Shakespeare and Emotional Expression

Finding Feeling through Colour

Bríd Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000556391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Shakespeare-Drama

Shakespeare and Emotional Expression offers an exciting new way of considering emotional transactions in Shakespearean drama. The book is significant in its scope and originality as it uses the innovative medium of colour terms and references to interrogate the early modern emotional register. By examining contextual and cultural influences, this work explores the impact these influences have on the relationship between colour and emotion and argues for the importance of considering chromatic references as a means to uncover emotional significances.

Using a broad range of documents, it offers a wider understanding of affective expression in the early modern period through a detailed examination of several dramatic works. Although colour meanings fluctuate, by paying particular attention to contextual clues and the historically specific cultural situations of Shakespeare's plays, this book uncovers emotional significances that are not always apparent to modern audiences and readers. Through its examination of the nexus between the history of emotions and the social and cultural uses of colour in early modern drama, Shakespeare and Emotional Expression adds to our understanding of the expressive and affective possibilities in Shakespearean drama.

1 ‘And weep to hear him speak’ Colour, emotion, and rhetoric in Titus Andronicus

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198246-2

The art of oratory and expression is dominated by the efforts of both mouth and voice (Christiansen 1997, 304).¹ In Titus Andronicus, Quintus describes Bassianus’ grave in such terms and links Bassianus’ demise with both colour and the unheard voice, saying

What subtle hole is this,

Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers

Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood

As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers?

(2.2.198–201)

The speaking mouth is allegorised as the hole which is cruelly stopped with sharp briars (Carter 2011, 27).² With the flashes of red blood³ on the leaves, we are directed to consider the violence which has interrupted Bassianus’ previous discourse. This will soon come to represent the bloodied mouth of Lavinia defiled in another brutal interruption of discourse. The rest of this scene is peppered with references to blood. For example, Martius describes the grave as ‘this unhallowed and blood-stained hole’ (2.2.210) when asking Quintus to help him out, evoking a redness that is associated with violence, loss, and the associated emotion of fear. The green represented by the leaves, which throughout the play has diverse and conflicting emotional resonance, serves here as a repository for newly shed blood contrasting with the mention of flowers and innocence. The colour red is superimposed both literally and figuratively upon the green and becomes the leading image.

Quintus, suspecting that the darkness is hiding the truth, asks Martius, ‘[i]f it be dark how dost thou know ‘tis he?’ (2.2.225). The triad of red, black, and white is again repeated by Martius when he describes his identification of Bassianus

Upon his bloody finger he doth wear

A precious ring that lightens all this hole,

Which like a taper in some monument

Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks

And shows the ragged entrails of this pit.

So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus

When he did by night lay bathed in maiden blood.

(2.2.226–32)

The contrast of light and dark is punctuated with images of red blood. The bloody finger, heralding violence, is contrasted with the light-creating jewel; the taper creates light contrasting with the earthy cheeks; and the pale moonshine is highlighted against the violence of maidenly bloodshed. The bloody loss of innocence is again countered by the darkness through the images of ‘hole’, ‘pit’, and ‘night’. Saturninus is persuaded of Quintus and Martius’ guilt and after tagging them with ‘bloody’ as an epithet, states: ‘Let them not speak a word – the guilt is plain’ (2.2.301). It was expected that the man using rhetoric to persuade his audience should be an upright citizen. Conversely, the villainous man should not be allowed to speak, a practice which Saturninus is facilitating in this instance.⁴

Humanism and importance of education

Reading the great classical poets was highly valued in the schoolroom as the charms of such writers have the greatest power to excite feelings. Rhetorical practices were seen as something that people did in order to have emotions (Scheer 2012, 194). While rhetorical teachings had been downgraded in the Middle Ages, humanism, once again, brought a fresh interest to these arts (Vickers 1988, 266). By analysing the relationships between the humanist educational system, emotion, and colour within the dramatic play, we can uncover connections that strengthen the emotional cues issued by colour emotives. Observing the use of colour words within a framework of rhetorical practices makes it possible to see how emotional transactions permeate the text. When colour is used in the rhetorical context, it is often an embellishment of style used to persuade the reader or listener but we can also look to the literal, metaphorical, and metonymical uses of colour as part of the rhetorical art of persuasion. Alongside rhetoric in the schoolroom, Lynn Enterline notes the importance of the dramatic arts, saying ‘[t]he confusions of ear and eye, the ability to impersonate characters on demand, were crucial components of school exercises in oratory’ (2012, 21). These confusions involve depicting while narrating and seeing while reading. They serve to show that the physical depiction of colour and its aural representation through the text, through the power of rhetorical training, had an equally powerful effect on audiences as they stabilised these confusions into a coherent emotion. Using Titus Andronicus as a dramatic example will illustrate some very fine moments of this phenomenon in the text.

It is important to explore the humanist education, as a social structure, to which we can reasonably expect Shakespeare will have been exposed. The humanist movement influenced the education that was on offer and, as Leonard Barkan puts it, ‘in an early modern education such as Shakespeare’s, the progression is not from language to literature but from grammar to rhetoric’ (2001, 34). The main works studied in this context were those of Aristotle; the Ad Herennium; the oratory works of Cicero; and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoriae (Joseph 1947, 20; Barkan 2001, 34). These texts provided students with a firm grounding in diction, speech, argument, and style. Although there is some debate on the minutiae of Shakespeare’s reading list, a lot has been surmised based on his presumed attendance at the King’s Free Grammar School at Stratford (Joseph 1947, 13; Murphy 1990; Plett 1995; Burrow 2004, 11; Gillespie 2016). Around this time a shift in classical education occurred when, as Grafton and Jardine note

early humanism gave way in the early sixteenth century to an ideology of routine, order and, above all, ‘method’. Early humanism⁵ had shifted the emphasis from the formal and artificial disputation within the schools to the oration as a personally tailored means of persuasion, and to mastery of language as a desirable accomplishment for the urbane member of a civilised community.

(1986, 123)

With this shift came tension between the older ruling aristocratic classes and the upwardly mobile educated middle classes, which is invoked by Shakespeare to create a political narrative that would resonate with his audience.⁶ The use of Rome as a location in Titus Andronicus intertwines ideas of classical learning with political and social instability. The scholars that came from the Roman Empire were reduced to textual references after the fall of this empire. Referencing Rome and its fall is a warning to use power and learning correctly. Titus Andronicus can be a contradiction to modern sensibilities which cannot conceive of the violence and butchery wrought on the characters in terms of a measured and exacting rhetorical background. However, the apparent incompatibility was acceptable to an early modern audience which in itself suffered the contradictions and pressures on society that humanist teaching uncovered.

Humanist thinking allowed Tudor writers to consider fashioning, re-fashioning, and self-fashioning as viable possibilities.⁷ Arthur Golding writes in his epistle to Metamorphoses about the need for awareness and restraint in the bid to know oneself

that every man

(Endevoring for too know himself as nearly as he can,

As though he in a chariot sat well ordered) should direct

His mynd by reason in the way of virtue, and correct

His fierce affections with the bit of temprance.

(1567, 12)

Humanist training encouraged students to participate in constructing an individual identity while using reason to control the greater excesses of emotion. Enterline (2012) suggests that humanist training in rhetoric was designed to intervene in social reproduction; to sort out the differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below); and was necessary in the process of defining and producing proper ‘English’ gentlemen. She adds that

when Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion… he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

(2012, 1)

Having an interest in manipulating language added a tool to one’s own self-fashioning.⁸ This contemporary emphasis on fashioning individual identity also involved a concerted effort to explore the emotionality that was involved in this sense of identity. The line between rhetorical writing and developing dramatic works became open to negotiation. The art of rhetoric used tales of fiction to promote its teaching while the fictional world of drama used rhetorical principles to give force to emotional themes, which an interest in self-fashioning opened up for exploration.

Reading from the works of Cicero added to renewed interest in the importance of emotions. In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero began by discussing emotion as a vigorous movement away from right reason which is contrary to nature. Emotions, in Cicero’s system, had two good and two evil classes. The good were desire and gladness, arising from gladness at present goods and desire for future goods; and the evil were fear of future evils and distress at present evils ([45BC] 2002, 43). Cicero noted that ‘the source of all the emotions, they say, is “loss of control”, which is a rebellion in the mind as a whole against right reason’ ([45BC] 2002, 46). Emotions needed regulation which resonates with the framework put forward by Monique Scheer (2012, 213).

It was a key point of rhetoric to effect a change in the audience: colour references were able, both literally and figuratively, to cause such a change to take place (Plett 1995, 121). Cicero warned that what made the speech of the orator or poet jar more quickly was ‘faults of over-colouring […] detected not only by the verdict of the ears but even more by that of the mind’ ([55-45BC] 1948, 81). The use of colouring, both literal and metaphorical, must be subtle, sparse, and not over-painted. If the lessons on oratory suggested colouring one’s speech to improve the quality of the oratory, then it was not such a leap to expect that some writers in the early modern literary field chose to understand this exhortation as an invitation to use actual colour references in their work to do just this and attempted to use colour to improve the power of their oratory. Colour was embedded in the actual text not merely as an adjective for surface ornamentation or description of a commonplace noun, but also as an aid for moving the audience. In this schema, colour became an aide-memoire to create images that moved emotions. In Titus Andronicus, the explicit mention of both Cicero and sweet poetry (suggesting works by Ovid),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The expression of emotion through systems of colour: Uncovering ways of feeling
• 1 ‘And weep to hear him speak’: Colour, emotion, and rhetoric in Titus Andronicus
• 2 ‘For blushing cheeks by faults are bred / And fears by pale white shown’: Reading the face for colour and emotion in Love’s Labour’s Lost
• 3 ‘There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’: Senses, science, and the imagination
• 4 ‘Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs’: Bodies, clothes, colour, and passions in Twelfth Night
• 5 ‘O well-painted passion’: Cultural commonplaces of colour and affective patterns in Othello
• Afterword
• Index