The Renaissance Tragic Interior and Its Classical Substructure
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The Renaissance Tragic Interior and Its Classical Substructure A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences by Andrew Alexander MAT Miami University June 2005 MA (Hons) University of Glasgow June 1988 Committee Chair: J. Z. Kamholtz PhD Committee Members: J. Carlson PhD, M. Griffith MFA Abstract How similar is the Classical private interior which birthed the public archetype of the vir bonus to the idea of identity which we now label “modern’ and to which Shakespearean characters lay claim when they assert selfhood by name: “always I am Caesar”; “I am Antony yet”? Over the last 15 years or so, the emergent field of Classical scholarship which has followed the cultural materialist and New Historicist turn in English studies has led to a reconsideration of such questions. Taking advantage of these new lines of inquiry, this discussion examines the extent to which Early Modern identity, as revealed in the works of sixteenth and seventeenth-century tragedians, takes its psychological scaffolding from Classical models, originating with the archaic Greek heroes of Homer and modified by the rhetorical and theatrical tropes of writers and statesmen from the Roman Republic and Imperiate, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. Each strand of the argument considers how Classical writers understood their own identities, both idealized and actual. Given that the influence of the Graeco-Roman psychological interior on its Renaissance successor is mediated by intervening centuries of Catholic ideology and Mediaeval appropriation, the avenues of reception for Classical thought in the Renaissance are considered as part of the argument. ii iii Acknowledgements This project could not have been completed without the help of the faculty from the University of Cincinnati English Department, not only in accommodating my work schedule but for providing me the academic tools necessary to get to this stage. Thanks are due particularly to Professor Russel Durst for getting me going, Professor Beth Ash for keeping me honest, and Professors Julia Carlson and Michael Griffith for stepping in at short notice to be my readers. Most especially, I owe thanks to Professor Jon Kamholtz, without whose guidance, encouragement, and practical support, I would never have gotten this far. iv Contents Introduction I Am I. 1 Elements of a psychological interior in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance Chapter 1 The Power of Speech To Stir Men’s Blood 31 The rhetoric of Ciceronian self-construction in Julius Caesar Chapter 2 A Towering Passion 83 Homer’s divine anger as a framework for Hamlet Chapter 3 When the Bad Bleeds, Then Is the Tragedy Good 140 Seneca, theatrics, and the good death in The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi Chapter 4 If You Have Writ Your Annals True 180 Plutarch and the long view of history in The Spanish Tragedy and Coriolanus Conclusion Th’ Observed of All Observers 214 Some issues of critical divergence and Horace’s imitatio versus Aristotle’s mimēsis Works 225 v Introduction I Am I. I. Defining the Self “Who’s there?” Barnardo famously asks in the opening line of Hamlet. Four lengthy acts pass before the prince seems to be able to respond with any kind of definity, “This is I / Hamlet the Dane.” In his cultural materialist examination of the seventeenth-century split psyche, Tremulous Private Body (1995), Francis Barker points out that the Hamlet who boards the pirate ship, wrestles with Laertes in Ophelia’s grave, and ultimately kills the king is a wholly different prince from the earlier procrastinator: he is become a man-of-action who has broken through the stifling social conditions that consign him to the hand-wringing of the first four acts. Renaissance tragedy in general seems to concern itself at times almost exclusively with the notion of interior space breaking through boundaries. This irruption of the private into the public has been theorized extensively by Hegel et al., and most frequently, it manifests as a Senecan statement of identity: “Know I am Hieronimo”1; “‘Tis I, ‘tis Vindice, ‘tis I!”2; “I am / Antony yet”3; “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I”4. In the face of this litany of names and first person pronouns, the obvious questions arise as to how these boundaries came into being, why the phenomenon should erupt in the dramaturgy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what it is these characters think they are naming. 1 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill (Norton, 2014) 4.4.83. 2 Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. Brian Gibbons (New Mermaids, 1991) 3.5.167. 3 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by John Wilders (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, 1995) 3.13.98–99. 4 Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. by James R. Siemon (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, 2009) 5.3.183. 1 The first of these two questions have already been addressed by the considerable body of theory arguing that modern, autonomous subjectivity has its origin point in the Renaissance—a period which marks the beginning of the overdetermined self, existing at the intersection of the monarchic authority over the body, the Protestant claim on the conscience and the mercantile expectation for use value. In a Foucauldian sense, these forces act to give identity definition, thereby constituting it, but they do so by placing boundaries on autonomy and are perceived by that identity as the threatening, external other which must be accommodated or opposed. There is perhaps no better example of the transformative effect of such forces on the “I” than the enforcing of the First Act of Supremacy in 1534. Virtually overnight the Henrician Catholic subject finds himself with an imperative to choose between recusancy and treason or blasphemy and fealty—neither particularly appealing given the consequences, but more important than the choice itself is the manner in which the decision will have to be made. Aligning oneself with the German doctrine underpinning the Act would necessitate a turning inward to the self as the source of moral and ethical decision making and away from Catholic authority. Given that the how and the why of identity construction have already been heavily theorized by the New Historicists and others, they are considered here to a lesser extent than the third question: what are Renaissance tragic heroes putting a name to? The direction of an answer is offered by A. J. Boyle, when he observes that Medea’s dramatic exclamations, Medea superest [Medea remains] and Medea nunc sum [Medea now I am] are the likely inspiration for these rhetorical flourishes of identity.5 This stoic response to adversity implies that Renaissance conceptions of interiority are to some extent scaffolded by Classical models of subjectivity. This argument, therefore, examines the extent to which such modeling takes place and the modes by 5 A. J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca (Routledge, 1997) 94ff. 2 which Renaissance tragedy receives and mediates Classical understanding of self. Of course the proposition that the Renaissance is the demarcation point of modern interiority and even what it is being referring to by the word, “interior,” continue to be areas of vigorous contestation. Francis Barker, for example, claims that the citizens of sixteenth-century England did not yet have the category of private self from which autonomy could be generated. There is also little if any consensus even on what constitutes the “category of person,” as opposed to “person,” either by the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the skepticism of Humean British empiricism, or the existential free-reign decision making proposed by individualists like Sartre. If there is any broad agreement to be found, at least in contemporary theory, it is that the matrix of activities which make up conscious thought has an evolutionary history and that it is fundamental to the human condition only within cultural parameters. With this in mind, therefore, this discussion is confined to conceptions of self and autonomy that are specifically Western, while acknowledging that other cultures retain their own unique conceptions of private/public, inner/outer, group/individual, conscious/unconscious, arrived at by different historiographies. Equally, Mary Midgley has pointed out that, even within this narrower field of examination, “the whole idea of a free, independent, enquiring, choosing individual, an idea central to European thought, has always been the idea of a male… taking for granted the love and service of non-autonomous females.”6 In light of the impossibility of addressing such a wide array of caveats by anything more than simple acknowledgement, the argument presented here loosely employs the notion of self developed in the evolutionary theories sketched out by the social anthropologists of L'Année Sociologique in the early part of the 20th century and especially, Marcel Mauss’s 1938 essay, “A 6 Mary Midgely, “Sex and Personal Identity. The Western Individualistic Tradition,” Encounter, 63:1 (June 1984) 51. 3 Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self.”7 Mauss traces the word persona back to its Latin origins and, even further, to the possible Etruscan borrowing of the Greek perso (πρόωπον), which is used by early Latin societies to indicate how an actor, through the mouth of the mask (per), projects the sound