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5. Form, Characters, Viewers, and Ford’s The Broken Heart
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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t q chapter five orm, haracters, iewers, and ord’s The Broken Heart n their attempt to establish a link between the body and social theory, M. L. Lyon and J. M. Barbalet grant emotion a vital, active role. Emotion, they write, “activates distinct dispositions, postures and movements which are not only attitudinal but also physical. . . . Emotion is precisely the experience of embodied sociality.”1 Lyon and Barbalet’s sense of emotion as marking the bodily intersection of an individual, psychological existence and a shaping social order corresponds in interesting ways to the concept of dramatic catharsis. Aristotle’s idea of the purgative function of tragedy has usually been understood to mean that individual viewers are purged of excessive emotion through their social experience of attending a play. Some maintain that Aristotle meant to grant a social utility to theater, as a means to siphon off the unruly emotions of the masses. Others stress the individualistic possibilities of the idea, extending to the ethical realm the educative possibilities of catharsis. A minority view understands the idea in formal terms, seeing the catharsis as occurring within the structure of the play. As Stephen Orgel notes, the conversation about catharsis has taken on a life of its own, so that Aristotle’s intentions may now be deemed less important than the evolving influence of the idea,2 and what it has provided is a familiar site for understanding emotion as “embodied sociality.” Thus, while high-minded theorists have taken Aristotle’s term catharsis to mean “cleansed” or “purified” (resonances that support the moral emphasis and suppress the physical one) or have lamented it as an unfortunate meta- phor,3 there exists a particular relevance to Renaissance drama of a theory that sees emotion as bodily, as something that might be purged. Whatever the Greek may have meant, his conflation of the emotive and the physical makes good sense in relation to the early modern era, when the governing concept of the humoral body made emotions a function of physiology. Although available moral codes counseled the importance of asserting the superior will to subdue the passions, the experience of attending the theater was not only or even primarily an affair of the mind and spirit. It was instead a shared group experience in which emotions were pricked and inflamed— an effect to which the hand-wringing antitheatricalists testify when they offer their ironical endorsements of Aristotelian theory.4 Given the visibility and importance of emotional responses to this drama, theories that concentrate on strictly cognitive dimensions of the viewers’ experience (whether intellectual , moral, political, or aesthetic) remain inadequate.5 As we have seen, within the historical context of humoralism, Renaissance drama was simultaneously a matter of emotions and bodies, since the balance of bodily fluids within the individual was understood to largely determine his or her emotional state. What we think of as private or internal experience was mediated by a set of social norms that structured individuality along rather different lines than those to which we are accustomed. Gail Kern Paster has brilliantly demonstrated how the tumultuous internal experience of the humoral body is inscribed in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.6 In this chapter I am building on her insights about the physical and emotional lives of early modern subjects in order to revisit the concepts of dramatic form and viewer response associated with the debate about catharsis. The problematically negative implications of purgation will be brought to bear on the problem of locating either pleasure or aesthetic value in the reception of John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c. 1629). Unlike Titus Andronicus or the numerous spectacularly violent seventeenthcentury tragedies, The Broken Heart eschews extravagance in favor of forms of violence that are not merely restrained but actually accomplish destruction and death through restraint. Extreme forms of control and self-torment— starvation, bleeding to death, dying of a broken heart—demonstrate divided selves. But, crucially for my inquiry, the division does not conform with the division between body and soul that a dualistic interpretive tradition has taught us to expect. When Penthea speaks of a “divorce betwixt my body and t 139 q Form, Characters, Viewers, and Ford’s The Broken Heart [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:48 GMT) my heart” (2.3.57),7 she riddlingly problematizes the significance of “heart,” making it at once physical and emblematic.8 The effect is...