Shakespeare and Emotions

Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies

R. White, K. O'Loughlin, R. White, K. O'Loughlin, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137464750
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays approaches the works of Shakespeare from the topical perspective of the History of Emotions. Contributions come from established and emergent scholars from a range of disciplines, including performance history, musicology and literary history.

1

Reclaiming Heartlands: Shakespeare and the History of Emotions in Literature

R. S. White

Whatever it is in the zeitgeist that causes such shifts must remain a larger mystery, but since the millennium we seem to be living through what has been dubbed ‘an affective turn’, an unprecedented era of the academic study of emotions, particularly in the unashamedly emotive vehicles of literature and drama, history and musicology. Following in the wake of pioneering work by Norbert Elias, recent contributions by Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy have developed historical methodologies for the history of emotions, though the application of these to literature is arguably limited.¹ In the former case, to consider as ‘emotional communities’ examples of, let us say, The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, not to speak of the Globe’s London in the 1590s, we find each so complex and various that it barely makes sense to speak of them at all in these terms. At the same time, Reddy’s proposition that emotions are ‘performatives’ (‘emotives’) and cause change is so axiomatic in relation to fictional works that it does not take us far along the path towards deeper understanding of emotions in literature and drama. There is little doubt that Shakespeare’s works ‘move’ audiences and readers in more senses than one, and there needs neither ghost come from the grave, nor modern theorists, to tell us this. The real questions (how? why? what?) begin rather than end at this point. (Reddy has, however, published a book which is significant to the study of romantic love in literature.²) Other scholars, such as David Konstan, have explored emotions respectively in the classical world³ and in other cultures, while in Western literary history there have been many important studies, approaching the subject from a range of points of view. Centres for the History of Emotions have appeared, most notably one at Queen Mary College in London, and the interdisciplinary Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100–1800. The study of emotions is permeating other disciplines such as cognitive science, anthropology, cultural studies, philosophy, and it is generating new fields such as Emotional Geographies. As this chapter will illustrate from the ground of literary studies, interest in affective states is by no means new, but the formation of an apparently coherent study of ‘history of emotions’ as a general field has emerged since about 2000. At the more visible, popular end of the spectrum, ancient and indigenous knowledge of herbal remedies is being retrieved and used to ameliorate emotional and psychological problems. The broad phenomenon of the recuperation of ‘affect’ (bodily responses to emotional stimuli – hairs raising on the back of the neck, heart pounding …) invites closer attention in relation to ‘affections’ and ‘emotions’ as more discursive ways of conceptualising and naming those stimuli (terror, excitement …).⁴ This introductory chapter seeks to place the present, pluralistic and eclectic collection of essays in the longer perspective of some general ways in which emotions have been analysed in literature, and more particularly in Shakespeare’s works. The ‘Afterword’ will look back in retrospect and hazard some suggestions about ways in which the collection has opened up new approaches to Shakespeare through the prism of emotions.

The longer view

Imaginative literature, including drama, has always in its practice asserted the pre-eminence of emotion both as subject matter and as a matter of reception. Literature and drama have routinely been recognised as vehicles to tell stories about emotions and equally intended to move readers and audiences, whether to tears, laughter, wonder or some other feeling. Homer begins The Odyssey with a statement of the emotional suffering of Ulysses when his men perished at sea, dwelling on how much he longed to return to his wife and country but was waylaid by a goddess who fell in love with him, a fate which some other gods came to pity. The Iliad opens with a summary of quarrels and anger among men and gods, while the epic action in Virgil’s Aeneid is precipitated by the wrath and hatred of Juno which leads to Aeneas’ exile. While criticism has fluctuated on questions concerning the status and nature of emotions, the literary works themselves are unapologetic in giving them priority as wellsprings for divine and human actions. This Introduction seeks to place the recent emphasis on emotions within the fluctuating fortunes of emotion in the longue durée from Plato’s Athens to the early twenty-first century, during which we see shifts and turns in the critical fortunes of ‘affective’ analysis.

From its ancient origins, literary theory has centrally included consideration of emotions, though they have from time to time been viewed from a variety of perspectives. Two extreme poles were established right from the beginning and have persisted as reference points. In Book X of The Republic Plato acknowledged that poetic representation was designed to stir the feelings, but he saw this as a fatal weakness since it relies on fictions rather than reality, and feeds the baser aspects of human consciousness. Whereas in our own lives, he argues, we do our best to control, restrain and overcome strong feelings such as grief and lust, imaginative literature and drama gives us free rein to ‘over-indulge’. While reason trains us to judge the good from the bad, to embrace the former and reject the latter, once again poetry ‘relaxes our guard’ and subverts such moral considerations. By its direct appeal to emotions it seduces us to sympathise with ignoble feelings (such as in later times Macbeth’s or Othello’s, for example), and to laugh indulgently at the ‘loathsome and repulsive’ as a source of comedy, instead of sternly discrediting them.⁵ At the heart of the untrustworthiness of poetry as a truth-telling medium lies the claim that it is twice removed from reality, which Plato equates with ideal forms, effectively fabricating ‘lies’ that are attractive because they cast a ‘spell’ based on emotional effects. It can prevent us from achieving the highest human goal of goodness. However, Plato’s student, Aristotle, in daring to challenge his master’s argument, gave definition to the other end of the spectrum. He concedes that, by acting directly on the emotions, ‘speech in verse’ is a more coercive way than reason can provide of training the moral faculties, but he argues that this in itself can give a positive moral utility to imaginative literature and drama. Whereas, admittedly, the kind of art that Plato dismissed as endorsing wickedness is not ethically effective since it does not raise potentially edifying feelings of ‘pity and terror’, yet on the other hand good art, for example in its tragic form, employs sympathy with suffering (pity) in order to persuade us to follow the path of virtue in our own lives and to shun evil-doing (terror). Such emotional effects can turn on anagnorisis or ‘recognition’ (see Simon Haines’s chapter in this book). The desired end-effect is catharsis, a purging of unpleasant emotions which morally purifies readers and audiences. Both Plato and Aristotle accept that imaginative literature and drama work directly on the emotions, but they are literally poles apart on the question of the moral efficacy of this operation.

Right through its history, literary interpretation has tended to swing from pole to pole of this spectrum, not only across periods but within them, and Shakespeare has, since the eighteenth-century growth of bardolatry driven mainly by David Garrick, been treated as a kind of litmus test in the debate. In Elizabethan England we have, on the one hand, Puritan attacks on theatre advanced along Plato’s lines, asserting that plays tell lies and pander to the emotions which are considered baser than reason.⁶ However, on the other hand, we have also Sir Philip Sidney’s Aristotelian Defence of Poetry arguing that poetry is a far more powerful educative tool and agency of moral improvement than both history and philosophy, primarily because it acts directly upon the emotions. Even if we find ‘the discourse itself feigned’ yet its application may be ‘most true’. He even invokes Plato to make the point: ‘if the saying of Plato and Tully be true, that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravishd with the love of her beauty – [the poet] sets her out to make her more lovely in her holiday apparel’.⁷ Not all were to agree that Shakespeare, for example, invariably does this. Neo-classical critics from the Restoration through the eighteenth century, from Dryden to Johnson, downplayed Shakespeare’s emotional effects, and felt authorised to rewrite his plays in order to create conventional moral designs out of the more ambiguous and often unruly source texts. Samuel Johnson expressed strong opinions challenging the endings of, for example, Othello and King Lear, deploring the way in which emotional sympathies counteract the precepts of reason and poetic justice. His arguments are still uncomfortably acute and astute, and in some way or another they need to be considered at least implicitly by every new director of the plays. How, for example, can the deaths of exemplary characters such as Desdemona and Cordelia, be justified as teaching virtue? However, like the difference between anti-theatrical Puritans and imaginative writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a political divide was imputed, between an essentially conservative defence of reason and social control over unruly passions, and a positive desire for change driven by the volatile emotions.⁸

Many of the Romantic-age writers who followed, inspired by the wave of revolutions which swept away anciens regimes across Europe and extended to America, tended to begin their critiques of Shakespeare by deriding Johnson’s. They may have failed to acknowledge that he was not defending a simple either/or binary, but was instead fully aware that the emotions driving literature could be as much a force for good as for evil: for example, ‘Upon every stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed’.⁹ Immanuel Kant, writing in the revolutionary 1790s, more consciously evaded the binary by arguing that it is a fallacy to equate life and art, since they inhabit different realms. The former is marked by cognition and the exercise of practical reason and judgement, the latter by non-physical understanding based on the imagination – loosely speaking, practical living requires thought but literature invites emotion. The two realms are connected through the senses, but while in the former they are physically present, in the latter they are merely evoked through words beyond sensation, and exist as aesthetic ideas whose content is spiritual and emotional rather than literal. In England, Edmund Burke sought to maintain a similar distinction by defining greatness in art by its ‘sublimity’ or grandeur which virtually by definition could not, and perhaps should not, exist in real life, except in the case of natural landscape that could be seen aesthetically as sublime or picturesque. As contemporaries such as Thomas Paine, John Thelwall and William Hazlitt sardonically pointed out, the motivation of such a divide was again implicitly political, since it enabled Burke to praise the power of emotions in aesthetic terms, while denying them in the realm of human aspirations for improving their own world. He was a vehement opponent of the French Revolution and an apologist for aristocratic vested interests and values against the suffering people, a tendency which Paine memorably skewered as misplaced emotion in an age of sensibility:

Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection that I can find throughout his book, has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.¹⁰

Paine’s general argument is that the emotional power of art can be employed to improve a corrupted world. His condemnatory phrase ‘not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart’ is the language of the prevalent cult of sensibility, in which sympathy and benevolence were regarded by such writers as Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson as necessary social virtues that would lead to a more just world. Burke himself was in fact ‘touched’ by this movement at least in his appreciation of art, but in the world of contemporary politics his stance was patrician and authoritarian, fearful of the political consequences of emotions unleashed in revolution. Burke happily appropriated words by Shakespeare which enabled him to understand subversive sentiments expressed in the plays, but which he could not condone in the England of his own times. He was also able to establish a kind of unassailable authority in de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Reclaiming Heartlands: Shakespeare and the History of Emotions in Literature
• Part I Emotional Inheritances
• Part II Shakespearean Enactments
• Part III Emotional Legacies and Re-enactments
• Selective Bibliography
• Index