Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Humoring the Body

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments........................................................................................................................................................xiA Note on Citations....................................................................................................................................................xvIntroduction...........................................................................................................................................................1CHAPTER 1 Roasted in Wrath and Fire: The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello................................................................................25CHAPTER 2 Love Will Have Heat: Shakespeare's Maidens and the Caloric Economy..........................................................................................77CHAPTER 3 Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Other Passionate Animals: Reading Shakespeare's Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier.....................135CHAPTER 4 Belching Quarrels: Male Passions and the Problem of Individuation 189Epilogue...............................................................................................................................................................243Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................247Index..................................................................................................................................................................261

Chapter One

The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello

To a Red man, reade thy read: With a Browne man breake thy bread: At a pale man, draw thy knife: From a black man keepe thy wife. Proverbial English rhyme

In this chapter I focus on a few locutions of affect in Hamlet and Othello in order to determine how such locutions, if properly contextualized in terms of early modern phenomenology, may point to key epistemic changes in subject-object relations. I might have chosen the texts of almost any two Shakespeare plays to make this argument, because the large-scale changes in which I am interested inform affective phrasing everywhere in the plays, which in this respect (as in many others) powerfully reflect their historical and lexical embeddedness. But Hamlet, as the canonical text for establishing the possibility and terms of "inwardness" in the late sixteenth century, is useful because of its own large role in the intellectual history of subject-object relations. And Othello has the distinction of being the Shakespeare play most profoundly affected by new cultural histories of race, gender, and European imperialism. Clearly it matters to our understanding of such familiar and important plays to read the passions represented in them with historical care. What most impedes our ability to do so, I argue, is our tendency as post-Enlightenment readers-with a residual tendency toward mind-body dualism even in an age of cognitive science-to underestimate the materialism governing pre-Enlightenment thought about the embodied passions and thus to find abstraction and bodily metaphor where the early moderns found materiality and literal reference. Often what is now emotional figuration for us was bodily reality for the early moderns. Their reports on emotional change describe blood rising and falling in temperature and quantity, spleens producing melancholy, and the size and contents of livers or gall bladders determining who will be bold or fearful in an attack. ("For Andrew," says Sir Toby contemptuously of his cowardly friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, "if he were open'd and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of th'anatomy" [3.2.60-63].) Reports on cognitive operations-on what is happening in the mind in sleep or wakefulness, in passion or calm-speak of smoky vapors ascending from heart to brain, of bodily fumes puzzling thought and darkening judgment. In melancholy, writes Timothy Bright, the "substance of the brayne" drinks plentifully of "spleneticke fogge, whereby his nature is become of the same quality, and the pure and bright spirites so defiled." We must be prepared to accept such reports of mind and body literally in order to track the semantic transformations that overtake bodily locutions as they slowly change from being names for material bodily phenomena such as humor, spirit, and temper to being primarily abstract figurations for the individual psychological characteristics of the disembodied self.

It is true, as Katharine Maus argues and as I acknowledge in the introduction, that "Renaissance speech habits can make it difficult to know when ... a bodily analogy is really an analogy; when we are dealing with metaphor and when with a bare statement of fact" (196). But these distinctions between analogy or metaphor and bare statement of fact fail to register the importance of analogy to an emblematic way of thinking, still dominant in Shakespeare's lifetime, that made discovery of similitude and resemblance the richest and most direct path to knowledge of the world. Thus the hermeneutic hazards about body analogies that Maus points to, while real enough, only serve to underscore the importance of historical rigor in the phenomenological project of imagining earlier ways of understanding the embodiment of emotion and earlier modes of bodily self-experience. The significance of analogical thought for understanding the early modern emotions is, as I argue in the introduction, that characters' emotions are ontologically coextensive with the particular social and physical environments in which those emotions arise: as one of the six Galenic nonnaturals, the passions or perturbations of mind were fully embedded in the order of nature. Thus to report on an emotion-whether subjectively as experienced or objectively as observed-was, among other things, to describe an event occurring in nature and thus understandable in natural terms. As William B. Ashworth has remarked of Renaissance natural knowledge, early moderns believed that to know the peacock, "you must know its associations-its affinities, similitudes, and sympathies with the rest of the created order." What was true for knowing the peacock was even more important for knowing the emotions of the human body-soul composite, because the stakes were immeasurably higher. For the early moderns, knowledge of emotions required knowing not only about the spleen, the gall bladder, and the liver, which produced various emotions, but also about what in the natural world their organs and emotions most resembled. "I am pigeon-liver'd," says Hamlet to himself bitterly in the second soliloquy, "and lack gall / To make oppression bitter" (2.2.577-78). In order for us to appreciate early modern emotions historically, we must widen the focus from seeing emotions as necessarily originating within an individual body in response to stimulus to seeing how...