The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English

3. 1500–1620: Reading, Consciousness, and Romance in the Sixteenth Century

103 3. 1500–1620 Reading, Consciousness, and Romance in the Sixteenth Century f. elizabeth hart Between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, the concept of human consciousness became increasingly linked to the question of what goes on inside the human head. The early modern minde—seat of reason, soul, will, and even passion—had long been known to be connected corporeally to the braine, although the exact nature of their relationship was (and remains) a mystery.1 Human figures in the literature of the period gradually assumed more of the outlines of Renaissance individuality, especially by comparison with their medieval counterparts, and one of the ways this individuality was expressed, I contend, was through a narrowing of focus toward the mind as an object and as an adjunct to the head—the latter now a wellspring of imagined realities. To be sure, the English had important precedents for representing interiority and for understanding the “self” in terms of the mind’s inner workings. Writings by Augustine, Boethius, and other Christian Platonists had long treated “soul” and “mind” as more or less synonymous concepts.2 But by the sixteenth century , and owing (as Scott Manning Stevens has shown) to shifts in medical science, the discourse of interiority had begun expanding toward the more inclusive semantics of the physical—toward a sense of self that could be represented as supplemental to the metaphysical.3 At the same time, however, and in a development that more keenly interests me in this chapter, representations of the mind also became more precise in their imagery, enacting a shift both in the etiology and the symbolic resonances of “mind” away from the heart and toward another organ altogether—the brain—and thus toward the metonym of the head-as-mind.4 Narratives across the period’s important genres, from the Bible to romance, epic poetry, and staged drama, presented figures of humans who now possessed a head-centered (and mindcentered ) interiority, a quality of inwardness that even aspires, at times, to simulate the act of thinking. In the sixteenth century, we still find representations of humans whose thoughts and emotions are expressed by the external means familiar from medieval literature—for example, spoken dialogue, gestures, or other somatic signs.5 Only now, we also glimpse brief representations of conscious self-awareness and introspection: people pausing in the midst of action to wrestle with their inner conflicts, to speculate about others’ intentions, or to lose themselves in imaginary worlds. While such representations occur only rarely throughout the sixteenth century, by the century’s final decades they had become a recognizable feature of romance fiction and a distinguishing trait of the theater, particularly of Shakespeare’s plays.6 Within another half century, the impulse to inhabit purely imaginary worlds occasionally dominated such diverse literary works as Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (ca. 1650–52) and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666, 1668). But might this tendency toward richer portraits of interiority in the early modern period indicate a phenomenological as well as a literary sea change? In this chapter, I argue that it does. Specifically, I claim that the heightened impulse to represent consciousness bespeaks a shift in people’s actual experiences of themselves, insofar as the act of engaging one’s consciousness as such became an aspect of human life newly worth telling, writing , and reading about. The fairly obvious agency behind such a change would be the introduction of print technology to England in 1476; but the more direct cause—itself arguably an effect of print—was a massive shift in people’s cognitive abilities toward reading in particular. Print technology, in conjunction with humanism and the Protestant Reformation, both of which placed enormous emphasis on text reading, supported an unprecedented increase in English literacy rates across geographical , class, and gender boundaries. Many more people learned to read—and some to write—than had previously been able to; 104 f. elizabeth hart and still more who were not literate themselves became exposed to those who were, in towns, cities, and throughout rural areas. Today, researchers complain of the difficulty of measuring the exact rates of early modern literacy, but all basically agree that literacy increased markedly in the hundred or so years following printing.7 This chapter hypothesizes the development of what I will call a reading-based consciousness in England—first, by briefly surveying what historians now believe about...