(Re)Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts

Seven years ago in these pages I interrogated the recent discoveries made by a number of New Historicist, feminist, and cultural materialist critics that people in Renaissance (now early modern) England were unable to think of five ideas widely held today—that dramatic characters could serve as foils, that the drama could be illusionist and empathetic, that there was a category of valued writing which we now call “literature,” that there was a biological basis for gender division, and that humans possessed a self or identity persisting through time and change. ¹ I presented evidence to show that each of these “unthinkable” ideas was in fact thought during this period, and I am happy to report that soon after the article appeared several of my arguments were endorsed by Lee Patterson and David Aers, and I also learned that two years earlier one of them had been anticipated by Natalie Zemon Davis. ² I cannot report, however, that the objections of Patterson, Aers, Davis, and myself have had any discernible effect on the unthinkability enterprise: none of the critics we criticized, so far as I know, has modified his or her views and more discoveries of this kind keep cropping up. I want to move on, then, from a description of the enterprise, which is all I attempted in my earlier article, to propose some explanations for it, but before doing so I will list a few of the additional discoveries that have been announced, or have come to my attention, since I wrote the article, and to correct the impression that they are limited to the Renaissance, I am including two from other periods.

Linda Charnes claims that “in early modern England, Love with a capital L” (which she defines as the idea of a love the “transcends” any “specific material, political, and social conditions”) “would not have been thinkable”; but she goes on to say that Antony and Cleopatra “examines the implications” of transcendent love and “subversively insists on” questioning it, ³ so Shakespeare and his audience had to think of this unthinkable idea.

Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass claim that “neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality existed as categories in early modern Europe” because “the latter-day incontrovertible male/female binary . . . was not yet in place”; and Alan Sinfield says that in this period homosexual relations “were rarely apprehended as sodomy—precisely because that was so unthinkable.” ⁴ But the laws against sodomy (under which people were apprehended and convicted) prove it was thinkable, and so does the well-known passage in Leviticus 20:13, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (King James Version), which defines heterosexuality and homosexuality as distinct categories, based on an incontrovertible male/female binary.

James Kavanagh claims that our idea of “dramatic structure” was “unutterable” and “unimaginable” in the Renaissance because it is “invested . . . with two hundred years of a discourse on the literary and the aesthetic whose most basic terms could not be uttered until two hundred years after Shakespeare wrote.” ⁵ But Ben Jonson discusses this unimaginable dramatic structure in the final section of Timber, or Discoveries, and so does Aristotle in the Poetics which was written more than 2,000 years before the term could be uttered.

Karen Newman claims that “by the time of Rymer’s attack on Othello [in A Short View of Tragedy, 1693], Shakespeare’s heroic and tragic representation of a black man seemed unthinkable”; but on the preceding page she quotes from Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, which was written a few years before Rymer’s book and presents a heroic and tragic black man, ⁶ as does Thomas Southerne’s popular tragedy with the same title, produced in 1695. We also know that Othello was frequently performed in London at this time (in versions close to Shakespeare’s text), and so can infer that many people in the audiences were able not only to think of this unthinkable thought but also to approve of it.

Terry Eagleton claims that the modern failure “to see eye to eye on all the...