Speaker: Katharine A. Craik (Reader in Early Modern Literature, English, Oxford Brookes University)
Title: “Quickening Shakespeare”
This paper explores emotion in Shakespearean comedy through ideas of movement and speed. Much recent scholarship has illuminated single emotions such as fear, anger or sadness in Shakespeare’s plays, often drawing comparisons with early modern medical or philosophical writings. Critics have acknowledged humoral and passionate experience as fluid, but have still nevertheless tended to organize such experience into materially recognizable states, or systems. This paper proposes that Shakespearean emotion is usefully approached instead as transformational change. The idea of the passions as “motions” was familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries thanks to Augustine’s discussion of emotion (motus) directed by the will (voluntas); and Aquinas’ account of “passion as a motion of the sensitive appetitive faculty.” My paper traces the legacy of these ideas in Shakespeare’s comedies, considering how characters experience emotion as quick internal movement. Such flux is often described and expressed through gesture, bodily comportment and fleeting facial expression. Adriana’s account in The Comedy of Errors of her husband’s “heart’s meteors tilting in his face,” for example, or Berowne’s description in Love’s Labours Lost of desire which “with the motion of all elements/ Courses as swift as thought,” reveals feeling as sudden, provisional and improvisatory – allowing us to revisit the systemic “emotion scripts” and “emotional regimes” which underpin some recent accounts of Shakespearean character. One particular aim of my paper is to explore synergies between two important approaches to Shakespearean emotion that have often seemed methodologically separate: historicist accounts of emotional experience that belongs in and to the past, and presentist work on communicating Shakespeare to audiences today. I will suggest that Shakespearean emotion can be both historical and immediately present, existing through the affective movements that continue to surround us.
Speaker: Mary Floyd-Wilson (Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Title: “By Instigation of the Devil: Obsession, Distraction, and Murder in Early Modern England”
What does it mean to be distracted or vexed in early modern England? The terms imply that external forces plague the sufferer, and contemporary sermons, religious tracts, and popular pamphlets identify the devil as a common cause of distraction and vexation. But in Distracted Subjects, Carol Thomas Neely categorizes “distraction” as an early modern term for secular madness that emerges from a reworking of boundaries between natural and supernatural boundaries. Privileging the contemporary debates on exorcism and feigned possessions, Neely establishes the dominant scholarly view that the controversy over demonic possession “encourage[d] the secularization and medicalization of distracted subjects.” But this narrative fails to account for other, under-recognized arguments about the devil’s influence in the period. The same controversialists who dismiss possession cases as staged also declare that an excessive focus on possession will render people “forgetfull and carelesses” of Satan’s more typical modes of attack (John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels (1601). The spectacular behaviors associated with possession functioned, they argued, as satanic diversions from his more subtle and common emotional assaults. Indeed, Satan’s most “pernicious power” lay not in possession but in “obsession” and “temptation”: the devil’s “power of obsession, consisteth especially, either in an outward assaulting and vexing: or in an inward suggesting and tempting.”
The devil’s capacity to distract, vex, and tempt is plainly represented in the popular discourses on murder. A majority of contemporary murder ballads and pamphlets indicate that the devil functions as an invisible and intrusive entity, infecting people’s passions and prompting them to act in sinful ways. The texts’ accompanying woodcuts often depict the devil as a presence hovering at the edges of the murder scene: he is invisible to the human perpetrators but recognizable to the reader as a force in the action. This paper will look at an array of murder pamphlets, as well as two plays inspired by the pamphlets, the anonymous A Yorkshire Tragedy and George Wilkins’ The Miseries of Enforct Marriage. I argue that examining popular representations of the devil’s influence in pamphlets and ballads helps us discern how dramatists represent demonic causality and raises significant questions about the supposed disenchantment of early modern theater.
Speaker: Amanda Bailey (Professor, English, University of Maryland, College Park)
Title: “Early Modern Cosmopolitical Feeling”
Most broadly, my talk considers how early modern thinkers conceptualized political affiliation in light of classical ideas about the natural world, which included animate and inanimate bodies, and how such conceptualization informed an understanding of the political as an affective phenomenon. More particularly, I explore the relation between astral thought within early modern intellectual culture and Romeo and Juliet, a play in which astrology provides the philosophical foundation for extended inquiry into the most pressing question occupying early modern civic humanists: the relation of causation and contingency. Late sixteenth-century political thought sought to identify how seemingly arbitrary shifts in forms of governance were connected to celestial activities. Astrology offered a means of imagining political process in what we might describe as cosmopolitical terms. But because astral thought did not distinguish between the known laws of the universe and evolving theories of human appetite, motivation, and disposition, it also allowed for a considerably more circumspect notion of human intentionality; all matter was affected by simultaneously occurring antipathetic and sympathetic forces. Shakespeare’s play elaborates how an awareness of astral influences allowed for a new sense of civic consciousness and the political implications of this. On the one hand, fluctuations in vehement passions set the stage for dispersed agency and attenuated structures of authority. Yet, on other hand, an awareness of causation beyond human agency lay the foundation for collective despair.
Speaker: Patricia Cahill (Associate Professor, English, Emory University)
Title: “Surface Encounters: Skin Fantasies and the Affective Force of Early Modern Blackface”
Scholars tend to assume that early modern playgoers would not have been especially perplexed by what they saw when white English actors—using some combination of wigs, masks, coal, charcoal, cosmetics, gloves and leggings—impersonated Moors on stage. After all, in early modern England, black skin was a clear signifier of a denigrated Otherness. But as I argue here, this common sense understanding of the easy legibility of black skin in the early modern theater overlooks the affective dimension of such “blackface“ performance, especially its entanglement with racial anxiety and even terror. I turn in this talk to a few especially complex scenes in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar and Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andronicus: scenes in which black skin, though linked with diabolical villainy and death, is also conceptualized as an uncannily vibrant surface. In reading these skin scenes, I contend that both playwrights solicited the affective engagement of white playgoers through deeply unsettling cutaneous fantasies, including various evocations of burned, swaddled, pierced, and confined black skin. After tracing the affective dynamics of these skin fantasies, I conclude by underscoring that, at least in this instance, affect does not trump racial formations. That is, I suggest that while some may be tempted to interpret the terror aroused in (white) early modern playgoers by these black skin narratives as evidence of a shared sense of vulnerability across the racial divide, it is well to recall that the very apparatus of English blackface performance entails white assertions of racial dominance.
Speaker: Benedict S. Robinson (Associate Professor, English, Stony Brook University)
Title: “Anxious and Melancholy Fears”
According to virtually every ancient and medieval system of the passions, one of our primary modes of orientation to the future is fear: fear is the future apprehended in the form of imminent threat; fear reduces the openness of the future to an immediate zone of concern, to what is not yet present but is directly anticipated. Fear is time given urgent shape and meaning. But the early modern period also saw a rising concern with forms of fear that do not fit this model: fear with an occluded or hallucinatory object; fear seen as a long-term disposition rather than a state of emergency; fear explained as bodily sickness or affective contagion, or projected as crowd psychology. These kinds of fear were baptized under new names—anxiety, panic terror, diffidence—but their conceptual roots lie in a revived and expanded discourse of fearful melancholy. This talk will investigate changing early modern cultures of fear, first by using digital methods to model large-scale patterns of language use, tracing a cultural and conceptual history of anxious fear written into the language itself; and second, by arguing that Shakespeare’s tragedies explore the phenomenology of anxiety by shifting received accounts of the place of fear in tragic pathos. Linguistic history and the history of literary forms are both crucial kinds of evidence for a history of fear and, beyond that, a history of the future written in the forms of our affective response to it.
