Escolme, Bridget. "Notes." Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’S Slaves
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Escolme, Bridget. "Notes." Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage: Passion’s Slaves. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. 229–274. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781408179703.0007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 06:25 UTC. Copyright © Bridget Escolme 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Notes Introduction * All quotations are in modern spelling. Play quotations are from modern editions and I have rendered all other quotations into modern spelling, in order not to suggest that plays are somehow more accessible to the modern reader than other writings. 1. There is a wide range of early modern writing criticizing, in terms both highly serious and lightly satirical, the pure stoical position on the passions, whereby one rejects all feeling as inconsequential to a life of virtue. See Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance (Chicago, 2011), ch. 1, ‘Against the Rule of Reason’, in which he reads Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly as a genuine celebration of the ‘folly’ of human passion and a satire on stoicism (32–6) and 37–42, where he cites Luther and Calvin as supportive of a place for the passions in Christian life. See also, as other early modern examples, James Sandford’s The Mirror of Madness in which he satirizes the Stoic Zenocrates’ position on anger and the contorted excuses a Stoic might make for indulging his own fury (London, 1576); Levinas Lemnias’ The sanctuary of salvation, helmet of health, and mirror of modesty and good manners (London, 1592), in which even moderate levels of enjoyment are said to be ‘reprehended […] of the ‘sour sad and unpleasant Stoic’ (142); William Fulbeck’s Direction or Preparative to the Study of the Law (London, 1600), which is particularly scathing of Stoic ‘sourness’, and which suggests that in seeking to overcome man’s nature, those of the Stoic philosophy ‘become beasts’ (16); Joseph Hall’s poem on the succession of James I, The King’s Prophecy, which suggests that a passionate ‘Weeping Joy’ is the only appropriate response to the Queen’s death and the coming of the new King, which opens: What Stoic could his steely breast contain (If Zeno’s self, or who were made beside Of tougher mold) from being torn in twain With the cross Passions of this wondrous tide? (London, 1603) In Thomas Adams’ sermons on England’s Sickness (London, 1615) it is sinful to claim a Stoical immunity to the suffering imposed upon man by 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 229 06/08/2013 08:56 230 Notes God: ‘But when God sees that thou digestest his Physic as diet, and with a strange kind of indulgency, wilt neither grieve that thou hast offended, nor that thou art offended: God will strike home, and sharpen at once both his blow & thy sense. Now thou shalt feel; even thy seared heart shall bleed. In a word, the wicked may be senseless Stoics, they cannot be insensible stones. There is in all men an impossibility of impassibility’ (85). James I’s own Basilicon Doron in James I, Works (London, 1616) advises his son in a balance of feeling and self-regulation thus: ‘Keep true Constancy, not only in your kindness towards honest men; but being also invicti animi against all adversities: not with that Stoic insen- sible stupidity, wherewith many in our days, pressing to wine honour, in imitating that ancient sect, by their inconstant behaviour in their own lives, belie their profession. But although ye are not a stock, not to feel calamities; yet let not the feeling of them, so over-rule and doazen your reason, as may stay you from taking and using the best resolution for remedy, that can be found out’ (178). 2. A moving example of such advice comes from Ludvig Lavater’s The Book of Ruth Expounded in Twenty Eight Sermons (London, 1586), which explains that ‘Our saviour Christ himself wept often, therefore that Stoical senselessness is not approved of God. Yet as in other things so also in weeping their must be kept a mean, neither must we weep for every cause. For all kind of weeping cannot be excused. SENECA although he was a Stoic himself, yet he sayeth we may weep but not howl out. But this makes greatly to our comfort, that in this little book it is written down twice, that these poor women wept abundantly, for hereby we do gather, that God regardeth the tears even of them that be very poor’ (34). 3. Thomas Playfere, The Mean in Mourning (London, 1595), 5–6. 4. See Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971, 174) for an explanation of this concept, whereby the social subject is created by the ideological call into being. While I do not hold Althusser’s somewhat disempowering position, whereby the social subject appears to have no agency whatsoever in the world and is entirely a construct of the various ideological apparatuses that inter- pellate him or her into subjectivity, the idea of interpellation into emotional subjectivity usefully denaturalizes the notion of emotional expression and provokes us to consider what kinds of cultural historical moments value which emotions and why. 5. Jonas Barish’s analysis of works such as Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1595), and Prynne’s Histrio-mastix (London, 1633) still provides a useful 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 230 06/08/2013 08:56 Notes 231 introduction: The Anti Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1981), 82–96. 6. For an account of the emergence of the concept of emotional intel- ligence within the academic discipline of psychology and within self-help discourses, see the Introduction to Gerald Matthews, Moshe Zeidner and Richard D. Roberts, Emotional Intelligence: Science and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 1–21. The work that was largely responsible for the popularization of the concept was Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (New York, 1995). 7. A key work on the ambivalent status of the public theatre in early modern England is still Steven Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London, 1988). 8. See Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingtoke, 1996). 9. The Tudors television series, dir. Michael Hurst, Peace Arch Entertainment for Showtime (2007–10). This series was a highly colourful costume drama, based on the life and loves of Henry VIII. 10. Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain (BBC, 2012). The first episode of this series offered some engaging examples of commentaries on English culture by European travellers such as Erasmus, who remarked on the English propensity for kissing visitors at every available opportunity; see Erasmus, Epistola 65, translated in Retrospective Review 5, 251. 11. See above, n. 1. 12. All references to the Oxford English Dictionary are to the 2000 online edition. 13. In fact the current OED entry for emotion (3) is fascinatingly ambiv- alent about the development of the word to its current usage. The whole definition of Emotion (3a) reads: ‘Originally: an agitation of mind; an excited mental state. Subsequently: any strong mental or instinctive feeling, as pleasure, grief, hope, fear etc., deriving esp. from one’s circumstances, mood or relationship with others.’ Its list of citations begins with the 1602 example I have quoted above, then ranges through ten more, ending with ‘1992 More 28 October – 64/2 Lust is a powerful emotion and can often be mistaken for love’. However, the historical moment where ‘original’ usage shifts to ‘subsequent’ is not pinpointed. 14. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003) for an analysis of how ‘over time, affective psychologies became gradually less theological and more philosophical, and ultimately more “scientific”’ and how termi- nology shifted correspondingly (20–5 and passim). See the Introduction 9781408179666_txt_print.indd 231 06/08/2013 08:56 232 Notes to Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, 2004) for a useful summary and problemati- zation of the historical usage of ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ among other relevant terms (1–20, 2). For an account of challenges to universalist scientific approaches to the production and meaning of emotion, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context, an International Journal for the History of the Emotions 1 (2010). Available online at www.passionsincontext.de/ uploads/media/01_Rosenwein.pdf (accessed 1 April 2012). 15. It is still a current enough tension for the novelist Ian McEwan wittily to summarize, for example. See Solar (London, 2011) 130–2. 16. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1999). 17. Paster et al. (in Reading the Early Modern Passions), have pointed out that ‘we now tend to associate’ both the terms passion and affection ‘with amorous or fond feelings’ (2). ‘Emotional excess’ could mean ‘an excess of emotion’ or ‘an excess which is emotional’, where ‘passionate excess’ may just mean ‘an excess which is passionate’ to the reader. 18. Dixon, Passions, 35–6. 19. See Konstantin Stanislavski ‘Emotion Memory’ in An Actor’s Work trans. Jean Benedetti (Abingdon and New York, 2008) 195–228. Affective Memory, as Lee Strasberg named it, became one of the most significant techniques for what came to be called The Method in the USA.