The Curious Absence of Soft Matter: A Response to Cute Shakespeare

Among the many objects that furnish the current spate of anniversarial archaeologies of Shakespeare, there is really nothing that passes for cute. Judging by the uniformly stiff and uncharismatic contents of its institutions and repositories—for example, the money pot, pike blade, and signet ring in “Shakespeare in 100 Objects” hosted online by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust—Shakespearean history has no truck with cuteness’s “warm and fuzzy” aesthetic (Ngai 5). At a glance, this claim is too obvious to deserve much elaboration. What is built to endure is by definition, or at least derivation, “hard, unyielding” (OED); what counts as history does so by keeping its shape. One could even say that the touch of cuteness—or rather, the touchability that is its hallmark and incitement to tenderness and abuse—is a means of dividing now from then (Ngai 3).

This palpable difference between our late capitalist moment and the early modern past therefore poses a challenge to the task of “historiciz[ing] differently” that Sianne Ngai announces at the outset of Our Aesthetic Categories (17). Inasmuch as this is a process of “relating artifacts that prevailing, period-based methods of doing cultural history discourage us from considering together,” what is to be done when a prior culture yields up no artifacts suitable to relate? (17) There are no early modern analogues to the polyurethane sponge (c. 1941), memory foam (1966), and polar fleece (1979) that make cuteness’s emergence as a “vernacular aesthetic” possible (16). The evident absence of such matter is exemplified by the difference between item 45 in “100 Objects,”—a “doll, possibly from the seventeenth century . . . carved out of walnut,” whose adamantine constitution leaves “uncertain” even to the expert whether it is “definitely a child’s toy”—and such the “snugglesome misfits” as the Cabbage Patch Kids™, whose squished-in vinyl heads and fabric bodies epitomize to a post-Boomer audience cuteness’s manipulability and manipulativeness (“Number 45, a doll”; Harris). Given Ngai’s assertion that cuteness is an aesthetic “foremost aligned with playthings designed for children,” the Birthplace doll, a rare survivor—if indeed that is what it is—from the Renaissance’s meager toy output, points to a period dispositionally and materially unconducive of the cute (73).

Four essays in this issue tackle this adversity by taking up cuteness in a state of dreamy incipience, as a sensibility assembling itself in snips and patches from depleted structures of belief. Indeed, as Julia Lupton shows in her introductory essay, cuteness indexes those structures’ erosion. Romeo’s disposition as a thing “to be cut, sewn, and aesthetically reworked” evokes the upcycling of clerical vestments in a defrocked landscape. For Luke Wilson, Shylock’s “strange kind of wanting” for a “loathsome and worthless” piece of Antonio expresses the desire for which the merchant is himself the chosen object in the wan dramaturgy of early modern secularization (90). Colby Gordon’s “candied Cleopatra” is similarly a figure whose acts of cutification premonish her future cuteness as an object to be puppeted and boyed. Her diminishment of Antony, from a “triple pillar” to each of an uncounted number of “tawny-finned fishes” snared on her hook, is nicely anticipatory of the cheap multiplicity and over-loving, unlovely handling that are cuteness’s hallmarks, even as it cuts down the myth of sovereignty to a portable, pettable size (2.5.14; 1.1.13). Finally, “tenderbodied” Marcus, a tyke only glimpsed at before Volumnia restores him to the flinty, bloody, Coriolanus, is for Thomas P. Anderson a resurgence of Eucharistic enchantment, and thus a glitch in the psychic management of “fleshly materiality.”

At the same time, what is more narrowly at stake across these four essays is flesh that has been alienated from its frame and cultural frameworks. Linking Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra and even, improbably, Coriolanus under the sign of cuteness are characters pared down to biological matter. To be sure, the viscidity of the resulting clots and collops is not uniform. Shylock’s...