the suddenness with which they impact the body through its humors and organs, and thus the spirits and the soul. Note that the descriptions I offer in Chapter 1 merely reflect the effects everyday potions were understood to cause in early modern subjects, which we witness in the drunken violence of The Old Arcadia’s Phagonian rebels. The effects magical potions might manifest, in contrast, would presumably need to outperform effects such as these. Such an understanding, however, relies on a specific assumption of the ways in which subjective identity functions in the world of early modern texts. For the characters in The Old Arcadia, identity appears to be shaped by two competing impulses: first, Sidney’s concern with the body’s liminal spaces traces the typical early modern fascination with masks, with the demarcation of outward show from inward truth, which finds expression in the cross-dressing which Pyrocles and Musidorus adopt, for example— by gender and by class, respectively—; and second, Sidney complements this trope in The Old Arcadia through the studied incorporation of material hinging on contemporary theories of embodiment and emotion. The first system generally relies on the self-fashioning, to adopt Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase, which Sidney’s characters actively pursue in this work; the second involves the more recent turn to humoral embodiment characterized by the work of Garrett Sullivan, Gail Paster, and Mark Breitenberg. These differing paradigms—while certainly not mutually exclusive—nevertheless yield a fruitful tension within which we may investigate Sidney’s textual representations of subjective identity, in general, and forms of psychosomatic instability, in particular. One way in which self-fashioning finds its distinct flavor in The Old Arcadia is in terms of its representations of gender. For example, when Pyrocles transforms himself outwardly into an Amazon in order to woo Philoclea, he initially horrifies his friend, Musidorus, for whom one’s outward bodily presentation registers necessarily as a sign of one’s inward state (OA 18). Indeed, as a result of his 12   It is to be avoided, as Barrough in his 1596 The Method of Physic says, because it “fill[s] the braine with vapours, and that so much the more (as Galen sayd) if the braine be hote by nature….” (1.10). As Robert Burton explains in The Anatomy of Melancholy, the danger such strong drinks pose to the health of the subject lies in all “overhot, compound, strong thick drinks.… For many times the drinking of wine alone causeth” such illnesses (1.2.2.1).

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duplicitous role-playing, Pyrocles must take pains to vow his essential masculinity to Musidorus in spite of his woman’s habit (OA 21), stressing that his outward transformation is ultimately justifiable in the pursuit of his particular goal. Because love itself serves as a “woman-maker,” Pyrocles insists he can and in effect must become one in outward form (OA 17–18). This adopted mask of effeminacy thereby offers the form necessary to meet the demands of his specific audience through a manner in many ways just as calculating as any Castiglione or Machiavelli might recommend.13 Indeed, while wearing female garb as Cleophila, Pyrocles is consistently identified by the narrator as “she.” Sidney illustrates the relative merits of Pyrocles’ transformation by subsequently illustrating Musidorus’ own transformation through a similar process when he takes on “shepherdish apparel”14 as Dorus. In order to effect their ends, these two characters accordingly self-fashion distinct outward selves with which both the narrator and the reader ineluctably play along. But concepts of gender in The Old Arcadia also take direction from theories of embodiment, and thus tap into contemporary medical theories. The potion’s apparent effect upon Basilius, for example, hinges on a concept of psychosomatic volatility of the aged, early modern male that has important bearing on the construction and representation of subjective identity presented in Sidney’s work as a whole. Working off the humoral commonplace that increase of age signifies a diminishment in vital heat, for example, Cleophila taunts the love-struck Basilius that “age cooleth the blood” (156). Doing so leads Basilius to retort hollowly that his “age is not without vigor” (156) and that he desires the “assuaging of [his] heat, and enjoying of [her] excellencies” (101). Readers had earlier overheard him relate a poem that ran as follows: Let not old age disgrace my high desire, Old wood inflamed doth yield the bravest fire When younger doth in smoke his virtue spend. (83)

Basilius’ metaphor here confirms how early modern psycho-physiology tends to view the human body as an implicitly volatile apparatus. Sidney explicitly 13   See Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995): 77, 411. See also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990), and Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 1–25. Since the male and female genders were understood to serve as unstable ends upon a continuum, Pyrocles’ behaviors are particularly troubling within early modern gender theory. 14   OA,33. Note Pyrocles and Musidorus’ awareness of issues of gender and class involved in their respective metamorphoses in the following passage: “Shipwracks, daily dangers, absence from our country, have at length brought forth this captivating of us within ourselves which hath transformed the one in sex, and the other in state, as much as the uttermost work of changeable fortune can be extended to” (39).

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names love-melancholy, along with its “dangerous” effeminizing properties in males, as the physical and psychological cause for the transformations of the two young heroes (OA 25, 50, 64). And Musidorus, accordingly, addresses Cleophila as his “dear he-she friend” (OA 38). This link relates in particular to the inward cooling in temperature that Renaissance theory associated with the female body, with the elderly—as Cleophila maintains in her conversation with Basilius above—and with youthful males affected by the cooling propensities of black bile (or humoral melancholy).15 Indeed, inverting Robert Burton’s famous observation that dominance by natural melancholy itself “turneth a man into a woman” (3.2), Sidney’s narrator wryly presents Cleophila’s discovery as Pyrocles as though he were “sudden from a woman grown a man” (244). But the humorally-induced ambiguity of gender categories is evident throughout the work in the behaviors that these melancholy males exhibit, behaviors which include the deep sighs that pervade nearly every page of the Arcadia, the Amazonian dress Pyrocles wears, the solitariness of both Basilius and Cleophila, as well as the impact of caloric increases and suddenness upon their humoral selves. Timing the Self in Arcadia It is indeed notable, the extent to which Sidney addresses the philosophical concept of time in this tale. The overarching temporal construct is that of fate, signified by Apollo’s oracle (5, 241), and Sidney accordingly incorporates references to “the changing favour of fortune” (149) and the “continual motion of our changing life” (202). Further, owing to the humoral composition of the body, which, he insists, “can never be uniform” (129), “the very constitution of our lives remain[s] in continual change” (313). The Renaissance temporal obsession—tempus edax rerum, time the devourer of things—makes its appearance, as well, when the aged Basilius observes he is “loath to lose the precious fruit of time” (100); the related concept of mutability makes its appearance, too, when the narrator refers to Cleophila’s subjective impression of time as a “long-sought-for commodity” (105), and when all note that haste is appropriate, because “ten of the clock was stricken” (233). The Eclogues, on the other hand, present the reader a form of Heraclitian, illusory time, especially in Agelastus’ elegy: “Time ever old and young is still revolved / Within itself, and never taketh end; But mankind is for ay to naught resolved” (301). Further, in response to the madrigal of Basilius—he who cannot “bear delay” (192) and who takes as his subject his own sense that time “haste[s] away”—Philoclea optimistically evokes time as occasion, and thus constructive to her desires:

15   See Crooke, 200–03, for a fascinating discussion of vital heat and the role it plays in male and female health and well-being. For discussion of the issue as it relates specifically to concepts of masculinity, see Breitenberg 40–43.

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Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England O stealing time, the subject of delay (Delay, the rack of unrefrained desire), What strange design hast thou my hopes to stay, My hopes which do but to mine own aspire? … O time, become the chariot of my joys; As thou draw’st on, so let my bliss draw near. Each moment lost, part of my hap destroys. Thou art the father of occasion dear: Join with thy son to ease my long annoys. In speedy help thankworthy friends appear. (182)

But this array of explorations of time in the work only clarifies that it is suddenness, as an emotional and temporal nexus of volatility, which impacts most severely the emotional representations of these characters. As I have suggested, such suddennesses are ubiquitous in this emotionally overwrought text and range from the nobles to the commoners, and from male to female characters. The narrator observes, for example, that “the lover’s heart is apt to receive all sudden sorts of impressions” (48), and is worldly wise to the “cruel instant of [lovers’] parting” (154). Cleophila, too, upon viewing Musidorus transformed into Dorus, desires to know, ironically, what “sudden thing had thus suddenly changed [him]” (38). In formulating excuses to his wife after he had presumed to enjoy Cleophila (which she, in turn, had transformed into the bed trick), Basilius struggles to absolve himself in a speedy fashion, permitting the narrator to draw upon medical concepts deeply involved with humoralism— purging or bloodletting: “But the matter in itself hardly brooking any purgation, with the suddenness of the time, which barred any conjoined invention, made him sometimes allege one thing, to which by and by he would bring in a contrary” (240). Mopsa the shepherdess engages the swiftness of emotion as well, demanding that Apollo acknowledge her desire and “grant post-haste … my burning fancy” (233). The narrator proceeds to extend this focus on suddenness from his literary characters to his immediate, contemporary, early modern audience. After Cleophila is injured by the lion in Book 1 of The Old Arcadia, for example, the narrator explains that it was sport to see how in one instant both Basilius and Gynecia … came running to see the wound of Cleophila; into what rages Basilius grew, and what tears Gynecia spent…. But so wonderful and in effect incredible was the passion which reigned as well in Gynecia as Basilius (and all for the poor Cleophila, dedicated another way) that it seems to myself I use not words enough to make you see how they could in one moment be so overtaken. But you, worthy ladies, that have at any time feelingly known what it means, will easily believe the possibility of it. (OA 44, emphasis added)

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Sidney’s narrator thus demonstrates the implicit dangers to health and emotion that volatility represents within this emotional universe, and his extension of this awareness to his immediate audience—to the “worthy ladies” he addresses time and again—appears to reflect this understanding. Sidney figures the impact of these passions more broadly at the level of narrative structure, as well, in the form of political rebellion within the state. In doing so, he entertains a contemporary legal issue that involves the nature suddenness plays in assigning blame to instances of killing. ***** When Basilius falls ill with “melancholy dreams” (NA 395) brought on by the oracle at the outset of the romance, for example, the first action his friend Philanax takes is to secure the “frontiers” (OA 6–9) of Arcadia, thus linking concern with the physical body of the “mighty” ruler with the security of the borders of his physical state. The decision would seem to be a shrewd one, as the narrator explains that previous attacks by Thrace, Pannonia, and Epirus upon Macedonia, sketched at the beginning of The Old Arcadia, were suitably noted as “sudden and dangerous invasions” (9). But such concern with borders, with cartographical masks, in a sense, proves to be ill-founded with regard to Arcadia: the correlation Sidney draws between the rebellion in the body politic of this state and the disruptive illness in the body of Basilius indicates that the greatest danger had stemmed all along from within these respective borders rather than from without. While Sidney’s concern with the body’s liminal spaces thus follows a fascination with such masks and self-fashioning, Sidney’s Old Arcadia again complements this trope through the studied incorporation of contemporary medical theories. Midway through The Old Arcadia, political rebels, in the form of a democratic mob, threaten the stability of the province. Identified as Phagonian rebels in the Old version, the New presents them as Enispians, and expands upon their story to a significant degree. Where in the Old, we learn that the “rude tumult” had its origins in a drunken festival dedicated, paradoxically, to the “nativity” of Basilius himself (OA 119, 111), in The New Arcadia, on the other hand, the narrator explains that this motley rout, for whom Sidney’s well-heeled narrator appears to have little more than contempt, has been coaxed by Clinius under the authority of Cecropia, who herself instigated the riot out of the hate she bears for Basilius, here King of Arcadia, and the jealousy she feels both for his wife and daughters. In both versions, the rebels fail in their attempt at revolution, and Stephen Greenblatt and Richard M. Berrong have engaged the topic of whether Sidney portrays these traitors foolishly or sympathetically. Reading this slaughter against historical rebellions during the Elizabethan period, Greenblatt perceives in Sidney’s representation of Arcadian rebellion what he calls a “cruel laughter” that

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inscribes “ineradicable difference” between the common rebels and the nobles.16 Berrong, on the other hand, argues that in the transition from The Old Arcadia to the New, Sidney engages a “remarkable social sensitivity,” and a “considerable awareness of the lower orders and their rebellion,”17 carefully presenting the respective class-interests of the rioters. Regardless of where Sidney’s possible sympathies may lie in the text, however, the chief characteristic Sidney’s mobs share at the literary level is their explicit, even emphatic, drunkenness. This representation has important bearing on The Old Arcadia’s narrative, especially, in that by framing the peasants’ would-be revolution as an autonomous rousing of passion within the body politic, Sidney does so by modeling it off the rousing of drunkenness within the humoral body. Such rousing further complements other examples in the work, such as that of Gynecia in her furious longing for Pyrocles, or Cleophila for Philoclea. In the terms that the romance presents, the rebels are thus drawn, at the structural level of the tale, as utterly lost in passion caused by the heat of wine. And indeed, this “confused rumour of a mutinous multitude” (OA 108) appears not to be merely tipsy but woefully in their cups: a miller reels, “half drunk … vomit[ing] his soul out in wine and blood”; others respond when addressed through the “thick dulness of their senses” (NA 380, 386). The gang as a whole is identified as “well-chafed [or heated] with wine, having spent all the night and some piece of the morning in reveling,” and when they speak, they do so in a “winy conference” that only “increases [the] fire in their minds” (OA 111, NA 390): “So general grew this madness among them … [that] their banquet [itself] turned to a battle, their winy mirths to bloody rages.” This passion sets them all off on a “drunken rage” that escalates into a “fury,” until “adding fury to fury and increasing rage with running” (OA 112), they head off to slaughter their ruler, Basilius himself. The narrator claims that the rebellion’s origin lies in the “raging motion” of “choler nursed with resistance,” of these “minds all knit together only in madness” (OA 109, 113, 111). Luke Wilson observes that the farcical nature of the drunken Phagonians’ rebellion centers fundamentally on Sidney’s representation of the inaptness of their weaponry.18 He identifies this utilization of common working devices for alternate, murderous purposes with the term “use-against-design,” which contemporary courts of assize records frequently rely upon, Wilson suggests, in order to distinguish the legal category of premeditated murder (in which the premeditation entails the planned use of an apt weapon for killing) from non16

  See Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion.” Representations 1.1 (1983) 17. 17   See Richard M. Berrong, “Changing depictions of popular revolt in sixteenthcentury England: the case of Sidney’s two Arcadias.” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19.1 (1989) 19. 18   Wilson observes that this point is not a feature in what is likely Sidney’s chief source for this passage, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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premeditated forms of homicide (in which the tool at hand inadvertently performs the killing). Wilson observes that each form of killing involves different forms of temporality: the former, a premeditated construct he calls “killing time”; the latter, a sudden shift from “working time” into “killing time,” one that disembodies the murderous object from the hand that wields it. This separation of subject from object defines the legal status of suddenness as that which delineates premeditated murder from unpremeditated homicide. Sidney’s representation of rebellion in The Old Arcadia draws upon such legal concepts as, in amassing their weaponry, these rebels explicitly never weighed how to arm themselves, but took up everything for a weapon that fury offered to their hands: some swords and bills; there were other took pitchforks and rakes, converting husbandry to soldiery. Some caught hold of spits, things serviceable to the lives of men, to be the instruments of their deaths; and there wanted not such as which held the same pots wherein they had drunk to the duke’s health to use them (as they could) to his mischief. (OA 112)

The New Arcadia notably adds to this list of items a “lever” and a “sheep hook.” In representations of rebellion in both the Old and New Arcadias, as Wilson notes, “use-against-design is entirely class-dependant” (135). He continues: The social meaning attached to tool abuse here is inversely related to its aesthetic or rhetorical value, for the more acutely faulty (abusive, ineffective, and worthy of contempt) the conversion is, the greater the literary pleasure it affords. The more egregious the tool abuse, the better the poetry; the worse the one works, the better the other. (136)

According to Wilson, Sidney maintains this inverse proportionality of literary pleasure to the abuse of tools, and nowhere is this point more clear than with regard to the misuse of drinking vessels, or “pots,” at the end of Sidney’s list above. Wilson argues that this misuse is particularly significant to Sidney in that the commoners make sudden use of them as weapons. Indeed, the objects of “working time”—and for the drinking cups at the end of the series, “pleasure time”—thus become re-signified within “killing time.” Wilson observes: The example of the pots used to drink the [duke]’s health and then deployed as weapons to threaten his rule does show premeditation and abuse, on the part of the peasants, to be inversely proportional; but its rhetorical placement, at the end of a series of increasingly abusive comparisons as the ultimate end of that series, reveals it as the most plotted, the most premeditated part of the paragraph, the ultimate and most effective expression of the governing strategy, which is to mock the Arcadian commons’ lack of intelligence, skill and courage by associating pleasure with abuse. Thus the literary representation of tool abuse … founds its specifically literary quality on its reversal of the model of agency and

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Wilson suggests that Sidney’s handling of the use-against-design of the drinking cups outdoes Ovid, his literary precursor to this moment of rebellion, because he is able to turn the legal and the everyday relation between abuse and extemporaneity to literary account. He does so by constructing the literary as a mirror image of its referential object, literary precisely to the extent that it performs a structural reversal of what it represents. And this is simultaneously to make referentiality, that through which literature is liable for and responsible to what it portrays, the index of literature’s own self-sufficiency, its own jurisdictional authority (137).

This concept is one Wilson abstracts to Sidney’s (self-) representation of the artist, painting the battle, whose arms are lopped off. Wilson entertains the idea of premeditation, or of “fore-conceit” in art as if it were a metaphor for murder, rather than as unpremeditated homicide, as contrasted in Sidney’s revision of the Old Arcadia in the New. But it is worth observing that revision obtains exclusively within The Old Arcadia, as well, and here it involves not merely the drunken rebellion of the Phagonians, but the uses and functions of Gynecia’s potion, as we shall see. When they are finally subdued and defeated, the rioters ultimately blame this transgression foremost on “Bacchus,” the god of wine, for it is he who “sounded the first trumpet of this rude alarm,” leading the rout to “show the depth of their affection in the depth of their draught” (OA 111). A few pages subsequent to this scene, in the Second Eclogues, the squelching of the traitors gives occasion for the “honest shepherds” to begin their Pastoral with a dance they call the “skirmish betwixt Reason and Passion” (OA 119). And here the shepherds highlight that the passion we have just encountered in the form of the rebels unfolds not merely at the level of their individual bodies, but also a kind of disease in the body politic. For, relying on the well-worn link between the ruler’s body and the body politic, sobriety is thus placed in dialectic here with drunkenness, and hence good citizenship with rebellion. This structural feature of a sudden passion brought on by wine destabilizing the state at the level of the macrocosm, too, compares nicely with The Old Arcadia’s sudden passions brought on by desire at the level of the microcosm through which these characters are emotionally destabilized. Sidney’s representation of passion thus moves seamlessly between the body and of the body politic, influenced by the material fluidity understood to cause such effects within the humoral paradigm. But more than this, Sidney’s representation of the rebels’ assault upon Basilius establishes “use-against-design” and regicide within a corporeal context, in that these drinking cups, or “pots,” are utilized both rhetorically and quite literally as weapons in order both to foment a dangerous drunkenness and to carry out murder.

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This instance of “use-against-design” in the form of rebel assault and regicide within a corporeal context borne by a cup is one, however, that will be taken up by Sidney’s narrative in an equally destabilizing political context later in the work: as the potion Gynecia hands to Basilius, which “kills” him off. This representation of the potion obtains insofar as the inverse proportionality of literary pleasure to the abuse of tools is collapsed in the uses and function that the potion signifies as a literal, metaphorical, and, notably, sudden agent that proves its function in the context of unpremeditated homicide. This correlation between the rebels and Gynecia is thus a formal one that extends through to the emplotment of the romance. Timing Poisons in Arcadia The relationship between concepts of drunkenness, poison, and rebellion within The Old Arcadia centers on forms of suddenness in the text. These forms of suddenness mediate between their impacts upon fictional characters, which Aristotle refers to with the term ethos, and aspects of plot, which Aristotle refers to as the organizing principle of mythos. Of course, Sidney of all early modern writers is intimately aware of these connections, as his Defense makes clear, particularly through recognition of the terms he names certain components of plot: namely, peripeteia (a sudden reversal); and anagnorisis (recognition, or sudden insight). Just as Aristotle locates in the negotiation between character and plot the matter of great literary representation, so too does Sidney sense in this relationship, I am suggesting, the matter for a similarly fleshed out and masterful literary display. Sidney’s representation of subjective identity, as embodied within the humoral paradigm, thus comes directly to affect the fundamental structure of The Old Arcadia, drawing upon Aristotle’s abstract terms in this fictional application. In the final paragraphs of The Old Arcadia, for example, the narrator pulls the narrative rug out from under his audience in his evocation of the nature and significance of the potion. He does so in two ways: first, by relying on aspects of humoral knowledge in his readers in anticipating the potion’s corporeal effects; and second, in revising the history and line of possession for the potion itself. The apparent cause for Basilius’ swoon is upended in these final paragraphs, as, on the verge of his burial, the ruler arises miraculously with a “great voice of groaning” (OA 359), which harkens back to his earlier groan at what we as readers had understood to be his death when he drank the “unknown potion” (242). The narrator promptly notes that the “drink [Basilius] had received [turns out to have been] neither … a love potion nor … a deadly poison, but a drink made by notable art … to procure for thirty hours such a deadly sleep as should suppress all show of life.” But this is not all. We learn that

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Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England The cause of the making of this drink had first been that [the] grandmother of Gynecia did furiously love a young nobleman of her father’s court [for whom] … she made that sleeping drink … and found means [for him] to receive it. Which done, he no way able to resist, was secretly carried … into a pleasant chamber in the midst of a garden she had of purpose provided for this enterprise, where that space of time pleasing herself with seeing and cherishing of him, when the time came of the drink’s end of working … she bade him choose either then to marry her … or else she would presently cry out, and show in what place he was, with oath he was come thither to ravish her. (OA 359)

The potion, in other words, proves not to have been a type of Viagra at all, but acts rather as a sleeping potion—perhaps best clarified in this instance as an early modern version of a knockout, or date-rape, drug—and used that way in the ultimatum Gynecia’s grandmother levies at her nobleman. Stephanie Chamberlain observes that, for Gynecia, “In many respects, the potion may well be construed as poison, offering an as yet pained Gynecia a way out” of the misery of her marriage (93). In carrying the untested potion with her the evening of the bed trick, however, Gynecia, misconstruing the words on the bottle, had evidently felt that it might offer her a way to secure Cleophila’s affections. In this way, Sidney has fooled not only Gynecia, Basilius, and the other denizens of Arcadia, but importantly his readers as well.19 At this early point in the narrative, we simply had no way of comprehending the properties of the potion. Since it is grounded in a utility based upon female desire, the effect of this potion thus has significant impact on Sidney’s narrative achievement as a whole. The contradiction the narrator presents in the potion’s history facilitates this impact. When first we had heard of it, the potion was presented as a possession by tradition descended from “the kings of Cyprus” (197), but at the close of the tale that tradition is emended and we learn that Gynecia’s grandmother had explicitly formulated it, and for a specific purpose. Why this discrepancy? Has Sidney slipped up? Has the narrator? As with Othello’s discrepant tales relating to the genesis of his handkerchief (Othello 3.4.55–68, 5.2.215–17), the concept here too involves representations of female autonomy and power. The suitably cryptic, “foretold inscription” that Gynecia’s grandmother had allegedly imprinted on the bottle, 19   But note Connell, in her work Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), who offers a very different explanation of the potion and its function: “coming where it does, Sidney’s careful explanation about the potion provides a commentary on the nature of [its] spell: its purpose is not to arouse lust or to infect with evil, though the lustful or the ignorant may thus mistake it. Its power, instead, is to disarm those who would resist beauty and to ravish them away from ordinary cares into the presence of beauty, which seen they must choose, like the nobleman, to love. The enchantment of the Old Arcadia, Sidney answers his readers at parting, has been a benign one” (36). I maintain that the potion is best conceived as a dangerous knockout drug that ruthlessly facilitates a kind of female sexual autonomy against the violent backdrop of Arcadia’s patriarchal system.

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after all, had stamped an ambiguous impression of its purported effects. That the potion offers females “free pow’r” over their male lovers had apparently first been “wrong interpreted by … the Queen of Cyprus,” Gynecia’s mother, the narrator acknowledges, since the bottle had subsequently been “given by her [mother] to Gynecia at the time of her marriage, … the drink, finding an old body of Basilius, had kept him some hours longer in the trance than it would have done a younger” man (OA 360). Gynecia’s efforts at interpretation when Basilius had swooned at his drinking of the potion had been severe—a wish for suicide had led her to the question: “Was this the folding in mine arms promised: that I should fold nothing but a dead body?” (243). So saying, and racked with a sense of guilt that she maintains through to the end of the trial scene, she resolves to die. Where Sidney’s narrator had introduced the potion to his readers midway through the work, it becomes evident at the end, however, that he had consciously misled readers into a false assumption of what the effects of such a potion might be upon Basilius. But based on a contemporary understanding of the implicit volatility of the passions in the body, Sidney’s narrator both conditions and takes for granted how his contemporary audience would have comprehended the cause of Basilius’ swoon the first time readers encountered the potion, when the old man drinks it. The final time the narrator mentions the potion, however, in the final paragraphs of the work, Sidney’s narrator corrects the readers’ understanding of the potion’s true faculty, and by retroactively correcting the history of its genesis and use, the narrator highlights that the female formulation of the potion derives from female strivings for power, in general, and for sexual power, in particular, in a way that directly combats the patriarchal system that so dominates in The Old Arcadia. Our reading of the nature of the potion midway through the work, in other words, ultimately stems from our own misapplication as readers of elements of Renaissance medical knowledge, deliberately provoked by the narrator, that have no bearing on what is ostensibly happening to Basilius when he lapses into his coma. By withholding this information about the potion until the last few paragraphs of the entire romance, by withholding the triumphant power of an aggressive female sexuality that chooses its partners by force, Sidney would appear to take shrewd account of the “dear ladies,” the “fair ladies” of his audience to whom he refers over and over again in The Old Arcadia.20 The potion in this work would seem thus to embody a fantasy of female sexual autonomy and power that Sidney’s Renaissance England had largely proscribed. The manner in which Basilius received the potion, and the immediacy of Gynecia’s sense of guilt thus suggests the potion’s “use-against-design” status. Given Gynecia’s warning to Basilius of her understanding of its properties (“extremely thirsty,” he “took it 20

  But see Helen Hacket, who argues that such address to a female readership served largely as a device used to titillate a largely male readership, in Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000). In Sidney’s dedication of the Old Arcadia to his sister, he of course indicates that he wrote the romance directly for her.

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out of her hands, although she directly told him both of whom she had it, what the effect of it was, and the little proof she had seen thereof, hiding nothing from him, but that she meant to minister it to another patient” [241]), we are manifestly not dealing with murder here, it becomes clear, but what appears to be unpremeditated homicide. Nevertheless, to the end, Gynecia claims the guilt of a murderess. It is among these events and within this milieu that Gynecia’s association with her potion can be more fully explored. Mother’s Milk and Female Melancholia Recent scholarship on the issues of female despair and psychological illness in the Renaissance period indicates that the hysterization of female bodies and minds was well underway in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Viena Skultans, Lucinda McCray Beier, Carol Thomas Neely, and Laura Gowing,21 among others, help contextualize Juliana Schiesari’s claim that “to speak of female melancholia is to speak of something that is historically mute.”22 These authors note that physical and psychological health for females during the period, particularly depressive illnesses, was intimately linked with, and often limited to, reproductive issues. Sidney highlights the psychological complexity of some of these issues by positioning the conflict over the prize of Cleophila between Gynecia and her daughter, Philoclea. While Gynecia recognizes that “it is [her] daughter which [she] has borne to supplant [her]” (OA 81) that has caused her failure to attract Cleophila, and that the “growing of her daughter seemed the decay of herself” (OA 107), this bitter realization leads her to stew in the thought that she will need to “bereave her daughter of her life” because Philoclea has “bereaved Gynecia of her own desires” (OA 81). Within the generational conflict of these varied roles of wife, daughter, and mother, it becomes apparent that, for Gynecia, any negotiation among them has become impossible. But in an attempt to engage in such negotiation, she notably evokes a fluid of another sort. Gynecia’s despair and suicidal self-resignation at the close of The Old Arcadia significantly draws on a nursing or breastfeeding metaphor that locates explicit blame for Gynecia’s current woes in her own absent mother; this transfer of blame to the mother, interestingly enough, is one Philoclea herself will echo subsequently to her own. The material transfer of the magical potion across the contours of the 21   See Viena Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580–1890 (London: Routledge, 1979) ; Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers in The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England. (London: Routledge, 1987); Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, (eds) (London, Routledge, 2000); and Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004) esp. 69–98. 22   See Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) 95.

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female generations that that the narrator presents thus comes to be paralleled by what amounts to an empoisoned mother’s milk. In her suicidal anguish, Gynecia bellows: “O mother of mine, what a deathful suck you have given me! O Philoclea, Philoclea, well hath my mother revenged upon me my unmotherly hating of thee!” (OA 243) This metaphoric projection of poison taken in by nursing highlights the fraught issue of early modern theories relating to greensickness,23 and, as such, Gynecia’s psycho-physiological health in her telling of it becomes a function of an inheritance of her maternity and her female family line: the same family line that has bequeathed to her the inheritance of her potion. As Gail Paster has observed, it was an early modern commonplace that the character of the nursemaid passed through the breastmilk into the child; here the issue is still more fraught in that it involves two simultaneous movements of liquid.24 And indeed, Sidney notably makes this association of nursing as a transfer of poison with regard to Cecropia in The New Arcadia, as well, whose rage toward Philoclea causes the “poison [to] swell in [Cecropia’s] cankered breast,” a poison she notably intends to force “Philoclea [to] receive … distilled in sweet liquor…” (NA 555, 457). Setting aside for the moment the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the breast itself—in particular, the traumatic emotions that can accompany weaning, what Melanie Klein has referred to as the resulting “depressive position” of the subject that helps her to explain adult-onset manic-depressive, obsessional, and paranoid mental states—the metaphoric use of mother’s milk, framed as it is in Gynecia’s words, in itself does a number of things within the world of the text. It serves, notably, as a kind of liquid poison that in its transfer, according to Gynecia, mimics the liquid potion that has apparently killed off Basilius by means of its effects on the liquid passion that defines his humoral constitution. For both The Old Arcadia and the New, after all, Sidney constructs a suggestive kenning that equates love with a “cup of poison” (OA 80, NA 213). The dangers such liquids pose to health in this story hinge on their upsetting of the order of reason through jolts of sudden passion—embodied, at the narrative level, for example, by both Gynecia and the drunken Phagonian rebels; at the corporeal, by wine and the potion itself. Tracing the nursing metaphor from mother to daughter in The Old Arcadia, as Gynecia does, touches in interesting ways on recent attempts in psychoanalysis to define female melancholia, which may be facilitated, theorists suggest, and significantly so in the context of female representations in The Old Arcadia, in the recognition of the devalued status of women within patriarchal cultures.

23

  See especially Crawford and Gowing, 29–35, 100, 265–77; and also Monica H. Green, (ed.) The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002). 24   See Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 198–202. For another suckling metaphor in The Old Arcadia, see 45.

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While Sidney repeatedly identifies Gynecia’s despair with certain melancholic characteristics,25 female melancholia itself is likewise not unheard of within an early modern medical context. Fumbling over the topic, Robert Burton grants certain aspects of the disease to women, but withholds any of its attendant, ennobling glories; and current theories, similarly, tend to maintain a certain ambivalence on the subject. So that while Burton concedes that “Comparisons are odious. I neither parallel them with others, nor debase them any more: man and woman are both bad and too subject to this pernicious infirmity,” he also maintains that women are especially susceptible to the most vicious kinds of melancholic jealousy: Some make question whether this headstrong passion rage more in women than men, as Montaigne.26 But sure it is more outrageous in women, as all melancholy is, by reason of the weakness of their sex. Scalinger concludes against women: Besides their inconstancy, treachery, suspicion, dissimulation, superstition, pride (for all women are by nature proud) desire of sovereignty, if they be great women (he gives instance to Juno) bitterness and jealousy are the most remarkable affections…. (3.3.1.2)

Since Sidney has himself explicitly identified Gynecia as a “great woman,” as “so great a lady,” as this so “great and wretched lady,” as possessed of a “longexercised virtue, which made this vice the fuller of deformity” (OA 196, 107, 80), her representation as an ennobled, despairing woman appears to seek to incorporate her within the masculine tradition of the disease. As a female trapped within the emphatically patriarchal world presented in Sidney’s work, however, Gynecia reveals a melancholic despair that might seem, in a sense, to need no explanation. Indeed, her marriage to Basilius is identified as a marriage between a young girl and a man “of much greater age” (OA 197), and as such revolves around the traffic in women that serves as a fundamental part of the romance.27 The magical potion, too, as we have seen, becomes implicated in precisely this element of the tale, explicitly permitting, insofar as the words on the bottle are decipherable, the female to choose her sexual partner and not the patriarchal cultural norm, one suspects, of the reverse. Juliana Schiesari engages the topic of female melancholia from a psychoanalytic perspective, in particular the way in which both early modern and current psychoanalytic theory implicitly valorizes male melancholia as an ennobling and productive form of loss, contrasted with the female hysteria it positions as debasing and unproductive. Indeed, Schiesari argues that melancholia from its very origins can be “understood 25

  Gynecia’s despair involves her “Wear[ing] these my words as mourning weeds of woes,/ Black ink becomes the state wherein I die” (OA, 185); further, note her songs at OA, 158–60, and her soliloquy at OA, 242–43. 26   Burton had access to Montaigne’s Essays in the Florio edition of 1603. 27   See Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) esp. 1–27.

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as a particular discourse that encodes male subjectivity in terms of great men and great deeds,” which positions it as a “culturally valued form of depression [that] has devalued other kinds of losses such that depression becomes hierarchized into ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms.” In this way, melancholia is a “state that allows the male subject to represent his stakes in the game of cultural legitimation. It is a privileged cultural form of depression” (68). This “privileged cultural form of depression,” of course, permeates Sidney’s Old Arcadia in that nearly all the males presented within the romance, as we have seen, demonstrate melancholy characteristics and behaviors. But Schiesari’s study also explores the way in which female melancholia finds expression in this context, and, significantly, she locates the issue within an intergenerational, intersubjective, relationship that finds notable integration in Sidney’s work—the relationship between mothers and their daughters. Schiesari centers us amid the debate between psychoanalytic theorists Luce Irigaray and Kaja Silverman, which involves the viability of this term in contrast with other forms of depression. Where Irigaray positions “the young girl [as] trapped within a symbolic order that designates her being as essentially lacking and thus neutralizes the capacity for the representation and politicization of loss,” women are, in fact, “not melancholic per se; they are depressed…” (69). Silverman, to the contrary, according to Schiesari, identifies the possibility for female melancholia in what she positions as the moment of “symbolic castration … where the child enters into language and desire. That moment is specifically relevant for the girl because it situates her in relation to the mother, to femininity” (71). Such a relation is crucial, for it serves as an important identification for the young female subject. Certainly, both theorists maintain that the oedipal phase contains two movements: one negative, in which the daughter identifies with the mother, and one positive, in which the daughter seeks to identify with the father. However, where Irigaray feels that in turning her identificatory energy toward her father, the young girl inevitably comes up short and accordingly lacks sufficient narcissistic reserves to establish her melancholia, according to Schiesari, Silverman maintains that the little girl has already built up sufficient narcissistic reserves during the ‘negative’ oedipal phase. The melancholic basis for female subjectivity, therefore, comes at the moment of the positive Oedipus complex. It is at this point, and only at this point, that the young girl perceives the mother as devalued. (72, emphasis in the original)

This recognition of the devalued status of the mother is crucial, for Silverman, toward a comprehension of the cultural weight melancholia represents for women: “The loss that is mourned is, thus, not merely the mother’s absence, nor simply the daughter’s devalued sense of self, but also and more generally the structured denial of privilege for all women within patriarchal societies” (77, emphasis in the original).

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And here, it would appear, the issue of Gynecia’s emotional status within Sidney’s text—and perhaps her very name itself, with its etymology as the Greek term for woman—provides a basis for her role as a female melancholic. Female melancholia plays out against a backdrop of what Schiesari identifies as patriarchal societal structures: Through depression and mourning, the mother’s imago resurfaces from the interstices of the oedipal to assert her desirability as refigured by her identification and solidarity with other women. If such refiguring is possible, then we can read women’s depression not as a failed expression of loss—as prosaic grief—but as an incipit to a mourning of both daughter and mother’s devalued status in a symbolic governed by a masculine economy of self-recuperation. (77)

This method of comprehending female melancholia, Silverman insists, “requires a positive encrypting of the mother within the daughter.” For Gynecia, however, there is no such positive encrypting. Far from it: she presents only an anger she directs toward her mother, her daughter, and herself. Squaring her discussion of female melancholia upon the subject’s “detachment from the mother,” Kristeva offers that the most effective and crucial “counter depressant” to melancholia—male or female—is what she calls a psychical “matricide.” Indeed, Schiesari suggests that “For Kristeva, the problem of melancholia thus comes down to a problem of differentiation: the lack of separation from the mother implies an inadequate integration into the symbolic…” (77–78). Where for Silverman, the giving up of the mother “only aggravates her depression” (79), for Kristeva, it is the image of the mother that must be destroyed in order to combat melancholia. She offers that the significance of this psychic matricide on the development of the subject: “For man and woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation….”28 It would appear to be precisely so with Gynecia. Indeed, within this context, Gynecia’s obsession with her inheritance of poisoned mother’s milk, the “deathful suck” she bemoans, vies with that other principle potion in the romance, the potion that, likewise, in the latter history offered by the narrator, has been transferred down her female family line. Further, the blame she casts at her mother reflects her grappling with the symbolics of loss as they span across the female generations figured through the structural correspondence Gynecia maintains between the potion that so threatens to destabilize the patriarchal order and the mother’s milk that grounds her intersubjectively to the material fact of female subordination within such an order. 28   See Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. (trans.) Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 27–28.

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In this context, the anger Gynecia demonstrates throughout The Old Arcadia can be addressed as efforts to lay claim to a kind of autonomy to desire. For Marilyn Frye, the emotion of anger has intimate associations with such concepts of selfhood and autonomy: “Anger implies a claim to domain—a claim that one is a being whose purposes and activities require a web of objects, spaces, attitudes and interests that is worthy of respect, and that the topic of this anger is a matter rightly within that web”.29 The decision of who can legitimately demonstrate anger, as Gwynne Kennedy observes, ultimately hinges on cultural codes of dominance. Kennedy notes that such anger, however, is “granted only rarely to early modern women” (12–13). It is this quest for autonomy that clarifies not only the role of the female sufferer of melancholia in early modern England, but Gynecia’s status as its sufferer and both the way she handles her guilt and distributes blame for it. Indeed, where Schiesari cautions us that “One must see melancholia not simply as a psychological construct, but as part of a cultural order …” (75), and that women are known by their “essential and therefore inconsequential lack” (74), it seems crucial that we fold Gynecia’s lament within such a construction.30 To this end, Gynecia’s guilt-ridden resolution to die, “to embrace death as soon as it should be offered unto her, and no way to seek the prolonging of her annoyed life” (OA 243) needs to be understood not merely as a representative statement of an individual electing to wear the mask of a guilty conscience, one that for the moment seems to fit Gynecia properly. While it is tempting to see Gynecia’s jealousy, anger, and guilt as the various results of the varying masks she adopts and discards in The Old Arcadia, masks that allow her to juggle what are for her the frequently conflicting desires associated with the roles of wife, mother, and child, and the un-recouped sense of loss that accompanies these desires and roles, such a view seems overly reductive. Indeed, when she subsequently exclaims of Basilius’ apparent death, “I, none but I, was the minister of this unnatural end” (OA 243), her self-fashioning of the role or mask of the guilty party, too, derives ostensibly and psychosomatically “within.” The joint representation of Gynecia’s psycho-physiological volatility and her struggle for sexual power and autonomy, which Sidney’s narrator projects as an abiding concern down through her female family line, combines to round out and showcase what is by far the most complex portrait of identity presented in this work.31

29

  Qtd. In Kennedy, 14.   See Schiesari: The complex relationship between the various identities Gynecia embodies as mother and daughter consequently function in the context of what Schiesari identifies as female intersubjectivity: “It is in this necessary intersubjectivity of the maternal that I would locate a feminist dynamics of mourning as the inception of a community of differences and the concomitant possibility of symbolic that would undo the phallocentric one of Lacan or of Freud” (76, note 31). 31   In Gynecia’s silence at the end of the work, however, like that of Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we can read the tacit ambiguity of this complicated portrait 30

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From Potion to Gender to Genre One of the principal features of The Old Arcadia is its generic indeterminacy. While readers might demur quite simply that the work is epic pastoral (with which the shepherds of the Eclogues would surely agree), it is important to stress, as Sidney’s narrator does (along with the rest of the characters in the piece), the highly dramatic nature of the work. The problem with doing so is that The Old Arcadia is manifestly not drama: the pause and reflection that the private reading of a prose romance or a novel entails, even necessitates, is finally irreconcilable with the palpable immediacy of drama. But against such a position, the narrator indicates early in the work the fundamentally dramatic framework of his romance, involving as it does the comedic nature of the love-quadrangle that lies at the heart of the tale: “fortune had framed a very stage-play of love among these few folks, making the old age of Basilius, the virtue of Gynecia, and the simplicity of Philoclea, all affected to one” (49). To this end, comedy serves as a possible genre for the work in the tomfoolery pervading the “tedious entertainment” that includes Cleophila, Basilius, and Gynecia (98). But the work presents far more circumstances that suggest not only drama, but drama associated with the tragic. Early in the romance, for example, Musidorus cautions that Pyrocles’ adoption of Cleophila’s guise will lead to disaster: “as if you should drown your ship in the long-desired haven, or like an ill player should mar the last act of his tragedy” (17). Perhaps most telling, however, the character who most insistently suggests the tragic circumstances within Arcadia is Gynecia. It is she who claims “she would stir up terrible tragedies rather than fail of her intent” (84); it is she who proclaims “I will not be the only act of this tragedy! Since I must fall, I will press down some others with my ruins; since I must burn, my spiteful neighbours shall feel my fire!” It is she who utters: “I will end my miseries with a notable example of revenge; and that accursed cradle of mine shall feel the smart of my wound …,” by which she singles out Philoclea and objectifies her icily as “the girl” (162). It is Gynecia who subsequently explains to Cleophila and others that “there is a fair scene prepared for them: to see the tragical end of thy hated lover [Philoclea]” (243). And, finally, it is she who senses herself trapped during the trial scene at the end of the work in the “most pitiful spectacle of a most dolourously ending tragedy, wherein I do play the part of all this now miserable province…” (311). The generic indeterminacy at the close of the work is thus palpable, for it is just at this moment, of course, that the sleeping potion comes to the fore as the sole object that hangs in the balance the full range of the generic possibilities of The Old Arcadia as a whole. Its effects upon the humoral construct that is Basilius will ultimately prove whether this work in an epic vein will tend toward tragedy or comedy.

of identity. Indeed, as with the Shakespearean heroines, the result of Gynecia’s trafficking leads only to her silence.

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Interestingly enough, such a generic span is a common feature of early modern literary works involving somnolent potions. As Tanya Pollard observes of early modern drama, the sleeping potion becomes a pivot on which the play’s ambiguity turns: it suspends the plot, holding out the simultaneous possibilities of death and rebirth. The recurrence of the motif suggests that narcotics held a special appeal to playwrights and audiences. The sleep that these potions induce onstage, moreover, parallels the suspension of time and identity produced in spectators by plays themselves, suggesting that these drugs offer not only a useful plot devise, but broader metatheatrical significance for the drama. (65–66)

In the non-dramatic context of The Old Arcadia, too, however, Sidney goes out of his way to stress the work’s dramatic and meta-fictive prose romance correlations. It is from them, then, that Sidney’s work demonstrates the ways in which strategically ambiguous objects, such as the magical potion, can productively complicate the characters and the plots of early modern fiction. In the suspension it provides the emplotment, or mythos, of the work, the potion facilitates a form of genre anxiety as the ambiguity of its faculty works retroactively as a deferred action upon earlier events in the tale. As we saw in Chapter 1, Sigmund Freud, within a psychoanalytic framework elaborated upon by Jacques Lacan, identified this retroactive form of temporality with the term Nachträglichkeit. This system, which underlies Freud’s concept of the temporal, is, as Jason Jones puts it, one “whereby future events control the meaning of ones in the past” (1). This “peculiar mode of causality,” as it functions in the analytic session, draws on what Freud proposes as the timeless reservoir of the unconscious and concerns itself with making meaning after the original event, or trauma, has taken place. Such a narrative structure in which sense comes after the fact, in which the organizing of the narrative achieves resolution only upon reflection on the original act, is one that is entirely of a piece with the narrative laid out in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, relying as it does upon the potion that proves to be somnolent, rather than overtly and lethally poisonous. And such emplotment hinges entirely upon certain functions associated with the contemporary, humoral medical paradigm. In order to demonstrate this concept, it is to the body and mind of Basilius, the old man inadvertently affected by Gynecia’s potion, to which we must return in order to make sense of the ending of Sidney’s romance. As I indicated earlier, the narrator of the work misleads his audience in two ways regarding the potion: first, as to its somnolent, not lethal effects; second, as to its history. By withholding the soporific effects of the potion until the last few paragraphs of his romance, Sidney relies explicitly upon the volatility of the passions in his construction of The Old Arcadia’s plot. And in doing so, Sidney quite literally turns the narrative of the work “back on itself” in the final paragraphs (Amos 16). Indeed, where the oracle of Apollo and the magical potion have been vying with one another over the concept of fate in the work, it is upon the potion

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that the narrator settles at the close of the work. And it is within such an ending that Sidney’s Aristotelian sympathies manifest themselves. In The Sense of Ending, Frank Kermode explains that peripeteia involves “the falsification of one’s expectation of the end” (18). Kermode continues, suggesting that peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route. (18)32

The reader of The Old Arcadia is in this instance tellingly misled into a discord (the “death” of Basilius) that precipitates concord (his “rebirth”) and the ostensibly formulaic ending of the work. But as Kermode observes, such endings are not without their dangers. In walking the line between credulity and skepticism, “The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work rejects our sense of reality …” (18). And here lies the conundrum involved in any current reading of The Old Arcadia: our comprehension of early modern passions forces us to wince at what we identify as an obvious romance conclusion, which is in fact one that the early modern medical and literary spheres suggest as not so obvious at all. This utilization of the counterfactual and coincidence is one narratology, interestingly enough, has identified as a key feature in the development of the novel. As Hilary P. Dannenberg explains: “The major form of the coincidence plot narrates the initially divergent but ultimately convergent paths of individual family members and culminates in recognition and reunion.”(1)33 It is this convergence that serves the goal of “closing and unifying … an artistic structure” (2). With roots in Oedipus Rex, such plots thrive from The Old Arcadia through to the nineteenth century and beyond. But where Dannenberg sees the focus of Old Arcadia’s recognition or anagnorisis in the problematic recognition scene between Musidorus and his father, Euarchus, it seems to me that, given the familial drama of Basilius and his family at the heart of the work, the peripeteia, or the sudden reversal of events involved specifically with them, serves as its core. Here it is that the work itself is clarified and readers perceive narrative convergence. But this narrative convergence, I am suggesting, is highly politicized. For the second way in which the narrator of The Old Arcadia misleads the reader involves the revised history for the potion he presents in the last few pages of the work. In changing the potion’s history from a masculine one involving its long possession “by the kings of Cyprus as a thing of rare virtue” (197) to one passed, woman to woman, down Gynecia’s female generations, the potion can   See Arthur K. Amos, Time, Space, and Value: The Narrative Structure of the New Arcadia (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1977) 16, and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 33   See Hilary P. Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 2008), 1. 32

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be refigured as it is by Sidney’s narrator, and in Luke Wilson’s formulation of the legalities involved, as an unpremeditated homicidal weapon. Indeed, the potion’s utilization in the work, set in its “fair cup all set with diamonds” (197), comes to fulfill the same use-against-design that the drinking “pots” (112) of the Phagonian rebels demonstrate in their abuse. While both find use as regicidal weaponry misapplied, the difference between the rebels and Gynecia is that the potion, as explicitly gendered, comes to serve as its own critique of female agency in the work. In other words, the link Luke Wilson offers between pleasure and abuse in the context of the drunkenness and the drinking pots that the drunken Phagonian rebels turned into weapons now comes to correspond, at the end of The Old Arcadia, with the potion’s ostensible amorous pleasure linked to its abuse. In this way, the potion marks its shift from “pleasure time” to an ostensible “killing time” in its “use-against-design” that Gynecia inadvertently engages in the “murder” of her husband, Basilius. The reversal Wilson senses in Sidney’s distancing of the rhetorical display of the drinking cups with that of the other weapons during the Phagonian insurrection is thus one Sidney carries through to the end of the work, a reversal that becomes implicated in a tectonic reversal of another sort, the peripateia that alters, suddenly and utterly, the groundwork, generic and otherwise, of the work as a whole. To this end, while Wilson suggests that class is usually the marker of what he terms “tool abuse” (133), here Sidney draws on gender as the final marker for “tool abuse” in The Old Arcadia. Indeed, while Wilson observes that “the tools most likely to be misused for homicidal purposes were those used by artisans and laborers …,” which “encoded and emblematized the social inferiority of the user” (133), I would argue that at the end of The Old Arcadia, gender becomes implicated in this final, most premeditated of actions that Sidney constructs as the catastrophe of his romance. Gynecia’s role in having given the potion to Basilius demonstrates that the female agency and gendered history with which it proves to have been charged portray it as of a piece with “use-against-design,” a gendered formulation of the drunken Phagonians’ efforts at insurrection with their toolabuse with their drinking cups. The retroactive revision of the potion the narrator engages, in altering the history of the potion, confirms this reading of the potion, just as the silencing of Gynecia at the end of the work confirms her depressed political status in the work as that of all women. That this diminution occurs in an humorally and gendered context, within a psychoanalytic paradigm, and within a formal structural patterning, as well, indicates the imbricated nature of Sidney’s efforts, and confirms in some measure the topical political events surrounding Sidney’s writing of the work during his rustication from the court under explicit displeasure of Queen Elizabeth herself.34 ***** 34   See Wilson, 138–39, and W. Gordon Zeeveld, “The Uprising of the Commons in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Modern Language Notes 48.4 (April 1933): 209–17.

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While Katherine Duncan-Jones insists that “structure is one of The Old Arcadia’s most notable features,”35 and that Sidney presents in the Arcadia Ariosto’s strategy of the “interrupted narrative” (xii), such observations can be further refined into what we can identify as a form of distinctly passionate narrative, in that the plot of the Arcadia itself is imbricated with concepts of selfhood that hinge upon the volatile status of the early modern humoral subject. Such a narrative form derives from what the romance presents at the story’s outset as a cast of characters composed of “moderate and well tempered minds,” which it subjects to extremes of passions, potions, and poisons in its quest for forms of love, which is itself repeatedly identified as that most “violent passion” (OA 4, 85). As Richard McCoy explains, Sidney’s works “pose a series of deliberately sharpened conflicts between obedient submission to authority and the recalcitrant urges of desire,”36 and it is these very conflicts which implicitly find expression in the narrative of The Old Arcadia. Within this framework, the potion plays a critical role in mediating between character desire and narrative structure. Indeed, where Sidney is at great pains in the Defense to accord his views on drama with those of Aristotle, it is surely not incidental the extent to which the potion achieves this end in The Old Arcadia. Where Sidney appears to concur with Aristotle, for example, that the dramatic catastrophe in a work should take place offstage and be related by a messenger, it is notable that the messenger-function in this work appears to be carried out by the narrator’s sudden reflection on the history of the potion at the end of the romance. The case-history offered for the potion becomes, in effect, the narrator’s opportunity to “recount thinges done in former time or other place” (122), as Sidney puts it in the Defense, a recounting that retroactively makes intelligible the ending of the tale. This clarification of the events of the narrative by means of the material form of the potion nicely complements other structural elements of The Old Arcadia. While “Sidney’s narrative sequence,” in McCoy’s estimation, “presents a pattern of ambivalence and irresolution” (111), it is important to recognize that such ambivalence is a structural feature of the work as a whole. Franco Marenco, for example, notes that these eruptions of the plot “open a series of unhealthy parentheses in a state of normality which looks more and more precarious, until they lead to a final breakdown in the private life of the characters as well as in the life of the state.”37 Marenco’s move here from the microcosm to the macrocosm traces precisely the sort of structural issues I am suggesting serve as a consistently explosive narrative structure in the work. Not only does Gynecia, for example, face challenges at engaging in what Sidney calls “well dooing” throughout the text—that is, until she is miraculously transformed into the “perfect mirror of all 35

  See Duncan-Jones, x.   See Richard C. McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1979), ix. 37   See Franco Marenco, “Double Plot in Sidney’s Old Arcadia” Modern Language Review 64 (1969) 251. 36

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wifely love” (OA 360) at the end of the tale—but just so with the rebels, the “weak mistrust of the many-headed multitude, whom inconstancy only doth guide at any time to well-doing!” (OA 115). Sidney’s concept of “well dooing” thus carries with it a specific didactic goal, one that necessarily implicates the reader’s decision-making and evaluative processes. As Ann W. Astell points out, Sidney’s Arcadia is a profoundly didactic work, and this didacticism, following Sidney’s injunction in his Defense, is centered in the self-knowledge that ought to characterize the reader’s aesthetic experience. Such an experience, Sidney remarks, should result in “well doing and not well knowing onely.”38 The potion and its ambiguous effects, it would seem, lie at the crux of such concerns in the work. It is Sidney’s great achievement to have formed in this romance an aesthetic experience that, in demonstrating the problems related to unregulated passion, makes its moral, in Sidney’s words, as palatable as a “medicine of Cherries.”39

38   See Ann W. Astell, “Sidney’s Didactic Method in The Old Arcadia.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 24.1 (1984) esp. 40–43. 39   See Sidney, Defense,102.

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Chapter 3

“Very Now”: Time and the Intersubjective in Othello

Psychoanalysis will provide scientific bases for its theory or for its technique only by formalizing in an adequate fashion the essential dimensions of its experience which, together with the historical theory of the symbol, are: intersubjective logic and the temporality of the subject.—Jacques Lacan [T]ime becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal experience.—Paul Ricoeur

Issues related to time and narrative have stood at the heart of critical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello since the seventeenth century. A central feature of this focus has been the “double time” scheme that scholarship has theorized for the play, a model which has remained, according to a recent critic, the single “greatest   Othello, 1.1.88. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, (ed.) G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). The textual situation for Othello is a complex one, and the issue deserves an overview at the outset of this chapter. The problem centers on the differences between the Quarto version of 1622, which I will identify in the text of this essay by utilizing brackets with the inclusion of the letter Q, and the first Folio version of 1623, which the reader can assume is in use in all quotations unless otherwise indicated. As will become clear, while there are vast differences between these two manuscripts, only two instances from Q impact my citation in this essay: the word “sir” mid-line at 3.3.391; and “ear” at 1.3.395. All other use of brackets is my own, used for purposes of grammatical clarity. The textual variation’s impact upon my argument in this essay is thus negligible. For a careful overview of the issues involved in the differences between the Q and the F versions of Othello, however, I have found particularly helpful E.A.J. Honigmann’s discussion of this issue in Appendix 2 to his edition of the play. See The Arden Shakespeare Othello (Surrey, UK: Arden, 1997), 351–67. Further, the reader should also find interesting Leah Marcus’ recent exploration of the implications of race on each of these versions. See “The two texts of Othello and early modern constructions of race,” located in Textual Performances, Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie, (eds) (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2004), 21–36.    Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Ecrits, (trans.) Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 239.    Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, (trans.) Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52. The emphasis is Ricoeur’s. 

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crux in Shakespeare for more than 300 years.” According to this theory, the dramatic actions showcased in the play have been cast against the backdrop of a longer, albeit unrepresented, temporal unfolding alluded to directly in the drama. The text of the play, the argument runs, suggests this “double time” bifurcation in a number of places, such as in Emilia’s expansive comment, “My wayward husband hath a hundred times / Wooed me to steal [the handkerchief]” (5.2.292– 93), and in Othello’s, that Desdemona had “with Cassio … the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (5.2.211–212) in their “stol’n hours of lust” (3.3.338). At root, this dilemma is one the Russian formalists explain in the disjunction between fabula (“the order of events referred to by the narrative”), and sjužet (“the order of events presented in the narrative discourse”). While first proposed in 1849 by John Wilson, who sought to confront issues of verisimilitude in the swiftness with which Othello becomes convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity, such concerns even then had been simmering in the scholarship of the play for at least 150 years. Wilson’s thesis that there are two distinct clocks at work in the play attempts to alleviate a fundamental problem relating to narrative time in Othello, which had been identified as early as 1693 by Thomas Rymer, who, in noting that Shakespeare explicitly distances Michael Cassio from Desdemona on the journey to Cyprus, observes that any attempt to view their opportunity to have cuckolded Othello is “very hasty.” As Steve Sohmer demonstrates, tracing the issue from George Steevens, writing in 1788, to Edmond Malone, in 1821, and through every editor of the play from Wilson, in 1849, right up to Ernst Honigman, in 1997, and whatever its merits, the “double time” scheme of the play has demonstrated remarkable endurance. Sohmer attempts to resolve the “double time” theory through an analysis that is worth a brief summary. Working off consideration of these two hypothesized clocks, Sohmer looks to what he proposes as Shakespeare’s subtle utilization within the drama of the two principal calendars in use in Europe at the time: one Gregorian, favored in the Catholic Venice of 1603, when Shakespeare wrote the play, and one Julian, favored simultaneously in Eastern Orthodox Cyprus. The temporal disparity between the two calendars is resolvable in the drama in that the Shrove Tuesday (Gregorian) which confronts us in Act 1 of Othello becomes five weeks later in the integration of the two calendars, according to Sohmer, the identical Shrove Tuesday (Julian) which confronts us in Act 2 of the play, in   See Steve Sohmer, “The “Double Time” Crux in Othello Solved,” ELR 32.2 (Spring 2002) 214.    See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Knopf, 1984) 12–13.    Published under the pseudonym “Christopher North,” in Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1849, April 1850, May 1850. Quoted in Sohmer, 214.    Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693) 121–22. Quoted in Sohmer, 214. See Sohmer for a tidy summation of the “double time” theory in the criticism of the play.    See Sohmer, 214–16. 

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Cyprus (17–21). Most significantly, however, as the Venetian calendar (identified, tantalizingly enough, as the More Veneto) accorded largely with the Gregorian reforms undertaken by Catholic Europe, and the Cypriot Julian calendar accorded with that of the Old Style calendars of Protestant England, “the reason we sense two clocks running on Cyprus,” according to Sohmer, “is that Shakespeare knew that Venice and Cyprus reckoned time by different calendars,” since the “Jacobeans had ready access to both calendars in the ubiquitous English parallel almanacs.”10 The politico-theological issue of these rival calendars was, of course, a heavily contested issue in early modern England, a condition aggravated by Elizabeth’s stubborn adherence to the increasingly imprecise Old Style calendar. This situation continued in England, nevertheless, through to 1752. While Sohmer’s argument appears in equal parts clever and ingenious, it unfortunately suppresses a fundamental problem inherent to Othello’s treatment of time. Outside of the temporal disjunction that Sohmer’s theory seeks to resolve, there is a further, and, indeed, arguably far more treacherous, deployment of time within the play to which Sohmer’s essay alludes but ultimately marginalizes and subsequently ignores. He identifies this utilization of time as “post-Freudian,” and associates it with the work of Lorne M. Buchman, who articulates in 1987, concisely and eerily enough, that “Iago destroys Othello by altering his perception … of time.”11 The argument antedates Buchman, however, reaching back to Frederick Turner’s 1971 assessment that “Iago’s rhythm destroys Othello’s.”12 But regardless of its provenance, what can it mean to say that one character’s “rhythm” destroys another’s? And in what sense is this statement conceptually “post-Freudian”? Further, what might the narrative ramifications be, at the level of plot, for such a temporal disorientation, rhetorically driven or otherwise, at the level of character? The “double time” scheme, that is, may belie a more insidious quality implicit to the drama’s representation of time, timing, and temporality than Sohmer’s calendrical analysis can either engage or acknowledge. In order to trace the juggling of these various concerns related to the post-Freudian concern with time and narrative, however, it will be helpful to draw upon Jacques Lacan’s engagement with these concerns. Lacan’s departure from the International Psycho-Analytic Association (IPA) in 1963 over the use of variable-length analytic sessions highlights the significance he accords the issue of time to the psychoanalytic project. He addresses the topic explicitly in two papers, entitled “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (1945) and “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), both of which locate concerns related to time and 

  See Sohmer, 225–26, 30–34.   Sohmer, 217, 219. 11   See Lorne M. Buchman, “Orson Welles’ Othello,” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987) 10

59.

12   Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 116.

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temporality firmly at the center of his practice.13 Indeed, these essays radically rework Sigmund Freud’s treatment of the issue, offering a more explicit investigation into the significance of time to central aspects of psychoanalysis. Where Freud hesitantly maintains that the unconscious knows no time and is in fact timeless, and largely restricts discussion of the issue to the concept of the deferred action of Nachträglichkeit, Lacan’s investigation of time is simultaneously more direct and more subtle.14 Lacan’s approach to time, in narrative terms, is end-directed, in that he tends to locate in the rush to termination the power of the temporality of the subject. This feature of his interest in time is evident in both of his essays on the subject, but in different contexts: the first is a thought experiment on logical time as an intersubjective construct; the second, an investigation into the ways the experience of time shapes the arc of the intersubjective relationship between analyst and analysand within the analytic session. Both essays identify in punctuation, in waiting, and the act—in the instant of the glance, the time for understanding, and the moment of concluding—a range of ways of engaging the textures of subjective temporality, the Heideggerian being-in-time.15 And both engage the central feature of Lacan’s theories of time, what he terms “intersubjective logic.” Lacan’s use of this term derives from a sophism16 he presents in his essay on logical time in which each of three prisoners is assigned one disc to wear on his back, drawn from a pool of five discs—two of which are black and three of which are white. While unaware of the color of his own disc, each man is permitted to view those worn by the others. Without communication, the first prisoner to deduce the color of his own disc will be allowed to walk out the door of the room a free man. We learn that, “After having contemplated one another for a certain time,” they all pass “side by side through the doorway.” Their ability to do so hinges on each one’s awareness, as one of them will proclaim, that I am a white, and here is how I know it. Since my companions were whites, I thought that, had I been a black, each of them would have been able to infer the following: “If I too were a black, the other [the third] would have necessarily realized straight away that he was a white and would have left immediately;   See “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” Ecrits, (trans.) Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 161–75; see Lacan, “Function and Field.” 14   But note that by 1926, Freud was not so certain of the timelessness of the unconscious. See William Meissner, Time, Self, and Psychoanalysis (Lanham: Jason Aronson, 2007) 230–31. Where in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), for example, Freud asserts in a subsequently added footnote (1907) that “The unconscious is quite timeless” (Meissner, 231), by 1926, however, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties, he refers to “the vicissitudes of the repressed” that he “suspect[s]” do not remain “unaltered” (Meissner, 231). 15   For a solid discussion of these issues, see especially John Forrester, “Dead on Time”, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 168–218. 16   Lacan describes his use of this term in “Logical Time,” 163. 13

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therefore I am not a black.” And both would have left together, convinced they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them. At that, I made for the door to make my conclusion known.

The narrator concludes: “All three thus exited simultaneously, armed with the same reasons for concluding.” 17 The process of the inmates’ simultaneous hesitations followed by their simultaneous haste, issues to which we shall return, interests Lacan especially. As John Forrester notes with regard to this sophism: “in this collective logic, which Lacan counterposes to classical logic, the truth is dependent on the other as temporalised, and there is no way that the subject can arrive at his own truth except in the company of, and via the truth of, the others.”18 I invoke this Lacanian sophism at the outset of this chapter on Othello as it provides a remarkably rich theoretical model for engaging time’s function in a range of issues central to the tragedy. After all, the “collective logic”19 Lacan presupposes as a condition for his concept of the temporality of the subject finds an authentic home in much of Shakespeare’s work, but especially so in Othello. Foremost among Shakespearean drama, as we have seen, this play has been singled out for the temporal conundrum it poses within its closed narrative system.20 The obsessive and ubiquitous representations of time in the work derive power from their entwined association with Aristotle’s concepts of both ethos (character) and mythos (plot) in that the text is an ars narrandi that bleeds between the two. Time in Othello stands at the core of the play as a supple and manipulable rhetorical entity which impacts the full range of variables scholarship has explored in the work, including the nature of the hero and heroism that we might expect to engage within essentialist, character criticism; the deployment of issues pertaining to power, including race, class, and gender, that we might anticipate from scholarship attuned to new historicist techniques; and the focus upon narrative structure we perceive in scholarship attuned to formalist methodologies. This chapter demonstrates that the network of character—and, hence, narrative—relationships Shakespeare presents in this work functions as a kind of Lacanian sophism in its own right, one which temporalizes its subjects in a way that squares the role of time within the intersubjective logic the text requires. It is crucial to reiterate, however, that the comprehension of time, conceptually speaking, is not a transcultural phenomenon.21 Accordingly, it will be helpful to begin by situating Lacan’s discussion of time

17

  Lacan, “Logical Time,” 162. Emphasis in the original.   Forrester, 182. 19   Lacan, “Logical Time,” 173 20   See Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693), 121–22. Qtd. in Sohmer, 214. 21   See Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 47–68. 18

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and temporality in the context of historicized representations of emotion, which impact these concerns to a marked degree.22 Now, now, very now: Giving him a rouse Representations of the passions in early modern literary works, as I have been charting, frequently reflect the complex way contemporary medical texts present human emotion and its causes. It is my ongoing contention that as profitable as the recent critical interest in early modern subjectivity has been—of the body and its emotions as classed, gendered, and raced—such efforts have been limited by their failure to take into account the roles of early modern characters as temporalized subjects.23 As proof of the demand for such analyses, we need look no further than Shakespeare’s Iago, whose ability to fashion narratives for his auditors carries with it the implicit ability to fashion in them frames of subjective temporal awareness. To be sure, in sculpting the temporal elements of the drama at the level of character in such fashion, Iago commensurately shapes the drama’s narrative forms.24 As Paul Ricoeur has shown, narrative itself relies profoundly on its representation of time as form; drawing on Aristotle and St Augustine, the formative theorists of time in the Western tradition, Ricoeur demonstrates the ways in which the 22   See Chapter 1 above, as well as Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004); Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, (eds) Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004); and Douglas Trevor, “Love, Humoralism, and ‘Soft’ Psychoanalysis.” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): 87–94. 23   As I indicated in Chapter 1, the recent movement in early modern studies toward an imbricated methodology involving both historicized and psychoanalytic critical strategies has been particularly fruitful. For an overview of the issues involved, see especially “Dreams of History,” by Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, (eds) Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000). Other helpful works, in a list by no means exhaustive: Breitenberg; Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1993); Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), and Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986); Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, (eds) Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986); Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); and Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992). 24   See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 238.

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Aristotelian concept of poetry, laid out in the Poetics, structures the extension of the soul in time that Augustine proposes in his Confessions.25 This temporal interaction between aspects of mythos and ethos is a crucial one for Shakespeare. In Othello, for example, his great “tragedy of passion” 26 in A.C. Bradley’s phrase, the predominant temporal elements would appear to be the volatility, rousing, and rupture Shakespeare places at the core of his characters’ subjective experiences, precisely at the juncture where character emotion conjoins with time. Shakespeare constructs in Iago a figure whose brief career hinges on manipulating this link: in shouting to Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, at the outset of the play, Iago foments a reaction in the old man through the impress of timeurgency27 that subsequently fans out across Venice: “Even now, now, very now,” he exclaims, “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88). He shapes similarly temporal responses in others, as well. Directing Roderigo into a state of heightened expectation early in the play, Iago suggests that though “Pleasure and action make the hours seem short” (2.3.379), “How poor are they that have not patience!” (2.3.369). Once he has ensnared Othello, too, Iago again continues to preach “Patience,” though only by design, constructing Othello’s subsequent response that, once this waiting has ended, his “bloody thoughts, with violent pace, / Shall nev’r look back” (3.3.457–58). So while Iago commands Othello to “Confine [him]self but in a patient list” (4.1.75), Othello has been primed to respond that he “will be found most cunning in [his] patience; / But (dost thou hear?) most bloody.” Iago duly answers, “That’s not amiss; / But yet keep time in all” (4.1.90–93). The significance of the emotional content to the experience of time—that is, in hesitation and the act—is in this sense its most crucial aspect.28 As we have seen, within the humoral paradigm by which early modern corporeal and emotional health was conceived, suddenness, that subjective experience of time so essential to volatility, was understood to cause disastrous results to the constituent, and humorally palpable, equipoise of subjective health.   “Quid est enim tempus?” Augustine famously asks in Book 11 of his Confessions: “What, then, is time?” (Saint Augustine, Confessions. R. S. Pine-Coffin, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1961) Book 11, section 14). As I discuss in Chapter 1, the answer he formulates for this question has served as a challenge to all who have grappled with issues relating to time and temporal processes in the Western tradition down through the ages. See pages 37–39. 26   See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Facett Premier, 1986), 148. 27   See Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 13–27, who argues that this sense of time-urgency is the hallmark of Renaissance artistry. 28   See Bridget Gellert Lyons’ Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England, (New York: Norton, 1971), 149–61, for a fascinating discussion of time and melancholy as they pertain to Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” Lyons explores the way in which the melancholic subject’s perception of mutability in the physical world causes inward effects given shape in the art of the period. 25

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The historicized nexus of time, temperature, and the humors thus facilitates the volatile shifts and explosive transformations that unleash a range of hazardous disorders within the ostensibly unitary human minds, bodies, and souls of the humoral paradigm. From Robert Burton’s observation that “[T]his thunder and lightning of perturbation causeth such violence and speedy alterations in this our Microcosm, and many times subverts the good estate and temperature of it”29 to Stephen Batman’s, that “sodayne chaunging of cold into heate, chaungeth and appayreth [wastes] bodyes [… and that] Therefore ofte sodaine chaunging of time is cause of sicknesse,”30 we ought to look to Othello with a keen eye on its representation of such suddennesses. The relationship between time, temperature, and the humors demands as much, and it quickly becomes evident that Shakespeare makes deliberate use of such suddenness in Othello. Indeed, the sheer number of “rousings” Iago imparts to various entities in the play is both manifold and crucial. From the first, in facilitating the search for Othello at the outset of the play, Iago insists that Roderigo “Call up her father,” Brabantio, and “Rouse him” (1.1.67–68). Iago subsequently shouts “Arise, I say!” (1.1.92), and suitably jarred, the old man vows to incite his own kindred by means of “rousing” them, as well (“Raise all my kindred” [167], he bellows). Iago identifies them all as one by their having been piqued: “Those are the raised father and his friends” [1.2.29]. Next, Iago must alternatively work to rouse Roderigo into action from his depressed state of love-melancholy for Desdemona (1.3.301–82), all the while deliberately suing to him for patience. Further, in implementing his “engend’red” plan of bringing his “monstrous birth to the world’s light” (1.3.404), Iago begins by plying Cassio with wine, that which has “given [him] a rouse already” (2.3.65), in order to place Cassio among the “foul rout” (2.3.210) involved in drunken insubordination, as an effect of which, Othello cautions, Cyprus itself “will rise” (2.3.162). Iago’s coup de grace, of course, hinges on the ultimate rousing, or “moving” (3.3.217, 234), of Othello’s suspicion, jealousy, and, cue for murder. Such an arrangement of the explosive propensities of subjective emotional balance implicitly foregrounds the role and function of a volatile temporality, which reflect contemporary concepts of both the fragility and the volatility of masculine identities. Where recent scholarship has made clear the relationship between humoral theory and gender in this context, the relationship between humoral theory and time is just as crucial. Contemporary medical theorists, as we have seen, understood that the principal cause for humoral variability hinged to a remarkable extent on the caloric—palpable, somatic temperature. The cool propensities of the black bile of melancholy within the humoral theory, for example, thus were understood to cause in the male a movement away from the heat associated with masculinity and toward the chilled temperature associated with the feminine; Burton indicates 29   See Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Henry Cripps, 1628) 1.2.3.1. The first edition of the work was published in 1621. 30   See Batman uppon Bartholome (trans.) Stephen Batman. London, 1582.

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that dominance by the black bile of melancholy “turneth a man into a woman.”31 But the commensurately distinct temporal, and hence narrative, ramifications to this gendering of the humors capitalize upon this link. Since dominance by melancholy was understood to lead to a lethargic despondency that directly impacted the subjective experience of time, it is helpful to note the way in which such delay as a narrative concept is itself feminized, just like Hamlet, who “like a whore” must “unpack” his heart “with words.”32 The principal love-melancholic Shakespeare presents us with in Othello, of course, is Roderigo—part stooge, part Romeo—whose marginalization from the homo-social economy in the play becomes manifested in his inability to secure Desdemona’s hand in marriage from her father, Brabantio. Iago’s exploitation of Roderigo’s moods and behaviors, just as with Brabantio, as we have seen, hinges on the manipulation of each character’s sense of time: by slowing it down rhetorically through hesitation, or speeding it up through extreme haste. Iago’s model of temporal organization comes to serve as a crucial template toward understanding how he interacts with the other characters in the play. And the man with whom he begins his plot to “enmesh them all” (2.3.362) is Michael Cassio, whose drunkenness in 3.2 leads to his demotion. ******* The nature of Cassio’s relationship with wine unfolds in a crucial passage of Othello, 2.3, which highlights the significance of volatility upon this man described earlier as “rash and very sudden in choler” (2.1.266). Critical exploration of the passage33 has tended to center on Iago’s apparent nationalistic concerns, in his drinking songs, largely ignoring the fundamental issue presented in the scene: contemporary views on the causes and effects of drunkenness itself. In recent scholarship exploring the deployment of humoral theory in early modern literature, too, this issue of drunkenness has largely escaped critical scrutiny.34 This omission is odd, because one of the foundational, and popular, texts of classical humoral theory, Aristotle’s Problem XXX, I, makes explicit comment on the marked effects wines were understood to inflict upon humoral bodies, and these effects appear to have played a significant role in shaping subsequent literary tradition. In this treatise, Aristotle maintains that “dark wine more than anything else makes men 31

  Burton, 3.2.   The rhetorical skill of dilation that Iago masters in the play is one Patricia Parker notes to remarkable effect in “Shakespeare and rhetoric: ‘dilation’ and ‘delation’ in Othello.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. (ed.) Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. (New York: Routledge, 1990) 54–74. 33   See George Evans Light, “All Hopped Up: Beer, Cultivated National Identity, and Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1524–1625,” JX 2.2 Spring, 1998, esp. 159–63. 34   Do note carefully the essays collected in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (ed.) Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), especially that of Smyth, 193–210. 32

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such as melancholics are” (22); however reductive, such a totalizing, materialist explanation for aberrant behavioral psychology typifies classical humoral theory.35 Aristotle suggests that this comparability obtains because the corporeal effects of both the melancholy humor, acting from within, and of wine, acting from without, hinge on their relative potency as a function of the caloric, and that applied heat thus determines the unique “character” of the corporeal impact of either fluid within the body.36 Because of the perceived homology between wine and the black bile of melancholy, formulated by the Aristotelian text and maintained down through the ages, the relationship between Cassio’s drunkenness and Othello’s rage are more closely related than has been noted. Helkiah Crooke, in the Mikrokosmographia, for example, observes that “Melancholy juyce” is “like unto the lees of Wine” (138).37 This emphasis on caloric economies as a crucial function in determining the nature of both the melancholy humor and wine’s psychosomatic effects appears to have originated with Aristotle, whose conceptual additions to humoral theory provide the crucial intermediary link between early Hippocratic writings and later Galenic and subsequent traditions.38 Indeed, as Aristotle explains, raw temperature itself “determines the character (for heat and cold are the factors in our bodies most important for determining our character): like wine introduced in larger or smaller quantity into the body, it makes us persons of such and such a character …”39 By means of this variability, black bile thus becomes understood as the material cause not only for a range of depressive psycho-physiological illnesses, but also for the series of outstanding qualities that comprise the heroic identity, as the material cause for heroic “greatness.”40 But this link forged between wine and humoral melancholy is not merely limited to classical texts.

35   As I discuss below at length in Chapter 5, the authorship of this treatise remains a contested issue. While Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky maintain that the text was written by Aristotelian adherent, Theophrastus (Saturn and Melancholy, New York: Basic Books, 1964: 41), I have followed Juliana Schiesari (The Gendering of Melancholia, Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1992) in attributing the work to Aristotle. The text is translated in full in both Jennifer Radden (The Nature of Melancholy, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) and Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky. All quotations in this paper are taken from Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky. 36   Problem XXX, I. in Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 21. 37   See Mikrokosmographia: a Description of the Body of Man, Together with the Controversies and Figures Thereto Belonging (London: W. Iaggard, 1616). 38   See Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 55–57. 39   Problem XXX, I, in Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 28–29. 40   This connection was made through a conflation of the Platonic concept of “divine frenzy” and Aristotelian ideas relating to physical determinism; see Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, esp. 38–42.

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From Aristotle onward, through Galen into Avicenna, and thus integrated into the texts of Renaissance theorists Marsilio Ficino (1489), Timothy Bright (1586), Philip Barrough (1596), Thomas Wright (1604), Robert Burton (1621), the influence of temperature upon the human body became a central element in diagnosing a range of psycho-physio-theological troubles. For Thomas Wright and many other early modern humoral theorists, alcohol’s psychosomatic influence was thus understood to be especially dangerous and jarring to human health. While these authors frequently caution against the excessive drinking of ale or beer, often strong wine draws their more emphatic warnings.41 Philip Barrough, for example, writing in The Method of Physic (1596), cautions against the use of wines by the individual affected by melancholic diseases, (“Let him altogether abstaine from wine”42) specifically recommending, in his chapter “De Melancholia,” that those thus affected “eschue wine that is thicke and blacke …” (1.28) While the caution he offers regarding the drinking of such wines surely derives from wine’s material likeness to black bile, the main reason these wines ought to be avoided stems from their caloric propensity to lead the humors into sudden states of adustion, with commensurate dangers to health and behavior. Robert Burton, who identifies himself in his introductory “Democritus to the Reader” as “no wine drinker,”43 notably insists that hot wines are indeed most deleterious to subjects afflicted with melancholy. He goes so far as to identify that “many times the drinking of wine alone causeth [such diseases]”.44 Indeed, tracing this paradigm of fungibility to its limit—with relevance, as we shall see in Chapter 5, to Milton’s dramatic poem—Barrough even suggests that hot humors in and of themselves, free of wine or other alcohols, can cause drunkenness: The causes and signes of drunkennesse are evident inough, chiefly hote wines, & strong drinks are causes thereof, for that they fill the braine with vapours, and that so much the more (as Galen sayd) if the braine be hote by nature: sometime also hote humours ascending to the head, do cause drunkenness ….(1.10)

This brief survey of the medical tradition involving the relationship between wine and the melancholy humor deliberately highlights this correlation, synthesizing likeness between internal and external corporeal influences to human health. In Othello, of course, Shakespeare pursues this line by stressing Iago’s ability to read and compel a range of depressive masculinities: whether in Brabantio’s jealous 41

  Note the nationalistic concerns at work here. On this issue of alcohol and nationalism, see Light, 159–178. For a more thorough treatment related to the issue of alcohol and the symposiastic tradition, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002). 42   Philip Barrough, The Method of Physic (London: Richard Field, 1596) 1.6. 43   Burton, 24. 44   Burton, 1.2.2.1. He goes on here to concede that “The thinnest, whitest, smallest Wine is best, not thick, nor strong; and so of Beer, the middling is the fittest.”

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paternalism, Roderigo’s love melancholy, or Othello’s dual heroics and jealousy. However, Renaissance humoral theory suggests that these diagnoses too be seen as of a piece both with Cassio’s “infirmity” at his wine and the depressive remorse that attends it. The nature of Cassio’s relationship with wine unfolds against the backdrop of a character Shakespeare identifies, through Iago, as fundamentally “rash and very sudden in choler” (2.1.271).45 Relying on this tendency and Cassio’s self-professed “poor and unhappy brains for drinking” (2.3.33–34) as the cause for a breach of civil peace, Iago remarks of him: “If I can fasten but one cup [of wine] upon him / With that which he hath drunk to-night already, / He’ll be as full of quarrel and offense / As my young mistress’ dog” (2.3.48–51). And Iago proves to be correct: Cassio’s drunken brawling and subsequent demotion serves in many ways as the spur to the course of the play’s events. Due to the tough justice Othello metes out in 2.3, a reeling Cassio is left to contemplate the effects of wine upon his life, to explore precisely what it has wrought upon him in one brief evening: “O thou invisible spirit of wine,” he exclaims, “if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” (2.3.270–71). He proceeds to denote the process of effects that lead to drunkenness: “To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unblest, and the ingredient is a devil” (292–95). Further, on Cassio’s frank inability to recall precisely why it was he found himself fighting with Roderigo and Montano in the first place, he laments, “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains” (276–79). Personifying wine with the terms “devil” and “enemy” embodies the ready influence—not only physiologically, but also morally, or ethically—that “misuse” of this beverage was understood to impart to early modern subjects.46 That is, against the comic elements of drunkenness—his need to insist that “this is my right hand, and this is my left” (2.3.108-09), and thus to distinguish right from wrong— Cassio’s demonization of wine leads Iago to come to its defense, providing his usual dash of rational, relativistic, and wry, common sense: “Come, come, good wine is a familiar creature if it be well used. Exclaim no more against it” (2.3.295–96). By returning Cassio’s focus to himself, to the reestablishment of his occupation and sense of honor, Iago thus both maps out and engages the precise pattern he will subsequently employ with Othello to wrest back his occupation, his honor, and his perceived injured merit. The turbulent nature of wine’s effects upon Cassio leads him into an unfortunate pattern of turbulent behaviors evidenced in his civil strife and fighting. But this turbulence, or volatility, in its relationship to time both within Cassio and without, is not limited to medical texts or concepts. The Elizabethan “Sermon against Gluttony and Drunkennesse” comments, for example, suitably enough, that “Wine 45

  Emphasis added here.   Not to mention nationality. As others have noted, Iago’s rigid compartmentalizing is a consistent strain in his view of the world. See Light regarding early modern perceptions of wine versus ale and beer, as well as regarding drunkenness itself as a foreign import for the early modern English, 160. 46

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drunken with excesse, maketh bitternesse of minde, and causeth brawling and strife.” 47 Of the anonymous drunkard, it goes on to note: hee knoweth not himselfe, hee stumbleth and stammereth in his speech, staggereth to and fro in his going, beholding nothing stedfastly with his staring eyes, beleeveth that the houre runneth round about him. It is evident that the minde is brought cleane out of frame by excessive drinking, so that whosoever is deceived by wine or strong drinke, becommeth as Solomon saith, a mocker or a madde man, so that hee can never be wise.48

This passage presents a number of features that touch incidentally on matters central to Othello, revolving around a concern with civil disorder. In Cassio’s own estimation, too, to be drunk is to “speak parrot! And squabble! Swagger! Swear! Discourse fustian with one’s own shadow!” (2.3.268–70). Such a view, linking inward turmoil with outward, accords nicely, of course, with other portrayals of drunkenness in early modern writing: from the drunken man Henry pardons over the objections of Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey in Henry V; to the drunken rebels of The Tempest; to those of Philip Sidney’s Arcadias, who even in their cups threaten the stability of Basilius’ rule. Cassio’s actions are manifested in the term Othello uses to name all who engage in such drunken insubordination, as we have seen, identifying them as a “foul rout” (2.3.200). But this homily is concerned with more than mere issues of “brawling and strife.” Indeed, this excerpt alone touches on alcohol’s relationship to issues of self-knowledge, to the drunken subject’s metamorphosis into a madman, from acts of stumbling, stammering, and staggering, to a focus on the eyesight, and, perhaps most interestingly, to a critical concern with subjective temporal experience. In this sense, the homily reads nearly like Othello in miniature. And perhaps most notably, wine’s effects affect the sense of time. The specific lexicon by means of which Cassio discusses his drunkenness thus begs comparison with other forms of passion that boil up throughout the drama: even before Iago can work his worst, Cassio claims his previous drinks “have given [him] a rouse already” (2.3.60). This use of the term “rouse” complements the other uses of raising, rousing, and rupture I identified earlier: not only in Othello’s use of the word “rout,” but also the various “rousings” of Brabantio and his kindred (1.1.67, 166, and 1.2.29) that Iago had instigated in the search for Othello at the outset of the play. In the character of the drunken Cassio, then, we are presented with the principle of environmental infection that we have seen plays such a fundamental role in humoral theory. For Cassio’s behaviors demonstrate one roused to wrath by the sudden influx of heat, whatever the means, and this model of volatility in relation both to time 47   See Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–1571). Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup, Intro. (Gainsville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints, 1968). 48   Certain Sermons, 100.

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and emotion is one Shakespeare applies to Othello’s rousing to the murder of Desdemona, which follows hard upon it. ******* Recent scholarship on Othello has stressed, and rightly so, the role of its titular hero’s racial otherness as a product of his “geohumoral” provenance, contrasting this otherness with Iago’s and that which Italy as a whole signified to the early modern English. The work of Mary Floyd-Wilson, in particular, has afforded us a crucial window into the play that was clearly lacking in the previous scholarship.49 But what is needed is a way of grappling with Othello that preserves this geohumoral, racial otherness while acknowledging, even foregrounding, his humoral, heroic otherness. Such a diagnosis reflects not merely the range of characteristics found in contemporary medical treatises, but also centers on the tradition of the tragic, melancholy hero Shakespeare adapts from the classical tradition of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, among others.50 To be sure, Othello’s melancholic 49   See Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). On Othello in particular, see 132–60. 50   And Ovid. One way in which Iago constructs and exacerbates an emotionally charged, melancholy Othello is by incorporating him within a nuanced and temporalized treatment of Ovid’s Narcissus myth. Iago does so by drawing on its audio-visual aspects. Indeed, Iago’s chief method for achieving his ends hinges on convincing Othello that he does not truly know, let alone love, himself. In 3.3, the passage in which Iago plants the seeds of Othello’s destruction, Shakespeare loads the conversation with the myth by the way in which Iago echoes Othello’s terms. Iago establishes that Cassio served as Othello and Desdemona’s go-between:

OTHELLO: O yes, and [he] went between us very oft. IAGO: Indeed? OTHELLO: Indeed? Ay indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that?



IAGO: OTHELLO: IAGO: OTHELLO: IAGO: OTHELLO:

Is he not honest? Honest, my lord? Honest? Ay, honest. My lord, for aught I know. What dost thou think? Think, my lord? ‘Think my lord?’ By heaven, thou echo’st me…. (3.3.102–110).

In squarely adopting the character of Echo for himself, Iago forces the melancholy role of Narcissus upon Othello, implanting the seed, in a sense, that will blossom in Othello’s subsequent insistence that his “fountain” has turned vile and rank, a “cistern for foul toads/ To knot and gender in” (4.2.59–62). Within this context, at 4.1.81, Iago will transfer these roles when he commands Othello to “encave” (81) himself, as is Echo toward the end of Ovid’s myth, in order to read Cassio’s gestures, all the while urging patience: “Or I shall

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qualities read like a who’s who or a what’s what of melancholic symptoms drawn from any standard classical or early modern medical text, including: bouts with epilepsy (twice he is “fall’n in an epilepsy” [4.1.50]), solitariness (“leave me but a little to myself,” and “Leave me, Iago” [3.3.85, 3.3.240]), halting speech (“Pish! … Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!” [4.1.42–43 and 245–56]), and bizarre facial contortions (Desdemona notes he is “fatal … When his eyes roll so” [5.2.36-37] and asks, “why gnaw you so your nether lip?” [5.2.43]).51 In addition, Othello’s designation, like Hamlet, as one of the “great ones” (3.3.273), having been singled out as “such a man” (4.1.77), and of so “great of heart” (5.2.361) as to have pursued a classically honorable suicide, positions him additionally in the long line of heroic types reaching back to antiquity.52 The trajectory of Othello’s fall, from that of a self-sufficient ideal to the basest of men, a “monster and a beast” (4.1.62), is, of course, new neither to the Western tradition of tragedy as a whole nor to Renaissance tragedy in particular. In Othello, however, this path uncannily reflects Iago’s shrewd temporal manipulation of Cassio and the other males in the drama. The fears that early modern medical writers register regarding sudden caloric increases, after all, function transferably, or fungibly, with regard both to excesses of alcohol and to other methods of scorching the humors. In working Othello to the point where his emotional framework may be negatively affected by humoral heat, Iago repeatedly tests the status of his effect on raising Othello’s passion with overt temporal ramifications: “I see this hath a little dashed your spirits,” (3.3.215) he says, then tests him again, “But I do see y’are moved” (217), and yet again, “My lord, I see y’are moved,” (224). Othello responds tersely, “Not a jot, not a jot” (215), and “No, not much moved” (224). But with the suddenness of revelation, however, Othello’s creeping doubts reduce into a frenzy, and he finally bellows the words “O monstrous! monstrous!” (427), and “I’ll tear her all to pieces!” (431). Iago offers knowingly in soliloquy that say y’are all in all in spleen, / And nothing of a man” (90). Where Echo fades away to very nothing but a voice, of course, Othello, playing the part of the melancholy hero of classical tradition, has been primed to respond through bloody action. As a drama, however, Othello comes to represent more than a merely metaphorical representation of the process of ecological infection at the level of the subject; it achieves, that is, more than Ovid’s melancholy myth lends to it. Indeed, the play represents an actual material representation of infection based on the principle that such knowledge of the self, thus infected, is selfcanceling. 51   See Problems, XXX, I, in which, citing Hippocrates on Heracles’ “mad fit,” Aristotle names epilepsy “the sacred disease,” 18. Also see Burton, 3.3.2, where he notes that the man dominated by melancholy engages in “strange gestures of staring, frowning, grinning, rolling of [the] eyes, menacing, ghastly looks, broken pace, interrupt[ed], precipitate, halfturns. He will sometimes sigh, weep, sob for anger … swear and belie, slander any man, curse, threaten, brawl, scold, fight.” 52   See Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 17–42, who explore this tradition in detail. Also see Schiesari, 1–32.

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Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (3.3.326–29)

With the application of this conceit “upon the blood,” again, as an infective action, Iago thus constructs the conditions by which he can subsequently, and even humbly, greet the erratic Othello with the words “I see, [Q sir,] you are eaten up with passion” (3.3.391). Othello’s explosive bodily shift thus facilitates his unswerving jealousy, and with that shift comes a commensurate shift in his very being-in-time: “my bloody thoughts,” he utters, “with violent pace, / Shall nev’r look back” (3.3.457–58). Iago, in contrast, observes he ought “Dull not device by coldness and delay” (3.2.388). Iago’s words, in this sense, make an important correlation between temperature and time, equating coldness with delay, and, implicitly, heat with both urgency and action. It is this shift in Othello’s sense of time by which an audience becomes assured of Iago’s mastery of Othello, just as with Brabantio, Roderigo, and Cassio. The way in which Iago abuses and destroys the other characters in the play thus would appear to center on Iago’s grasp of what Stephen Greenblatt calls empathy,53 and what Bruce Boehrer identifies as courtship-function and deterritorialization. The empathy of which Greenblatt speaks manifests itself through what he identifies as a process of displacement and absorption, which he roots in the “enzymatic function” of humanism, that devours and at the same time makes new.54 It is as a result of this ability, according to Greenblatt, that Iago appears to enable himself to insinuate infectiously his own psychic content within the other males in the play. And, indeed, Iago does seem to infect Othello based on something fundamentally treacherous that Iago locates within the very nature of time: its projectability. This projectability lies in the rhetorical ability he commands in recognizing time’s relativity and in shaping this relativity—its swiftness, its delay—in others.55 As Bruce Boehrer similarly observes, Iago’s rhetorical efforts ultimately facilitate a false but seeming “dynamic mutuality” among characters (124).56

53

  Greenblatt, 225.   Greenblatt, 230. 55   As Parker observes, “The effect of that disproportion which we call ‘double time’ might be not just the combination in the play of a sense of haste and a contrasting sense of waiting or delay, but also the creation of that rhetorical technique which, like jealousy itself, is capable of precisely such multiplicity,” in “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation,’ 65–66. 56   Bruce Boehrer, “Othello’s Monsters: Kenneth Burke, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Impulse to Narrative in Shakespeare,” Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 3.2 (April 1999): 119–38. 54

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Greenblatt’s proto-colonial model of character usurpation corresponds to a marked degree with the essentialist psychoanalytic model propounded by Ernst Kris, Heinz Hartmann, Rudolf Loewenstein, and others, which dominated AngloAmerican psychoanalytic analysis in the mid-twentieth century. This model goes by the name of ego psychology, and made a marked impact upon Shakespeare criticism, as well. In 1971, for example, as we have seen, J.I.M Turner identifies in Iago’s accomplishment what he calls a “post-Freudian” usurpation of Othello’s time-sense (“Iago’s rhythm destroys Othello’s”57), and the concept was seconded by Lorne M. Buchman in 1987 (“Iago destroys Othello by altering his perception … of time.”58). It is at precisely this juncture, where Iago’s achievement appears to hinge on the overlap between time’s role within the “post-Freudian” sphere and time’s role within the proto-colonial framework, that Lacan’s views on time come into play as particularly beneficial. This proto-colonial model of the usurpation of one ostensibly stable ego by another is one Lacan would suggest is unfortunately bound by the very ego psychology for which he had such great distaste. And wit depends on dilatory time The sophism with which this chapter began foregrounds Lacan’s ideas on the temporality of the subject and intersubjective logic, and it is to these topics I would like now to turn. As it is presented, the parable of the three prisoners analyzes the subject’s process of reasoning, when placed among a group of others, in ascertaining a truth that is only discernable when perceived through the process of time. This is a concept Lacan identifies as “collective logic.”59 Set within the context of game theory, the sophism deliberately presents this process as a period of time from which Lacan discerns the emergence of the subject: the instant of the glance, the time for comprehending, and the moment of concluding. The three prisoners, in other words, must achieve their glances at each others’ discs, ponder the meaning of those glances, and select precisely the right moment to conclude: ‘Is this the right time for me to present myself as a white?’ It is within this structure that Lacan would come to see what Bruce Fink refers to as “the moments of the analytic process itself,”60 and ultimately the potency of his variable-length analytic sessions. According to Lacan’s analysis of the sophism, there are two “suspended motions” that the subjects within the logic of the game must work through in the context of what Lacan presents as a “modulation.”61 These suspended motions involve two discrete hesitations each subject logically must undertake in the 57

  Turner, 116.   Buchman, 59. 59   See Lacan, “Logical Time,” 173. 60   Fink, Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995) 64. 61   Lacan, “Logical Time,” 167. 58

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process of the instant of the glance and time for comprehending, as they spill over into the moment of concluding—which is precisely what Lacan will present as the act. As the logical givens for these suspended motions, Lacan proposes the following: Three combinations of the subjects’ characteristic attributes are logically possible: two blacks, one white; one black, two whites: or three whites. Once the first combination is ruled out by what all three subjects see, the question as to which of the other two is the case remains open …

The “answer” to this conundrum, we learn, derives from the dynamic understanding that … The experiential data … amount to signals by which the subjects communicate to each other—in a mode determined by the conditions of the test—what they are forbidden to exchange in an intentional mode, namely what each see of the other’s attribute.

Lacan insists that the limits of classical logic lie right here, in that these movements result in a temporal aporia. Where “[classical logical] forms never furnish us anything which cannot be seen at a single stroke [d’un seul coup],” each subject within this sophism, on the contrary, must make use of the other two players as signifiers; in doing so, the sophism moves beyond spatial categories of meaning and takes on a temporal structure. This temporal form becomes manifest in that the process of reasoning unfolds in the following manner for each subject: I) Being opposite two blacks, one knows that one is a white…. II) Were I a black, the two whites I see would waste no time in realizing they are whites…. III) I hasten to declare myself white, so that these whites, whom I consider in this way, do not precede me in recognizing themselves for what they are.62

The certainty anticipated by the subject within the time for understanding thus tips into a form of haste that precipitates the moment of concluding. Accordingly, the subject determines in the others’ movements the clarification of the essential error or truth of the subject’s decision in the moment of concluding. Hence, according to Lacan, each of the subjects ineluctably subjectivizes himself through the processes of what he calls the “temporal tension” implicit in the collective logic of logical time. And, indeed, in recognizing the other in the moment of concluding, each subject “introduces the form of the other as such, i.e. as pure 62

  Lacan, “Logical Time,” 167–68.

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reciprocity, since the one can only recognize his own attribute in the equivalence of their respective times.”63 Such recognition facilitates the realization, as Lacan puts it, that “the ‘I’ in question here defines itself through a subjectification of competition with the other, in the function of logical time.”64 The objective fact of time here, from the prison warden’s point of view, for example, is logically excluded from the “subjective assertion” of the subject in the moment of concluding. The three men walk to the door abreast, after all. But each subject’s assertive judgment, according to Lacan, “finally manifests itself here in an act”: What makes this act so remarkable in the subjective assertion demonstrated by the sophism is that it anticipates its own certainty owing to the temporal tension with which it is subjectively charged; and that, based on this very anticipation, its certainty is verified in a logical precipitation that is determined by the discharge of this tension— so that in the end the conclusion is no longer grounded on anything but completely objectified temporal instances, and the assertion is desubjectified to the utmost. 65

This desubjectification centers on the objectively synchronous nature of the moment of concluding. Further, the function of time here relies on a situation where hesitation and the act both contain subjective meaning to the other inmates: for each, either error or truth hangs in the balance. Within this context of intersubjectivity and the temporality of the subject, then, we can observe an immediate way in which Lacan’s ideas clarify the network of relationships in Shakespeare’s tragedy—namely, that Iago’s achievement, such as it is, relies on the manipulation of the competitive nature of the intersubjective deployment of time in the play. But as we shall see, there are others. Central among them is the way in which such deployment hinges on the critical role time plays in the emergence of Lacan’s fleeting subject, and its relationship to Lacan’s crucial term, object a. Contrary to ego psychology, which Lacan viewed as an active misreading of Freud, Lacan famously views the subject or ego as a construct of language, as what Fink refers to as a “breach in discourse.”66 This fleetingness of the subject itself takes on temporal attributes as a “pulsation,”67 in that the hollow that represents the split self—with its fissure between the ego and the unconscious—manifests itself fleetingly, as over a void. Temporally speaking, Lacan’s subject serves as 63

  Lacan, “Logical Time,” 170.   Lacan, “Logical Time,” 170, original emphasis. 65   Lacan, “Logical Time,” 170–71. 66   Fink, Lacanian Subject, 41. For a discussion of Lacan’s relationship to schools of ego psychology, see Chapter 2 of Fink, Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 38–62. 67   Fink, Lacanian Subject, 41. 64

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a reaction, or clarification, to Freud’s “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”—that the subject is temporally elsewhere—always about to be or having-been.68 Judith Butler engages Lacan’s concept of the formation of the ego, presenting the term as the agglomeration of a temporalized process which, due to its very dynamism, will serve a clarifying function here. Butler observes that for Lacan, not only do “identifications precede the ego,” but that the “identificatory relation to the image is itself a relation, indeed, the cumulative history of such relations.” As a result, the ego is not in itself a unitary substance, but rather a “sedimented history of imaginary relations which locate the center of the ego outside itself, in the externalized imago which confers and produces bodily contours.” In this way, the ego itself is more a process than a palpable entity. Moreover, it is by means of the mirror stage of development, in which the child perceives his or her corporeal image and then subsequently constitutes a self-image by means of this specular image, that Butler notes the “ego is formed around the specular image of the body itself.” This specular image, however, Butler is clear to point out, is itself temporalized: it exists in time. The ego is, simply, “an anticipation, a subjunctive delineation. The ego is first and foremost an object which cannot coincide temporally with the subject, a temporal ekstasis; the ego’s temporal futurity, and it’s exteriority as a percipi, establish its alterity to the subject.” Therefore, as Butler points out, “As imaginary, the ego as object is … the permanently unstable site where that spatialized distinction is perpetually negotiated; it is the ambiguity that marks the ego as imago, that is, as an identificatory relation. Hence, identifications are never simply or definitively made or achieved; they are insistently constituted, contested, and negotiated.”69 This contested nature of the ego, and in particular its essential futurity, registers within the contested nature of relationships within Shakespearean drama. These relationships ultimately center on what Lacan identifies as object a. Lacan famously named this term his principle contribution to psychoanalysis. Grounded in the fact of desire, it can most rudimentarily be translated in the following manner: the subject is caused by the other’s desire. Crucially here, however, Lacan not only pits his subject as “fleeting,” but presents it as a product of language and the other’s desire. A subject’s unconscious itself, for example, represents for Lacan the reservoir of other people’s desires; this situation hints at a Lacanian truth, as Fink observes, that without language “there would be no desire as we know it … nor would there be any subject ….” (9). Kinds of desire produced through language, of course, lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s Othello; indeed, the course of events Iago wreaks in the play hinges to a marked degree on precisely the kinds of desire that Lacan’s concept of object a endeavors to explain.70 68

  See Forrester, 189–206.   See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 74–76. 70   I am indebted here to Joel Fineman’s extraordinary essay “The Sound of ‘O’ in Othello,” (New York: G.K. Hall, 1994),104–23, in which he discusses the play as the “Tragedy of Desire.” 69

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The cause for Iago’s actions in the play, for example, remains famously openended. The foundational assessment of the topic remains Coleridge’s supposition of Iago’s “motiveless malignancy,” but the play of course provides a few possibilities. We might note his icy utterance to Roderigo early in the play: “I hate the Moor” (1.3.386); or observe Iago’s later claims of jealousy at 3.3.146–4871; or, intimately related to such jealousy, his intense representation of cuckoldry anxiety, at 2.1.295– 307.72 Or perhaps, we might examine still another possibility, that which consumes Iago early in the play: his botched promotion to the lieutenancy. Borrowed from the French, the term lieutenant, of course, signifies that which holds the place of another. A critical concept Lacan brought to psychoanalysis is helpful here, that of something qui manque à sa place: literally, “something which is out of place, not where it should be or usually is.”73 This concept helps situate Iago’s original cause for action out of a sense of injured merit quite similar to Cassio’s, or, for that matter, to Milton’s Satan.74 Of course, Cassio’s election by Othello to fill this role of placeholder relegates Iago to the telling role of ensign, or flag-bearer, or communicator-by-sign: “I must show out a flag and sign of love, / Which is indeed but sign” (1.1.156–57), Iago insists, having earlier concluded: “I am not what I am” (1.1.65). Iago makes use of this figure to place Cassio, linguistically at least, in Othello’s marital place, convincing Othello that Cassio “hath ta’en your part” (3.3.73), and that Othello ought to “scan” Desdemona’s infidelity “no further; leave it to time. / Although ‘tis fit that Cassio have his place—for sure he fills it up with great ability…” (3.3.245–47). From the position of ensign he ‘wrongly’ occupies, then, Iago will utilize the desires of others in order to place himself into the position of lieutenancy he feels Cassio ‘wrongly’ occupies. But in this sense, of course, the other’s desire that generates Iago as a subject in Othello is ultimately overdetermined. The various causes for his malignancy coalesce in the desire, that is, that Iago incorporates from those that surround him, with Desdemona serving as the agalma. The issue of cause thus demonstrates a consolidation, I would suggest, an overflow of the extreme aspects of the patriarchal system of early modern England: in the codes of behavior, the rules, if we can call them that, which govern the homo-social, life-or-death, cuckoldry-anxietydriven, woman-as-property form of game that signifies the patriarchal system Shakespeare demonstrates within the world of the drama.75 Hence, the codes 71   Iago observes here that “(it is my nature’s plague / To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not …). 72   Iago notes here that “I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leap’d into my seat; the thought whereof / Doth (like a poisonous mineral) gnaw my inwards; / And nothing can or shall content my soul / Till I am even’d with him, wife for wife…. [and ] ( … I fear Cassio with my nightcap too)…. 73   See Fink, Lacanian Subject, 52. 74   See John Milton, Paradise Lost, The Riverside Milton, (ed.) Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), Book 1, line 98. 75   See Breitenberg, esp. 1–34, 175–201.

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pertaining to masculinity themselves become the rules of the game, in the Lacanian conception of the term. Within the homo-social network in which “honest” Iago paradoxically thrives, after all, Iago notably controls the ways in which the other men inhabit their narratives. While this control centers on his ability to manipulate such narratives, we have seen above the way in which that impulse dictates— by drawing on the psychosomatic role of volatility in the Renaissance male— how they experience time. To this end, within the confines of Lacan’s sophism, Iago comes paradoxically to fill the roles of both the prisoner and the warden. His role as stage manager for the other male characters’ narratives permits him to straddle, as it were, two different realms: to be one of the gang and yet somehow stand beyond it. Undoubtedly, his function as Vice-figure aids him in this ostensibly mediating task. And, indeed, the way in which Iago carries out this function hinges on the fungible nature in which he treats the male characters he encounters within his ‘game.’ Throughout the play, men serve in Iago’s speech as transferable. Thus it is we are forced to grapple with the pronominal ambiguity of the comments he makes, such as “I follow him to serve my turn upon him” (1.1.42); or “It is sure as you are Roderigo, / Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. / In following him, I follow but myself” (1.1.56–58); or “After some time to abuse Othello’s [Q ear] / That he is too familiar with his wife” (1.3.395–96). The slipperiness of these cruxes point toward what Boehrer, drawing on Deleuze and Guittari, presents as the “challenge of rethinking the subject as a multiple and mutable construct” (129). Boehrer locates in these patterns of exteriority of the subject in the play—and such linguistic cruxes, in which he includes Desdemona via her father, Brabantio—a conceptual move that Lacan engages with the term intersubjectivity. Lacan discusses the term in his second essay on time, “Function and Field.” This later analysis explores the ramifications of Lacan’s early paper on logical time in the context of the analytical setting. It takes the three-fold movement of logical time—the instant of the glance, the time for comprehending, and the moment of concluding—and utilizes it as an allegory of time’s function in psychoanalysis itself.76 Treating explicitly on the topic of the variable length sessions that drove a wedge between Lacan and the IPA, “Function and Field” also engages the concept of the intersubjective relationship between the analyst and analysand, which Lacan grapples with in the context of time and temporality: a speaking subject [locuteur] who enters into analysis, Lacan explains, engages his or her analyst as addressee [allocutaire], and in doing so formulates an “intersubjectivity.”77 Within this context, I suggest, Iago maintains his role in what amounts to what Lacan would recognize as an analyst / analysand relationship—a bad analyst, to be sure, but a bad analyst in a technical sense.78 To this end, as Lacan would have it, Iago positively dictates duration of the ‘sessions’ he conducts with Othello, 76

  See Forrester, 189–90.   Lacan, “Function and Field,” 214. 78   Fink, Lacanian Subject, 61–66, 87. 77

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but negatively sets himself up as the object a for the men whom he engages in analysis. The conversations between Iago and Othello center as much on the temporalized nature of logical time as the variable-length session Lacan proposes as crucially beneficial to psychoanalytic treatment. It is this variable-length session that Iago manipulates skillfully with each male in the drama, but with Othello especially. Iago terminates his “sessions” with Othello most carefully; Iago both abbreviates and lengthens these sessions as need requires. At 3.3.462, for example, as he kneels in the mock-nuptial in which Iago finally achieves the status, or place, of lieutenant, Iago insists to Othello “Do not rise yet.” In doing so, he selects the moment of concluding in what Lacan calls the excluding form of an ‘I am’ phrase, and also as a proclamation of love: “I am your own for ever” (3.3.480). At 4.1.92, however, Iago again plots to abuse Othello’s ear, abruptly concluding their conference by leading Othello to withdraw and eavesdrop upon Iago’s conference with Cassio: “But yet keep time in all,” Iago insists to Othello as Cassio approaches: “Will you withdraw?” Here, again, Iago dictates duration in order to achieve his desired end. Such manipulation of time, as “Function and Field” makes clear, is a central aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Similarly, as we have seen, the conversations that Iago and Othello engage in position Iago gleefully in the role of Lacan’s subjectsupposed-to-know.79 This is a position Lacan adamantly insists the analyst try to avoid in analyst/analysand relations. But against this, the temptations of ego psychology are always there. Essentialist readings of the play can freely position Iago as usurper, and voilà: the very absence, or lack, that comes to signify Othello’s selfhood (“Othello’s occupation’s gone!” [3.3.357]), just as with the anxiously voiced term— “nothing”—that consumes both Leontes and Lear, for example, can be seen to create a vacuum or a void that Iago’s jealousy, in this case, readily fills. By formulating a suitable justice for Desdemona, the very “cause” (5.2.1) for which Othello murders her, Othello as Othello can be seen to have been entirely superseded by Iago. Indeed, where Iago, famously, is “not what [he is]” (1.1.65) at the outset of the play, Othello, too, can come to be seen as not what he “is” at the play’s end. Iago’s psychic energy, this reading runs, and with it, the temporality he continuously forecasts for Othello as a false ego-image, can be argued always to remain a step ahead of the Moor. And so it goes. What makes Lacan’s concept of intersubjectivity and the temporality of the subject so compelling, however, lies in the fruitful way in which these concepts offer nuanced readings that approach more fully an appreciation of the dexterous linguistic achievement Shakespearean drama poses. Lacan writes in “Function and Field,” for example, that I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no   Fink, Lacanian Subject, 84–90.

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Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming. (84)

This sentence forthrightly positions the self as discourse in language, but simultaneously highlights the fleetingness of the subject within the matrix of the here and now. The way in which Shakespeare’s Othello presents the subject’s status as a projected, always anticipatory image has significant bearing upon the way in which we can conceive of Iago’s handling of all the men in the play, but notably Othello’s process to derangement. Iago’s insistent prodding of Othello hinges on such futurity: “she’ll betray more men” (5.2.6), he exclaims—that is, “she will”. The futurity of the comment is revealing not so much due to the lack that constitutes Othello at the close of the play is itself the unstable site of the subject, which is always in the process of formulating its own negotiation of being. What matters more here is Iago’s foundational role as bad analyst, in that it is by means of such abuse of the intersubjective ties between Iago and Othello in their analyst/analysand relationship that we come to see in the Tragedy of Othello, as Joel Fineman noted long ago, the Tragedy of Desire. Othello’s act in the moment of concluding, his murder of Desdemona, thus relies on the truism that he or any of the other male characters in the play would presumably do the same; male honor, as the principal code of the rules of the game, dictates as much. But with the realization of the act comes desubjectification, as Lacan indicates. Where Othello commits suicide within the catastrophe of the tragedy, the play offers other forms of this act: Cassio famously desubjectifies himself in the critical moment of his drunkenness (I cannot speak” [2.3.189] he mutters to Othello), unable to defend himself; and, just so, Iago too formally desubjectifies himself, electing at the close of the play “From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.303–04). The volatility that characterizes the representations of masculinity in Shakespeare’s tragedy thus thrives on a suddenness that serves as the psychosomatic model of temporality in the play. But this model itself both anticipates and complements conceptually what Lacan proposes as the rudiments of logical time: for the instant of the glance, the time for comprehending, and its precipitant haste into the moment of concluding. Indeed, these similar methods of structuring time and the temporality of the subject ultimately situate Lacan’s concept of intersubjectivity within the drama, and it is within the temporal movements these men engage, in competition with one another, that this network of homo-social activity offers a viable example of Lacanian game theory. The decision of when to glance the truth or the real, when to make the time for comprehending, and the selection of the right moment to conclude implicate Othello in this arc of decisionmaking in the tragedy, though it is Iago’s assumption of the role of analyst, and hence of object a for Othello, that brings him down. It is not only his reading of the others’ desires that produce him as subject, but others’ readings of him that cause theirs.” As Othello demands of Iago: “Show me thy thought” (3.3.116), reworking the phrase he had earlier uttered, “As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown” (3.2.106–07). Othello’s precipitation to

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act in murdering Desdemona, within the world of male honor and volatility that “honest” Iago comes to master, appears in the end as a forgone inevitability. At the close of his paper on logical time, Lacan elaborates upon his sophism of the three prisoners in order to incorporate more inmates and, accordingly, more discs. In doing so, he facilitates additional ways of enabling his representation of logical time within the confines of the rules of his game. But in applying such rules to the color coding that pervades Othello, of course, such intellectualizing reveals itself as, somehow, ultimately irrelevant. Just as the discs implicit within the game of Shakespeare’s tragedy inevitably turn out to be white at its close, in 5.2, and thus to trump Othello’s blackness—like the disks in Lacan’s sophism—the result for the play is always the same. The bare fact of the black and white disks, however, does in fact tap into the coded march between signifier and signified in the tragedy. As Bruce Boehrer has suggested, Iago’s handling of Othello comes from his ability to get Othello, who when we greet him views himself in an “exteriorized sense,” to perceive self-division within himself. So where Othello views himself at the outset of the drama as of “a free and open nature” (1.3.393), by the end he consciously divides himself, repeatedly attempting to look upon himself objectively from without: “I took by the throat the circumcised dog, and smote him thus.” The dynamic of mutuality, a kind of Lacanian intersubjectivity, thus falters in the interchange of inward and outward. In the context of Lacan’s sophism, having been misled by Iago-as-warden, Othello confronts not only his own weakness within but an aggressive malignancy without, and these confrontations demonstrate the way in which Lacan’s engagement with time-theory as intersubjectivity clarifies the complex representation of time in Shakespeare’s play. This observation is critical, it seems to me. In a time when Lacan is commonly felt even in academia to complicate unnecessarily the rudiments of psychoanalytic theory, I have attempted to demonstrate the way in which Lacanian theory actually helps us avoid obfuscation and home in on clarity. In turning away from the essentialist model that ego psychology offers, in addition to the commensurately incomplete nature of the proto-imperial model Greenblatt proposes for the nature of character in the play, we come closer to engaging the infinitely rich subtlety of Shakespeare’s achievement. Only by simultaneously finessing the limits of the new historical methodology and of ego psychology through the medium of time can we open a world of methodological possibilities; and it is through Lacan that such interpretations become possible.

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Chapter 4

“Not a jar o’ th’ clock”: Time and Narrative in The Winter’s Tale

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: I see by you I am a sweet-fac’d youth. —Dromio of Ephesus, Comedy of Errors Nothing is more precious than time. Wherefore of each possession two may be had together or more: but of time two moments may not be had together. —Batman uppon Bartholome

William Shakespeare’s dramatic exploration of time reaches its most radical narrative emplotment in The Winter’s Tale. While the principal source for the play, Robert Greene’s prose romance, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), certainly foregrounds temporal concerns, Shakespeare develops these concerns in his play in any number of additional ways; chief among them, of course, Time as Chorus makes a crucial cameo appearance, shuffling onstage at the outset of Act 4, hourglass in hand. An incontrovertible figure, Time’s visual form might appear to suggest nothing so much as that favorite medieval and early modern figure, the very type of Time the devourer, or tempus edax rerum, the tyrannical formulation in which “nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defense” (Sonnet 12) except progeny, and perhaps a timeless art. But verbally, however, this choric Time stresses a very different temporal characteristic: its ability to reveal truth, as temporis filia veritas. To this end, a second way in which Shakespeare examines    The Winter’s Tale, Act 1, scene 2, 147. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, (ed.) G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).    The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.418–19.    See Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome, his booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582) Book 9, section 2.    See, for example, Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972) for his discussion of the very different conceptions of time by individuals in the medieval and early modern periods. Also note David Scott Kastan’s suggestion, in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1982), that in the transition from the kind of providential time encountered in the medieval Corpus Christi play (4–5) to the “explorations of time” found in the early modern period, particularly given expression in Shakespeare, “time becomes a source of anxiety in men” (5, emphasis his).

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time in the play involves Time’s announcement that he will “slide / O’er sixteen years” (4.1.5–6) to pursue this pattern of revelation in Acts 4 and 5 of the play, which culminates in Leontes’ reunion with friend Polixenes, daughter Perdita, and wife Hermione. At the heart of this hybridized representation of what Inga-Stina Ewbank identifies as time’s role as both “Destroyer” and “Revealer,” Shakespeare constructs the play with a sixteen-year gap at its core. While this structural feature is one that has certainly received critical attention over the years, of far more scholarly interest, however, has been puzzlement over the cause for Leontes’ derangement, the precipitating event for the plot of the play itself. In fact, assessment of the motivation for Leontes’ ostensibly sudden transformation has served as a central feature in scholarship of the play. Counter to Frank Kermode’s observation that “Shakespeare removes Leontes’ motives for jealousy,” or J.H.P. Pafford’s, that “Causes of the jealousy are no concern of ours,” or Harold Bloom’s, that Leontes serves, simply enough, as his own Iago, or Dover Wilson’s, who, in a similar tack, suggests that Leontes is consumed with jealousy from the very beginning of the play, other scholars offer that the question of motivation, at root, appears to hinge upon features related to time and dramatic pacing in the play. Where Othello charts its hero’s wrenching progress toward a murderous cuckoldry anxiety over the course of the tragedy, The Winter’s Tale begins, rather, with Leontes’ process complete by the end of Act 1, scene 2. While one way to handle the question of motivation, consequently, as with Kermode and Pafford, is simply to deny it, another way in which to handle the problem is to cite it as the play’s deficiency. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, for example, observes out of frustration that “Shakespeare had time, or could have found time, to make Leontes’ jealousy far more credible than it is. I maintain that he bungled it” (emphasis in original). Another way is to assume that the motivation, such as it is, serves its dramatic purpose, as does Roger Trienens, who zeroes in on the suddenness of Leontes’ apparent transformation, concluding that such suddenness must be perceived as fundamental to Shakespeare’s own artistic rationale. A final way to clarify the cause of Leontes’ derangement has been to situate it within the medical language Shakespeare incorporates within 1.2 in order to focus on the process of the derangement itself, such as it is. Scholars are facilitated in their efforts to the extent that Leontes presents us with an attempt at self-diagnosis, as we shall see.   See, for example, Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Triumph of Time,” A Review of English Literature 5.2 (1964), reprinted in Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, (ed.) Kenneth Muir, (London: Macmillan, 1968) 99. Also see Peter Lindenbaum, “Time, Sexual Love, and the Uses of Pastoral in The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972), reprinted in The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, (ed.) Maurice Hunt, (New York: Garland, 1995) 202; and Laurence Wright “When Does the Tragi-Comic Disruption Start?: The Winter’s Tale and Leontes’ ‘Affection’,” English Studies 3(1989) 225–32.    See Frank Kermode, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green, 1963) 30; Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998) 639; and Roger J. Trienens, “The Inception of Leontes’ Jealousy in The 

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But the problem of Leontes’ motivation can be explored productively in a range of other ways, as well. For example, we might engage Leontes’ rupture within psychoanalytic methodologies that can clarify the various roles narcissism, shame, melancholia, nostalgia, and repetition disorders play within the context of the psychic drama that the play evokes such as demonstrated in the scholarship of Murray M. Schwartz, Peter Erickson, and others; or perhaps we might view its cause as entirely social in origin— that is, best pursued within the contemporary milieu of power relations, such as the malleable gender identities that inform representations of cuckoldry fears and other masculine anxieties within early modern England, as engaged by scholars like Mark Breitenberg, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and others; or we might explore the various representations of time in the work—from calendrical to eschatological, from oracular to corporeal, and otherwise—and pursue the ways these disparate temporalities complicate aspects of emplotment, character, and the role political and material economies play in structuring the drama, as has been pursued in the scholarship of Michael Bristol and Lowell Gallagher. What I propose here is to exploit these ostensibly disparate methodological modes in a reading of the play that clarifies the nature of Leontes’ emotional derangement while demonstrating that Shakespeare draws upon that derangement itself as the play’s structuring principle; he does so by utilizing the psychosomatic volatility of the humoral body—in the nexus of its manifestation of time, temperature, and the humors—to formulate a narrative volatility, and consequent generic indeterminacy, that finds explicit expression in The Winter’s Tale. Foregrounding this integration of Aristotelian ethos and mythos against the backdrop of Hilary Dannenberg’s structuring principles of coincidence and counterfactuality serves to clarify and confirm the essential volatility of the passions within the humoral body, the manner of their portrayal on the early modern stage, and the unique narrative temporality of The Winter’s Tale itself. Too hot, too hot! I find untenable the positions that Leontes is either manifestly jealous from the outset of the play, or that the causes for his jealousy are ultimately irrelevant. Whether my distaste with these positions involves the ultimate sympathy, however opaque, I presume Shakespeare intends an audience to feel for Leontes, or for the apparently genuine (albeit curt) nature of the earnestness I perceive in Leontes’ first few enunciations, I simply fail to find him “angling” (1.2.180) from the play’s very outset. What I take as the principal moment of Leontes’ collapse, both in terms of the playtext and perhaps an antique sense of character coherency, is the instant in which Leontes receives a cue, possibly visual, that precipitates our first impression that he is unstable. The cue itself comes at the end of the interchange Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953) 321–26. J.H.P. Pafford, Dover Wilson and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch are quoted in Wright, 225–27.

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between Leontes and Hermione, in which Leontes explains to his wife—who has just convinced Polixenes to spend another week with them in Sicilia—when first she had spoken “To better purpose” (1.2.89). According to Leontes, this instance was when, after Three crabbed months had sour’d themselves to death, … I could make thee open thy white hand, [And ] clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter, ‘I am yours for ever.’ (102–05)

Justifiably proud of her “potent” (51) rhetorical ability, Hermione concludes: “Why, lo you now! I have spoke to th’ purpose twice: / The one for ever earn’d a royal husband; / Th’ other for some while a friend” (106–08). At this moment, a stage direction indicates the following action: “[Gives her hand to Polixenes.]” Charged with the weight of the marriage vow Leontes has just recalled, and, for the audience, the words of Archidamus and Camillo in 1.1, that Leontes and Polixenes, though separated for many years, had exchanged gifts and “shook hands as over a vast” (30), this visual cue between Hermione and Polixenes apparently serves here, for Leontes, as a parody of it. It is at this very instant, however, that Leontes looks on in horror and exclaims: [Aside.]Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, But not for joy; not joy.

The halting staccato, fierce alliteration, and close repetition of the words ‘too hot / too hot,’ ‘mingle / mingle,’ ‘not joy / not joy,’ express performatively the emphatic shock of what appears to Leontes to represent, on one level at least, his nearly inexpressible torment at being cuckolded. Drawing as this soliloquy does upon an intense compression of vocabulary associated with self-constituting forms of psycho-physiological affect, with a lexicon that draws on critical aspects of psychosomatic volatility within the humoral paradigm, Leontes’ brief exclamation touches on a variety of early modern concerns relating to the embodiment of emotion. Leontes’ expression manifestly demonstrates, as well, the overlapping vocabularies of mental and physical disease in the humoral body, revolving around

  Interestingly enough, the first stage direction—“[Gives her hand to Polixenes]”— does not originate with the 1623 First Folio, the only version of the play that has come down to us. Rather, it was first added by Edward Capell in his 1768 edition of Shakespeare, entitled Works. Further, the second term—“[Aside.]”—was added by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare, also entitled Works.    1.2.108–111. 

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the jarring excesses of somatic heat that early modern physicians identified to be prominent among the atmospheric variables that could negatively affect health.  While a certain amount of this radical or vital heat, as we have seen, is understood to be requisite in order to facilitate the body’s general solubility, or the healthy flow of the bodily fluids to the various bodily members,10 early modern theorists consider excesses in heat to be extremely dangerous to the humoral body. Timothy Bright, for example, compares the scorching of the melancholy humor in particular to the boiling of milk: “such is the force of heat in bloud, that it turneth that milke sweet tast” into an “itchy brackishness.” Because “natural” melancholy is implicitly cold and sluggish in comparison to the “unnatural,” Bright maintains that when it is turned “adust,” or scorched by an “excessiue distemper of heate,” melancholy is especially dangerous. He draws focus to the psychosomatic effects of such caloric increases, noting that “excessive distemper of heat . . . raiseth the greatest tempest of perturbations and most of all destroyeth the braine with all his faculties, and disposition of action.” Bright explores the role of caloric increases within the humoral constitution in some detail. For example, “Atra bilis,” or black bile, he notes: riseth by excessive heate of such partes, where it is engendred or received, whereby the humour is so adust, as it becommeth of such an exulcerating, and fretting qualitie, that it wasteth those partes, where it lighteth; this most commonly riseth of the melancholie excrement before said, and diverse times of the others thicke parte of blood; as also of Choler, and salt fleame: which take such heate, partely by distemper of the bodie, and partly by putrefaction that thereby a humor riseth, breeding most terrible accidentes to the minde, and painefull to the bodie: which the melancholicke and grosse bloud, doth more forcible procure: in that that anie heate, the grosser the substance is, wherein it is received, the more fiercely it consumeth …. Otherwise choler being by nature of the hottest temper, carieth with it, more qualitie of heat then the other: but by reason the substance of the humor is more subtle and rare, the lesse it appeareth: &, as the heat of a flame in comparison of the other, more speedily passeth it. (32–33)

Even this passage’s fungible use of the terms melancholy, adust, choler, and salt phlegm fails to obscure Bright’s thesis that the colder the implicit temperature of the humor (the chillness associated with natural melancholy) the “more speedily” the humor is exacerbated by sudden caloric increases. Bright labels the affected

   Notably relating to the male. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990) esp. 28–29, 108, 141–42. 10   See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 9–10.

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psycho-physiology of such an afflicted individual with the term “melancholie madnesse.”11 Corresponding to this inward drama, Robert Burton identifies unnatural melancholy as the cause for a series of similarly sudden behavioral changes centering on the caloric. For example, in addition to the panicked condition in which the afflicted individual is both “tormented in mind” and often suspects “treason … of their dearest and nearest friends” (1.3.1.2),12 Burton observes that when fear stokes melancholy adust, “Many lamentable effects this fear causeth in men, as to be red [or] pale, tremble, sweat, it makes sudden cold and heat to come over all the body, palpitation of the heart, syncope, &c.” Such transformations, he insists, result in swift changes that “causeth oftentimes sudden madness, and almost all manner of diseases ….” (1.2.3.5). He observes, as well, that anger unifies this connection between suddenness and emotional display into a pervasive and protracted disease: “From a disposition they proceed to an habit, for there is no difference betwixt a madman and an angry man in the time of his fit” (1.2.3.9); “They are void of reason, inexorable, blind, like beasts & monsters for the time …”; “If these fits be immoderate, continue long, or be frequent, without doubt they provoke madness”; and, finally, “In hot cholerick bodies, nothing so soon causeth madness as this passion of anger …. It diminishes blood, it increases bile …” (1.2.3.9). Stephen Batman, too, indicates that such an affected person, for whom he uses the term “Passio melancholia,” often “stirreth to wrath and desire of revenge” due to this unnatural humor that “breedeth euill passions in the bodye”; he adds that it has “aptly evill deadly qualities” and that one thus affected often possesses an intense fear for one’s life, and a “suspicion of [one’s] death.”13 According to contemporary medical theorists—and, notably, to Leontes’ own self-diagnosis—the explosive pattern of melancholic affect takes its inward shape through the somatic interaction between the heart and brain, precisely the organs he identifies as having been altered by his disease: first, as the “infection of [his] brains” (1.2.145), and second, as the fluctuation of the heart he terms “tremor cordis.”14 As Bright observes of this interaction between the two organs within the humoral paradigm, melancholy adust

11   Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie: Contayning the Causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies . . . . (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586) 2. 12   All quotations from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1628), are numbered as Burton himself divided his work: first, by Partition; second, by Section; third, by Member; and, fourth, by Subsection. 13   See Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome, 4:10, 4:11, 5:39. 14   See Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 186, n. 35, and 187, n. 49.

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counterfetteth terrible obiectes to the fantasie, and polluting both the substance, and spirites of the brayne, causeth it without externall occassion, to forge monstrous fictions … whiche the iudgement taking as they are presented by the disordered instrument, deliuer over to the hart, which … giuing credite to the mistaken report of the braine breaketh out into that inordinate passion, against reason.15

This interplay between the brain and the heart, Bright proceeds, thus serves as cause for the false interpretation of outward events—that is, of hallucinations. Indeed: “if the brayne be altered, and the obiect not right apprehended then is it deliuered otherwise then it standeth in nature, and so the hart moued to a disorderly passion” (93). This concept of fear or rage without cause is one that serves as a particularly unfortunate aspect of the disease, according to Bright. In the following passage, he links such hallucinations with the overriding problem of the swiftness with which the humors and spirits enact false interpretation: Now particularly the spirite of the humour being subtiler, thinner, hoter, then is meete, maketh the apprehension quicker then it should be, and the discretion more hasty, then is meete for the vpright deliuery to the hart, what to embrace or to refuse: this causeth pronenes to anger, when we are offended without cause, commonly caused teastiness, and frowardnes. If the humour also with this spirite possesse the brayne, then are these passions of longer continuance: humour being of a more sollid nature then the spirite, and so not easily dispersed, which causeth fits of such passions to be of longer continuance: and thus the hart may be abused from the brayne ….(94)

Leontes’ precision in regarding the heart as the site of his trauma is therefore particularly telling. To be sure, critics of the play have thrilled at the detail involved in Leontes’ offering of this physical locus as the seat of his pain. Derek Cohen, for example, acknowledges the “clinical specificity” of tremor cordis in itself as a “brilliant dramatic stroke,” while David Ward has perhaps most successfully explored what this medical term signified within the context of Leontes’ illness during the early modern period.16 But the dynamic role the heart was understood

15

  See Timothy Bright, 113, 110, 102.   See Derek Cohen, “Patriarchy and Jealousy in Othello and The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Quarterly 48.3 (Sept. 1987) 211. Also see David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Review 82.3 (1987), esp. 549–52. Ward successfully grounds Leontes’ “Affection” soliloquy as an attempt at selfdiagnosis, in a reading that complements mine. Ward’s concern lies in comprehending Leontes’ disease as disease, however, not in tracing the movement of the humor from its natural to its unnatural state, as I am stressing here. 16

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to play in such psycho-physiological breakdowns as Leontes’ may be further clarified. Batman suggests that a subject’s emotional health relies significantly on the heart’s ability to maintain proper “movement.” Writing well before William Harvey, Batman is not citing here the heart’s pumping of the blood and its circulation throughout the body. Rather, he cites the heart as the seat of emotion; just as the heart is the “beginning and well of bloud,” he points out, so too is it “the beginning and well of moving [i.e., emotion], of liking, and of unliking. And generally of all wits, the moving beginneth in the heart, and thereunto restoreth, and the vertue thereof is spred and staight into all the members, and after one manner” (5.36). In this way, the heart “bringeth to every of them proper life and proper kinde heat.” As Galen had indicated, after all, the heart requires blood that is “in quantitie and qualitie … full hot and moist” (5.36); however, if this vital or radical heat becomes overcharged to the extreme, then tragedy will follow: For if passing heat have mastrie in the heart, the bloud of the heart boyleth and moveth, and so the vitall spirite is grieved…. Also the heart sometime quaketh…. And so it seemeth to a sicke man, [as] yf the heart moveth from place to place. (5.36)

This activity Batman calls “Cardiaca passio” (5.36), in which the moving of the heart, or the strong emotion toward like or dislike, turns to movement of the heart, which causes it to palpitate as Leontes has described for us. Burton, too, confirms that a common effect of this shift in the quality of melancholy is “palpitation of the heart” (1.2.3.5, 1.3.1.1, 1.3.2.2). Thomas Wright, as well, further captures the simultaneity of the terms moving and movement here, in the context of suddenness and emotion: “we may easily perceive, how unquiet is the heart of a passionate man, tossed like the Sea with contrary windes, even at the same time and moment: For sometimes a man will bee in the prime of his joy, and presently a sea of griefe overwelmeth him” (71). Such discussion of the heart’s role in effecting illness in the humoral body urges our reinterpretation of the role it plays in Leontes’ derangement. The work of Harold Goddard, Hallet Smith, John Erskine Hankins, Laurence Wright, and David Ward has ably traced Leontes’ attempts at self-diagnosis here. In Leontes’ use of the terms “tremor cordis,” “communicat’st,” “co-active,” “co-join,” and even “infection,” we can discern precisely the nature of what Shakespeare is after here: as Smith indicates, an ostensibly rational individual attempting to narrate his own moral and mental state (164). Leontes’ utilization of such a medical lexicon, localizing of trauma in the interaction between his brain and heart, and insistence on the agency of sudden caloric increases signify, then, not simply precious or quaintly deluded expressions, in equal measure both intriguingly specific but annoyingly vague. On the contrary, Leontes’ terminology points specifically to a subjective expression of the sudden onset of an illness that follows an early modern understanding of the nature of psychosomatic cause and

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effect within the humoral body. In addition, Leontes’ narration of his subjective transformation from a natural humoral state into one unnatural, as confirmed by contemporary medical writers, carries with it a commensurate temporal shift they denote related to subjective forms of temporality: from the “slownesse”17 of the natural humor to the frenzy and rage they associate with the unnatural. Such forms of time cast a long shadow in the play. Time, Mirror, and the Self While Leontes’ dynamic medical status in The Winter’s Tale follows the contours of the humoral outline that these early modern medical writers identify as normative to the melancholic humoral trajectory, his process of derangement simultaneously traces a psychoanalytic patterning that further helps to clarify this movement. The heft and moment of his rage, after all, appears to center on forms of affect—contained in 1.2 within the interactive triad of Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione—pertaining to projection, transference, and countertransference; or to condensation and displacement (evident in such intrapsychic formulations we might hypothesize for Leontes, such as: [viewing Polixenes] “I don’t love him, she does”; or [viewing Hermione] “I don’t love her, he does”).18 Beyond such possibilities, however, Leontes’ rage also appears to derive from intense moments of self-reflection that ground him in especially keen manifestations of nostalgic loss within a stark narcissistic patterning that permeates the play. Here Lynn Enterline’s reading of the early modern mirror as a “pedagogic tool” employed by the melancholic individual is helpful in positioning Leontes’ “fascinating but dangerous temptation … to see [him]self through [his] own reflection.”19 Leontes confirms through this gaze what Kathryn Schwarz identifies as the narcissistic subject’s reading of an “image of identity imagined … as a hierarchy of value,” one that “forecloses gaps between body and image, referent and display.”20 The use Leontes makes of this gaze presents us with a remarkably complex overhaul of a version of this mirroring trope, in which the divergent values Leontes ascribes to these images of self-identity accord with a temporal dialectic implicit to narcissism itself, one that has a significant impact upon the portrayal of time in The Winter’s Tale.

17

  Bright, 177.   See Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996) 159. 19   See Lynn Enterline, “‘You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (1997): 42, 2. Here Enterline notes the relationship of the Narcissus and Pygmalion myths to Shakespeare’s play. 20   Kathryn Schwarz, “Breaking the Mirror Stage,” in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, (ed.) Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000) 279–98. 18

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It is tempting in this foreclosure between subject and object that Schwarz identifies, though, to seek to clarify Leontes’ derangement exclusively by means of post-Freudian ego psychology or object-relations theories, such as those of D.W. Winnicott, among others. Such readings would position Leontes’ (or even Shakespeare’s) fears and desires as they are portrayed in the text of the play as identifications focused upon the discrete and varied forms of the other he encounters. Indeed, within such readings, concepts such as projection, transference, and countertransference might fully—and productively— govern our understanding of the deployments of the mirroring trope in the play among its various characters. As Freedman illustrates in her reading of Lacan, however, the very “stabilization” of the subject/object relationship that ego psychology predicates is implicitly subverted by what she identifies as both the “fantasy of self-representation” and the “fantasy of the representation of the other as that which completes the self.” Such stability, Lacan offers, is mere illusion. Indeed, Leontes’ tendency to misread himself in others thus stems, as Lacan would have it, from the illusory nature of the ego as it misreads itself in the deceptively stable form of the other through a series of misrecognitions. The ego may thus be understood to be the “delusory site of unity which always plays out in misrecognitions.” However, such misrecognitions can be seen to mimic productively the apparent “stability” of the subject/object relationship that is embedded within ego psychology and object-relations theory. Consequently, I intend to engage such theories here, but to do so as what amounts to an allegory: Lacan’s insistence on the structural lack, or absence, at the core of the ego, the site of its constant negotiation in the split between the unconscious and the ego, will in the end serve as my central model in explicating Leontes’ derangement.21 Schwarz’s essay, “Breaking the Mirror Stage,” contrasts the temporalities appending to Ovid’s presentation of the Narcissus myth and Freud’s interpretation of it. Where Freud positions the narcissistic subject as hopelessly lost in the divergence between the timeless past of the unconscious and the here and now, “retreating deictically from the subject’s present moment,” Schwarz notes that Ovid’s myth of the self-directed gaze “presents a union of subject and object characterized by … immediacy”: “For Narcissus,” she suggests, “identity and desire [occupy] an endlessly expansive now.”22 Lacan’s insistence on the fleetingness of the subject presents itself here as helpful. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 3, Lacan understands the subject or ego as a construct of language, as what Bruce Fink refers to as a

  Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 207, 208, 209, 32. Freedman comments on Shakespeare’s representation of dramatic characters defined by their “interior place of unknowingness” (26). “By pointing to a certain absence within,” she suggests, “these characters derive presence” (26). 22   Schwarz, 280 (emphasis hers). 21

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“breach in discourse.”23 This fleetingness of the subject itself takes on temporal attributes as a “pulsation,”24 in that the hollow that represents the split self—with its fissure between the ego and the unconscious—manifests itself fleetingly, as over a void. Lacan’s subject thus serves as a reaction to, or clarification of, Freud’s formulation that “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden”—that the subject is temporally elsewhere—always about to be or having-been.25 This “other-where-ness” thus coincides with an “other-when-ness” that comes to define the ego, pointing to the problematic temporality of the nature of the self to which Schwarz’s handling of the Narcissus myth alludes. The split within the individual between this false sense of self, which is the ego, and the automatic function of language, or the signifying chain, produces the spatio-temporal enigma that is the self. Such inconstancy of the self reveals itself in the temporal processes at work in Shakespeare’s play. Leontes’ breakdown draws on this imbricated paradigm of temporalities and values, through which he ostensibly reads himself in the forms of others in a similarly contrasting manner: that is, both nostalgically and immediately. These differing, and hence hierarchized, temporalities mirror nicely the psychological frames associated with humoral melancholy in both its natural and unnatural states. When in the throes of his rage, Leontes glances to Mamillius in1. 2, for example, and, reading himself as a boy his son’s age, 26 he notes to Polixenes: Looking on the lines Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d. (153–55)27

  Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995) 41. For a discussion of Lacan’s relationship to schools of ego psychology, see Chapter 2 of Fink, Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 38–62. 24   Fink, Lacanian Subject, 41. 25   See John Forrester, “Dead on Time”: The Seduction of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990: esp. 189–206. 26   Peter Erickson identifies Mamillius as Leontes’ “narcissistic reflector,” whose loss “punctures Leontes’ delusion” in “Patriarchal Structures in The Winter’s Tale,” PMLA 97.5 (Oct. 1982) 821. Also note Murray M. Schwartz’s suggestion in that in looking to Mamillius “Leontes seeks to find himself externalized in the image of his offspring,” but that this glance turns out to be merely “false therapy.” See “Leontes’ Jealousy in The Winter’s Tale,” American Imago 30 (1973) 268. Erickson and Schwartz’s readings of this play are indispensable. 27   I obviously disagree with the argument that Leontes lies when he says these words to Polixenes. I would argue that through the act of speaking the words aloud, Leontes performs the act he describes. 23

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This nostalgic “recoil” in time allows Leontes to teeter between the ‘here and now’ of his Sicilian kingship and the ‘then’ of his pre-pubescence, when his “dagger” was to be kept “muzzled” (1.2.156). The essential purity that Leontes discerns in his pre-pubescence is borne out by his emphasis that he, too, like Mamillius, was once non-sexualized: “unbreech’d.” Stephen Orgel notes that in the Elizabethan period, “the ‘breeching’ of boys was the formal move out of the common gender of childhood … [which was] largely controlled by women, and into the world of men,”28 adding that the breeching ceremony took place around “the age of seven” (15). Mamillius’ banter with “yond crickets” (2.1.31) shows he approaches this age and yet remains, importantly for Leontes’ position here, unsullied. This breeching also refers implicitly to an Edenic patterning regarding the use of clothing—that is, its requirement— after the Fall, a patterning Polixenes makes explicit in his recollection to Hermione of the idyllic youth he and Leontes had shared. In this prelapsarian fantasy, Polixenes famously proclaims that the two were as “twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’th’sun” (1.2.67), who “knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing” (1.2.69–70). 29 Time itself washed over the boys with superfluity, and they were “Two lads that thought there was no more behind / But such a day to-morrow as to-day / And to be boy eternal” (62–64).30 This Edenic paradigm symbolically accords with the Lacanian theory that positions feelings of loss as deriving from “rereadings of an origin without time or place” that represents in many ways the timelessness of the unconscious.31 But this ‘pursuit’ of their eternal boyhood becomes suspended, presumably, both by their development of the “stronger blood” (1.2.73) of puberty, and of the “Temptations” (77)32 which, Polixenes suggests, were imposed upon the kings’ lives by contact with the feminine, even as represented by lawful marriage. Coppelia Kahn notes of this passage that Polixenes offers a paradigm in which “childish innocence is contrasted with adult sinfulness, and that sinfulness is then specifically associated with … women.”33 As 28   See Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 15. 29   See Lindenbaum, 206–08. I follow Lindenbaum regarding the issues at work in Leontes’ overhearing of Polixenes’ words when he speaks to Hermione. Whether Leontes hears them or not, these words express parallel and reciprocated feelings the two kings feel toward their youth, toward which one king will “inevitably” react. 30   See Stanton B. Gardner, Jr., “Time and Presence in The Winter’s Tale.” Modern Language Quarterly 46.4 (1985), who insists that these lines “subvert the very idea of time,” of “temporal succession” itself (348). 31   Freedman, 208. 32   Enterline argues that this “(barely) suppressed undercurrent of illicit sexuality . . . comes to define the very notion of time” (“Rhetoric of Animation” 31) as it is portrayed in the play. I insist that this is only one aspect of the temporal in The Winter’s Tale. 33   See Coppelia Kahn, “The Providential Family and the Shakespearean Family,” Representing Shakespeare, (eds) Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) 233.

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such, Hermione herself even offers, in jest, that Polixenes’ stark terms position the queens as “devils” (1.2.82); she notes that Polixenes implicitly frames the men’s fall as a paradise lost. And the shifting triad in The Winter’s Tale between Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione indeed does correspond somewhat with the malleable portrait of Adam, Eve, and Satan that John Milton subsequently incorporates in Paradise Lost; Leontes’ jealous soliloquies, for instance, recall Satan’s in Book 4, when he first views Adam and Eve in the garden. As Hermione saunters off with Polixenes, she notably goes so far as to express to Leontes “We are yours i’ th’ garden” (1.2.78), where Adam and Eve, too, discovered shame. But such a correlation begs the question regarding the identity of the tempter: is this individual Satan after all, or is it Eve? Shakespeare stresses that where Hermione had positioned women as devils merely in jest (1.2.82), Leontes unflinchingly conflates the two. Either way, Shakespeare offers Leontes’ derangement as a form of temporally-constructed, moral analogy in which youth is to Eden as adulthood is to the postlapsarian world, and Leontes’ humoral melancholy therefore becomes a synecdoche for the postlapsarian melancholy of formalized Christianity. By this logic, the fall into sin for the sacrificial twinn’d lambs of which Polixenes speaks brings about both their mortality and, thus, significantly, the origin, and unfolding, of time.34 ******* But Leontes’ nostalgic pursuit of his idyllic but irretrievable past is, simply put, a temporal paradox: entropy, and the arrow of time that subtends it, does not register as viable such a quest. The play makes clear, however, that somehow Leontes does. Within the intrapsychic processes of psychoanalysis, of course, repetition compulsion has close association with melancholia, which tends to handle the issue as a kind of temporal conundrum involving Nachträglichkeit, the Freudian concept of the two-way interaction involving the past and the present, between the timeless reservoir of the unconscious and the here-and-now. As William Meissner observes, such nostalgic fixation on an idealized past fundamentally involves an effort to arrest time. On one level, he suggests, “repetition” stands in a

34   As Polixenes and Hermione chat closely, Leontes’ meticulous observation of them, and his freighted words of loathing, may be viewed as a portrayal of his own horror at having wooed Hermione in the past. As Katharine Eisaman Maus has it: “The jealous male’s distance from what he sees casts him as both traumatized, impotent child and as omniscient father-judge” (“Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH 54.3 [Fall, 1987] 571). Such a marked binary is a stark formulation, one that nicely characterizes Leontes’ reaction to the cuckoldry that he fears. For more on Edenic patterns in Shakespeare, see Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999).

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“special relation to experienced time—it is basically opposed” to it. He cites Heinz Lichtenstein, who observes that Repetition is an attempt or a tendency to transcend the irreversibility of the flow of time, to capture, as it were, the time which has disappeared, to compel time to stand still …. Amid the immutable changes to which everything is exposed that exists in time and is determined by time, repetition effects a kind of duration, albeit often a mere appearance of duration. Indeed, the only mode of duration accessible to anything living is, strictly speaking, duration by means of repetition.

Repetition compulsion thus frequently seeks to diminish or ignore the transformation that individuals undergo in their maturation from childhood to adulthood. Lichtenstein continues, suggesting that repetition compulsion takes on the quality of defiance against the acceptance of the changes imposed by time; it becomes a rebellion against having undergone the process of becoming older with the passage of time. By its exclusive effort to remain fixated at a particular phase of life, it becomes an obstacle for any further growth …. It can be claimed that transference, insofar as it is a repetition phenomenon … demonstrates clearly the conserving ‘time-suspending’ effect of repetition.

Lichtenstein consequently views repetition as an internal, or subjective, marker of temporal concepts related to cosmic cyclicality and eternal return, as propounded by Mercia Eliade and Friedrich Nietzsche.35 The link here between melancholia—in Freud’s definition the search for an unnamed or unnamable lost object, the loss of which leads to a kind of mourning— and repetition—the nostalgic effort to maintain indefinitely a past stage in one’s life—suggests on one level the intrapsychic forces at work in Leontes’ breakdown as his effort to annihilate any aspect of ostensible proof of his manhood.36 In this vein, Stanley Cavell, too, observes that: Leontes seems rather to want revenge on Time … not because of its threat of mutability, bringing change to present happiness, but for something like the

35

  Qtd in Meissner, 233–34, emphasis in original.   See Sigmund Freud, who notes that the object-loss for which the melancholic subject grieves is often “withdrawn from consciousness,” in The Ego and the Id, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (ed. and trans.) James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975) 245. He adds that this objectloss may be directed toward “what he himself was.” See “On Narcissism,” Standard Edition vol. 19, 90. Indeed, the patient’s “ideal” may be the “substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (94). 36

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reverse reason, that its change perpetuates the nightmare of the present, its changes, its issuing, the very fact of more time.37

And indeed, Leontes’ polarized objectification of Polixenes and Mamillius through his encounter with a form of internalized, temporalized early modern mirror nicely embodies his battle against temporal immediacy, of his impassioned nostalgic desire. In this manner, Mamillius’ youthfulness comes to represent a prelapsarian identification of inestimable worth within the economy of the hierarchy of value Kathryn Schwarz posits, a value squarely opposed to the inestimable shame appending to Polixenes’ outward manifestation of Leontes’ fallen adulthood.38 Narcissism and narcissistic shame39 are thus reconstituted and reshaped here as temporal formulations, each rooted deeply in a nostalgia embodied in a quite literal way from Archidamus’ initial assertion that Mamillius is a boy who “makes old hearts fresh” (1.1.39); such is the case here, though with ironic and tragic results.40

37   Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984) 211. 38   See Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the relationship between Leontes and Mamillius, esp. 193–99. Cavell reads their relationship as an inversion of the Oedipal conflict, in which “the conflict seems primarily generated by the father’s wish to replace or remove the son” (199) out of fear not that he is not the father, but out of fear that he is (195). Cavell argues that Mamillius’ death and Leontes’ immediate recantation of his jealousy are imbricated in the sense that Apollo has been “tricked into taking Leontes’ revenge for him” (196). Cavell’s explanation of the relationship between the father and son ought to be contrasted with Erickson’s reading of Mamillius’ death as the event that breaks right succession in the virulently patriarchal system The Winter’s Tale evidences (281). 39   Significantly, Bright and Burton draw direct correlation between the melancholic subject’s initial manifestation of disease and inward feelings of shame. Bright, for instance, associates feelings of remorse for a past action as fundamental to an understanding of melancholy: “If [the cause of regret] be anything wherein we have displeased ourselves with, it is called shame,” (84). Burton, too, notes that often in the melancholic individual, feelings of guilt relate to “some disgrace, loss, injury, abuse . . . [or] shame” (1.3.1.2). From the psychoanalytic perspective, Andrew P. Morrison suggests that shame is “an effective response to a perception of the self as flawed, and thus inevitably involves narcissism [and] vulnerability” in Shame: The Underside of Narcissism (New Jersey: Analytic Press, 1989) 48. 40   Lowell Gallagher offers that nostalgia stems from a subject’s desire to conflate temporal with spatial immediacy, resulting in a spatio-temporal “discrepancy” whose primary psychological result in the subject is the quality of “belatedness.” Though Gallagher marginalizes the impact of shame as it relates to the play, he insists that the “reading” of objective reality at the beginning of the play “turns lethal because it denies the signs of its belatedness” (473)— that is, because it improperly attempts to conflate temporal with spatial immediacy. Gallagher breaks down the word etymologically as “the temporal contingency of the recuperative ideal of nostos (the ‘return home’)” with “the disintegrative

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For Leontes this mirroring trope proves—that is, reflects—a range of emotional qualities: from nostalgia to shame, from rage to hatred. But early modern mirrors apparently have a tendency to yield such value-oriented interpretations. In a recent study, for example, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet observes that in early modern Europe, the function of mirrors was inherently corrective: “The feeling of selfhood that the mirror awakened was a conflictual one of modesty or shame, consciousness of the body and of one’s appearance under the watchful eye of another” (140). The significance of time as a sign of moral worth accordingly presents itself as a fundamental concern in making sense of Leontes’ derangement in The Winter’s Tale, and this shattered temporality of a fractured mirroring becomes at once the most artful and terrifying aspect of the play. Leontes’ psychological dissatisfaction with himself allows him to create versions of himself that he can treat according to his perception of each version’s just deserts, and his identification with the males in the play—Mamillius (1.2.122,129, 159, 208), Polixenes (1.2.69), and by extension Polixenes’ son, Florizel (5.1.124–126)—thus comes to illustrate the melancholic individual’s tendency to view all that surrounds him as signs of subjective meaning, of signs as self-focused types.41 Murray Schwartz points out that in paranoia, the individual enters a “form of psychic imprisonment in which the loss of ego boundaries makes the world nothing but a confluence of symbols” (262, emphasis his). The manner in which Shakespeare portrays Leontes’ derangement works along these lines, where Leontes formulates exclusively subjective meaning from ostensibly objective social relationships. In such a construction, Murray Schwartz suggests, “Others lose their otherness.”42 The words that these characters speak, accordingly, ought to be interpreted in this limited sense as the words spoken by the objectified “types” which Leontes seems to perceive them to be. Understood in this way, Leontes enables himself to formulate discursively a scenario in which he is urged to lash out against the cause of his dissatisfaction. In the midst of his narcissistic frenzy in 1.2 of the play, Leontes turns to his son and demands: Leontes: Mam.: Leontes:

Mine honest friend, Will you take eggs for money? No, my lord, I’ll fight. You will? Why happy man be’s dole! My brother….43

algos (‘pain’)” (465–66). He notes that “the word makes explicit the historically bounded conditions of separation and physical limit implicit in the idea of the return” (466). 41   Note as well Polixenes’ further mirroring off the form of Camillo: “Your chang’d complexions are to me a mirror/ Which shows me mine chang’d too” (1.2.381–82). 42   Schwartz, 262. 43   1.2.160–63.

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Here Leontes identifies his unbreeched, “honest friend,” his son, to be the “unbreech’d” boy the king once was, the term “honest” referring here to chastity, to lack of sexual awareness and experience. Given the terms of his illness, Leontes thus asks his own youthful self if he would stand to be made a fool of.44 The unequivocal answer is no; and with that he turns to engage his ‘brother,’ Polixenes. Leontes’ narcissistic identification with the unfallen frame of his son, the aspect within himself which linear time (tempus edax rerum) as a destructive force has devoured, thus galvanizes Leontes’ own will to act. Leontes seeks an impossible nostalgia for a past that, the boy insists, can only be recouped through violence. In the temporal divergence between Leontes’ idealized self-identification as a youth—evoked by his boyhood friend, Polixenes, and evident in the form of Leontes’ son, Mamillius—and his shameful self-identification as an adult—evoked by his son, Mamillius, and evident in the form of his adult double, Polixenes—Leontes’ encounter with the early modern mirror accordingly yields him a contradictory and apparently irreconcilable reflection of the self.45 It will be helpful to frame this disjunction at its root in the following way: if narcissism means looking into the mirror and feeling that the image reflected represents a greater estimation than that which the subject values in the self, then shame means looking into the mirror and feeling that the image reflected represents an estimation less than that which the subject values in the self. Because for Leontes an idealized youth and a fallen adulthood represent temporal manifestations of entirely discrete moral categories, his objectification of Mamillius and Polixenes suggestively portrays his grappling with loss as loss by drawing on both a kind of narcissism and a kind of narcissistic shame. Each is consequently to be positioned by Leontes upon a self-referential hierarchy of value, and treated accordingly. La Petite Différence At the outset of The Winter’s Tale the courtiers Archidamus and Camillo relate to us that “great difference” (1.1.3–4) exists between the kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia; but as Murray Schwartz has insisted, such immediate concern with difference in the play suggests that “Great difference, on one level, is no difference at all.”46 In relation to Lacan’s concept of la petite différence, Bruce Fink, too, observes that: “Difference inevitably creeps between even the most identical of twins, … and the closer the relationship at the outset, the greater the rage over minute differences is likely to be.”(85)   See The Winter’s Tale: Texts and Contexts, Mario DiGangi, (ed.) (Boston: Bedford, 2008) 34, n.161. 45   Such a division follows Freedman’s reading of Lacan, in which she notes a subject’s “primary loss” stems from “the splitting of the subject as a result of being in symbolic form,” 209. 46   Schwartz, 259. 44

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In Act 1 of the play we learn not only that each kingdom, of Sicilia and Bohemia, has at its helm a vibrant king, but that these kings “train’d together” in their childhoods as brothers, that each is married, and that each takes delight in his only son. Further, in each of the first two acts of the play, Leontes explicitly enjoins others to accept Polixenes in his place (1.2.174–177, 2.1.53–55). Such a decidedly ambiguous presentation of outward difference between the two kings and their respective kingdoms urges our interrogation of how difference functions within the social world of the play. And as each king proves to bear a melancholic disposition, it will be productive to investigate the inward differences that distinguish the men from one another as well. The social world that The Winter’s Tale inhabits in its first three acts is one dominated by behaviors associated with Yuletide; Michael Bristol observes that these behaviors are based upon an economy characterized by gift exchange. As gift economies implicitly rely on a complex network of temporary local imbalance mediated in time through exchange, the play’s immediate concern with establishing difference between the two kings may thus be seen to be part of a larger organizing structure that permeates the social world of the play as a whole (161–63). Bristol indicates that the initial conversation between Archidamus and Camillo (1.1.1–46), and the subsequent discussion in which Leontes and Hermione cajole Polixenes into lengthening his stay in Sicilia (1.2.1–56), are especially significant because they unequivocally express the interpersonal dangers associated with such an economy. These discussions regarding royal visitation signify anything but idle chatter; Bristol shows that behind such talk lies a “bitter, and potentially deadly, struggle for prestige.” In keeping Polixenes in Sicilia against his will (with Hermione’s explicit offer, as either “prisoner” or “guest”), Leontes, as the host king, abuses the guest-host relationship: his attempt to delay Polixenes’ departure serves as an example of what Bristol calls “pre-emptive gift-giving.”47 Indeed, where in their youth the lads had exchanged “innocence for innocence” (1.2.71), and in their absence had engaged in “interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies” (1.1.28), the two kings are now involved in a kind of symbolic warfare: “The lavish entertainment provided for Polixenes is prompted by Leontes’ desire to exceed his guest-friend in honor and prestige. The Bohemian courtiers are already somewhat anxious about this because Leontes’ exorbitant generosity may compromise their ability to offer adequate compensation.”48 Leontes’s derangement thus takes its shape by way of a gift-economy, or potlatch, run amok. Such an explication ultimately makes sense of Polixenes’ depiction of himself as a “cipher” (1.2.6), or zero, in that it keys us in to the point that he has absolutely nothing left to give; within the given framework of the gift economy his impulse to flee is unavoidable: defined exclusively by his sense of lack, Polixenes must leave Sicilia. Leontes seeks to prevent Polixenes’ departure because if he allows it to 47

  See Bristol, 158.   Bristol, 160.

48

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transpire, then he himself will be required to visit Bohemia in the future as a form of social reciprocity. And this is an obligation he will simply not perform. It is surely not insignificant in The Winter’s Tale that, like Leontes, Polixenes’ temperament tends explicitly toward the melancholic. Polixenes himself raises the issue twice in 1.2, alone: first, regarding his son, and second, his sadness at the conditions under which he must depart Sicilia. When pressed into comparing his love for his son with Leontes’ love for Mamillius (“Are you so fond of your young prince,” Leontes asks, “as we / Do seem to be of ours?” [1.2.164–165]), Polixenes indicates that Florizel’s “varying childness cures in [him] / Thoughts that would thick [his] blood” (1.2.171). Later, Polixenes fears his “best blood [will] turn / To an infected jelly” (1.2.417–18) when he hears of Leontes’s jealousy. As Burton points out, citing the authority of Bright, the tendency toward a thickening of the blood is a prime indication of dominance by the natural black bile of melancholy (1.3.1.3), and indeed whatever the thoughts that would produce such effects in Polixenes may be stanched, Polixenes offers, by what he terms “varying childness.” The formulation of “varying childness” suggests that either the boy’s development or his caprice cures the father’s sadness, and within the normative individual affected by natural melancholy, such may indeed be the case. For Leontes, however, Mamillius’ “childness”— “varying” or not— fails utterly to do so. Far from it: Mamillius’ words, as I have shown, spur Leontes to fight. Within the competitive setting of the Yuletide time-frame, as Bristol has expressed it, it is helpful to distinguish that Leontes’ struggle to assert outward difference from Polixenes, through the practices and patterns based on Yuletide gift exchange, is reconstituted in this passage as an inward formulation. In his struggle to assert domination over his ostensible double, Polixenes, Leontes constructs difference that necessarily takes an inward turn, exacerbating, or, quite literally, firing his melancholy from its natural to its unnatural state. The significance of such a swift emotional and bodily shift calls to mind many similarly explosive emotional transformations in Shakespeare, whether in Iago’s goading of Othello, “with a little act upon the blood / [to make him] Burn like the mines of sulphur” (Othello 3.3.328–29); in the “rash mood” that stems from Lear’s “corrupted blood” in the “Hysterica passio” scene in King Lear (2.4.169, 225, 57); or in the young Hotspur, “drunk with choler,” as he berates the King behind his back at the beginning of 1 Henry IV (1.3.129), among others.49 The particular modes of competitive behavior associated with the Yuletide setting of the first three acts of The Winter’s Tale, however, indicate that Leontes’ emotional upheaval, as similar as it is to those of these other characters, ought to be understood as an inward representation of the outwardly competitive social behavior within the play he inhabits. Such humoral progression derives from Leontes’ desire to establish “difference” from Polixenes, alongside his fear of “mingling” with him, which he maintains 49   See David F. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992) 307–38.

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in his “Too hot, too hot!” soliloquy (1.2.108–11). Leontes’ struggle to assert an individuated subjectivity, one that distinguishes “bourn,” or boundary, “’twixt his and mine” (1.2.134), thus appears to take inward shape as his bodily and intrapsychic reality can be seen to mirror in microcosm the social world that the play presents. But this gendering—that is, the manifestation of power relations in this inward struggle—is decidedly complex. Indeed, perhaps paradoxically, it is of a “woman’s mood” (1.3.237) that Northumberland accuses his son Hotspur in his chattily choleric diatribe; and it is the “mother” that “swells up to my heart” which Lear so fears (2.4.56). What we might assume to be a kind of hypermasculine rage folds back on itself as an emasculating emotional event. While theories on the gift and gift economies are ubiquitous across the social sciences and recent literary theory, I find most helpful within this context the focus on gender as it relates to such topics engaged by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. In The Gender of the Gift, Strathern observes that above all else gift economies hinge upon human relationships; the circulation of items serve the purpose of facilitating efforts to establish, maintain, or subvert such relationships. She notes, for example, that “The basis for classification [of gift items] does not inhere in the objects themselves but in how they are transacted and to what ends.” She proposes, accordingly, that the “compulsion of the gift … lies in forcing others to enter into debt,” and that what results in gift economies is a “contrived asymmetry” that either solidifies or destabilizes social relations. But Strathern goes further, here, noting Karl Marx’s observation that since commodity economies reify persons through their labor as things-in-themselves, items and persons within this context come to be treated essentially as things. Conversely, she argues that within gift economies “objects [come to] act as persons in relation to one another” (176). Since gift exchange centers upon the relationship between transactors, the actual objects transferred between agents come to serve as partible elements of these very persons; gifts, accordingly, she observes, come to assume the social forms of persons (176, 145). The resulting relationship she terms enchainment, within which agents can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others …. Whether between exchange partners, spouses, or between kin, the circulation of things and persons in this sense leads to comparisons between the agents. Items cannot be disposed without reference to such relations. [And] Enchainment is a condition of all relation based on the gift. (161)

Such enchainment, Strathern maintains, accordingly establishes gift-giving as an implicitly gendered act: “To ask about the gender of the gift … is to ask about the situation of gift exchange … in relation to the form that domination takes in these societies …” (xii); “The action,” she insists, “is the gendered activity” (xi). To this end, domination means something different within each kind of economy. Whereas those who dominate in a commodity economy are those who “determine the manner of appropriation,” especially of surplus goods: “In a gift economy …

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those who dominate are those who determine the connections and disconnections created by the circulation of objects” (167). Where this discussion becomes especially salient is that, according to Strathern, this formulation leads to two conceptual “symbolic modes of exchange,” either mediated or unmediated: First, as in ceremonial exchange transactions, things are conceptualized as parts of persons. Persons or things may be transferred as ‘standing for’ (in our terms) parts of persons. This construction thus produces objects (the person as a ‘part’ of a person— him or herself or another) which can circulate between persons and mediate their relationship. As parts, then, these objects create mediated relations…. The second mode I call unmediated. It characterizes the work of production. Persons do not detach parts of themselves …. [But] Persons are construed as having a direct influence on the minds or bodies of those to whom they are thus related. The capacity to have an unmediated effect creates a distinguishing asymmetry between the parties. (178)

The enchainment between giver and receiver in mediated relations signifies that as “items flow between persons … [t]he items carry the influence that one partner may hope to have on another” (178). Within unmediated relations, however, and more subtly, “one person directly affects the disposition of another towards him or her, or that person’s health or growth … as in so-called pollution beliefs” (179– 88).50 This distinction is helpful in the context of The Winter’s Tale, in that Leontes engages both forms of exchange in his interaction with Polixenes: outwardly in the mediated terms of his outward competitive exchange; and inwardly in the unmediated modes of inward competition and exchange centering upon emotion. If we are to take seriously the concept that the literal, outward competitive exchange between Leontes and Polixenes has ratcheted itself up to such a degree that it has turned inward, as I am suggesting, then it will be helpful to observe the way in which enchainment, partibility, and power relations—in short, the modes of symbolic exchange centering on the gendering of the gift—play out in such competition. Beyond the “sublimated” wish we might ascribe to Leontes in gifting Hermione to Polixenes, then disavowing the notion in horror (Bristol 159)— which is undoubtedly workable in this context—I am suggesting that the dynamism implicit to the humoral theory can help to uncover the processes (political and otherwise) at work here. After all, Leontes’ effort to establish difference with Polixenes propels him into the full-blown affect that adust melancholy facilitates. Intriguingly, however, the power relations involved in this transformation present Leontes with an identification, as we observed with Lear and Hotspur, that is paradoxically hypermasculine and utterly emasculated. In other words, the full raving pitch of Leontes’ emotional status in 1.2 leads him simultaneously into 50   Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988).

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a state of hypermasculine rage and the emasculated form of the cuckold, due to which he “counterfetteth,” as Timothy Bright has it, the hallucination of the gifting of his wife to Polixenes. At this moment in which Leontes seeks to trump Polixenes’ “disconnection,” and in so doing to adopt the role that Strathern suggests serves as the goal of the dominator in gift economies—within the parameters of unmediated symbolic exchange—, Leontes infects Polixenes with his emotional content. And true to form: it is Polixenes who subsequently comes to mirror that rage, at 4.1.344–441, where he, too, problematically establishes domination while both empowering and disempowering himself in attempting to seek individuation by enforcing his political authority over his son, Florizel’s, nuptial desires. To this end, Leontes’ exchange with Polixenes capitalizes here on Strathern’s suggestion that “gifts pose dramatic temporal problems” (211) within human relationships; as deployed within the implicit temporal variability of the humoral system, such is demonstrably the case within The Winter’s Tale. Strathern’s contention that “the anticipated outcome is the aesthetic trap of the gift economy” (223) too serves in the end as a proper coda for the imbricated relationship that The Winter’s Tale manifests in its display of the martial power struggle that unfolds within the volatile emotional worlds that Leontes and Polixenes inhabit. Diagnosing the Gaze It should come as no surprise that Shakespeare evokes Leontes’ unnatural form of melancholy by means of dramatized behaviors that render the disease as an early modern cultural presentation. Burton points out that the jealous man in the grip of cuckoldry anxiety portrays clearly defined theatrical and dramatic conventions, that for such a man, in other words, symptomatology becomes performance, as we saw with Othello in Chapter 3. Such a construction draws particular focus upon the actor’s representation of jealousy in early modern drama. Burton relates, for example, that the jealous individual portrays an array of physical, outward characteristics that include “strange gestures of staring, frowning, grinning, rolling of [the] eyes, menacing, ghastly looks, broken pace, interrupt[ed], precipitate, halfturns. He will sometimes sigh, weep, sob for anger, … swear and belie, slander any man, curse, threaten, brawl, scold, fight” (3.3.2). Similarly, Hermione observes that Leontes “something seems unsettled” (1.2.147), and that he holds “a brow of much distraction” (1.2.149). Polixenes, too, indicates subsequently to Camillo that as he had greeted Leontes “with customary compliment,” Leontes “Waft[ed] his eyes to th’ contrary and [letting] fall / A lip of such contempt, speeds from me.” Polixenes adds: “I saw his heart in ’s face” (1.2.371–373, 447). Even given his notorious paucity of stage direction, Shakespeare incorporates here into the text of the play, as with Othello, the cultural construction of an outward expression of inward disease. The portrayal of Leontes’ jealousy comes, therefore, out of

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a medical tradition centered on the outward bearing of the misaffected humoral body. Burton insists that the jealous man’s outward actions are further typified by what we today identify as paranoia: he is inquiring, mandering (or crying for her), gazing, listening, affrighted with every small object: why did she smile, why did she pity him, commend him? why did she drink twice to such a man? why did she offer to kiss, to dance? &c., a whore, a whore, an arrant whore!51

Such expression nearly reads as if it were lifted directly from the play itself, indicating that in early modern English drama, the discourses regarding the medical and the dramatic appear to develop side by side. With Polixenes fled north to his kingdom of Bohemia, Leontes directs a sadistic rage at Hermione. He publicly humiliates her: “’Tis pity she’s not honest” (1.2.68) he bellows; “O thou thing!” (1.2.82) he storms; “she’s a traitor” (1.2.89), a “bed-swerver” (1.2.93); and, finally, he concludes: “Away with her, to prison!” (1.2.103). In humoral terms, Leontes is consumed with rage due to his melancholy adustion, but it is through the shame he assumes from the narcissistic patterning of the play, the shame he reads in those who symbolize the cause of his corruption, that he expresses his illness in a culturally sanctioned manner in early modern England: against women.52 After their respective encounters with unnatural melancholy, Othello and Lear, too, it is important to recall, rage wildly at females—Desdemona, and Regan and Goneril, respectively. As with Lear, Leontes narrates the progression of his disease, and this act of narration raises a number of classic issues related to narcissism and the gaze. Because the fundamental concept at the root of narcissistic interpretation involves the psychological interpretive qualities of the gaze without and the gaze within, and because Robert Burton associates such interpretive behavior with the melancholic whose humor has become unnatural (3.3.2),53 we come to a situation in which Shakespeare formulates an essential disjunction that should lie at the heart of any interpretation of the play. Shakespeare constructs in Leontes a character whose misreading of external clues in his gaze without, causes him to construct a paradoxically proper medical diagnosis—in other words, an ostensibly well-formulated gaze within. This vexing of the early modern audience’s sense 51

  Burton, 3.3.2.   For a discussion of the subject in general and fascinating interpretation, see Breitenberg, esp. 1–34 and 175–201. 53   Under his entry for Love-Melancholy, Burton notes the rapid and continual reversals in the affected individual from blind rage to conciliatory apologies, seemingly ad inf. The self-doubt and projection that registers implicitly in such activity and the outward portrayal the affected individual was understood to manifest, I take as a veritable portrait in inwardness. 52

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of dramatic reality profoundly disrupts the terms of its spectatorship.54 Beyond the deterministic framework of Bright’s suggestion of the relationship between melancholy adust and hallucinations, Leontes’ attempt at self-diagnosis ought to be taken at face value: as Hallet Smith suggests as an instance of an ostensibly rational individual attempting to narrate his own moral and mental state. To this end, when Leontes looks beyond himself in 1.2, he misreads his wife and best friend, his double, hand in hand, cuckolding him. This cuckoldry he cannot bear, so he looks within himself and constructs and narrates all the verifiable medical data of the period—the sudden corporeal heat, the infected brain, the fluttering heart—to produce a diagnosis that confirms what he sees outwardly. We in the audience know that what Leontes sees outside him is false,55 is a misreading of reality, so should we not therefore assume that Leontes’ medical diagnosis, too, is somehow false? Brought on by his sense of inward shame, Leontes seeks to discern confirmation of this shame in his gaze without; this shame is one, then, that he projects, constructing it outwardly, upon his wife and his double, Polixenes, as he “counterfetteth,” as Bright suggests, the outward proof of cuckoldry. When he does so, he displaces it upon the two in a culturally prescribed manner, as that pervasive, dishonoring shame for the early modern English male, cuckoldry anxiety. Such misreading ought to be understood as a projected image in itself, and apparently would have been understood as such to an early modern audience, “because,” as Katharine Eisaman Maus has it, “the activities of evidence-gathering and of interpreting others are intimately tied up with a process of projection.”56 Consequently, the hatred Leontes directs upon his childhood and adulthood mates would likely have registered to an early modern English audience as one that he levels upon himself. Maus draws correlation between the dramatic role enacted by the jealous individual on the early modern stage and the lived role assumed by the audience,57 noting that “The analogue to the cuckold’s marginality is the exclusion of the spectator from the action of the play, an exclusion ambiguous in precisely the

54

  Note Freedman’s point that “At the level of plot, the comedies typically contrast the erring sight of folly with the right sight of reason only to confuse the two and so question the relationship” (23). This assertion raises generic concerns I will discuss below. Ward identifies the “dizzying perspectives” (554) of the various spectatorships at work in WT 1.2, as well. Also see Breitenberg, 182. 55   But see Gilian West for a close reading of the sexual punning at work in the language used in the interchange between Hermione and Polixenes, in “Fuelling the Flames: Inadvertent Double Entendre in The Winter’s Tale Act I Scene ii,” English Studies 74.6 (Dec. 1993). 56   See Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: UP, 1995), 125. 57   See Maus, “Horns of Dilemma,” esp. 568–78.

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same ways. Like the cuckold, the spectators in the theater see but are themselves unseen.” 58 In the following passage, however, Leontes turns his attention to, and apparently addresses, the play’s audience, voicing concerns that trouble that notion of audience exclusivity. Indeed, Leontes completely blurs the sense of comfort assumed by an audience, drawing explicit focus toward what Shakespeare himself perhaps quite reasonably suspected were the overt fears involving cuckoldry that characterized the masculine anxieties within his audience: There have been (Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now, And many a man there is (even at this present, Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’ arm, That little thinks she has been sluic’d in ’s absence, And his pond fish’d by his next neighbor—by Sir Smile, his neighbor.59

In turning his feminized, cuckold’s gaze back upon the masculine gaze of the play’s spectators, Leontes’ jeering here symbolically emasculates the play’s audience, leveling the playing field, as it were, and wrecking its “privileged” gaze. 60 He insists that it is, after all, a “bawdy planet, that will strike / Where ’tis predominant ” (1.2.201–02). Consequently, Leontes becomes, in Maus’ terms, both cuckold-spectator and cuckold-spectacle, one whose gaze without reaches ideologically into the audience’s world, beyond the confines of the text of the play. Such displacing of spectatorship is common to the comedies, as Freedman indicates (2–3), a generic concern I will take up subsequently. ******* Of particular interest here to me are the narcissistic and temporal elements at work in the passage. The matter of the soliloquy itself, based on the frantic concern with knowing, with establishing what Othello calls “ocular proof” (3.3.360),61 comes in a temporal formulation based on what we might call instantaneity. Leontes offers 58   Maus, 572. Maus observes the correlation between the jealous individual’s gaze and that of the theater audience: “In a theater . . . the spectator is obliged to evaluate symptoms, behavior the cause of which may be hidden or withheld. The art of spectatorship,” she insists, “is the art of diagnosis” (576). 59   1.2.190–96 (emphasis mine). 60   See Maus’ discussion, based largely on William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix, of the wholesale gendering of the early modern English theatrical audience as male, and the actor as female, in “Horns of Dilemma,” 567–70. 61   Both works by Maus deal with this subject in detail, but also note Breitenberg, esp. 175–201.

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a vivid self-portrayal that hinges on simultaneity, on the frenetic characteristics of jealousy as a temporal construct. The frantic quality of Leontes’ fear of cuckoldry hinges essentially on his insistent use of the term “Now,” which echoes Iago’s use of it in Othello to Brabantio, as we saw in Chapter 3: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88 emphasis mine). Such a formulation indicates that the frantic passion of jealousy is perhaps best illustrated as a specific form of temporally lived experience, as a psychosomatic humoral state characterized by a subjective form of temporality. This immediacy ought to be juxtaposed with the nostalgic, nebulous temporal-sense that characterizes melancholy in its natural state. The frantic formulation of the temporal, in which concern with knowing or establishing truth causes time itself to move at a frenetic subjective pace from the speaker’s point of view, is the temporal hallmark of the jealous in Shakespeare. Leontes’ outwardly directed expression of his inwardly formulated humor serves as the physical manifestation of his illness; but such illness in The Winter’s Tale is radically disjointed, bound by the paradoxical cogency of both interpretation and misinterpretation, of the discrepancy between Leontes’ gaze without and within. Such disjunction between the gaze without and gaze within in the play is important not only subjectively here, but also dramatically, because it ultimately defines the difference between catharsis, the purgation of kinds of desire, and cathexis, their projection; or, in a rough analogy, between anagnorisis (the moment of recognition) and exposition (where the basic elements of story are set forth). Generically vexed as the play is—identified in Greene’s 1588 first folio edition as a “pleasant history,”62 incorporated in Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio edition as a comedy, pierced with moments of gravitas suggestive of tragedy, and positioned currently under the perhaps more ambiguous title of romance—the play should be understood rather as something of an anomaly. To draw on Aristotle’s terms more formally here, The Winter’s Tale ought to be read as what amounts to a deeply complex exploration of the limits of the tragic form, in that both the first half of the play and the second present us with fully recognizable “whole[s] of some magnitude” (1462), containing the concepts of catharsis (which Aristotle famously refers to as “incidents arousing pity and fear” (1460); peripeteia (a “change from one state of things within the play to its opposite” that should unfold “in the probable or necessary sequence of events” [1465]); anagnorisis (“discovery,” or “change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortune” [1465–66], also identified as the moment of recognition and the denouement); and pathos, or suffering, which Aristotle defines as “action of a destructive or painful nature, such as murders on the stage, tortures, woundings, and the like” (1466). While all four of these features occur discretely within Acts 1, 3, and 5 of the play, respectively, their relative cogency within each scene is decidedly complex. 62   See Robert Greene, Pandosto. The Triumph of Time, An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Paul Salzman, (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 153.

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For example, while catharsis and suffering are demonstrable in Leontes’ treatment of his family and friends throughout Act 1, the deployments of peripeteia and anagnorisis are far more variable. In 1.2, for example, these two Aristotelian terms are deployed in Leontes’ “Too hot, too hot!” (108) and “Affection!” (138) speeches, but they come to function as an example of hamartia, which Aristotle defines as a tragic error, or mistaking. In the trial of Hermione in 3.2, when Leontes disavows the oracle, he shifts with all celerity from the position that “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle” (3.2.140) to the recognition that “I have too much believ’d mine own suspicion” (151), as he witnesses his family perish around him. In each of these cases, 1.2 and 3.2, we thus come to confront a situation which Aristotle especially recommends as a tragic formulation: the linking of the peripeteia with the anagnorisis, in which sudden insight is coupled with reversal of fortune (1467). But where in 3.2, this insight proves itself to be true, in 1.2 this insight proves itself to be false— though, notably, all the medical trappings that adhere to it are ostensibly true. That the conjoined peripeteia and anagnorisis come successfully halfway through the play demonstrates in some measure why The Winter’s Tale fails to follow the path of tragic determinism. The propulsion to the play’s conclusion, in 5.2, where once again the audience encounters all four Aristotelian tragic components, serves as a remarkable manipulation of narrative desire, in Peter Brooks’ terms, or of the developing “sense of an ending” in Frank Kermode’s, or of what Hilary Dannenberg calls the staggering of the recognition scene.63 Dannenberg, a theorist involved in analysis of anagnorisis as the term plays out in forms of narrative coincidence and counterfactuality in prose narratives, observes that such scenes of recognition and discovery can be deployed in a variety of ways: as instantaneous or delayed, as bilateral (involving more than one character) or unilateral (involving a single character) (100). For Leontes, of course, the problem is that his (false) anagnorisis, within 1.2, is itself a misrecognition, a hamartia of sorts, that simultaneously functions as a (true) peripeteia, in that the course of events do indeed shift, though from good to bad. Consequently, the falsity of the anagnorisis suggests that the shift is attributable to false knowledge. The dramatic irony that subtends this representation—that surprise for a fictional character and surprise for a reader are two distinct processes—is one that Dannenberg acknowledges leads to a disjunction that helps construct the reader’s anticipation of the deferred recognition (102). In Shakespeare’s play, as I have suggested, such will transpire within both 3.2 and 5.2. Dannenberg observes that such deferred recognitions are driven by what she calls the “cognitive desire” of the reader that the “final configuration achieved at narrative closure when (the reader hopes) a coherent and definitive constellation of events will have been achieved” (13). In this context, it is fair to cavil that The Winter’s Tale is drama, 63   See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), and Hilary Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008).

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not prose narrative, and that since it is fundamentally and implicitly narrator-less it cannot be held to adhere strictly to the standards Dannenberg sets forth. But even this generic distinction between prose and drama is one that Shakespeare blurs. With its roots in Greene’s prose narrative Pandosto, of course, the origin of Shakespeare’s story indeed proves to be an old tale. But Shakespeare’s formulation of Time himself as chorus in 4.1 is expressly his own dramatic innovation; Time indicates here that it is he himself who serves as narrator in the play, all and sum: I that please some, try all, both joy and terror Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time, To use my wings. Impute it not a crime To me, or my swift passage, that I slide O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap, since it is in my pow’r To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom …. … [I]magine me, Gentle spectators, that I now may be In fair Bohemia, and remember well, I mentioned a son o’ the King’s, which Florizel I now name to you; and with speed so pace To speak of Perdita …. What of her ensues I list not to prophesy; but let Time’s news Be known when ‘tis brought forth. A shepherd’s daughter, And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is th’ argument of Time. (1–9, 19–24, 25–29)

Where we might object that, to the contrary, the chorus never mentioned a son—Polixenes did— Shakespeare’s construction of Time as a kind of narrator is really quite striking. Where Dannenberg suggests that the narrator-position is one that “occupies a supreme position of power in coordinating virtual and actual domains” (49) in guiding the temporal orchestration of the narrative, it is crucial to note that Shakespeare’s figure of Time in the play positions himself not only as narrator, but as somehow a kind of more-than-narrator, in a voice that we might call first-person singular omniscient. In this sense, he does not merely know all, but speaks from a position, rather, outside of time though with the ability to enter into it—like the voices of the Father and the Son in Book 3 and down through Paradise Lost—from which Shakespeare’s Time quite literally bodies forth the play as a “witness” from “ere ancient’st order was,” while “now reigning” over “the freshest things … to make stale / The glistering of this present, as my tale / Now seems to it” (10–15). Time owns this old tale; he speaks it; he “name[s]” the characters (23); and at will either “o’erthrows” or “plants” aspects of time that we

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take as given. Such temporal orchestration, to use Dannenberg’s term, transcends Gérard Genette’s concepts of analepsis and prolepsis, tied as they are to the linear elements of story, in that temporal orchestration “centers on an ontologically pluralistic approach” (50), by which narratives coax multiple worlds into being. This concern is one I shall address in the final section of this chapter. While The Winter’s Tale is admittedly no prose narrative, its extraordinary handling of the issue of time proves that it is no standard drama either; its impact on the subjective temporalities of its characters reflects this. Such spatio-temporal explorations carry through to the play’s conclusion. The Sense of an Ending The conclusion of The Winter’s Tale is manifestly ambivalent. Bristol disparages the common reading of the play’s end as essentially redemptive, as based primarily upon the theme of reconciliation: What these religious interpretations seem to say is that Hermione forgives Leontes “objectively.” But there is no attempt to describe this forgiveness as something achieved or developed in the fullness of time, for the very good reason that no such temporally lived process is manifested in the play’s organization. In fact, a conscientious effort has been made to exclude the experience of duration as lived by Hermione in the “fullness of time.”64

While I concur here with Bristol, I suggest that instead of looking to Hermione at the play’s end for a tale worthy of the telling (174), it will be still more profitable to look to Leontes. His apparent melancholic grieving for his actions in the first part of the play, for instance, appears to be analogized by the sixteen-year hiatus at the play’s center.65 Indeed, his problematic masculine identification, and the resultant sixteen-year lacuna in The Winter’s Tale, stands markedly juxtaposed to his daughter, Perdita’s development. Her name, the Lost One, and her maturation from infant to young adult, suggests Leontes’ own corresponding psychological development into “adulthood.” But this solution is perhaps not really as neat as we might want to have it. The void in time at the play’s core has proved a perpetual stumbling block in criticism of The Winter’s Tale. I offer that this sixteen-year gap mirrors in important ways the hollow Lacan proposes at the core of the ego as a result of the subject’s “primary loss,” which is the “splitting of the subject as a 64

  Bristol, 173 (emphasis his).   See Martha Ronk, “Recasting Jealousy : A Reading of The Winter’s Tale,” Literature and Psychology 36.1–2 (1990), which follows this course: “The place where Leontes is located” during these sixteen years, she suggests, “is representative of the unconscious mind” (56). 65

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result of being in symbolic form.”66 Such a formulation has the advantage of clarifying the temporal ambiguity at the heart of Leontes as a “speaking subject” by acknowledging that his presentation in the play relies essentially upon his negotiated manifestation of two divergent temporal-senses, either of which accords nicely with the natural and the unnatural aspects of the melancholy humor. Leontes’ subjective temporality in the play thus can be seen to stem from the temporal aspects of the melancholy humor as they exist within him concurrently, as a form of melancholy with latent adustion. We need not look for Leontes’ fully realized adult identification to emerge by the play’s end, but rather to his magical ability to live in what emerges as a simultaneity of Bakhtinian chronotopes. 67 To follow Bristol’s terms, this simultaneity is one that is, in fact, incorporated in the play’s spatio-temporal organization (173). By the play’s close, Leontes comes to inhabit a world of psychologically temporal concurrence: in the Bakhtinian sense of holiday and workaday time, and in the psychoanalytic sense of a perpetual childhood folded onto a reluctant adulthood. In a technical sense, Leontes gets to have his cake and eat it too. As Dannenberg explores the ways in which current narratological theory handles concepts related to coincidence and counterfactuality, she introduces a range of ways of making sense of narrative conclusions. Because The Winter’s Tale, as we have seen, is deeply invested in the complex handling of scenes related to peripeteiea and anagnorisis, it will be helpful to explore the way Shakespeare presents his bifurcated recognition scenes in 5.2. The problem Shakespeare sets out for himself is that Greene’s Pandosto presents the recognition scene as unitary: as one between King Pandosto (Leontes) and Fawnia, his concubine (Perdita). Greene’s plot for Pandosto, Dannenberg observes, comes down to a wholesale staggering of the recognition scene, which, she suggests, forces a kind of cognitive stratification (40) that centers on what she identifies as “multiple possible alternatives.” These alternatives involve the threats (both capital and sexual in nature) that King Pandosto (Leontes) makes to the young maiden Fawnia (Perdita) at the close of the narrative. The reader’s suspense as to the options for narrative closure within Pandosto’s stark formulation thus uncomfortably involve, as Dannenberg offers, “rape, death, or recognition” (40). The Winter’s Tale, of course, maintains aspects of precisely these same options, which hints at the problematic nature of the ending of the drama. Indeed, René Girard notably discerns in Leontes at the beginning of Act 5 words and behaviors indicative of the jealousy that he had pursued in Acts 1–3. While Girard seems to feel that Leontes conquers such behaviors by the play’s close (“Leontes’ brief personal crisis is over and the episode concludes on a happy note” [51]), his reading of the textual ambiguity at 5.1.231 is shrewd. Leontes here, when facing 66

  Freedman, 209.   See M.M. Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, (ed.) Michael Holquist, (trans.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 67

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his daughter for the first time in sixteen years, insinuates himself within the relationship between Florizel and Perdita. To Florizel he says: “I am a friend to [your desires] and you” (5.1.231), as he leers at Perdita. Girard notes that through such interaction, “the past seems resurrected” (49), noting additionally that the focus of Leontes’ desire in his interaction with Florizel and Perdita “includes even [their] youth” as it is “reflected in the eyes” of Leontes (53, emphasis his). Through such desires, Leontes very nearly re-enacts the tragedy of the first half of the play. Shakespeare, however, elects to downplay both the recognition scene of this reunion, and that which transpires between Leontes and Polixenes, by situating them both offstage and subsequently narrated in conversation between Autolycus and three nameless gentlemen. He does so in order to draw focus upon the massive theatrical production that is the reunion between Leontes and his wife Hermione. This form of recognition scene involves one Dannenberg identifies, in the context of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, as the “causal-progenerative lineage” in which a character’s recognition scene involves kinship issues and a simultaneous discovery of character identity: The narrative power of recognition in this type of plot therefore has to do with the … pivotal position of the character experiencing recognition in a process which is the culminating phase of the temporal orchestration of the alternate worlds of the plot. Recognition thus evokes an experience in which a character is, often traumatically, transformed from a world that he or she has hitherto considered to be an actual and thrust into a new alien version of reality. (52)

Dannenberg claims this form of recognition scene gains its narrative power “through [its] competition for actuality with the alternate … version” (52), of the alternate reality that could have been. This concept of alternate worlds invokes what in postmodern fiction is called possible worlds theory, which Dannenberg demonstrates involves the concept of characters simultaneously inhabiting different worlds, as in the works of Philip K. Dick, Ward Moore, and John Wyndham. Within this context, The Winter’s Tale figures forth character identity against the fundamental plot that it inherits in part from Greene, centering upon coincidence and counterfactuality. As Dannenberg notes of such plots: In such plots of coincidence, the question of character identity within changing ontological constellations is therefore central: multiple versions of identity are experienced successively by a character within the recognition plot …. [And] counterfactuals also have a key component concerning character identity, but here multiple character identities are presented concurrently in different alternate worlds. (52–53)

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This non-aging quality for Leontes represents, in itself, a Bakhtinian parodic structuring that insistently refers to the carnivalesque in the play. Bristol points out that in the actual Jacobean world of 1610–11, when The Winter’s Tale was written and first performed, the carnival, as signified by the period of time between Christmas-tide and Shrove-tide, was limited to only one day: Shrove Tuesday. Because of an early Easter, the time between the festive Yuletide and Lenten seasons was given “only short shrift.” In other words, Bristol suggests that “there is no time for a transition … between the typical transitions and social behaviors of Christmas-tide … with its focus on expenditure, and those of Lenten-tide with its focus on abstinence, fasting, and repentance” (emphasis his). Thus Bristol points to The Winter’s Tale as consequently possessing a “complete omission of time for carnival.”68 I differ here with Bristol, and offer that Leontes’ melancholy and the play’s sixteen-year hiatus serve as material indications of Bakhtinian holiday time, and particularly in the character of Paulina of the characteristics typical of Bakhtin’s signification of the carnivalesque.69 The Shakespearean penchant for paradox, too, I would add, seems evident in the encompassing of sixteen years (and the magical materialization of Hermione’s wrinkles) within that one Shrove Tuesday. To acknowledge Leontes’ dual chronotopes at the play’s end is to accept that The Winter’s Tale offers dramatic ambiguity on a grand scale. Drawing on the symbolic economy at work within the limiting concept of a layered and conflicted spatio-temporality, I argue that Leontes’ derangement should be viewed not as a development on its own, but rather as a fundamental temporal bifurcation, thereby giving the lie to my second epigraph for this essay and granting Shakespeare the embodiment of yet another temporal paradox in this play. Leontes’ dual chronotopes take shape through what appears to be his static agelessness,70 and his split into two frames of both humoral and temporal being therefore clarifies Leontes’ own psychosomatic disjunction in the play.71 There is simply little sense that Leontes has in any way “matured” by the play’s end; indeed, in Act 5, he states that it is the “wrong he did himself” (5.1.9) that he

68

  Bristol, 167.   Here I follow David Schalkwyk, who, discusses the role of the carnivalesque in the play in “A Lady’s ‘Verily’ Is as Potent as a Lord’s”: Women, Word and Witchcraft in The Winter’s Tale,” English Literary Renaissance 22.2 (Spring 1992) 260–64. 70   Martha Ronk notes a similar paradox in Leontes’ supposed aging through the representation of an actor who has in fact not: “Leontes looks the same at the end of the play . . . yet is meant to be seen as transformed,” in “Disjunction and Subjectivity in The Winter’s Tale” The Upstart Crow 16 (1996): 126. 71   This tension between these opposed temporalities is evident in Leontes’ final discursive ambivalence at the play’s end, in which he insists upon the “leisurely” reporting of activity for all “since first [they] were disserver’d” (5.3.154–55), but a reporting brought about through being “Hastily” led away (5.3.152, 155). See Gallagher, 491–92. 69

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most repents, in leaving himself without an heir. While he had “bred his hopes” (5.1.12) out of Hermione, this ambivalent report in itself rings coldly. For example, Leontes continues at the end of the play to view children for the light they cast back on their paternity: on greeting Florizel, he notes “Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you” (5.1.124–26). This impulse harks back ominously to the pathological concerns Leontes had had at the outset of the play regarding the paternity of his now-dead son, Mamillius. Further, in “reading” Polixenes narcissistically in his son, Florizel, Leontes constructs a way in which to view his double, and, by inference, another way in which to view both himself and the son that he lost in Mamillius, as if in a carnival’s hall of mirrors. It also enables him to see himself nostalgically as an idealized young man of Florizel’s age. Leontes has thus not lost his tendency to (mis)read the father in the child through narcissistic identification even after he is supposed to have learned his lesson on the danger of pursuing such a matter. This tendency, however, is compounded by Leontes’ cyclical referencing at the end of the play to further specific events that had precipitated his derangement in the beginning. When in Act 5, scene 3, Leontes again views Polixenes and Hermione together, just as in Act 1, scene 2, Leontes inauspiciously re-recalls his wooing of her, and thus, again, his fall from grace. Again he invokes the issue of shame, uttering “I am asham’d” (5.3.37).72 Although ostensibly repenting here the role he had played in her death, such words resound with the issue of impurity resulting from his inward gaze. The word “shame” in itself eerily refers us to the last time Leontes had felt this emotion in the presence of Polixenes and Hermione; Leontes continues, though, and relates, ominously enough, that his “evils [are] conjur’d to remembrance” (5.3.40). These are precisely the worrisome concerns toward purity that generated the tragedy of the first three acts of the play in the first place. Excepting the death of Mamillius, the romance ending to The Winter’s Tale appears to offer a generic resolution that terminates with complete closure: Hermione is restored to life, Paulina is remarried, Perdita is found and is to be married to Florizel, and the kings of Bohemia and Sicilia are reconciled. Leontes’ ambivalent state at the end of the play, as I have traced it here, illustrates that the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale ought to be understood rather as an unsettled status quo, one brought about through Leontes’ continued feelings of shame and remembrance. The tripartite representations of anagnorisis in this play (the variously successful recognitions that the play forces upon the audience in Acts 1, 3, and 5) indicate that the play’s resolution, in tragic terms, is in fact more problematic, and, indeed, far more subtle, than has yet been suggested and intimately linked to the emotional world of its characters. The open-ended 72   Gallagher notes Leontes’ remembered “evils” as a staging of “representational discrepancy” between Hermione’s “narratorial agency” and Leontes’ “authorial design in the wooing of Polixenes” (488).

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nature of this conclusion taps into Dannenberg’s observation that a divergent ending, as opposed to a convergent, is one in which “the characters’ life plots are knotted together but left to fan out into an unwritten future” (2). Such appears to be the case at the conclusion of Shakespeare’s play. Further, in offering that Leontes is characterized by the various temporalities associated with melancholy in both its natural and unnatural forms, I maintain that discussion of Leontes’ subjectivity, as much as any other early modern dramatic character’s subjectivity, ought to rely on the character’s textual presentation in temporal form. In offering an example of subjective temporality in Shakespearean drama, one that functions as a precondition for psychic disruption both in The Winter’s Tale itself and in early modern culture as a whole, I argue that it would be wise to avoid altogether generic temporal labels in early modern drama.73 By insisting that the psychosomatic configurations of the characters ought to be assessed along with the temporalities associated with these configurations, I offer a way of reading the plays that draws attention to the temporal issues Shakespeare investigates in his works. These temporal-senses rely to a marked degree in The Winter’s Tale on early modern conceptions pertaining to the psychosomatic realities of early modern conceptions of melancholy and its related passions. Humoral melancholy and its close relative, jealousy, exist as emotions within temporally constructed and temporally identifiable worlds, and the indeterminacy of the ending of The Winter’s Tale hinges on the essential indeterminacy of the melancholy humor itself. The black bile of melancholy’s inherent ability to transform from its natural state to its unnatural indicates the limits of its radical instability, and this instability defined the melancholy humor as a fundamentally dangerous and irrational force within early modern English culture. While it could lead men to the height of intellectual and literary achievement, it also carried latently the ability to serve as cause for extraordinary violence. Stephen Orgel has noted that “Marriage is a dangerous condition in Shakespeare” (17), and the affective state of melancholy seems only to have exacerbated that danger. Surely the virulently patriarchal world of early modern England, from which The Winter’s Tale takes its shape, was not a comfortable or ideal world for women by any means; but this world appears to have been similarly uncomfortable for men as well.74 Such a paradox underlies the pathology investigated here. Leontes’ ambiguous and ambivalent portrait at the end of The Winter’s Tale illustrates not only the fundamental instability of the melancholy humor, but indeed further confirms the instability 73   David Scott Kastan, in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, argues that Shakespeare’s investigation of dramatic temporality reveals itself in his plays as a “complex grammar of forms”(7) based upon genre, that time is best understood in Shakespearean drama within the rubric of what works out to be a generic taxonomy. While he quibbles with this word, he does note elsewhere that the “genres in which Shakespeare works become the modes of vision by which he explores” time (173). 74   See Breitenberg, esp. 175–201.

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at the root of all patriarchal systems. Melancholy’s bifurcated temporal-senses help to clarify this instability, and further help locate the principal effect these passions have both on early modern subjectivity and contemporary narrative structures.

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Chapter 5

“Spirit of phrenzie”: Narrative Temporality in Samson Agonistes Milton works from the inside out.

To invert the first sentence of Raymond Waddington’s 1971 discussion of Samson Agonistes: let’s begin with what we can disagree upon. Criticism over the last forty-odd years from disparate methodological and ideological camps presents such a wide range of readings for Milton’s dramatic poem that the lay-reader is left to assume the work’s essential indeterminacy, reflected in nothing else, in this poem “loaded with question marks” as one scholar has it, than in the nearly overwhelming impression of doubt that permeates its guideless dialogue. Derek Wood has recently summarized this sense of indeterminacy, offering that Accounts … given … of what happens in the play can differ so startlingly from one another that the reader is left wondering if their authors have been reading the same text. There is no consensus about the nature of the central character, the moral significance of what he achieves, the authority or ideological status of any character or almost any statement made in the play.

This frank assessment of the poem’s uncertainties is borne out by a number of studies whose conclusions demonstrate the arc of indeterminacy that characterizes attempts to make sense of its ambiguous ending: Mary Ann Radzinowicz remains convinced, in what has come to be viewed as an orthodox fashion, of Samson’s triumphant heroism and ultimate regeneration; Michael Lieb proposes what he deems Milton’s critique of his culture of violence, yet   See John Milton, Samson Agonistes 1675. All passages from Milton are taken from The Riverside Milton, Roy Flannagan, (ed.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).    See Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge: Belknap, 2001) 23.    For Raymond B. Waddington’s impressive reading of Samson Agonistes, see “Melancholy Against Melancholy: Samson Agonistes as Renaissance Tragedy,” Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., James G. Taaffe, and Jane Cerny, (eds) (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve U, 1971) 259–87.    Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2002) 23.    See Derek Wood, Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2001) 3. 

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firmly maintains belief in Samson’s final regeneration by the drama’s end; John Shawcross, who concedes an acceptance of uncertainty in both what the poem says and means, also feels assured of Samson’s ultimate regeneration; Derek Wood, troubled with much of the poem’s violence, relegates Samson’s final act to unregenerate “blindness” under the Old Law; while Joseph Wittreich, in two monographs and as a co-editor of an essay collection on the topic, offers the most sustained non-orthodox view of the poem, maintaining that Milton shapes his drama into a critique of his culture of violence by constructing a Samson who serves as a type of Antichrist drawn from biblical commentary. Notably, Wittreich’s Samson is one “nurtured in blood, [who] delights in vengeance and whose enterprise entails the wretched interchange of wrong for wrong.” These studies reflect the development of something approaching a critical faultline that has transpired in readings of the poem; where orthodox readings frequently present Samson as a flat, though ultimately renovated, or regenerate, character who (re)acquires God’s grace by the poem’s end, non-orthodox readings tend to present Samson as a more complex, indeterminate, though ultimately nonheroic figure. This chapter moves discussion of Samson Agonistes beyond the    See Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1986) 244–45. See also the following works: Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward Samson Agonistes: the Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978); Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994) 226–37, 235, and esp. n. 12; John Shawcross, The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001) 40–43, 100, 95; Derek Wood, xvi-xxi; For the genesis of this non-orthodox position, see the following works: John Carey’s introduction to the poem in Milton. Complete Shorter Poems, Fourth Impression, with corrections. (ed.) John Carey (London: Longman, 1981); and Irene Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy,” Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Dieckhoff, 235–58..   One of the more interesting developments in the critical history of Samson Agonistes has been the burgeoning of these non-orthodox readings of the poem. Such readings have arisen as scholars have increasingly become uncomfortable with a number of the characteristics in the dramatic poem: some have become particularly ambivalent concerning Samson’s behaviors and have seen in the poem a repudiation of the violence he enacts; some have noted the apparent irony with which Milton appears to treat both Manoa and the Chorus; others, too, have drawn attention to what they perceive to be the fairly even-handed treatment of Dalila. These works include: Carey; Samuel; Donald F. Bouchard, Milton: A Structural Reading (Montreal: McGill / Queen’s UP, 1974; Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich, (eds) Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002); and Joseph Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2002). Orthodox readings of the poem include those by William Riley Parker, Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, UP, 1937); F.Michael Krouse, Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1949); C.S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961); and Radzinowicz, among others. One of the central features of any analysis of Milton and his works, let alone his construction of the hero, unavoidably centers on the nature of the Milton, as author, that scholars have felt compelled

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stark terms of such disagreement by means of a humoral reading that promises to offer a fresh outlook on the poem’s characterization, structure, and ambiguous conclusion. My focus centers upon consideration of the way in which the poem’s imbrication of the somatic and the theological manifests the rigid structural requirements Milton sets out to emulate in his poem’s preface. While Milton famously foregrounds here a purgative medical model for achievement of the poem’s catharsis, for example—one in which “things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours”—this pattern leads to a catastrophe that paradoxically hinges upon an ambiguous representation of ostensibly divine inspiration narrated secondhand by a traumatized Messenger. This melding of the medical and the divine as they shape the Aristotelian ethos and mythos of the poem has prompted readings of this humoral framework that have generally treated the humoral theory as if it must function teleologically toward a medical or theological cure for Samson himself. Such scholarship, however, frequently becomes caught in the respective traps of either problematic, incrementally regenerative spiritual readings, or those which treat humoral concepts of emotion as a pervasively stultifying narrative quantity. As this study has repeatedly demonstrated, the essential dynamism of the humoral theory is its fundamental feature; attention to treatments of time and temporal processes drawn from this paradigm can thus ostensibly help to clarify both the poem’s ambiguous characterization and its puzzling end. Melancholy’s significations are of course multivalent throughout the early modern period in both medical and literary contexts. We have seen the way in which corporeal excesses of black bile served, for example, as material cause for a range of emotions and behaviors including sadness, despair, suicide, suffering, effeminacy, frenzy, rage, an ennobling physical heroism, an ennobling poetic genius, and divine inspiration—in short, as the facilitator to a range of masculine instabilities, centering upon early modern conceptualizations of what Levi-Strauss identifies as a floating signifier of indeterminacy: that which Mark Breitenberg calls the “Other … within.” As Winfried Schleiner cogently to construct, one which inevitably reflects their own biases and predispositions. Indeed, since Dr. Johnson’s tendentious treatment of the writer in the eighteenth century, Milton’s life and work have served as a hotbed for biographical determinism. Fundamentally at issue in these analyses is the role Milton’s politically radical and religiously heterodox views should play in critical interpretation of his artistic legacy. Can Milton, for example, in any sense be identified as a proponent of the Christian humanistic tradition, as C.S. Lewis proposed? Or should Milton’s literary art be perceived, like his politics, as wholly revolutionary? Is Milton best understood, that is, as what Christopher Hill has identified as a “radical Protestant heretic”? For indeed, as Carey maintains, is Milton not a writer “for whom orthodoxy was little more than the starting-point for dissent”?    See Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 38. For a wonderful overview of the tradition of the melancholy hero

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demonstrates, while melancholy signifies differently across the various locations and among the various thinkers who have pondered the range of its faculties— from temperamental cause of the talents distinguishing the very best and the brightest, to a marker for dangerous forms of madness, from an emotionally driven form of cultural affectation to a formative cause of religious enthusiasm— over its long history, melancholy frequently signifies politically, as well. During the politically and theologically conservative backlash of the Restoration period in England, for example, any ennobling significations (especially those involving access to genius, divine inspiration, and prophecy) became demoted, denigrated to the point that they came to be understood as so much hot air: as leading not to vatic inspiration, but rather to false or empty inspiration. Consequently, in making the literary decision to melancholize Samson, Milton chose to hark back to its ancient signification in order to utilize humoral theory to the ostensibly ennobling effect that he achieves in some measure in the dramatic poem. But how to do so? Milton’s incorporation of such aspects of the melancholic tradition within Samson Agonistes does not merely inform the prolonged amplificatio of Samson’s character that Milton stages in the poem’s period of waiting for revelation, in which Samson holds out for something, anything, to terminate his sorrow: no, in Milton’s hands, the long tradition related to humoral melancholy provides for a groundwork that prompts action, as well. It is that action which informs the catastrophe of Milton’s poem and provides an ostensible symmetry Milton carefully evokes—to rework Fish’s phrase from the inside out—in his representation of Samson’s moment of passion and that of the drunken Philistines at their religious festival. A study of the way in which a dynamic theory of humoralism shapes the volatile narrative structure into which Milton molds the Hebraic matter of his poem thus presents itself as ultimately clarifying, necessary, and timely. Humoral Theory, the New Science, and the Restoration But first: given the poem’s 1671 publication date, why pursue the humoral theory as an illuminating mechanism for the poem at all? The seventeenth century ultimately saw the waning of the humoral theory as serious science in England, after all.10 And indeed, as Angelica Duran observes in The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution, the only title that could possibly vie within intellectual circles for the English seventeenth century—“The Age of Milton”— is the pursuit of knowledge that would finally come to displace the apparent in the context of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, see Rolf Soellner, “The Madness of Hercules and the Elizabethans,” Comparative Literature 10.4 (Autumn 1958) 309–24.    See Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1991) esp. 109–41. 10   See Jackson 367–76.

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efficacy of humoralism: “The Scientific Revolution.” Consequently, should we not look to the innovators of the new science, such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, or William Harvey, for elucidation of things medical in this poem, or, for that matter, in any other literary piece published within the period? Moreover, given the important role that Milton both played and was perceived to play in the Scientific Revolution during the period, the new science certainly ought to serve as fertile ground to such an end. Notwithstanding Milton’s incorporation of Galileo himself in Paradise Lost (1.2.88–91, 5.261–66), many contemporaries viewed Milton as an ally to this burgeoning field: based upon his reading of Milton’s epic, for example, John Beale, a supporter of the Royal Society, desired to enlist Milton in the writing of what he calls “scientific poems” to defend the Society against attacks; similarly, the preface to the first Latin edition of the epic (1690), published by William Hog, suggests the ways in which, in Duran’s words, “Milton’s epic corresponds with the labors of the Royal Society.”11 In a similar context, John Rogers’s The Matter of Revolution cogently demonstrates how Harvey’s publication of his discovery of the circulation of the blood in Latin (1628) and English (1649) offered corporeal confirmation to the vitalism that came to pervade and enliven the political and literary realms during the Interregnum period and beyond it.12 Against all of this, however, while it may indeed owe a nod to vitalism, Samson Agonistes explicitly does not concern itself with the circulation of the blood.13 In fact, the poem’s representation of mind, body, and emotion functions in an antithetical manner; the poem, like Samson, is demonstrably steeped in humoral theory. Moreover, new science or no, the humoral theory remained a way in which people conceived of themselves in terms of health and emotion well into the nineteenth century; remnants of it, in fact, continue to inform our discursive practices relating to health and emotion today. In this way, it represents what Michel Serres has identified as the temporal “lag” and “counter-currents” we can expect between “philosophical debate and scientific knowledge” in the shift from one intellectual paradigm to another.14 While the observationdriven experimentation of the new science certainly posed a terrific blow to the inherited humoral tradition, the question remains: what precise allure does the humoral theory offer Milton in the context of Samson Agonistes? Surely, part of the answer involves the extraordinary significations appending to the melancholy 11   See Angelica Duran, The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2007) 2. 12   For more on this matter, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996), and Stephen Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1991). 13   See John Rogers, “The Secret of Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 33 (1997): 111–32. 14   See Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (trans.) Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995) 45.

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humor itself. Since it was first identified as a principal cause for greatness and privilege in Aristotle’s Problem XXX, I, the black bile associated with the humor came to be perceived as causative both for heroic figures, like Hercules and Achilles, and for all great men—including those centered upon intellectual pursuits such as the political, the military, and the literary, to which Milton’s “Il Penseroso” amply attests. But this early poem celebrates the productive nature of genial melancholy in ways that Samson Agonistes manifestly does not.15 The rudiments of Milton’s exploration of Samson’s subjective experience of pain and loss, of course, vividly foregrounds Samson’s melancholy state. These features register in a variety of ways: through Samson’s desire for suicide (with “deaths benumming Opium as my only cure”[630]), which Manoa, too, ultimately fears his son has achieved by the poem’s ending (650–51, 575–76, 1583, 1664); through nostalgia, as Samson is full of “restless thoughts … [that] present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now” (18, 21–22); through physical status and gesture, as Samson is described by the Chorus in an inversion of melancholy’s emblem, as “carelessly diffus’d / With languish’t head unpropt” (118–19); through repeated fears of his own “foul effeminacy” (410, and 200, 408, 411, 417, 490, 562); and through alienation, since, as a Nazarite, Samson is “a person separate to God” (315), as a “blab,” he is “excluded / All friendship” (494–95), and as a slave, he is one whom God, as Harapha points out, “hath cut off / Quite from his people” (1157–58). Further, and most tellingly, Samson’s “anguish of the mind,” his “tumours of a troubled mind,” and “restless thoughts” derive, allusively, from his “humours black” (600); these griefs result in his hopeless “swounings of despair, / And sense of heav’ns desertion” (631–32). In addition, the psychosomatic nature of this affliction confirms the unified construct of Samson as a humoral subject, engaging simultaneously his organs, spirits, and mind (or soul): O that torment should not be confin’d To the bodies wounds and sores With maladies innumerable In heart, head, brest, and reins; But must secret passage find To th’ inmost mind, There exercise all his fierce accidents, And on her purest spirits prey, As on entrails, joints, and limbs, With answerable pains, but more intense, Though void of corporal sense. (606–16)

15   Schleiner observes that “the companion poems [L’Allegro and Il Penseroso] rise to an encomium of melancholic prophecy that is at odds with the increasing suspicion of melancholic genius” in seventeenth-century England (316).

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Notably, as with the other humoral embodiments I have pursued in this study, Samson’s melancholy representation is not static; on the contrary, it finds demonstration in Samson’s self-narrative as a dynamic process indicated by the active verbs he utilizes that capture the progress of the disease: My griefs not only pain me As a lingring disease, But, finding no redress, ferment and rage, Nor less than wounds immedicable Ranckle, and fester, and gangrene, To black mortification. Thoughts, my Tormenters, arm’d with deadly stings Mangle … Exasperate, exulcerate, and raise Dire inflammation, which no cooling herb Or medcinal liquor can asswage …. (617–27 emphasis added)

But working from this melancholy groundwork, which amounts to a kind of symptomatic checklist, it remains for Milton to develop such representation into a suffering that is somehow ennobling. The classical traditions associated with black bile offer ways of doing so by concatenating such representations of despair with concepts related to divine inspiration. Such a link has its source in Aristotle’s Problems XXX, I, in this work, as Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky observe, “the perception of the melancholy humor was transformed … in a way which, while it adhered to the Hippocratic tradition’s division of the humors, also overhauled its application in terms of the melancholy humor.” This transformation resulted in what for the Greeks is “the paradoxical thesis that not only the tragic heroes, like Ajax, Heracles and Bellerophon, but really outstanding men … were melancholics.”16 The abnormal imbalance of the black bile thus came to take on a unique and privileged position among the humors that obtains—in spite of a series of localized fluctuations in its associations across the West and Middle East—down through to the English early modern period.17 Traced from the characteristics ascribed to the melancholy humor in Problem XXX, I, as Juliana Schiesari observes,

16

  Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 16, 17.   See Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 40, and Schleiner, especially 18–197. Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky note that “Only the distinction between divine frenzy and frenzy as a human disease that is established in Plato’s Phaedrus (265a) could have made possible the differentiation between natural and pathological melancholy … set forth in Problem XXX, I. But only the Aristotelian notion of matter coupled with the Aristotelian theory of heat made it possible to bring systematic order into many forms of ‘vehemence’ ascribed to the melancholic in the clear terms of a theory of opposites; only the Aristotelian conception of the ‘mean’ made it possible to conceive an effective equilibrium between the poles of this 17

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Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England More than just the undesirable disease that humoral medicine had traditionally diagnosed as caused by an excess of black bile, melancholia by the time of the Renaissance had also come to be perceived as an eloquent form of mental disturbance … as hierarchically superior to mere depression as were the individuals afflicted by it.18

One way in which Aristotle does so involves making a crucial material link between the divine forms of inspiration Plato presents in the Phaedrus, and the material, deterministic processes toward frenzy that Aristotle offers in De Anima, De Physica, and The Nichomachean Ethics. This union of the metaphysical with the physical clarified the power of the melancholy temperament. Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky observe that as a result of Aristotle’s text, “Divine frenzy came to be regarded as a sensibility of soul, and a man’s spiritual greatness measured by his capacity for experience and, above all, for suffering.”19 While the literature of the pre-Restoration period, and of Shakespeare especially, makes use of this rich tradition in order to flesh out characters like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and, as we have seen, Othello, Milton is hampered by a contemporary parlance that equates the enabling enthusiasmos Milton wishes to draw upon with the topical perception of enthusiasm that demoted it to fakery at best. As we approach the Restoration period, such divine frenzy came to be perceived as deeply suspicious and even absurd, tied in as it had become with Nonconformist inspiration relating to excesses of enthusiasm and zeal. Against such representations, for example, Henry More observes in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1654) that: “Enthusiasme is nothing else but a conceit of being inspired.” He continues: “The spirit then that wings the Enthusiast in such a wonderful manner, is nothing else but that flatulency which is in the melancholy complexion, & rises out of the Hypochondriachal humour upon some occasionall heat, as winde out of an Æeolipila applied to the fire.” Such views deflate concepts of divine inspiration as so much gas. More likewise compares the chemical effects of melancholy with those of alcohol: “what is Melancholy but a Natural Drunkenness when it ferments. And moreover, it being but by chance that Melancholy or Drunkenness enables them to light upon such things [as intellectual brilliance], why may not Sanguine and Sobriety chance as well to do the same …?”20 antithesis … which justified the apparently paradoxical statement that only the abnormal was great.” 18   See Schiesari, 7–8 (emphasis hers), who points out that this linkage between the divine frenzy of Plato and the clinical category of Aristotle was subsequently taken up by Marsilio Ficino. 19   Klibansky, et al., 41. 20   Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656). The first passage is quoted in Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 225–26; the second in Schleiner, 139.

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This traditional link between black bile and wine established in Problem XXX, I, is here reworked, as Schleiner observes, “literally as based on an identical process of fermentation and thus reduced ad absurdum” (140). As we shall see, such a link plays a fundamental role in the structuring of Milton’s poem. But in small, the problem Milton faces in attempting to characterize his suffering Old Testament hero within a melancholic subjectivity lies here, in a political climate that distrusts enthusiasm and claims of divine revelation. As Schleiner explains, in seventeenth-century England, “Heroic or genial melancholy suffered from close associations with religious enthusiasm, i.e. Enthusiasm” (141); in order to present a melancholy hero in the classical vein, Milton must ostensibly allude to the tradition while not naming it, for to do so would be implicitly to debase the matter of the poem. As Karen Edwards notes: “To represent melancholy as it was traditionally understood, Milton cannot call Samson a melancholic. The term had become, for Milton’s purpose, unspeakable. The brave new discourse of the Restoration had stripped melancholy of its ancient grandeur; melancholic enthusiasmos cannot be taken seriously after 1660.” (229) In a similar fashion, the term zeal, which plays such a critical role in Samson Agonistes, is equally freighted in the Restoration period especially with complex significations. While the OED defines the term most basically in Def. 3. as “Ardent, earnest, or eager desire; longing,” and in a more specialized context, in Def. 4a. as “Intense ardour in the pursuit of some end; passionate eagerness in favour of a person or cause; enthusiasm as displayed in action,” it also offers the term in a biblical context in Def. 1, as in the following: “denoting ardent feeling or fervor (taking the form of love, wrath, ‘jealousy,’ or righteous indignation), with contextual tendency to unfavourable implication (emulation, rivalry, partisanship).” As Thomas Kranidas has demonstrated, Milton’s utilization of zeal in his prose tracts, written in the 1640s and 1650s, employs the term as the rhetorical means to an end. Kranidas suggests that “Like the language of many of his fellow activists, Milton’s language defies moderation and praises surrender to anger under the aegis of zeal….”21 Kranidas defines the term for Milton’s purposes in the context of the early church, for whom “[zeal] means an emulatory rivalry, as opposed to a hostile … phthonos, or envy. From the beginning, the Christian use of the term had powerful ambivalence” (2). The principal dialectic involved with such phraseology involves the “lukewarmness” of the Laodiceans, drawn from … Revelation 3: 14–16, whom Non-conformists understand will be vomited forth from the mouth of God (3–6). For Nonconformists, such lukewarmness became synonymous with the via media of the Church of England (6–17), as it placed itself between what it viewed as the excesses of Rome on one hand and Geneva on the other. The Milton of the prose tracts, Kranidas suggests, relies upon ardor based upon his sense of probity, “an ardor consciously and even 21   Thomas Kranidas, Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2005).

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defiantly deploying itself as the vehicle for vatic mission and national destiny. That ardor recognizes and dismisses the cries of alarm, from faint to traumatic, over the misuses of zeal” (3). As we move toward the Restoration period, however, zeal registers differently. While on the one hand, drawing upon biblical injunction and commentary as well as Restoration aesthetics, zeal serves as a term signifying devout belief verging upon fanaticism, on the other it involves a form of emulatory rivalry with a perceived opposition. While of particular urgency between the 1630s and 1650s, the issue remains of direct relevance within Samson Agonistes, as in Samson’s accusation of Dalila that “zeal mov’d thee” (895). The melancholy tradition that Milton adopts for his poem, then, is one loaded with a network of both classical and contemporary significations. The successful integration of the medical and the theological within the concept of frenzy, as laid out in Aristotle’s Problem XXX,I, permits Milton to move from the basic dangers associated with humoral imbalance to evoking Samson’s access to divine impulsion. But the critical metaphor Aristotle adopts in the text is one worth considering in the context of Milton’s poem and More’s demotive analogy for melancholy that we have just encountered. This metaphor stems from the natural homology Aristotle introduces in his text relating to the caloric economies he associates with both black bile and with wine. Indeed, this link extends from their material likeness, as in Helkiah Crooke’s observation in the Mikrokosmographia that “Melancholy juyce” is “like unto the lees of Wine,” due to the visual similarity and the latent volatility humoral theorists identify within each fluid.22 Further, each liquid’s ability to facilitate altered states of mind, characterized by the terms enthusiasmos and zealos, serve as central features of Greek tragedy, in general, and Milton’s dramatic poem, in particular. Since Milton’s Samson Agonistes draws notable focus to the thematic overlap between humoral melancholy and wine-drinking, it will be helpful to engage the ways in which their integration shapes the dramatic poem, especially within the context of the festival that serves as the setting for its ambiguous conclusion. Wine, Volatility, and the Humors Within the humoral paradigm, as we have seen, suddenness, that experience of time so essential to volatility, was understood to cause disastrous imbalances to the humorally palpable equipoise of human health. To recount briefly, Robert Burton (1621), for example, observes that sudden alterations in the humoral qualities of the individual, and thus through the processes of time, pose the gravest of dangers to human subjects, noting that these volatile shifts and explosive 22   See Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia; a description of the Body of Man, Together with the Controversies and Figures Thereto Belonging (London: W. Iaggard, 1616) 138.

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transformations unleash a range of hazardous disorders within human minds, bodies, and souls: “this thunder and lightning of perturbation,” as he indicates, “causeth such violence and speedy alterations in this our Microcosm, and many times subverts the good estate and temperature of it….”23 Similarly, Stephen Batman (1582) observes this link within the human body, citing Hippocrates on the impact volatility, time and temperature cause within human bodies: “The chaunging of time gendereth most evills. For sodayne chaunging of cold into heate, chaungeth and appayreth [wastes] bodyes …. Therefore ofte sodaine chaunging of time is cause of sicknesse.”24 The sources of this heat are expansive, however, so that by means of emotional triggers, such as anger, or, importantly in Samson Agonistes, by means of wine, the scorching of the humors produce both the clotted excrements of the humor itself, and the vapors or fumes that, ascending to the brain, swiftly cause an array of negative behaviors. As posited by these humoral theorists, the excessive drinking of alcohol is understood to cause potentially maddening and lethal psychosomatic ramifications upon the subject. While the Nazarite code presented in Numbers 6:3 and Judges 13:4 certainly forbade Samson’s drinking of alcohol, Milton enhances this injunction in important ways regarding the emphasis he places both on Samson’s abstinence and the Philistines’ abuse of wine in their religious rites. Although Milton himself, according to John Aubrey, is reported to have been a “Temperate man, [who] rarely dranke between meales,”25 alcoholic beverages, most commonly wine, surface repeatedly in his literary works. Wine-drinking, of course, as I have suggested in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, was involved in a series of nationalistic and political debates in early modern England, relating, among other issues, to its continental provenance, its tendency toward abuse and thus civil disorder, and its association with Catholic and High Church ritual and ceremony.26 Consequently, Milton’s treatment of the topic is somewhat complex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own temperate drinking habits, Milton generally recommends temperance in the consumption of wine and other alcohols. As a youth, for example, Milton sanctioned the drinking of wine by his friend Diodati, in that “Carmen amat Bacchum, Carmina Bacchus amat” [Song loves wine, wine loves songs] (“Elegia Sexta”). But for one preparing to write epic, however, Milton insists “Stet prope fagineo pellucid lympha catillo, / Sobriaque è puro pocula fonte bibat” [let the purest of water stand near him, in a beech bowl, and let him drink soberly from a pure spring].27 In other works Milton maintains his emphasis on the significance of moderation and temperance 23

  Burton, 1.2.3.1; emphasis added.   Batman uppon Bartholome; emphasis added. 25   John Aubrey, quoted in Scodel, 238 and 341, n.30. 26   Please note the essays collected in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (ed.) Adam Smyth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004). 27   Quotations and translations taken from The Riverside Milton, Roy Flannagan, (ed.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) 196–97. 24

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as necessary to living a virtuous life. “Sonnet XX,” for example, sanctions the “spare,” or temperate, drinking of wine, albeit ambiguously.28 Maintaining this tone of moderation, the denizens of heaven in Paradise Lost famously eat “angels’ food” and imbibe a “rubied nectar” (5.633), even as the unfallen Adam and Eve drink plain fruit juice. In Paradise Regained, too, the Son identifies various kinds of Roman wines by name (4.116–20). In still other works, however, Milton offers a more ominous treatment of wine-drinking, one that features the subjective results of its abuse: the sons of Belial, for example, in Paradise Lost, linked with the Cavalier poets and the Restoration, are described as “flown with insolence and wine” (1.502); and in A Mask, too, Milton identifies Comus’ father as Bacchus, who, as the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, was he who “first from out the purple Grape / Crush’t the sweet poyson of mis-used Wine” (46–47). The emphasis Milton places here on wine misused—presumably abused, or drunk to wild excess—raises the issue of the precise nature of the psychosomatic effects of this misuse. On this matter, it will be helpful to recap the ways in which early modern theorists cautioned that excesses in corporeal heat brought on by the imbibing of wine could cause a sudden misalignment in the humors, or lead a humor in dominance to burn up dangerously. From Aristotle’s Problem XXX, I, onward, the influence that alcohol was understood to effect on subjects within the humoral paradigm was understood to be a jarring one. Within recent early modern scholarship, the specific psychosomatic effects excesses of alcohol were understood to produce within early modern humoral subjects have largely escaped critical scrutiny. But as we have seen, Aristotle’s Problem XXX, I, makes explicit comment on the marked effects wines were understood to inflict upon humoral bodies, and these effects appear to have played a significant role in shaping subsequent literary tradition, particularly involving the melancholy humor. In this treatise, for example, Aristotle maintains that “dark wine more than anything else makes men such as melancholics are” (22); however reductive, such a totalizing, materialist explanation for aberrant behavioral psychology typifies classical humoral theory. Aristotle suggests that this comparability obtains because the corporeal effects both of the melancholy humor, acting from within, and of wine, acting from without, hinge on their relative potency as a function of temperature, and that variations in heat thus determine the unique character of the corporeal impact of either fluid within the body.29 Indeed, as Aristotle explains, raw temperature itself “determines … character (for heat and cold are the factors in our bodies most important for

  See Fish’s handling of this sonnet in How Milton Works. Fish argues that Milton’s use of litotes in the poem’s final words, “not un-,” places the onus of interpretation upon the reader, who must decide for him or herself precisely what “spare” uses of wine should entail. 29   Problem XXX, I. in Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 21. 28

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determining our character): like wine introduced in larger or smaller quantity into the body, it makes us persons of such and such a character ….”30 That is, just as the black bile is repeatedly positioned by subsequent medical writers as implicitly variable, owing to its susceptibility to changes in raw temperature from its environmentally labile status, so the outward behaviors of melancholic individuals can be understood as commensurately variable. But this link forged between wine and humoral melancholy is not merely limited to classical texts, as we have seen in the work of Henry More. From Aristotle onward, through Galen into Avicenna, and thus integrated into the texts of Renaissance theorists Marsilio Ficino (1489), Timothy Bright (1586), Philip Barrough (1596), Thomas Wright (1603), Thomas Walkington (1607) and, most importantly, Robert Burton (1621), the caloric influence upon the humoral self became a central element in diagnosing a range of psycho-physio-theological troubles. While these writers handle the topic of ale- or beer-drinking with caution, more often strong wine draws their more emphatic warnings.31 In The Method of Physic (1596), for example, as I demonstrated in Chapter 3, Philip Barrough stresses the specific dangers wines pose to one who suffers from melancholic diseases, warning “Let him altogether abstaine from wine.”32 His chapter “De Insania Et Fvrore,” confirms this injunction, in which he writes of those who tend toward madness, “you must forbid them altogether the drinking of wine,”33as does his chapter, “De Melancholia,” in which he urges of those affected: “let them eschue wine that is thicke and blacke….”34 As we saw in Chapter 3, this material link between wines deemed “thicke” and “blacke” and the comparable properties of the black bile of melancholy involves the caloric propensity the former can play in leading to humoral adustion in the latter. Robert Burton, notably, observes this caloric link between wine and black bile, insisting that “hot” wines are indeed most deleterious to subjects afflicted with melancholy. He proceeds to caution against: “All black wines, overhot, compound, strong thick drinks … and the like … all such made drinks are hurtful in this case, to such as are hot, or of a sanguine cholerick complexion, young, or inclined to head-melancholy. Many times the drinking of wine alone causeth [such diseases].”35 Tracing this caloric, material link to its limit, with   See Problem XXX, I, translated in Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky, 28–29.   Note the nationalistic concerns at work here. On this issue of alcohol and nationalism, see Light, 159-178. For a more thorough treatment related to the issue of alcohol and the symposiastic tradition, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002). 32   Philip Barrough, The Method of Physic (London: Richard Field, 1596) 1.6. 33   Barrough, 1.27. 34   Barrough, 1.28. 35   Burton, 1.2.2.1 (London: Henry Cripps, 1628). He goes on here to note concede that “The thinnest, whitest, smallest Wine is best, not thick, nor strong; and so of Beer, the middling is the fittest….” 30 31

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direct relevance to Samson Agonistes, Barrough observes that hot humors, in and of themselves, free of wine or other alcohols, can cause drunkenness: The causes and signes of drunkennesse are evident inough, chiefly hote wines, & strong drinks are causes thereof, for that they fill the braine with vapours, and that so much the more (as Galen sayd) if the braine be hote by nature: sometime also hote humours ascending to the head, do cause drunkenness …. (1.10)

Given this array of cautions, what beverages might be sanctioned for a melancholic? The ideal beverage for such a patient, according to Burton, melancholic extraordinaire, is, simply enough, water: “Pure, thin, light water by all means use, of good smell and taste, like to the air in sight…”(2.2.1.1) Burton maintains that while fresh rainwater is best suited to stave off melancholy, water from fountains may also be sanctioned, as is liquid from a “quick running spring”—for, regardless of its source, “pure water is best” (24). Barrough, too, insists that the melancholy individual should be restricted in their beverages to water alone: “For drinke let him vse water only” suggesting “Let his drinke be water alone….”36 The proximate relationship that the medical sphere recognizes between wine and the black bile of the melancholy humor thus deliberately synthesizes likeness between their internal and external influences to psychosomatic health; water, too, in this historicized, medical sense, comes to play a significant role in such discussions. Milton’s ostensibly unnecessary yet pervasive deployment of issues related to wine, water, and the black bile of humoral melancholy come to play a central role in the literary decisions he makes in constructing the arc of the catastrophe he evokes in building toward the poem’s conclusion. ******* Milton’s Samson himself, of course, is famously a teetotaler: “Abstemious I grew up” (637), he reminds his father, Manoa, and the Chorus. Indeed, while the Chorus confirms that Samson had had no difficulty living with such abstinence, the tempting language by which it evokes the thought of wine savors the beverage in all its sensuousness: Desire of wine and all delicious drinks, Which many a famous Warriour overturns, Thou couldst repress, nor did the dancing Rubie, Sparkling, out-pow’rd, the flavor, or the smell, Or taste that cheers the heart of Gods and men …. (541–45)

36

  See Barrough, 1.10. Barrough is cited by Book and Chapter.

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This encomium serves only further to alienate the already fallen hero from his status as “Lower than bond-slave” (38). But the Chorus continues: “O madness, to think use of strongest wines / And strongest drinks our chief support of health …” (553–54). Samson, of course, true to divine injunction and his melancholy temperament, heeds the advice of the medical theorists we have just encountered; he restricts himself to “the cool Crystalline stream” (546), for God … made choice to rear His mighty Champion, strong above compare, Whose drink was only from the liquid brook. (555–57)

Milton alludes to Samson’s association with pure water by referencing Judges 15:19, where God causes, as the Chorus points out, “a fountain at [Samson’s] prayer / From the dry ground to spring, thy thirst to allay” (581–82). To the end of Milton’s poem, as in the Judges original, Samson explicitly touches no wine.37 It is notable, however, that the excessive consumption of alcohol by the Philistines comes to play a central role in Milton’s poem. Indeed, Milton departs significantly from the Book of Judges narrative, in which wine-drinking plays no part in Samson’s final day, in order to emphasize that it is the Philistines whose “heads that turbulent liquor fills with fumes” (552). Samson ultimately denigrates Philistine wine-drinking as a sign of the fallacy of the Philistine religion, making a material link between the Philistines and both Catholic and high church Anglican ritual; it is no accident that Samson identifies the Philistines as an “Idolatrous rout amidst thir wine” (443). In order to capture the vehemence of the Philistines at their wine, Samson observes that Lords are Lordliest in thir wine; And the well-feasted Priest then soonest fir’d With zeal, if aught religion seem concern’d: No less the people on thir Holy-days Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable …. (1418–22)

Rather than merely denigrate Philistine behaviors here, however, Samson’s statement, in a roundabout way, actually comes to clarify his own. In drawing a link between the effects of wine misused and religious zeal, and especially 37   In discussing cautions related to avoiding temptations of occasion, Wright comments of the Nazarites, of which Samson was of course a member, that “God commanded that the Nazarites which were consecrated to him, should drinke no Wine, nor any thing that might cause drunkennesse; and lest they should, by eating grapes or great reisins be allured to the drinking of Wine, hee commended them, they should neither eate grapes nor reisins: So, he that wil not be guided by affections, must diligently avoid occasions”. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604) 83.

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in identifying the humorally significant flame or fire as the sign of its fervency, Milton’s Samson begins here to map his own material path to heroic action, and hence, religious fervor, by means of a humoral vocabulary that positions an escalation in the caloric quality of the Philistines’ humoral state at their wine, against precisely the same such caloric escalation within himself. This link can be perceived as either one of comparison between Samson and the Philistines, or one of contrast. While Samson’s search for heroic action must autochthonously produce the humoral logic required by means of firing through adustion his predominant humor, the Philistines facilitate their revenge by firing themselves through the heat of their wine while celebrating their victory at “Idolatrous Rites” (1378). The “revenge” (1591, 1660) that Manoa suggests Samson subsequently enacts, after all, is equally mirrored by the “revenge and spite” (1472) that the most extreme of the Philistines want to effect upon him—“That part that most reverenc’d Dagon and his priests,”38—those most swayed, that is, by religious fervor. Read in this way, a humoral reading of the poem can help to resolve the critical quicksand in Samson scholarship surrounding the “rouzing motions” (1382) Samson self-diagnoses: while it may appear that the emotion Samson documents in this phrase ultimately stems from a regenerative impulse, these “rouzing motions” may also be read more deterministically as a first step toward a heated action in Samson’s coldly depressive humoral body. And as these rouzing motions subsequently develop into what the Semichorus presents as a “fierie vertue rouz’d” (1690, emphasis added), such indeed may be the case. The “fierie vertue” that facilitates Samson’s final act is merely one example of humoral language used throughout the poem that involves the uses of flames and fire leading to a conflagration. In this way, Samson’s various incendiary identifications—with the “blaze of noon” (80), with his destruction of the Philistines as “noon grew high” (1612), with the angel who twice at Samson’s birth ascended in flame,39 with the image of the phoenix aflame, and even through his association with the sun in the very etymology of his name—each plays an integral role in such a representation.40 While all of these images have manifest theological associations, my focus here upon the strictly caloric nature of the images finds further complement in the Chorus’s caution that the hero, in refusing to perform at the Philistine celebration, not tempt the Philistines to do him harm by “adding fuel to the flame” (1351, emphasis added) that already pervades them. Read in this way, this flame signifies the zeal for Dagon that the Philistines demonstrate at the festival, in their wild inebriation in honor of the god. 38   Line 1463. Among the Philistine groups, the first is insistent on revenge and spite; the second on moderate revenge; the third on peace and calm and forgiveness. 39   See lines 80, 1612, 23–29, 361, 633–35, 1431–35. 40   See Sharon Achinstein, “Samson Agonistes.” A Companion to Milton. Thomas N. Corns, (ed.) (Malden: Blackwell, 2003) 416–17; and Lieb, 229–31.

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Here Milton, again, alters the Book of Judges, reworking the Philistine celebration into an explicitly Dionysian, or Bacchic, religious event. In doing so, Milton shapes Hebraic material into Greek tragic form. Indeed, we learn that while “The Feast and noon grew high, and Sacrifice / Had fill’d thir hearts with mirth, high chear, & wine,” the Philistines turn swiftly to their “sport” (1612– 14), which is Samson himself. As the Philistines prepare for the spectacle of a fallen Samson’s feats of strength and hence to revel in the triumphant worship of Dagon, the Semi-chorus notes in retrospect: While thir hearts were jocund and sublime, Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine, And fat regorg’d of Bulls and Goats, Chaunting thir Idol, and preferring Before our living Dread who dwells In Silo his bright Sanctuary: Among them he a spirit of phrenzie sent, Who hurt thir minds, And urg’d them on with mad desire To call in haste for thir destroyer…. (1669–78)

The “haste,” “frenzy,” and “mad desire” that the Semi-chorus identifies here facilitate the conjoined Philistine misuses of both idols and wine. Milton employs such misuse in order to engage a trajectory that ratchets up the intensity of the poem in order to highlight its imminent catastrophe. For it is at this moment, the Semi-chorus continues, that Samson becomes enabled to perform his final deed. As the Chorus had formerly commanded him, Samson can become “now a shield / Of fire,” and with “His fierie vertue rouz’d,” can ostensibly revivify by means of that fire, transforming “From under ashes into sudden flame” (1434, 1691). In this way, the drunken frenzy of that third of the Philistines most religious and consequently bent upon revenge, is conflated through the use of humoral vocabularies with the emotional release of its ostensible antithesis, signified by a Samson revitalized by humoral adustion. Indeed, this moment is crucial, in which, as the Chorus cautions, “Matters now are strain’d / Up to the highth, whether to hold or break” (1348–49). The moment of passion that characterizes both the Philistines and Samson thus collapses in the poem’s catastrophe in a structural linkage, an affective structure, that either elides difference between the two parties—they manifest likeness in respective, humoral flameouts—or presents a subtle, but crucial, distinction between them, in which one party undergoes an alcohol-driven humoral adustion and the other immediate divine inspiration. Either way, Milton reshapes Hebraic material within a classical, Greek narrative structure that complicates the allegedly divine sanctioning of Samson’s final act.

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Milton and the Politics of Greek Tragedy In the preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton of course offers an elaborate definition of classical tragedy that owes itself in large part to a selective reading of Aristotle’s Poetics. Toward its conclusion, Milton turns to the topic of plot, or mythos, which he engages explicitly: of the style and uniformitie, and that commonly call’d the Plot, whether intricate or explicit, which is nothing indeed but such œconomy, or disposition of the fable as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum; they only will best judge who are not unacquainted with Aeshulus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write Tragedy.

The extent of Milton’s engagement with the form, style, and thematics of Greek tragedy in his dramatic poem is a fraught one, which has bred an argument involving some of the greatest names in Milton criticism. The disagreement centers on the nature of Milton’s incorporation of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—and their respective forms, styles, and themes—in his own work. Where in Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes, William Riley Parker champions Aeschylean influence in the poem, for example, he necessarily diminishes Euripidean influence. In doing so, however, he fosters what Joseph Wittreich argues is an implicitly orthodox reading of the poem, one that positions the politically radical Milton squarely within a conservative tradition.41 According to Wittreich, such an effort diminishes both Euripides’, and Milton’s, heretical and revolutionary value. Similarly, F. Michael Krouse’s efforts, in Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition, to situate the theologically heterodox Milton within an orthodox Christian framework, too, ultimately appears to contain the subversive potential in Milton’s works.42 Within such scholarship, Wittreich identifies political subterfuge, for, contrary to such efforts, he insists that Milton’s poem remains simply “saturated with Euripides’ influence,”43 citing fifteen allusions to Euripides in Samson Agonistes alone—more than for Sophocles and Aeschylus combined. But why does such influence matter? Euripides is a “rebel poet … who dared to ask questions and who, in [his] daring, capture[s] Milton’s allegiance” (63). If nothing else, these concerns ought to press us toward a deliberate consideration of Milton’s poem in the context of Greek tragedy.

  See Shifting Contexts, 28–30.   Wittreich cites Stephen Greenblatt’s formulation of “subversion and containment,” in Shifting Contexts, 187. 43   Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, 12. Wittreich provides a checklist of correspondences between Milton and Euripides, 33ff. 41

42

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The religious violence at the heart of Milton’s poem, for example, is one that the poem shares with another specifically tragic depiction of a murderous religious festival, notably Euripides’ The Bacchae. Discussion of the role and function of the Dionysian in literary texts has been aided immeasurably by the interpretive work of the literary theorist René Girard, who has noted the special relationship Euripidean and Sophoclean tragedy share with specific concepts of violence and the sacred.44 Girard helps situate the role and function dramatic characterization and catastrophe play in such tragedies, as well as the nature of sacrifice and the position played by the scapegoat. But his work also helps engage the structural role and function Dionysian frenzy and violence effect in a way that is helpful toward establishing how to make sense of the conflict, catastrophe, and resolution that unfold in Samson Agonistes. Girard specifically singles out Euripides’ The Bacchae—and his Heracles, as well—for the way in which these tragedies handle this relationship, which centers on what he calls the sacrificial crisis. Each play grapples with concepts related to loss, repentance, and apocalyptic destruction, as well as with the problem of establishing the proper relationship between humanity and the divine. Girard suggests that one way in which these works handle such weighty issues is through the structuring of their plots, which he identifies as possessing a radical symmetry. In Greek tragedy, he notes, “it is not the differences, but the loss of them that gives rise to violence and chaos…” (51). Heracles, for example, features the horrible representation of its titular hero who “carries out the crime meditated by his counterpart”; Heracles gruesomely, though mistakenly, slaughters the one family—his own—that he had been trying to protect. It is within such plotting, Girard continues, that the ideal tragic form resides: “The more tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate in a violent mimesis; the resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror of the other.” (47) This symmetry in violence, or “violent mimesis,” as Girard terms it, serves as a repetition or imitation of acts of violence which he argues characterizes what the Western tradition has come to identify as tragic plotting. This destruction of differences between combatants plays an integral role in the crisis of sacrifice, and thus plays an integral part in the religious aspects of the bacchanal. Indeed, Girard notes that “the Dionysiac elimination of distinctions rapidly degenerates into a particularly virulent form of violent non-differentiation” (127). The Bacchae engages similar issues, though its religious context indicates its direct relevance to Milton’s poem. Girard observes that Euripides’ play takes as its subject a festival that goes wrong. The tragedy … traces the festival back to its violent beginnings, back to its origins in reciprocal violence. Euripides … brings into play the conflictual symmetry behind the mythological 44   See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Patrick Gregory, (trans.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977).

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message …— a message that conceals this symmetry at least as much as it displays it. (127)

This symmetrical representation of violence has far-reaching implications in terms of the form and structure Milton’s poem takes, insofar as Samson Agonistes, too: relies on a like against like purgative structuring; unfolds its catastrophe in the celebratory context of a religious festival; portrays representation of mass murder; and features the tribulations of Samson as the Old Testament counterpart to the classical version of Heracles (Hercules), the etymology of whose name also derives from the sun. While Milton’s preface had referred us to the tragedies of the Greek dramatists as models, here we can begin to perceive a specific way in which their structures and plots appear designed to clarify Milton’s dramatic poem. In this context, zeal plays itself out not simply as religious fervor, but drawing upon Kranidas’ definition, as a structural element that informs the emulatory rivalry of the two parties involved. In rhetorical terms, attuned to staged drama, this emulation serves as a form of energeia, in which the emotional interaction between actor and viewer, between spectacle and spectator, becomes increasingly imbricated and difficult to distinguish. Samson’s role as performer and the Philistines’ as audience suggests the feasibility of such affective exchange.45 Moreover, the Bacchic root of the Dionysian festival, with its emphasis both on wine drunk to excess and divinely inspired frenzy, permits Milton to engage a narrative structure for his poem that implicitly questions—as does Euripides— divinity’s role within a human context. Indeed, drawing on Girard’s concept of the “violent non-differentiation” at the heart of the sacrificial crisis in the poem, the structural parallel Milton offers through humoral lexical choices between Samson and the Philistines comes to serve as the dominant like against like pairing Milton alludes to in his poem, and thus arguably the most subversive pairing offered within it. As the Jesuit Thomas Wright points out in a related context: “It chanceth sometimes by Gods permission, that our enemies (who prie into our actions, and examine more narrowly our intentions then wee our selues) discouer vnto us better our Passions, and reueale our imperfections, then euer we our selues.” 46

  See Josh Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985) 44. (Qtd. in Katherine Rowe, “Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, (eds) [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004] 176.) 46   In reference to Augustine’s mother, Monica, whose drinking problem is pointed out by her maid. Monica would “sip a little wine, and so by siping little and little, she came to such a delight of drinking wine, that she drank a pretie cup” until her maid “upbraided her” with the term “meribulum, a tos-pot, or tippler of pure wine” (80). 45

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Having no precedent in the Book of Judges, such structural mirroring takes its form from the explosive volatility accorded to the effects that both melancholy adust and excesses in wine were understood to wreak within the self as conceived within the humoral paradigm. In equating the inward fumes that serve as the inciting cause requisite at the psycho-physiological level for the most extreme of the Philistines to effect their revenge with the fumes that serve as the inciting cause requisite to effect the same end within Samson, Milton’s exploration of emotional subjectivity in Samson Agonistes appears to subvert implicitly the moral value of Samson’s revenge. But such appearance may certainly prove illusory. Milton’s reliance upon the humoral theory manifests the possibility that its like-against-like narrative strategy—which mirrors the classical models he lauds in his play’s preface—can either confirm this subversion, or, to adopt Stephen Greenblatt’s hoary phrase, contain it. The demarcation of protagonist from antagonist, or self from other highlights the demonstrable ambiguity that builds toward the sense of an ending, such as it is, that Samson Agonistes affords. Appearance of Design: Catastrophe in Samson Agonistes Having expressed the apparent significance of plot to his endeavor in his preface, and paid homage to the three Greek tragedians, Milton concludes the piece by directing the reader’s attention to a final and implicitly linked concern—to time’s role and function in the dramatic poem itself. Milton writes: “The circumscription of time wherein the whole Drama begins and ends, is according to antient rule, and best example, within the space of 24 hours.” While these words indicate Milton’s professed adherence to the first of the supposed dramatic unities of time, place, and action, which Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson and other neo-classicists famously idealized,47 the need for such stress is, in fact, warranted. Indeed, structural concerns have proved to be a highly contested feature within Samson-scholarship over the years, stemming from Samuel Johnson’s insistence that the poem “must be allowed to want for a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson.”48 But the haste and delay Johnson isolate here as crucial aspects of narrative form are in fact central features of the temporal aspects associated with early modern representations of emotion, and specifically, as we have seen, with the black bile of humoral melancholy. In such representations, which pervade early modern literary texts, dilatoriness and delay frequently vie   See Sidney, Defense of Poesie, in Defense of Poesie, Astrophel and Stella and Other Writings (London: J.M. Dent, 1999) 121–24. Jonson, of course, identifies breaches of the dramatic unities in his preface to Every Man in His Humour as the “ill customs of the age,” Robert N. Watson (ed.) (London: A & C Black, 1998) 4. 48   See Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets 139. 47

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with swift and violent action. Milton’s poem implements such temporalities both in Samson’s emotional experience and as the central structuring principle for the poem itself. Contrary to Aristotle’s injunction in The Poetics, Milton’s deployment of time in Samson Agonistes readily combines the concepts of mythos and ethos. To a great extent, time functions subjectively in Milton’s dramatic poem as character-driven, a subjectively propelled form of temporality, which leads to specific forms of narrative time. In this sense, character emotion produces its own narrative temporalities within the poem. The way Milton and Aristotle differ on this relationship between mythos and ethos is revealing, in that where Aristotle famously identifies tragedy’s principal aim as the “imitation of an action,” Milton identifies in his preface to Samson Agonistes that tragedy’s principal goal is, “by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions” in the course of “reading or seeing those passions well imitated.” As Sharon Achinstein puts it, Milton’s shift from Aristotle’s definition for tragedy singles out “a spiritual function of drama, an inner location for a struggle which drama could relieve or purge.” Indeed, she continues, “Milton’s Samson embodies the experience of drama by becoming both the hero and the victim, the purger and that which must be purged, filled with passion yet capable of being sacrificed to relieve passion” (418). This link between character and readerly or audience passion goes to the heart of tragedy’s goal, as Aristotle and Milton agree, of catharsis. It is important to note, however, that traditional readings of the poem’s catastrophe draw upon concepts of time that are quite different from what I am suggesting here. Albert Cirillo, for example, drawing on Mercia Eliade’s concept of the sacred time of ritual, suggests that time functions in a narrative capacity in Samson Agonistes as an eschatological quantity: The great religious epitome of the Feast of Dagon, realized in terms of sensual rites which reach their climax at noon with the appearance of the humiliated Samson, is subsumed into another rite, the celebration of the one true God, as Samson rises out of his humiliation, feels more the light of God within him— appropriately, at the hour of noon— and asserts his power. This is the triumph of eternity in that human moment which is an image of eternity. 49

Such a view enforces an heroic end to the poem, and in doing so offers an orthodox reading that both marginalizes and ignores the striated problematics many perceive in the poem’s ending. Linking time with emotion, on the other 49

  See Albert R. Cirillo, whose essay presents an exclusively regenerative reading for Samson Agonistes: see “Time, Light, and the Phoenix: The Design of Samson Agonistes,” Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Dieckhoff. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., (ed.) (Cleveland, OH: P of Case Western Reserve U, 1971) 226.

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hand—foregrounding character passion’s influence upon narrative structure as the overarching rubric for the poem—leads toward an ambiguity for the poem that in my view clarifies both the poem’s catastrophe and its conclusion. This ambiguity undercuts the tripartite structuring that traditional humoral readings of Milton’s dramatic poem offer, that Samson’s meetings with Dalila, Harapha, and Manoa serve as a model of the hero’s incremental purification, reflecting the melancholy against melancholy model Milton sets forth in the preface. Though much of the recent, non-orthodox scholarship bristles at reading Samson in this regenerative light,50 such readings have nevertheless been largely successful at stifling subsequent humoral analyses of the poem. But it is important to note that a humoral reading of the poem need not be necessarily limited in such a way. Readers sympathetic to non-orthodox perspectives should observe that a dynamic humoral reading of the poem confirms in some measure such positions, offering far-reaching consequences for the poem as a whole, in that the poem’s representation of volatility, rousing, and rupture portrays Samson not as a flat, melancholy type, but rather as a dynamic and complicated character who evokes the dangerous volatility implicit in humoral theory. Such volatility confirms Samson’s attempts at violence, for example, in his visits with Dalila and Harapha where he rebuffs Dalila in her effort to touch him, “lest fierce remembrance wake / My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint” (952–53); and subsequently threatens to “swing [Harapha] in the air, then dash [him] down / To the hazard of [his] brains and shatter’d sides” (1238–41). Such incidents explicitly document the way in which volatile character emotion informs the poem’s structure, which centers on forms of volatility that manifest Samson’s depression and terminate in the afterglow of his passion. Consequently, the narrative structure of Milton’s poem may perhaps best be understood as, in a sense, wholly catastrophic, hinging as it does upon humoral adustion. Two recent readings of the poem engage aspects related to this structural concern. As Karen Edwards explains, this feature involves foremost in Samson Agonistes the significance, in the Miltonic sense, of waiting: Melancholy’s primary role in Samson Agonistes is a structural one. It motivates Samson’s inability to act, which ensures the duration of the play …. In Hamlet and Samson Agonistes … the subtle energy of waiting, composed of doubt, second-guessing, and the paralyzing perception of interpretive ambiguity, are more compelling than the violent clarity of the final action. (233)

Edwards suggests that Samson awaits a revelation whose arrival proves to be, in the end, ambiguous. Derek Wood, on the other hand, has proposed a two-part structure for the poem that is amenable to just this type of narrative tension. The structure he offers uniquely reflects this poem in which, he insists, “There is no 50   See Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes and Shifting Contexts; Rogers, “The Secret of Samson Agonistes”; and Derek Wood, Exiled from Light.

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progress and no growth,” in that “the sequence of the episodes is not causal.” The first part, according to Wood, consists of “an extended amplificatio of Samson’s nature …” (145) and the second part begins when Samson “is persuaded that God is once again impelling him” (140), and unfolds through to the poem’s catastrophe. Wood figures the poem as a simple, “metasentence” structure: “The drama,” in Wood’s estimation, “is Samson’s ‘I am’” (141). Terse as it might appear, this “metasentence” structure is an elegant improvement over earlier theories, in that it accounts for Samson’s emotions and behaviors as the central figure in the drama. Moreover, it is not overly beholden to the orthodox views of the poem that actively seek out Samson’s incremental renovation. But the two-part structure Wood proposes for the poem can itself be further refined by acknowledging the explosive structural form that a humoral reading of the poem contributes to it. Indeed, the distensive and explosive forms of time I have identified as uniquely associated with early modern conceptions of humoral melancholy in its natural and unnatural states further help to distinguish qualities related to character emotion, and thus with narrative structure in Milton’s poem. ******* Milton’s deployment of the Aristotelian components of plot in Samson Agonistes links with immense aesthetic success the catharsis, the peripeteia, and the anagnorisis. That Milton is able to combine, specifically, the peripeteia and the anagnorisis so effectively hinges on two features: first, their suddenness; and second, their occurrence off stage as reported through a traumatized Messenger.51 Whatever meaning we are to take from the poem at its close must come from the reader’s sense of an ending, the shaping force that we bring to the poem, along with our familiarity with the tradition of the tale from the Book of Judges. While Milton adheres to Aristotle’s prescription to relegate scenes of horror to an offstage status, the suddenness of this reversal and recognition scene plays a fundamental role in the structuring of the poem. Such suddenness impacts the poem in a number of ways: first, in the character perception of Samson’s action—as in the words of the Messenger that “Gaza yet stands, but all her Sons are fall’n, / All in a moment overwhelm’d and fall’n” (1558–59); next, in the medical perception of that act within humoral theory, as Burton links such suddenness, for example, with the problematic representation, in this context, of melancholic suicide: “if idle, or alone, very dispirited, or carried away wholly with pleasant dreams and phantasies, but if once crossed and displeased, his countenance is altered on a sudden, his heart heavy, irksome thought crucify his soul, and in an instant he is moped, or weary of his life, he will kill himself” (1.3.1.4, emphasis added); and finally, in a structural or narrative sense, as 51   We might compare this Messenger with the messenger-function I explored at the end of The Old Arcadia, in Chapter 2.

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Aristotle observes in the Poetics the circumstances of suddenness in the context of a most successful example of tragic plotting involving the marvelous: Tragedy, however, is an imitation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvelous in them then if they happened of themselves or by mere chance. Even matters of chance seem most marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys’ death by falling down on him when a looker-on at a public spectacle; for incidents like that we think to be not without a meaning. A plot, therefore, of this sort is necessarily finer than others. (1464–65, emphasis added)

The catastrophe of the poem and Samson’s moment of passion confirm his prophetic moments as he agrees finally to attend the Philistine festival. Indeed, as Samson grasps the two pillars and addresses the Philistines in his final speech, his representation, as related by the Messenger, is curiously inward: “with head a while enclin’d, / And eyes fast fixt he stood, as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (1636–39). Samson announces to the Philistines, after all, that he is done with pleasing them as a public servant and sets himself to riddling: “Now of my own accord such other tryal / I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater; / As with amaze shall strike all who behold.” The Messenger continues: This utter’d, straining all his nerves he bow’d … He tugg’d, he shook, till down they came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sate beneath, Lords, Ladies, Captains, Councellors, or Priests, Thir choice nobility and flower …. Samson with these inmix’t, inevitably Pulld down the same destruction on himself …” (1643–59).

While the peripiteia and the anagnorisis fuse irrevocably here to tremendous effect, and both apparently and simultaneously resolve character motivation, it is notable the extent to which so little appears finally left unresolved. The representation of violent action, related secondhand, comes to serve as the appearance of design that Aristotle commends, as in his apt example of the ostensibly revenging statue of Mitys at another public spectacle: for Milton, too, it looks like revenge—of Samson on the Philistines, of the Hebrew God on Dagon. But is it? While it is tempting to interpret the action as centering upon the immediacy of divine revelation, as has generation upon generation of scholarship, it can

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perhaps be helpful to observe the way in which such revelation can be perceived as simultaneously corporeal in nature. Timothy Bright distinguishes the way in which the animal spirits serve in an intermediary role between the soul and body; that is, in a material context, how the humors engage the divine. This passage suggests that an individual can be freed from fearful, vehement contemplations by means of appropriate corporeal nourishments. In this way, the somatic can trump the psychic. The unique propensity wine demonstrates both for Bright and for Milton is telling, in that such experience hinges upon the individual’s accrual of spirits via corporeal nourishments—citing wine as the most ready cause of what he calls “speedy alteration.” The passage is from a section entitled “Howe melancholie worketh fearefull paßions in the mind”: in vehement contemplations, men see not, that which is before their eyes …. This spirit is the chiefe instrument, and immediate, whereby the soule bestoweth the exercises of her facultie in her bodie, that passeth to and fro in a moment, nothing in swiftnesse and nimblenesse being comparable thereunto: which when it is depraved by anie occasion, either rising from the bodie: or by other meanes, then becometh it an instrument unhandsome for performance of such actions, as require the use thereof: and so the minde seemeth to be blame worthy: wherein it is blameless: and fault of certaine actions imputed thereunto: wherein the bodie and this spirite are rather to be charged, things corporall and earthly: the one, in substance, and the other in respect of that mixture, wherewith the Lord tempered the whole masse in the beginning …. It is maintained by nourishments, whether they be of the vegetable, or animall kinde: which creatures, afford not only their corporall substance; but a spirituall matter also: wherewith everie nourishment, more or lesse is indued: this spirit of theirs, is (as similitude of nature, more nighly approacheth) altered more speedily, or with more larger travel of nature. Of all things of ordinarie use, the most speedy alteration is of wine: which in a moment repaireth our spirits. And reviveth us againe, being spent with heavinesse….(35–36)

Complicated as it appears, this passage suggests that the swift spirits latent within wine can revive the afflicted subject’s inward spirits, but do so in generating a humoral alteration in the animal spirits’ intermediary role between soul and body that ultimately frees the subject from vehement contemplation. The role wine plays here is telling, in that it is suggestive of the interplay of vapors that the drunken Philistian festival presents in its evocation of characterological and hence structural forms of energeia—the dramatic interplay between an actor’s emotion (Samson’s) and the viewers’ (the Philistines’). The fundamental dilemma at the catastrophe of Samson Agonistes, in other words, is that of the basic root of all poetic endeavor, between simile and metaphor: are Samson’s “rouzing motions” like the Philistines’, or are they identical to the Philistines’? The various traditions that inform black bile, in a remarkably explicit manner, appear to confirm both readings.

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Milton’s presentation of humoral melancholy as a process in Samson Agonistes thus traces a movement in dramatic pacing that shifts from one of dilation and delay, of waiting, into one of sudden action, and in the suddenness of that shift lies the danger of the volatility ascribed to humoral selves in early modern physiology.52 But the structure of Milton’s poem itself points to an experimentation with narrative time that follows the contours of such volatilities in character emotion. As a result of Milton’s reworking of the Samson story in the Book of Judges, the reader of Samson Agonistes must be especially attuned to the significance of suddenness and other forms of temporal processes in this poem. The mere use of the words “occasion,”53 for example, or of “speed,”54 or “Immediately”55 in the poem is fraught with a historicized meaning within the humoral paradigm that should bear critical weight within any reading of the poem. Indeed, the richness of such terms simply cannot be understood within a transcultural context, but rather must be situated within an early modern medical context in which these words carry quite specific meaning. Dangers associated with immediacy,56 or temporal volatility, in this sense, correlate as well with dangers in the poem related to space and spatial volatility: excepting line 1, Samson is described within the poem as “a person separate to God” (31), one whom God “hath cut off / Quite from his people” (1157–58), as one “excluded / All friendship” (494–95), and is also emphatically kept separate from his visitors. In this context, the collapse with the other he achieves in his act of destruction serves, perhaps paradoxically, as his means of re-establishing 52   While the nostalgic, brooding section of the drama, for example, drills Samson with a sense of the “foul effeminacy” he associates with the depression brought on by natural melancholy and its consequent narrative delay, the temporal immediacy of his final act, on the other hand, displays a sudden shift into action facilitated by the dominance of the unnatural form of the humor. Narrative delay, repeatedly gendered as feminine in the poem, and signified by the absence of God, thus gives way to a narrative explosivity that is repeatedly gendered as masculine. In his despair, of course, Samson lamented that he had been “Effeminately vanquished,” and is “Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonoured, quelled….” Indeed, his remaining life’s work might consist of nothing else “But to sit idle on the household hearth, / A burdenous drone” (562, 563, 566–67). Dalila offers to Samson an emasculated life of “leisure and domestic ease” (917). Having lacked any heroic prowess, Samson bitterly recalls that even in demonstrating a “grain of manhood … / [he] Might easily have shook off all her snares; / But foul effeminacy held [him] yoked / Her bondslave” (408–11). While delay is positioned in these passages as emasculated and effeminate, action, of whatever sort, becomes gendered as masculine. 53   Lines 224, 237, 423, 425, 1329, 1596, 1716. 54   Lines 650, 1263, 1304, 1316, 1343, 1345, 1539, 1681. 55   Line 1614. But note “No delay”(1344, 1395); and “too suddenly”(1565); and “All in a moment overwhelmed and fall’n,” (1559). 56   Note that the Philistines want to effect the mocking of Samson as swiftly as possible: their officer warns Samson to come before them to be jeered at the feast of Dagon “Immediately . . . without delay” (1394).

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self-identity. When he places his hands upon the pillars and, tugging and shaking, causes himself to become “inmixt” (1657) among his enemies, Samson demonstrates that the only way in which he can “quit himself / Like Samson, and heroicly … [finish] / A life Heroic” (1709–11), is quite literally to collapse the physical space that separates subject from object, self from the other, in the world of the poem. This collapse is facilitated by the structure of the “sacrificial crisis” that Girard posits, which links Samson and the Philistines through the similar volatility of their inward passion at Dagon’s festival. That Samson reassumes his heroic identity through his self-inflicted collapse with and among the Philistines, both literally and symbolically, serves only as the final correlation drawn between Samson and his enemies in a poem which, quietly at least, is full of them. Indeed, when Manoa learns that his son has perished “inmixt” with his enemies, for example, “tangl’d in the fold” (1665), jumbled among the slain, he proposes that he will proceed with “cleansing herbs [to] wash off / The clotted gore” (1727–28) from Samson’s body. Such a removal of “clotted” gore explicitly maintains the terminology associated with humoral melancholy that we have been tracing here, in this instance represented as its burnt, inward passion remains as humoral excrements after its moment of passion. That Manoa should expect to find a “clotted” mess suggests that he envisions what he names as “revenge” (1591, 1660) to have been brought about through the explosive trajectory of the humors even to the point of their conflagration. This progression “From under ashes into sudden flame” has important textual bearing on the role and function of the problematic phoenix imagery at the poem’s close, which takes its strength and power from that of a sudden influx of applied heat as it “Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most / When most unactive deem’d” (1704–05). But focus on melancholy can distract from the overarching model of volatility that humoralism offers to the poem. Indeed, while melancholy is certainly a great variable here, a far greater problem posed in the work is that of the various ways in which volatility can be achieved: by secular or by spiritual means. The like-against-like patterning, in the end, refers not to Samson and his interactions with Dalila, Harapha, and Manoa; rather, the ultimate like-againstlike purgative action that informs the catastrophe of the poem proves to be the interaction between Samson and the Philistines. ******* The ambiguity at the end Samson Agonistes is such that, from the humoral perspective, those in search of a regenerate Samson by the poem’s conclusion can have it; the like-against-like model Milton adopts for the poem obtains to that point at which we can discern Aristotelian design in the contrast between Samson’s inward motions and the Philistines’. Conversely, however, those in search of confirmation of non-orthodox readings of the poem can draw on a dynamic humoral reading in order to pair what they might claim to be Samson’s

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vapid inspiration as comparable with the alcoholic vapors that produce such drunkenness in the Philistines. What early modern conceptions of melancholy adustion offer Milton’s Samson is the psychosomatic basis for him both to mourn his past and execute his unnamed revenge: nothing more. As Karen Edwards observes: “Samson’s melancholy resolves interpretive uncertainty into perfect ambiguity. The ‘rouzing motions’ that lead him to act may stem from suicidal despair, but they may stem from enthusiasmos. Melancholy allows, indeed sets the seal on, both possibilities.” (236) The structure of humoral adustion that serves as the groundwork for the poem demonstrates as much. But the Aristotelian concept of prosopopoeia might be helpful here, in that it tends to serve in instances where likeness and difference falter, or are no longer discrete and intelligible. It is here where, as Philip Sidney observes in his Defense (with reference to prophecy in the Psalms), a middle way can produce itself in the “free changing of persons,” and an ostensibly absent entity can come forth as speaker. If this is “God comming in his Maiestie,”57 as Sidney conceives of it, then that would appear to present a deeply ironic ending for Milton’s poem: in an act of violence whose choral interpreters (Euripidean to the core) apply false and bloodthirsty meanings, with the Hebrews returning to open idol-worship and the tribe of Dan finding itself blotted out of the Book of Life.58 While melancholy and its long tradition endows Milton’s Samson with a volatility that permits him with incredible celerity to re-work his past by the apocalyptic means of canceling the future, in other words, the poem’s conclusion suggests that, in the end, such tradition is ultimately insufficient cause for clarification of the moral value of Samson’s final act. To assess that value, we must locate from within the ambiguities of motivation Milton provides his Samson, ranging from the material to the divine, Samson’s manifestation of either apocalyptic vengeance or of renovation to the status of God’s champion. The likeness Milton figures between Samson and the Philistines at the catastrophe of his poem, that is, from the inside out, leaves the reader with a near-perfect ambiguity, indeed.59 57   See Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesie, in Defense of Poesie, Astrophel and Stella and Other Writings (London: J.M. Dent, 1999) 87. 58   See Wittreich, Shifting Contexts, 243–85. 59   The movement from Samson’s lament, regarding the “dark, dark dark … / Irrecoverabl[e] dark”(80–81) of the external world, to what the Chorus identifies as Samson’s own inward darkness, is further maintained by Samson’s own political subjection under Philistian yoke—“Which shall I first bewail,” asks the Chorus, “Thy bondage or lost sight, Prison within prison/ Inseperably dark?/ Thou art become … the dungeon of thyself; thy soul … In real darkness of the body dwells …” (151–56,158–59). It is this relationship between internal and external darkness to which Milton draws focus at the poem’s close, referring to the Philistines at Dagon’s feast as having been beset with “blindness internal” (1686). Shame and the narcissistic patterning relating to the dichotomy of outward and inward in the drama impact the humoral presentation of despair Milton offers.

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But the ironies that pervade the ending of the poem are surely not negligible. In spite of the praiseworthy triumph that Manoa and the Chorus perceive in Samson’s final achievement, surely there is no cause for such triumph: the “horrid spectacle” (1542) is presided over by a fearsome, avenging God, identified as “our living Dread” (1673), and the Danites, as biblical tradition indicates, soon backslide. Further, the varying blindnesses, willful and otherwise, that all the characters demonstrate in the poem—from Manoa to Dalila, from the Chorus to the Semi-chorus, and ultimately from Samson to the Philistines—manifest the spine of indeterminacy that structures the dramatic poem. What real “Honour” and “freedom” (1715), we might ask Manoa, who perceives both in his son’s final actions, can there be from such an act which produces neither honor nor freedom for the Hebrews generally or the Danites in specific in any literal sense? Manoa’s desire that “the valiant youth” will visit his son’s grave, “And from his memory inflame thir breasts / To matchless valour, and adventures high” (1738–40) rings hollowly because we know it shall not pass; in the Hebrew reversion to open idolatry, Samson, paradoxically perhaps, becomes arguably the most complicated legacy in all biblical tradition. The termination of Samson Agonistes, in this way, functions as a study in irony, with its roots in a catastrophe that centers upon a likeness and difference on which hangs the interpretation of both the physical, and indeed, metaphysical worlds. I shall conclude with this: in the post-9/11 context in which I write, numerous studies of the poem have come into print debating Samson’s role in Samson Agonistes as religious terrorist. The uncanny coincidence that the acts upon the World Trade Center in New York share with the “two massie Pillars” that Samson shakes, “to and fro,” before they descend and crash with a “burst of thunder” (1648–51) killing 3,000 people, combined with Samson’s apparent awakening to the thought, as he heads off to the festival, that “this day may be my last,” certainly implicates the text as part of a tradition of religious violence that I have examined here within the context of Milton’s stated ambition of trying his hand at Greek tragedy. But enough time has transpired since the attacks of 9/11 that we in the United States have begun to achieve some perspective on the deep changes these attacks have caused within our nation, and the course of action that our government has pursued since those attacks. In short, we have been forced to come to terms with a range of reprehensible behaviors only now coming to light that have been pursued by our elected officials in the name of fear—ranging from the wire-tapping of US citizens to the extreme renditions of suspect aliens; from knee-jerk religious fanaticism to psychological and physical torture; from the outing of our own spies and demotion of government employees for political purposes to the pursuit of war under false pretenses—any one of which obscures the link between “us” and “them,” between “subject” and “object,” between “self” and “other.” What I am driving at is the thesis that the non-differentiation that makes so irrevocably complex the distinctions to which Milton alludes in Samson Agonistes continues to find itself at the heart of contemporary political, military, and ethical conversations well into the twenty-first century not simply

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in the momentary context of an act of violence, but in the long-searing embers of its afterglow. The throb of anxiety we must face in that bleak likeness is the crux upon which future discussions of Samson’s regenerate or non-regenerate status will ineluctably be fought.

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Conclusion This project has engaged one way in which early modern scholarship might begin to historicize time, especially insofar as early modern English concepts of time reflect the porous embodiment of humoral selfhood. My focus upon early modern theories of palpably material emotion has sought to illustrate first, the way in which such concepts facilitate historically specific forms of subjective time; and second, the way that early modern artists deploy these concepts within a range of narratives that permit such subjective temporalities to rise to a structural principle in their literary works. Ideally, this topic has been narrow enough to demonstrate lucidly the features of early modern temporal representations, or, to use David Scott Kastan’s term, “Renaissance explorations of time” (6, emphasis his), across a range of traditional literary genres. In the end, it is enough, I think, to acknowledge that the forms of time that inform early modern medical theory are quite different than those upon which our current medical paradigm relies; heeding that difference, as I have done here, can lead us to new ways of comprehending early modern selves, and consequently of their mimetic representation in early modern drama and other creative fictions. In large part, the ongoing success of early modern literary works as both popular reading and as staged theater hinges upon their intelligible transferability to current ways of comprehending our shared human experience: the ways in which time, narrative, and emotion successfully maintain their varying comprehensibility to audiences ranging from the English of the early modern period to an international audience in the twenty-first century. But as this study has demonstrated, such transfer is not without its thoroughgoing historicizing eccentricities. The ubiquitous medically-oriented footnotes common to current editions of such literary texts, if nothing else, point to early modern ways of being-in-the-body—and thus to subjective forms of temporalities—that are decidedly different than those perceived within our post-Cartesian philosophical framework. While Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton demonstrably are not medical physicians—which is a point worth stressing repeatedly—they do become medical theorists, in a sense, by default in their literary endeavors. Insofar as they demonstrate mimetic displays of credible character motivation and behaviors through the unifying system of humoralism, they adhere within available discourses to verisimilar psycho-physiological representations. The remarkable success their many early modern creative fictions reflect in this endeavor confirms their skill. Each chapter in this study has explored the literary results of what Cathy Yandell refers to as the “subjective secularization of time” (27) in early modern England, especially the ways in which such subjectivization shapes the respective narrative structures of the literary works under consideration. The coincidence

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and counterfactuality that Hilary P. Dannenberg suggests root the plotting of early modern novels, for example, have been concepts I have been able to trace within these canonical works with some surprising results. Indeed, while the respective treatments of time that each of my chapters examines zero in on time as a volatile entity that helps clarify the subjectivizing of time during the period, doing so also permits us to trace the world of narrative possibility that such treatments facilitate. The burgeoning generic form of the novel comes to rely upon precisely such utilizations of time. In fact, as Michael McKeon has illustrated, such a radically subjective conceptualization of time and consciousness, of “realism,” will ultimately help come to define the novel as its own discrete genre. McKeon’s observation, for example, that the early modern period is one in which the novel’s origins are shaped by an amalgamation of competing forces—from issues ranging from the epistemological to the socio-ethical—, is difficult to envision outside of their phenomenological dimensions and commensurate temporal implications. The subjectivization of temporal and narrative experience that characterizes the literature of the early modern period both evokes and anticipates these issues to a marked degree. Representations of character, anachronistic as that term may be, lie at the heart of such matters. Linda Charnes has discussed the process of dramatic subjectivity most astutely, to my mind. In Notorious Identity, she defines subjectivity within the “legend” plays she engages—Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra—as “the subject’s experience of his or her relationship to his or her ‘identity’”(8), which manifests itself, she suggests, in the context of moments of crisis: “subjectivity is represented only in those moments that threaten to destabilize—or even to shatter—identity” (9). She offers the term identity in contradistinction to this concept. To identify, she suggests, is “to determine to be   See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967). Watt observes that ancient, medieval, and Renaissance portrayal of individual character in various genres relies largely upon the re-hashing of “timeless universals” which pale when compared with the novel’s ability to portray life with any verisimilitude. Watt suggests that the great bulk of literature previous to the novel’s eighteenth-century provenance avoids grappling with what he calls “temporal flux” (23); instead it deals with time as a type designed to illustrate the “supremely timeless fact of death” (23). Watt concludes that such consideration leads to the “very minor importance accorded to the temporal dimension in most literature previous to the novel” (23). I quote Watt at length here to give voice to a position that contrasts strongly with my own. Michael McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), has developed Watt’s theories on the rise of the novel with an eye on the role social function plays in its development: “with the aid of the novel modernity elaborates a fluid model of social identity composed of disparate factors and submerged in the shifting, internal dynamics of subjectivity and self” (xxiii). It is in this crisis of individuality in terms of epistemology and socio-ethics that leads from the social to individualistic selfhood that McKeon perceives as the groundwork that gives rise to the birth of the novel.    Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993). 

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the same with something that is already known, to establish what a given thing, or who a given person, is. Thus, to ‘identify’ someone is to secure meaning, to erase multiplicity and eliminate indeterminacy—to ‘fix’ that person, so to speak” (8, emphasis hers). This is the way “legends,” especially, according to Charnes, assert themselves as subjects in relation to their established identities. Garrett Sullivan acknowledges these concepts in his study of memory and forgetting, tracing the embodied concept of memory and the way it vies with instances of the dramatic subjectivity, as he calls it, of self-forgetting. The ubiquity of Shakespeare’s demonstration of these conceptualizations, particularly those which interrogate the discrepancy between dramatic subjectivity and the stability of an established, fixed “identity,” leads me to what will serve as my concluding move for this book, involving perhaps the most striking example of what we might call an identity crisis in all of Shakespeare: 2.4 of King Lear. It is in this scene, of course, plagued by what he perceives as ingratitude, Lear famously demands with great pathos “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (230). In exploring Lear’s predicament, I would like to engage him to some degree within the context of the “legend” plays Charnes examines, in the sense that Lear presents here a fixed identity that has been shattered in deliberate ways that prevent him from reconciling his own perceived loss of self against the new version of that self that rises in the crisis of the new dramatic subjectivity Regan and Goneril force upon him. Here his past self—his “identity,” to use Charnes’ formulation, the legend Lear bodies forth of his own past—thus comes to stand markedly juxtaposed with something approaching the “poor, bare, fork’d animal” (3.4.107–08) Lear will come to perceive himself, like Edgar, to be. The issue, in sum, is one of forgetting, which, as Sullivan demonstrates, has its own “subjective content” (135). As Goneril explains to Lear: “I would you would make use of your good wisdom / (Whereof I know you are fraught) and put away / These dispositions which of late transport you / From what you rightly are.” (1.4. 219–22) In this sense, Lear’s “notorious identity,” such as it is, provides a rich groundwork for 2.4, which begins with his self-diagnosis of “Hysterica passio” and ends with the pathetic fallacy of a “tempest” (284), a term pregnant with etymologically temporal connotations. I want to pursue this discussion through Kaara Peterson’s recent analysis of Lear’s self-diagnosis of “Hysterica passio,” an analysis that draws upon a historicist methodology that, while it engages the gender politics that underlie Lear’s problematic use of the Latinate term, simultaneously traces the implicit symbolic ramifications scholarship habitually has invoked in correlating the historicized hysterica he claims with a psychoanalytic hysteria. In doing so, Peterson thus establishes the dangers of relying exclusively upon psychoanalysis as a default methodology for analysis of the brief passage. Drawing    See Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).    See Kaara L. Peterson, “Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.1 (Spring 2006) 1–22.

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upon this methodological tension, I would like to push past her exclusive focus on the term itself to provide a context for it across the play as a whole that involves, at the core of its embodied psycho-physiology, the claims of time, temperature and the humors—that is, tempus, temperatura, and temperamentum—upon Lear’s humoral self. ***** The way Shakespeare portrays Lear’s self-forgetting, the distance between Charnes’ concepts of “identity,” as something somehow stable, and “subjectivity,” as something fleeting, involves, as it so often does for Shakespeare, his reliance on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, Shakespeare hews, aesthetically at least, to that myth to which he returns again and again for its associations with concepts ranging from self-knowledge to self-loss, and from gendered forms of desire and the passions to a conclusion consolidated in male tears: the tragedy of “Narcissus and Echo.” What makes Shakespeare’s adaptation of these elements of the myth in King Lear, oblique as they are, so fascinating is two-fold: first, he foregrounds the sensory elements of the myth—the audio (invoking Echo) and the visual (invoking Narcissus); and second, he temporalizes them. As odd as it first appears to discuss a myth of young (albeit tragic) love in the context of an old man’s identity crisis, we should note that the default methodology of psychoanalysis which Peterson perceives in scholarly analysis of the “Hysterica passio” passage is one that has obtained, as well, with regard to Ovid’s myth in Shakespeare’s play. Rather than pursue the link directly, in other words, criticism has tended to handle Lear’s “narcissism” in a psychoanalytic context, deriving from his senectitude, his old age. Such scholarship identifies in Lear’s behavior a refusal to accept the indignities of age. But surely the specific ways we might engage narcissism in this play need not be so limited. Shakespeare incorporates mirroring and echo effects that position Lear’s reading of himself in others via a form of temporal mirroring we witnessed with Leontes in Chapter 4 on The Winter’s Tale, through which Lear appears to seek to confound the ineluctable nature of time, of tempus edax rerum, that has brought him quite literally to his knees (2.4.154). In order to bring about this effect, Shakespeare reinforces what we might term a temporal superabundance at the play’s outset that complicates severely Lear’s emotional status. Crucially, Shakespeare surrounds Lear at the outset of this play with dukes identified as “younger strengths”: Cornwall, Albany, and France. But more than    See Karl M. Abenheimer, “On Narcissism, with Reference to Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Narcissism, Nihilism, Simplicity and Self (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1991) 29–38. Also see Leonard Shengold, “King Lear and the Multiple Meanings of ‘Nothing.’” “Father Don’t You See I’m Burning?”: Reflections on Sex, Narcissism, Symbolism, and Murder: From Everything to Nothing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 19–28.

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simply serving as younger foils to the aged Lear, Shakespeare is careful to stress their passionate—that is, humoral—youthfulness. The “hot-bloodied France” (2.4.212), for example, departs court “in choler” (1.2.23), having proclaimed sympathy for Cordelia’s position in the familial drama of 1.1 through her ability quite literally to fire his affections: “Gods, gods! ‘tis strange / that from their cold’st neglect / My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.” (1.1.254–55) This caloric progression is one I have traced throughout this book; here its manifestation in a nominally amorous framework is one swiftly repeated, though more dangerously, in this play populated by a host of choleric temperaments. Cornwall, too, it is worth observing, is possessed by the “fiery quality” of choler (2.4.91), that which typifies youth within the humoral paradigm; and Lear himself, identified at the outset of the play by Kent as manifesting a “hideous rashness” (1.1.151), has apparently bodied forth such a disposition all his life. According to Goneril: “The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-ingraff’d condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.” (1.1.295–99) Interestingly, Goneril’s prophecy of Lear’s future “choleric years” of rashness, of course, upends the common early modern view of age as a gradual cooling governed by a humoral dominance by phlegm or melancholy. But Goneril’s misdiagnosis ostensibly relies on “experience” that suggests she knows better. Like Leontes in Chapter 4, Lear comes to read himself in those that surround him, and his choleric disposition thus mirrors within himself their emotional content. Just as Lear appropriates mimetically the quality of their inward states, that is, so too does he project this emotional content (to read these passages psychoanalytically) into others. For example, when Lear wishes upon Goneril a choleric child—“Create [for] her [a] child of spleen, that it may live / And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her” (1.4.282–83)— he projects even his grandchild in his own image. This image unfortunately echoes Goneril’s assessment of Lear, that “Now by my life / Old fools are babes again” (1.3.18–19). The youthful, choleric self-image Lear desires to demonstrate, on the other hand, is one he simply cannot actually embody due to the effects of time; the youthful self he idealizes is only one he can idealize from afar, both spatially and temporally. Lear’s longing to demonstrate both outward shows of power and the commensurate inward virility of humoral heat actually signifies that which, in a sense, Lear can only attempt to read in himself: he is implicitly belied such an actuality by the proverbial cold of the phlegm or melancholy that should constitute his emotional disposition in old age. Shakespeare highlights this formulation as an embodied (and historicized) portrayal of an aesthetic adaptation of narcissism that manifests through instances of echo that reverberate throughout the text of the play. Perhaps most notable in any encounter with the tragedy, the word nothing echoes from the outset of the drama through to its conclusion. At 1.1.87 and following, for example, Lear demands Cordelia document her love to him— “Speak,” he commands. Her response, “Nothing, my lord,” in its very emptiness,

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seems to mock him. “Nothing?” he responds, in disbelief. “Nothing,” she confirms. “Nothing will come of nothing,” he demands: “speak again.” The linguistic insufficiency Lear identifies here he is one he distinguishes likewise in others’ speech throughout the play, a kind of lack that comes to correspond with his own. Famously, Lear’s Fool will identify the former King as one who, possessed of a hard-boiled egg, has “cut the egg i’ th’ middle and eat the meat” in giving away his “two crowns of the egg” (1.4.58–59); for Lear stands now as a cipher: an “O without a figure,” says the Fool: “I am better than thou art now. I am a Fool, thou art nothing” (1.4.192–94). Of course, other forms of emotionally-inflected echo pervade the play. In 1.4, having been ignored by Oswald, servant to Goneril, Lear sends a Knight to demand audience with Goneril’s husband, Albany. Having spoken with Oswald, the Knight responds that Albany will not meet with Lear: “he answered me in the roundest manner, he would not” (54–55). Lear’s amazed response is as follows: “He would not!” Immediately following this exchange, Lear demands of the recalcitrant Oswald: “Who am I, sir?” To which Oswald responds: “My Lady’s father.” Lear quotes him, in a sour parody: “My Lady’s father!” (78–80). In 2.4, echo again bursts forth. Outside the castle of Regan and Cornwall, Gloucester relates to Lear that he has inform’d Regan and Cornwall of Lear’s desire to see them: “I have inform’d them so” (98). A disbelieving Lear responds again in a mocking echo: “Informed them! Dost thou understand me, man?” (99). He makes clear he will not be trifled with: “The King would speak with Cornwall, the dear father / Would with his daughter speak, commands, tends service. / Are they inform’d of this?” (101–04) Perhaps most intriguingly in this passage, Lear greets Gloucester’s report of Regan’s denial to meet with him with his own arch command: “Fetch me a better answer” (91). Such an enunciation radically destabilizes Ovid’s model of echo, overhauling it into a game of power relations. This utilization of echo in the play manifests itself most crucially here in 2.4, where Lear awaits his meeting with Cornwall. Lear’s ire prompts Gloucester’s caution that Lear ought to bide his time and steer clear of angering the younger man: “My dear lord, / You know the fiery quality of the Duke” (91–92). But Lear focuses on the emotional content of the word fiery, worrying this “fiery” quality aloud until it comes to contaminate his own humoral constitution. In doing so, and in opposition to the coldness that the humoral tradition associates with old age, he attempts through language to recoup the youthful virility characterized by influxes of heat: “Fiery? What quality? … My breath and blood! Fiery? The fiery Duke? Tell the hot Duke that—” (2.4.96, 103–04) Here Lear mirrors physiological heat off the alleged heat yielded by the choleric temper of Regan’s husband, Cornwall. But as Lear uses it, the word “fiery” serves importantly as a “speech-act,” not only reflecting, but actually doing—escalating performatively Lear’s own inward heat. Such emphasis on the term “fiery,” which as we have seen is granted a specific power within the humoral theory, also re-directs attention to the sheer amount in this play of mirrored and echoed elements.

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It is precisely these elements that help situate Lear’s use of the term “Hysterica passio” (57) earlier in the scene. Whether the term serves either as diagnosis or misdiagnosis (and I follow Peterson that it appears to be the latter), the context for Lear’s use of the term is crucial. While the rising of the “mother” surely matters here for a range of reasons, it also functions as a humoral pun. The passage runs as follows: “ O how this mother swells up toward my heart!/ [Hysterica] passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element’s below. — Where is this daughter?”(2.4.56– 58) Here the “climbing sorrow” would appear to signify affliction from the adustion of his burnt humor as it rises up, as he claims, “toward my heart!” Yet the pathos of the scene, and our sense both of Lear’s madness and resultant misdiagnosis, relies upon his appeal to the material stuff of his humor: “Thy element’s below” (58), he claims: that is, the humor’s material element, which lies in his liver, or abdomen. But the line continues: “Where is this daughter?” (58). In one sense, he is surely awaiting Regan. But in the sense that the “mother” is the palpable stuff of his humor, the term “daughter” signifies as well the vapors caused by adustion, which he fears will ascend as a wave of madness. His verbal attempt to restrain the rising of these secondary vapors relies upon a humoral punning that links the vapor as daughter and the humor as mother with all the familial drama that corresponds to such a scenario in a play, famously, as Adelman observes, lacking a mother. It is worth noting in this context that when Hotspur, “drunk with choler” (1.3.129), rails cholerically against King Henry in 1 Henry IV, Worcester accuses him of demonstrating a “woman’s mood” (237). But as with Lear’s misdiagnosis of “Hysterica passio,” the diagnosis I am proposing for Lear has the distinct advantage of granting him a partly valid self-diagnosis insofar as it shows Lear using available, and gendered, discourses. He proceeds: “O me, my heart! my rising heart! But down!” (79). We would do well to observe, however, that Lear’s rage alternates with moments of calm and clarity. While temporal forms of instaneity are pervasive through the scene—“I’ld speak with them / Now, presently” (2.4.116–17)— Lear contrasts such temporalities with their opposite. Indeed, he pauses from his rage to surmise that perhaps Cornwall cannot attend him due to illness: “may be he [Cornwall] is not well,” proceeding to the conclusion that “I’ll forbear, / And am fallen out with my more headier will, / To take the indispos’d and sickly fit / For the sound man” (105, 109–12). Lear’s choleric temporality, rash as it is, remains for a time capable of dilation. Earlier, for example, he had contemplated whether his “discernings [senses]/ Are lethargied” (1.4.228–29). A quick glance at the stocked Kent, however, and his rage returns: “Death on my state!”(2.4.112). Lear is certainly disbelieving of others and of his situation; in addition, Shakespeare draws upon topical interest in representing “psychological” illness for Lear drawn   See Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004) 62–65, and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays from “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992) 112–14. 

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from two contemporary manuscripts: A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother and The Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, as Peterson cogently demonstrates. But in terms of aesthetics, it is important to note that all the mirroring and echoes in the play either reflect directly upon Lear, or Lear manipulates in order to reflect directly upon himself. Such mirroring in this play uncovers a King, as his Fool says, “old before [his] time” (1.5.35). Lear’s essential question—“Does any here know me? This is not Lear. / Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? /…Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.226–27, 230)—suggests that the play serves as a quest for a self-knowledge that finds its natural embodiment in some sense in the Narcissus myth. In keeping with that tale, the Fool’s response to Lear’s question—“Lear’s shadow” (1.4.231)—actually draws on the myth quite literally. A.D. Nuttall observes that Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare repeatedly and consistently in their work use the term “shadow” to designate Narcissus’ reflection, as in Venus and Adonis. Nuttall notes that both authors take it to be the literal translation of Ovid’s Latin term umbra. Shakespeare uses this translation to brilliant effect in Richard II, in which Richard puns with Bolingbroke that he has become the “shadow” to Bolingbroke’s “sun.” In that scene, Richard looks into his mirror, then, dashing it, shatters the shadow he claims is now “crack’d in an hundred shivers” (4.1.289). If a Lear—emasculated, effeminized, emptied out, divested, however we want to have it—has in some way actually become Lear’s “shadow”—the hollow, reflected image of the Narcissus myth—then what do we make of this new, dramatically subjectified version of Lear, the man? In the myth, Narcissus’s delusion shatters with the drops of his own tears, and gendered tears famously play a significant role for Lear as well. While he rails at Goneril, his anger turns to tears: I am ashamed that thou hast power to shake my manhood thus, That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, Should make thee worth them, Blasts and fogs upon thee! … Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out And cast you, with the waters that you lose, To temper clay. (1.4.296–99, 301–04, emphasis added)

   For discussion of the relevance of these texts, see especially Peterson and Adelman.    See Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis: “Narcissus so himself forsook,/ And died to kiss his shadow in the brook” (161–62). Also note A.D. Nuttall, “Ovid’s Narcissus and Shakespeare’s Richard II: the Reflected Self.” Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Charles Martindale, (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 137–50.

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Later he bellows: “You think I’ll weep; / No, I’ll not weep. / I have full cause of weeping but this heart/ Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws/ Or ere I’ll weep: O fool I shall go mad” (2.4.282–86). Here he offers an unfortunate echo of his earlier hope, “O, let me not be mad, not mad sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper, I will not be mad!” (46–47, emphasis added). In these passages, Shakespeare links the tempering of clay with Lear’s humoral temperament, formulating each along a caloric economy that rejects what Lear conceives as the unmanly moisture of his tears. Additionally, his “hundred thousand flaws” echoes the “thousand shivers” of Richard II’s cracked mirror. In Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s self-image as “shadow” expresses itself as far older and far emptier than the King is willing to tolerate or to accept. Through the loss of all stately rule, all power and all virility, he is left but the “bare, forked animal” he had feared he was all along, and he must work through his “madness” in time: where in Ovid’s myth it is Echo’s fate to diminish and abate to nothing but a voice, and it is Narcissus’ fate to diminish and abate to nothing but a flower, in Shakespeare’s play it is Lear’s fate to diminish and abate to a nothing at all that, ostensibly, can be rebuilt. Shakespeare accordingly frames Lear’s progression to a kind of wellness by continuing to reference this pattern of visual mirroring and auditory echo. In some ways the most moving transition in King Lear, for example, involves the yielding of the spatially-driven echo of “nothing” from the play’s outset to the temporallydriven echo of impossibility at its close, as the bereft Lear sputters through his verbal gauntlet in the realization of Cordelia’s death: “Thou’lt come no more / Never, never, never, never, never.” (5.3.308–09) It appears that in King Lear to be old before your time is not only to be in the wrong body, but, likewise, and as the unifying system of humoralism suggests, to be in the wrong mind. The old and empty man Lear views as his shadow seeks to assume possession of the inward heat of youth, but lacks the force and virility to effect—that is, to affect— the ends that such choler requires. In this way, the time that confounds Lear is not precipitated by the explosive potion that both haunts and clarifies The Old Arcadia, nor the nostalgia that so confounds Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; not the discord that haunts Othello, nor the ambiguous “rouzing motions” that complicate Samson Agonistes, but a subjective, choleric affectivity and related temporality that has entirely outlived its use. These complex representations of affective temporality function as examples of how the early modern English envisioned the dangers and possibilities implicit to subjective forms of temporality. The “tempest” that concludes 2.4 of King Lear, for example, does so with an arch pathetic fallacy—arch because the pathetic fallacy, strictly speaking, requires a distance between self and setting to which the humoral concepts of embodiment and environment refuse to commit. Adding to the canniness of this timely “tempest” involves its etymological root (tempus),    Sullivan suggests that the pathetic fallacy in early modern period is complex because there is no “clear separation between subject and environment” (744–45), in “Romance, Sleep, and the Passions in the Old Arcadia,” ELH 74.3 (Fall 2007) 735–57.

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which suggests or rather confirms that the time against which Lear does battle is naturalized in his tragic universe as a passionate form of time and tide, ultimately of a piece with the tempus, temperatura, and temperamentum that has served as the focus of this book. It is from this position that an exploration of early modern subjective temporalities can genuinely begin.

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Index

adustion, see humoral theory. aging 134, 50, 52, 54­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­–5, 70, 174–80 air (and embodiment) 20, 27–31, 142, 152, 161 ale 87–8, 151 see also beer. see also wine. amazons, see gender. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Shakespeare. anagnorisis 39, 61, 73, 128–9, 132, 136, 162–3 see also Aristotle. see also Dannenberg. The Anatomy of Melancholy, see Burton. anger 25, 109, 124, 149, 178; and suddenness, 24–6, 91, 108–9; female, 49, 68–70; and zeal, 147 see also emotion. animal spirits 17, 24, 25, 31, 163–4 Aristotle 15, 19, 25, 30 and time 32–3, 37–8 and emplotment (The Poetics) 35–6, 38–9, 50, 61, 74, 81–2, 128–9, 143, 148, 150, 156, 159, 160, 162 –3 and the messenger-function 74 and epilepsy 91 and humoral theory 86, 151 see also Problem XXX, I. Arlow, Jacob 1, 33, 33 Astell, Ann 75 As You Like It, see Shakespeare. Augustine, and time 37–9, 82–3, 83 and drunkenness of his mother, Monica 158 Avicenna 27, 87, 151 Babb, Lawrence 2, 24 Bakhtin, M.M. 9, 10, 15, 132, 134 Barrough, Philip

The Method of Physic 53, 87, 151–2 Batman, Stephen Batman uppon Bartholome 1, 28–9, 84, 103, 108, 110, 149 Batman uppon Bartholome, see Batman. beer 87, 87, 88, 151 see also ale. see also wine. belatedness 6–7, 117 Berrong, Richard 58 Bible Judges 149, 153–4, 158, 162, 165 Revelation 147 black bile, see humoral theory. blood, see humoral theory. Boehrer, Bruce 92, 98, 101, Breitenberg, Mark 18, 53, 55, 105, 141 Bright, Timothy Treatise of Melancholie 4, 21, 107–9, 117, 121, 124, 126, 151, 163–4 and subjective time 4, 22, 24–6, 31, 87, 107–9, 151, 163–4 Bristol, Michael 10, 105, 120–21, 123, 131–4 Brooks, Peter 5, 9, 12, 39, 129 Bruster, Douglas 12 Burton, Robert The Anatomy of Melancholy 3–4, 17–19, 21–2, 53, 66, 91, 110, 117, 121, 124–5, 151–2, 162 and subjective time 4, 24–6, 31–2, 84–5, 87, 108, 125, 148–9, 151–2, 162 Butler, Judith 96 catharsis 61, 128–9, 141, 160, 162 see also Aristotle. see also Sidney. Cavell, Stanley 116–17 Chamberlain, Stephanie 51, 62

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Charnes, Linda 13–14, 34, 172–4 Chaucer, Geoffrey 51 choler, see humoral theory. Cirillo, Anthony 151, 160 Cohen, Jeffrey 5, 8, 13 Cohen, Stephen 12 Comedy of Errors, see Shakespeare. Crooke, Helkiah Mikrokosmophagria 49, 86, 148 Dannenberg, Hilary P. 12, 39, 44, 72–3, 105, 129–33, 136, 172 Defense of Poesie, see Sidney. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 9, 13, 34, 98 depression and Gynecia 67–8 and Romeo (char.) 1–4, 18–19, 22, 24, 32, 34, 85 and Samson (char.) 161, 165 and subjective time 1–4, 44 and women 67–8 Dekker, Thomas 45, 52 Duran, Angelica 142–3 Elyot, Thomas The Castel of Helth 4 emotion, and environment 26–32 as faculty psychology 15, 25 and time distortion 1–4, 8, 25, 36, 83, 92 see also humoral theory. energeia 158, 164 Enterline, Lynn 111, 114 Euripides 90, 156–8 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 7, 104 Ficino, Marcilio 87, 146, 151 Fineman, Joel 100 Fink, Bruce 93, 95–6, 112–13, 119 Fish, Stanley 139, 142, 150 Flaherty, Michael 36 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 18, 90 see also Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson Foucault, Michel 6, 15 Forrester, John 9, 40, 43, 80–81

Freedman, Barbara 112, 119, 126–7 Freud, Sigmund, see psychoanalysis. Galen 11, 15, 19, 20–21, 27–9, 53, 86–7, 110, 151–2 Gallagher, Lowell 105, 117, 135 gender masculinity 1–4, 18–22, 29, 31, 50, 54–6, 63, 67, 84–5, 91–2, 98–101, 107, 115, 118, 124–28, 165, 174 femininity (and effeminate males) 10, 18–22, 29, 44, 49–51, 54–6, 62–74, 165, 178 transvestism 49, 51, 54–5 geohumoralism 90 see also air. see also environment. see also humoral theory. Gil Harris, Jonathan 7–9, 10 Girard, René, and The Winter’s Tale 132–3, 135 and Samson Agonistes 157–8, 166 Greenblatt, Stephen 53, 58, 92–3, 101, 156, 159 Green, André 40–42 Greene, Robert 103, 128, 130, 132–3 Hamlet, see Shakespeare. Hampton, Timothy 11, 16, 20 Harvey, William 45, 110, 142–43 heat, see temperature. Heise, Ursula 5 Heracles / Hercules 142, 144, 158, Hippocrates 1, 19–20, 29, 91, 149 humoral theory adustion (unnatural humors) 4, 20–26, 29–32, 87, 91, 107–08, 110–11, 113, 121, 124–5, 132, 136, 151, 154–5, 161–2, 165, 167, 177 choler 14, 19, 21, 24–6, 28, 30–31, 33, 58, 85, 88, 107–08, 121–2, 151, 174–7, 179 melancholy black bile (natural) 3–4, 19–21, 24, 55, 84–7, 107, 121, 136, 141, 143, 145–8, 151–2, 159, 164 adust (unnatural) see adustion. phlegm 14, 19, 21–2, 48, 107, 175

Index sanguinity 14, 19, 21, 28, 147, 151 see also time: suddenness. immediacy, see time. intersubjectivity, see psychoanalysis. Irigaray, Luce 67 Jameson, Frederic 6 Jones, Jason 39–40, 71 Jonson, Ben 45, 159 Kastan, David Scott 8, 37, 136, 171 Kennedy, Gwynne 49, 69 Kermode, Frank 9, 12, 36–7, 39, 72, 104, 129 Klein, Melanie 41, 65 Klibansky, Saxl, and Panofsky 2, 86, 144, 145, 146 see also Problem XXX,I. Kranidas, Thomas 147–8, 158 Lacan, Jacques, see psychoanalysis. Lemnius, Levinus The Touchstone of Complexions 24 Love’s Labor’s Lost, see Shakespeare. Lyons, Bridget Gellert 83 McKeon, Michael 172 Maus, Katherine Eisaman 105, 115, 126–7 Meissner, William 32–4, 36, 41, 43, 80, 115 melancholy, see humoral theory. Middleton, Thomas 45, 52 milk(breast) 64–6, 69, 107 Milton, John Paradise Lost 45, 97, 115, 130, 143, 150 Paradise Regained 45, 150 Samson Agonistes 5, 11, 31, 44–5, 52, 139–69, 179 Philistines 31, 44–5, 52, 142, 149, 153–5, 158–9, 163–8 Samson (char.) 31, 44–5, 139–40, 142–5, 147–9, 152–5, 158–69 Manoa 45, 140, 144, 152, 154, 160, 166, 168 Dalila 140, 148, 160–1, 165–6, 168 More, Henry

197

Enthusiasmus Triumphans 146–7, 151 Much Ado About Nothing, see Shakespeare. Nachträglichkeit, see psychoanalysis. “Narcissus and Echo,” see Ovid. narrative structure, see time, Aristotle, Brooks, Dannenberg, Kermode. New Arcadia, see Sidney. New Historicism 1, 6, 12, 34 nostalgia 7, 41, 105, 117–19, 144, 179 Old Arcadia, see Sidney. 1 Henry 4, see Shakespeare. Othello, see Shakespeare. Ovid 8, 31, 47, 60, 90 see also “Narcissus and Echo” 90–1, 111–13, 174, 178–9 Paradise Lost, see Milton. Paradise Regained, see Milton. passions, see emotion. The Passions of the Minde in Generall, see Wright. Paster, Gail Kern 17–19, 21, 27, 65, 82 Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson 15–18, 20, 27, 35 peripeteia 39, 61, 72–3, 128–9, 162 see also Aristotle. see also Dannenberg. see also Kermode. Peterson, Kaara 173–4, 176, 178 Petrarch 3, 7–8, 11, 19, 47 phlegm see humoral theory. poisons 48, 61–2, 65–6 Pollard, Tanya 52, 71 potions 44, 50–52, 60–67, 69–75, 179 Problem XXX,I 85–7, 91, 143, 145–8, 150 see also Aristotle. psychoanalysis ego-psychology 93, 95, 99, 101, 11213 Freud, Sigmund 39–43, 69, 71, 79–80, 93, 95–96, 112–13, 115–16 intersubjectivity 44, 69, 80–81, 93, 95, 98–101 Lacan, Jacques 112, 114, 119, 131–2

198

Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England and time 39–40, 42–4, 71, 77, 79–81, 93–101, 112–14, 131–2 and variable-length sessions 42–3, 79, 93, 98–9 Nachträglichkeit 40, 71, 80, 115 see also time.

Quinones, Ricardo 7–8, 83, 103 Ricoeur, Paul 9, 12, 37–9, 47, 77, 82 Rogers, John 143 Romeo and Juliet, see Shakespeare. Samson Agonistes, see Milton. sanguinity, see humoral theory. Schiesari, Juliana 49, 64, 66–9, 86, 91, 144, 146 Schleiner, Winfried 141, 144–5, 147 Schoenfeldt, Michael 18 Schrag, Calvin 35–7, 43 Schwartz, Kathryn 111–13, 117 Schwartz, Murray 105, 113, 118–19, Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour 9, 17, 143 Shakespeare, William As You Like It 1, 41 Comedy of Errors 2, 103 1 Henry 4 2, 121, 177 Love’s Labor’s Lost 3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 29, 70 Much Ado About Nothing 2 Hamlet 22, 29, 45, 52, 85, 91, 146, 161 Othello 24, 31, 42–4, 63, 77–101, 104, 121, 124–5, 127–8, 146, 179 Iago 24, 79, 82–4, 88-93, 96–101, 104 Othello (char.) 78–9, 83–4, 88–93, 97, 99–101, 121, 124–5, 127, 146, 179 Romeo and Juliet 1, 2, 22, 52 Romeo (char.) 1–4, 18–19, 22, 24, 32, 34, 85 Two Gentlemen of Verona 3 Venus and Adonis 178 The Winter’s Tale 4–5, 7, 41–2, 44, 103–37, 174, 179 Florizel 118, 130, 133, 135 Hermione104, 106, 111, 114–15, 120, 123–6, 129, 131, 133, 135

Leontes 4, 32, 44, 99,104–06, 108–09, 110–29, 131–36, 174–5, 179 Mamillius 113–14, 117–19, 121, 135 Perdita 104, 130, 132–3, 135 Polixenes 44, 104, 106, 111, 113–15, 117–21, 123–6, 130, 133, 135 Sidney, Philip 44, 47–75, 159, 167, 171 Defense of Poesie 50, 61, 74–5, 159, 167 New Arcadia 47, 57, 59, 65 Old Arcadia 3, 5, 11, 31, 43, 47–75, 162, 179 Basilius 44, 48, 50–2, 54–8, 61–6, 70–73, 89 Gynecia 48, 50–52, 57–8, 61–6, 68–71, 73–5 Musidorus 3, 54–6, 70, 73 Philoclea 3, 50, 54, 56, 60, 64–6, 70–71 Pyrocles (Cleophila) 3, 48, 50–51, 53–8, 64–5, 70–71 Silverman, Kaja 67–8 Sohmer, Steve 78–9 Strathern, Marilyn 122–4 Strier, Richard 12 subjective temporality, see time. suddenness, see time. Sullivan, Garrett 18, 34, 53, 173, 179 Sutton, John 17, 27, 30, 35 Taylor, Charles 16 temperament defined 22–4 see also emotion. temperature 14, 17, 19–26, 28–30, 47, 55, 84, 86–7, 92, 105, 107, 149–51, 174 defined 22–4 see also adustion. temporality, see time. time (and temporality) defined 8, 22–4 and narrative 32–9, 61, 72–3, 128–9, 132–7, 162

Index

199

see also Aristotle, Brooks, Dannenberg, Kermode, and Ricoeur. and subjective temporality 1–43, 47–75, 77–101, 103–37, 139–69, 171–80 and the law 58–64 and suddenness 4, 11, 18, 24, 25–7, 31, 39, 44, 47–8, 51, 53, 55–61, 66, 73–4, 85, 87–9, 91, 104, 107–08, 110–111, 126, 129, 149–50, 155, 161–2, 165–6 and immediacy 35, 64, 70, 112, 117, 128, 163, 165 see also emotion. transvestism, see gender. Treatise of Melancholie, see Bright. Two Gentlemen of Verona, see Shakespeare.

Walkington, Thomas 19, 24, 29, 31, 151 Watt, Ian, 172 Wilson, Luke 11, 44, 50, 58–60, 73 wine 30–31, 52–3, 58, 60, 65, 84–9, 147–55, 151, 153–5, 158, 164 see also ale. see also beer. see also adustion. The Winter’s Tale, see Shakespeare. Wittreich, Joseph 140, 156 woman, see gender. Wood, Derek 139–40, 161–2 Wright, Thomas The Passions of the Minde in Generall 4, 21, 24, 27–8, 87, 110, 151, 153, 158,

Venus and Adonis, see Shakespeare.

Yandell, Cathy 9–10, 18, 171

vitalism 143