Moral Physiology, Ethical Prototypes, and the Denaturing of Sense in Shakespearean Tragedy

Shakespearean tragedy explores patterns of feeling and thought that lock characters into asocial consistencies, preventing affective intuitions from modifying self-understanding and judgment in the ways that both early modern moral physiology, as popularized by Erasmus, and current neuroscience suggest ethical sense and practical reasoning require. Blocking "dialogue" between body and discourse, such consistencies induce characters to lapse into what Wilma Bucci describes as "dissociation": either bodily experience disconnects from symbolic representation, or an "emotional schema" activated in "core consciousness," cannot be integrated into "extended consciousness." In Julius Caesar, Brutus's Stoic deprecation of the emotions prevents him from appreciating how embodiment opens memory to affective, prototypic imagery in ways that will guide how the ethical significance of Caesar's body will be grasped' in Hamlet, nature revenges itself upon the dissociation of cognition, and thus identity, from somatic ethical responsiveness that the "rottenness" of the new order of Denmark seeks to effect.