The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Obeying Time Shakespeare’s King Lear finds his grasp failing in a changed world. Reduced, hedged in and scolded by an unsympathetic daughter, he asks in confusion: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”1 The play itself poses this double question: who is he and who can tell him? Precipitous action and self-indulgence have collapsed the frame where he has presided as a king of subjects, a father of children and a master of servants. He no longer knows who and what he is, only that his former self is crumbling and that his identity depends upon others. Further deterioration of mind and body amid the chaos of civil war dramatically inhibits whatever formation of self and identity may be possible in a world of thoroughgoing personal, political and natural disruption. For many recent critics, King Lear supports an influential critique of early modern subjectivity. Lear’s disintegration is offered as evidence of a contingent self decentered by dislocations in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. For Jonathan Dollimore such disintegration as Lear’s invalidates any received critical position based upon “essentialist humanism” and its assumption of a centered , unified self.2 Dollimore was an early and formative voice in a varied chorus including cultural materialist, new historicist, and postmodernist critics, who despite their differences tended 1 to reinforce each other in setting the terms of a continuing debate about early modern subjectivity. Other influential voices included Catherine Belsey, Alan Sinfield, Francis Barker, Stephen Greenblatt , and Louis Montrose. They envisioned a decentered, provisional , contingent self incapable of a unified subjectivity. This is a self constructed by contending historical forces, especially discursive ideologies and power formations. Claiming a decentered self is not just a theoretical weapon against an allegedly outdated “essentialist humanist” critical position. It expresses a secularized belief about human subjectivity allegedly expressed in early modern works and clarified by late twentieth century assumptions. The success of this secularized claim, by concentrating attention on historically specific cultural discourses said to construct human subjectivity and its representation in literary works, owed much to the kinship between British cultural materialism and American new historicism. Both were indebted to influential French poststructuralist thought, in particular the early works of Michel Foucault. This secularized orientation, when brought to bear on early modern religious culture, stimulated two related objections in the debate about self that followed. One is the status of inwardness in early modern subjectivity; the other, the necessary religious context for considering the self. Katharine Maus’s search for inwardness in Renaissance drama addressed the problematical “claim that a conception of personal inwardness hardly existed at all in Renaissance England.”3 A secular critic herself, she confronted the blinders on modern literary criticism when faced with “Renaissance religious culture that nurtures habits of mind that encourage conceiving of human inwardness.”4 Maus’s stance brought her in line with broadening awareness and emphasis in English studies, captured in Debora Shuger’s explicit reminders, that we are dealing with a religious culture: “Religion during this period supplies the primary language of analysis. It is the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic: kingship, selfhood, rationality, language, marriage, ethics, and so forth. Such subjects are, again, not masked by religious discourse but articulated in it; they are considered in relation to God and the human soul. 2 The Self in Early Modern Literature That is what it means to say that the English Renaissance was a religious culture, not simply a culture whose members generally were religious.”5 It is in this spirit that we need to engage the lingering presumption of a decentered self in early modern subjectivity. The current study, which argues that the intersection of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism as a stabilizing factor in early modern construction of self in support of the common good, enters a continuing debate by interrogating claims of radical discontinuity in a “contingent” and “fragmented” self. To ignore this source of stability is to ignore a crucial element in what Judy Kronenfeld has aptly called the “sheer magnitude and weight of Christianity in the Renaissance.”6 She rightly argues that a pervasive cultural discourse allowed rigorously opposing and often-divisive perspectives on crucial cultural issues while nonetheless preserving a common ground of Christian values. On that common ground we can find the answer to Lear’s question about the source...