The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

Introduction

t q ntroduction t least since samuel johnson recorded his anguished response to Cordelia’s death, critics have struggled with the awesome power of King Lear to unsettle its audiences. How to explain the aesthetic goal or moral purpose of a work that so determinedly wrenches readers or viewers past the bounds of emotional comfort, past even the certainty of physical safety? The blinding of Gloucester, Cordelia’s unanticipated death, and the formal and structural excessiveness of the play’s design have led some to speculate that Shakespeare was purposefully tormenting his audience. Stephen Booth, apparently troping on A. C. Bradley’s remark that Lear was Shakespeare’s greatest achievement but not his greatest play, called King Lear an audience’s greatest achievement, shifting the focus from a formalist concern with design to a phenomenological one with reception. Performance critics such as Michael Goldman have also emphasized the emotional experience of viewers or readers as the site of meaning.1 These were productive moves, but still the problem persists, for what sort of explanation can it be to assert that Shakespeare ’s viewers willfully chose to endure an emotionally devastating few hours? Such a claim runs counter to generally held ideas that great art is pleasurable or recreative and that it conforms with affirmative moral, religious, and/or aesthetic designs. King Lear presents an extreme example of an emotionally demanding text, yet it was hardly anomalous within its own culture in purposefully shattering the repose of viewers or readers. In this book I show that an astonishing range of texts offered to late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century English audiences an experience of psychic fracture or undoing. So multifarious was this element in early modern English texts that its exploration takes us from the religious propaganda of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments to the lovesick sonneteers of Petrarchan tradition, from the rough spectacle of the public theater to the coterie drama at Blackfriars. In these various settings, we find works that ratchet up emotional energies in what was evidently a carefully contrived effort to dismantle the composure of those who read, watched, or listened. The impulse resulted from the uneasy consolidation of early modern subjectivity: in the face of forces that were shaping a liberal, autonomous subject, there existed a well-established notion of individuality as both morally and ontologically suspect. This older understanding was manifest in multiple ways: in the established sense, derived from humoralism, of the human body as fluid and changeable and of the emotional self as highly volatile ; in a religious tradition dubious of claims of individual self-importance; in a textual aesthetic of excess and extension; and in cultural practices that encouraged public display of emotion and shared catharsis. The contrast between these existing elements of early modern English society and the emerging idea of subjectivity demonstrates why and in some ways how an aesthetic of shattering or self-negation took hold: it constituted a counterforce to the nascent ethos of individualism. The historicist model recently dominant in literary studies has overlooked or suppressed the tendency of early modern texts to shatter rather than to affirm selfhood. Stephen Greenblatt’s influential concept of “selffashioning ” effectively recuperated the humanist narrative of the birth of individualism in the Renaissance, giving new impetus to a paradigm equating subjectivity with power and control. Although the investigations of materialist critics into political ideologies and economic and social conditions have added immensely to available knowledge of the period, they have too often maintained an unexamined sense of the congruency between history and literature . Moreover, the new historicist idea that texts do the work of culture and manifest power within it collapses textuality into culture, denying the imaginative space of writing. The force of textuality itself has gone largely unremarked, and the dialectical relation of texts to the culture within which they arise—the way writing arises from within a culture but exists at a self-conscious remove from it—has been neglected. What a culture in its official versions of itself is suturing together and publicly solidifying—such as the outlines of the individual subject in early modern England—texts t 2 q The Shattering of the Self designed for entertainment or meditation might be busily undoing. Our modern culture’s entertainment industry, of course, largely operates on this model. To understand some of the fixations of our culture, we can return to the...