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Moral Physiology, Ethical Prototypes, and the Denaturing of Sense in Shakespearean Tragedy
Donald R. Wehrs
It has long been noted that if, as Hegel argues, Greek tragedy concerns the conflict of competing goods, Shakespearean tragedy concerns a crisis of meaning epitomized in Macbeth's assertion that life is but a "tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" (V.v. 26-28).1 Placing the threat of nihilism at the heart of tragedy, Shakespeare seems to anticipate, if not inaugurate, Romantic and Modernist vocations for literature—offering literature as the site where significance after the debunking of myth and metaphysics may be reclaimed; likewise, he anticipates or inaugurates many of modern literature's technical features and communicative strategies. John Wiltshire has recently traced, for example, how Jane Austen's innovations in novelistic indirect discourse derive from appreciative appropriation of Shakespearean models.2 Notably, the [End Page 67] generic role played by fate, divine possession, or nemesis in Greek tragedy, pulling noble figures toward a destruction both of their own making and emblematic of forces beyond themselves, comes to be filled in Shakespearean tragedy by psychological or cultural equivalents—patterns of feeling and thought that lock otherwise admirable characters into asocial consistencies, preventing affective intuitions from modifying self-understanding and judgment.
Such consistencies are the fruit of various exercises in "self-fashioning" that arise when a mutually modifying "dialogue" between the body and discourse has been deformed or suspended in ways that "denature" both individuals and societies, alienating them from the moral physiology that early modern thought, as popularized by Erasmus, took to be normatively human. Shakespearean tragedy explores the consequences: such denaturing blocks a "sense" constituted intersubjectively—along the lines of Aristotelian phronêsis, Ciceronian prudentia—from guiding conduct. By imaginatively rethinking Erasmian critiques of Stoicism, scholasticism, dogmatism, Shakespeare poses challenges to any project of engineering subject formation that assumes humans are infinitely malleable—that they are either the mere "constructions" of external contexts or the self-authored products of autonomous will. Much current research in cognitive science likewise provides neurological detail and support for intuitive or experiential claims central to the traditions upon which Erasmus and other advocates of moral physiology drew—especially the neo-Aristotelian humanism of Cicero and Plutarch and the anti-dogmatic satire of Lucian. As Mary Thomas Crane notes, by emphasizing "the physicality of mind" (2001, 157) in ways that make it irreducible to the effects of proto-Foucauldian technologies of state power (156-77), Shakespeare allows us to see the remarkable degree to which pre-Cartesian notions of embodied subjectivity are consistent with neuroscience's dismantling of Cartesian dualism (3-35, 161-63).3
Although "cognitive science" denotes a heterogeneous field of disciplines and theoretical models,4 neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and transcultural linguistics have consistently yielded results supportive of central contentions that Renaissance moral physiology derives from classical humanism—primarily that reason and emotion presuppose and enrich one another, that habitual practices modify states of being, and that moral deliberation hinges upon a cultivated, continuous interplay of right feeling and right thinking, an interplay that depends upon concrete images or patterns of excellence, prototypes, that impress and reinforce themselves upon us through experience. Cognitive science, along with scholarship in philosophy and psychology, further agrees with Erasmus on the importance of maternal relations in forming such models or images.5 [End Page 68]
Arguing that cognitive science reveals "the body" grounding "meaning in an intersubjective way . . . central to reason" (1999, 95), as when bodily experience orients one to the sense of metaphors or structures the ordering of categories, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that obviating the Cartesian mind/world gap obviates the mind/body gap,6 and so allows an account of subjectivity, as shaped by affections linking ideas to images to embodied sensations, such as Aristotle inaugurates in De Anima and the Rhetoric.7 Because emotions are thought to bear what Martha Nussbaum, commenting upon Aristotle, describes as "cognitive-evaluative" dimensions, much classical pedagogy and philosophy seeks to "educate" the emotions through acculturation or argument into the kinds of cognitive-evaluative reflection and image-production that free us from irrational agitation and enable good judgment.8
Despairing of educating the passions, the Stoics sought to argue one into a dispassionate benevolence (apatheia) to free reason from their influence, thus anticipating both Kantian efforts to segregate practical (moral) reasoning from interested (emotional) motivation and neo-Marxist, neo-Nietzschean "unmaskings" of emotions as ideological delusions or co-optive ploys. Neurological research into the amygdala cognitive-emotional network supports Aristotle's general picture:
Once the amygdala excites, it produces emotional arousal . . . [but it also] can influence various infrastructural processes for perception, thinking, memory, and selective attention. . . . Memory, imagination, and thinking can activate the amygdala in the cognitive circuit, thus generating emotion without any direct sensual trigger. . . . Wide involvement of the cognitive circuit . . . ties emotion to all other dimensions of mind, including our inclinations, latent beliefs, and desires . . . .
(Auyang 2000, 331, 332, 333, 336-37)9
Sunny Auyang underscores how closely these findings dovetail with Aristotle's claims that "[b]elief and evaluation belong to the cognitive aspect of emotion . . ." (326, Damasio 1994, 127-222). The observable operation of the hippocampus-amygdala complex is consistent with an evolutionary account of the advantage of integrated and progressively improved communication (through trial-and-error correction) between cognitive and emotional registers of significance, for "primates and higher mammals need to process and evaluate the differential significance of sensory input (a snake, a picture of a snake, a shadow in a doorway) in order to determine, in a flexible manner, whether—or to what degree—emotional significance will be assigned . . ." (Bucci 1997, 129, 132-33). Clinical findings and evolutionary arguments support Aristotelian-Hellenic contentions that cognitive and social ideas, rather than pure animal or irrational feeling, motivate and are [End Page 69] communicated by emotional experience, which in turn supports Aristotle's, and early modern humanism's, insistence that practical reasoning (phronêsis) entails a "right feeling" that only intersubjective, sociable life can cultivate.10 Moreover, Aristotle's claim that habitual practices modify states of being, making us responsible for the quality of character that our exercise, or non-exercise, of virtues generates (Nicomachean Ethics 3:5, 1113b 5-1115a 5), receives support from neuroscientific demonstrations of what Auyang calls "downward causality," "the causal influence exerted by a system's high-level structures on its subsystems and subprocesses" (2000, 194-95).11
For both Renaissance moral physiology and contemporary neuroscience, cognition informed by and receptive to sociable affections yields ethical practice only if judgment is shaped by (not colonized by) a range of prototypes (categories generating and regulating ideal or representative mental images) derived from intersubjective and cultural experience. Skilled, flexible "perception" (aesthêsis) is integral to Aristotelian phronêsis for "the standard of excellence is determined with reference to the decisions of the person of practical wisdom; what is appropriate in each case is what such a judge would select" (Nussbaum 1986, 300). Paul Churchill notes that "Aristotle's perspective" is echoed in "the neural network perspective," for, according to the latter, people with "penetrating moral insight" will be those with "a rich library of moral prototypes from which to draw" and with "a keen eye for local divergences from any presumptive prototype and a willingness to take them seriously as grounds for finding some alternative understanding" (1996, 104-05, 103).
Neuroscience therefore suggests that the relation of culture to embodiment is not, as in much postmodern thought, a merely negative one of imposing containment strategies or naturalized hegemonic ideology upon bodily practice, but rather, as in humanism, an enabling one of addressing, actualizing, and refining embodied capacities and needs. For neuroscience, cognition informed by moral sense is experienced viscerally, somatically, in ways that, to use the vocabulary of the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, are undeclinable, prior to freedom, and primordial.12 Ethical judgments are neither cultural constructs nor rebellions against such constructs. In a series of clinical studies, Antonio Damasio has measured involuntary changes within the autonomic nervous systems of people exposed to images of others in distress, and found that individuals with brain damage producing flattened emotions and histories of poor practical reasoning "failed to generate any skin conductance response" to ethically "disturbing images" (1994, 174), whereas "subjects without frontal damage . . . generated abundant skin conductance response to the disturbing pictures . . ." (206).. Two implications follow: first, what Damasio calls the "somatic marking" of mental [End Page 70] images (making involuntary emotional responses inseparable from ethically disturbing cognitions) is crucial to practical reasoning (humanism's phronêsis, prudentia); second, humans normally respond somatically to images of afflicted others in ways that support Levinas's claim that ethics is not "added on" to subjective experience, but rather is its defining context.13
Invoking the philosophical categories of the unconditional and absolute, Levinas offers no psychological, much less neuroscientific, account of the inherence of ethical obligation in embodied subjectivity. His recourse to metaphor, however, suggests that prototypes internalized within ordinary psychic development ground the somatic responsiveness that tears one away from both egocentric intentionality and the asocial consistencies of dogmatic or conventional discourse. To evoke somatically articulated ethical sense, Levinas is led to imagery of maternal devotion: "in maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others . . ." (1981, 75).
Levinas presents the ethical-maternal as an unconditioned absolute, which is psychologically vague and renders him vulnerable to charges of naturalizing feminine self-sacrifice.14 Julia Kristeva, however, offers a more detailed understanding of how what we are here characterizing as maternal, ethical prototypes might be inculcated. She argues that actual mothers may offer themselves as images of being-for-another only if they counter infantile identities bound to assimilating, enjoying, consuming the other (beginning with the breast) by placing another's "growth, accomplishments, future" above narcissistic temptations to cling to, devour, and use the child (1996, 62).15 What enables such maternal love, Kristeva argues, is that identity articulates itself in grateful imitation of one's own mother and maternal substitutes. By teaching us to speak, mothers open us to selfhood; by loving us as speaking subjects, as separable from themselves, they grant us the psychic security that makes both freedom and investments in meaning emotionally possible. Our gratitude to the mother's protection and subject-nurturing activity anchors subjectivity in responsive, reformative, dialogic imitation not only of her being-for-another, but also of her investments in particular cultural, symbolic orders that make having an Other, loving an other one, imitating patterns of love, integral to culturally-mediated identity and value.16
The way somatic ethical responsiveness articulates creative, generative (not static) imitative gratitude may be illuminated by Wilma Bucci's account of how prototypes derived from habitual interactions between mother and child bind together cognitive and emotional, nonverbal and verbal registers of significance. In addition to "the hippocampus-amygdala complex" which "provides a neurophysiological basis for the bidirectional interactions of emotional evaluation and cognitive processing," there is an evolutionary and developmentally anterior "thalamo-amygdalar" circuit that registers immediate [End Page 71] but "non-specific" emotional-cognitive "input" (regarding possible danger, sense of security, etc.) that "contrast[s] with highly integrated inputs from modality-specific and multimodal association areas processed through the hippocampus," and that "may play an important role in the processing of emotional information in human infants prior to the full maturation of the neocortex and its anatomical connections" (1997, 132-33).
The relationship between the thalamo-amygdala circuit and the hippocampus-amygdala complex is at least suggestively analogous to the relationship between somatic ethical sensibility and practical reasoning, ethical and moral prototypes: the visceral immediacy of the former is contrasted with the multivalent deliberativeness of the latter, which is motivated by, but also potentially modifies, the urgent impulses or raw impressions of the former. Summarizing much research, Bucci argues that interpersonal interaction, especially maternal care and example, are crucial to the child's ability to interconnect originally separate and evolutionarily distinct information-processing systems (1997, 108-51). This "referential process, the mechanism of transformation from subsymbolic information to nonverbal and then to verbal symbols" rests upon constructing prototypic images in ways that allow "bidirectional" communication between systems and "recursive" effects upon systems—i.e., translating an image into words may modify the image (183). Maternal care facilitates intercommunication among diverse information-processing systems by initiating the young child into the work of placing self and other, body and discourse, into mutually modifying and enriching "dialogue," a process that generates "emotion schemas" grounded in "memory schemas" (197), for "each person's emotion schemas depends on the child's interactions with the central figures in her life and the emotional valences associated with them" (196).
By enabling the child to become a speaking subject (in Kristeva's terms), the mother initiates an education in right feeling (in the language of humanism). The process of interacting with others, developing, in effect, resources for practical reasoning by imitating patterns of cross-referencing, correcting, extending, modifying diverse systems of significance against one another, offers reasons for gratitude no less than our indebtedness for physical and emotional care. Moreover, at a deeper level responsive imitation so weds cognitive and emotional life that the very interplay between somatic marking and practical reason registers spontaneously, involuntarily, the debt subjective identity owes ethical prototypes and the individuals who, by anchoring those prototypes within our psyches, have allowed our potential humanity the opportunity for realization.
Precisely such an ordering of gratitude is indicated by Erasmus's account of moral physiology: following Paul, Erasmus characterizes human affective [End Page 72] life as arising from responsive, grateful imitation of a prior, unconditioned love.17 Indeed, for Erasmus nature is so shaped by divine love that, unless we willfully, sinfully, block its influence, it will "maternally" guide us toward an ethical corporeal subjectivity marked by a mutually enriching dialogue of culture and nature that enables the actualizing and refining of embodied capacities and needs. Manfred Hoffmann notes that Erasmus uses the term "natural equity" (aequitas naturae) to describe how "the harmony in the balance of nature itself" incarnates divine love by "point[ing] to an ethical attitude of virtue in general." We are, as it were, physiologically induced to acclimate ourselves to nature by internalizing its "temperance" (1994, 121) in ways that, as Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle points out, inscribe into the "reason, which allows moral reflection upon experience," a "common grace." This grace is conveyed by nature rather than by a revelation conceived of as perfecting or rendering explicit what nature intimates; "common grace" explains why "many teachings in pagan literature . . . coincide with the gospel" (1981, 85-86). The maternal care implicit in nature's cultivation of temperance and sociability opens us to gratitude for the maternal care given us by nature and nature's God not only directly, but also through distinct cultural traditions. Indeed, the trope of gratitude for cultural maternal care was deeply inscribed in Erasmus's classical sources. Cicero argues in De Officiis that "Nature likewise by the power of reason associates man with man in the common bonds of speech and life . . ." ["Eademque natura vi rationis homininem conciliat homini et ad orationis et ad vitae societatem . . ."] (1913, 12-13) and Lucian, in a rare panegyric, notes that "men count holy and divine their native land" because "she bears, nurtures, and educates them" ["anathrephamene kai paideusamene"] (1913, 210-11).18
Positing nature's maternally ethical effects, Erasmus reiterates traditional Christian rejections of Seneca's extreme Stoic program of inducing a heroism characterized by "rocklike or godlike invulnerability" in "indifference to external things," and thus a constancy characterized by immobility and imperviousness (Miles 1996, 41).19 Affirming "the psychological and moral importance of the human affections" (Hoffmann 1994, 201), Erasmus argues that speech is rational and ethical to the extent that it "confirms and intensifies the positive dispositions of the heart as much as it negates and changes its negative inclinations," and thus becomes effective by moving and changing us through seizing and delighting us: movere, flectere, rapere, and delectare imply one another in ways that enact word (logos) becoming flesh, Christ being resurrected in the heart (Hoffmann 1994, 225-26; Bennett 2000, 30-51). By contrast, speech that ignores or does violence to the dialogue between affection and cognition can be neither rational nor ethical, for it [End Page 73] implies a disjunction between rationality and ethics precluded by the divine structuring of nature and human nature.
Thus, only a speech insistently recalling one to embodied ethical-rational subjectivity can work against the tendency of conceptuality to evade or efface the "sense" that divinely structured nature would impress upon us. For Erasmus, scholasticism exemplified the fall of speech into abstractions cut off not just from historical-philological contextualization, but also from sociable openness to the discourse of others (patristic and classical traditions) and thus ethical responsiveness to lived, felt experience.20 By contrast, Erasmus saw the Greek Syrian satirist Lucian as "unparalleled in usefulness for detecting and irrefutably exposing the impostures of certain persons who in our time, too, are in the habit of imposing upon the common people by magic and miracles, fake religion or pretended pardons," because he saw Lucian achieving what we tend to associate with Shakespeare, "paint[ing] men's manners, passions and desires, and set[ting] them forth not to read but plainly visible to the eye."21 In Philosophies for Sale, for example, Lucian targets, as does Erasmus in Praise of Folly, sophistic logic and notions at odds with common sense and civility, but when a Peripatetic declares, echoing the Nichomachean Ethics, that "goods are threefold, in the soul, in the body, and in things eternal," he is declared a man of "common sense" ["Anthropina phroneî"] (1915, 504-05). In the Colloquies, Erasmus seeks to emulate Lucian's delineation of diverse "manners, passions and desires" in dialogues that differ from Plato's or Cicero's in frequently revealing practical wisdom to be distributed unevenly and unexpectedly among interlocutors. The reader is forced to grasp ethical significance emerging naturally, spontaneously, "plainly visible to the eye," from evocations of lived experience.22 In "Military Affairs" (1522), when a mercenary proclaims his conscience clear because a priest has declared war just and the learned agree that "everyone has a right to live by his trade," his interlocutor responds, "A splendid trade—burning houses, looting churches, violating nuns, robbing poor people, murdering the innocent!" (1997, 39: 38-39). Here, Erasmian rhetoric, claiming an authority at once transcendent and immanent, is subversively modern: no matter what the priest and the learned say, we cannot help knowing, involuntarily, somatically, that any reasoning dismissive of ethical sense is damnable folly. Indeed, the necessity of such knowledge is the precondition for subjective freedom.
Erasmian premises long shaped the Tudor pedagogical, political, and ecclesiastical institutions which allowed England to position itself against both counter-reformation Catholicism and Calvinist Protestantism.23 Erasmian pedagogy underlay Shakespeare's own education, but echoes of Erasmus in Shakespeare's early and middle comedies—Love's Labour Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It—reflect more [End Page 74] than a legacy of cultural influence24 ; they suggest Shakespeare's consciousness of how his theater was particularly well-suited to expose the folly and moral cost of separating self-fashioning reason from a corporeal subjectivity binding the self to ethics and sociability.25
Shakespeare's turn to tragedy at the opening of the seventeenth century coincided with increasingly insistent Puritan attacks upon Erasmian defenses of theatrical art that stress the ethical and cognitive value of affective appeals.26 Contrasting with the comedies, which delineate the regenerative possibilities of mutually enriching and modifying dialogue between nature and culture, the tragedies place humanist moral physiology under stress by exploring the potential to live out alternatives that Erasmus rejects but that are revived by the Puritan challenge and other currents in early modern culture—Stoic deprecations of the emotions, dogmatic estrangements of theory from felt experience, equations of identity with will and disembodied consciousness, drives toward systemic ideological closure. Othello, Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, for instance, are all characters whose asocial consistencies estrange them from practical rationality by estranging them from gratitude and somatic responsiveness. Here, however, I will focus on the works in which Shakespeare pioneered the themes and forms of his mature tragedies—Julius Caesar and Hamlet.
Following the isolated attempts of Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare came to a sustained engagement with tragedy only upon reading (or rereading) Plutarch's account of Brutus in preparing Julius Caesar (1599). Stressing Brutus's philosophical bent—"there was no sect nor Philosopher of them [the Greeks], but he heard and liked it: but above all the rest, he loved Platoes sect best" (1967,183)—and the disinterested nature of his actions—"it was thought then that Brutus would take parte with Caesar, bicause Pompey not long before had put his father unto death. But Brutus preferring the respect of his contrie and common wealth, before private affection, and perswading himselfe that Pompey had juster cause to enter into armes then Caesar: he then tooke parte with Pompey" (184)—Plutarch leads Shakespeare to locate tragic action in something other than turbulent or titanic passions. W. Warde Fowler observes, "The idea that a good man could do incalculable harm from the best possible motives was, as far as I know, a new one in tragedy" (qtd. Thomas 1989, 67), and Willard Farnham notes, "Before Brutus there had been no tragic hero on the English stage whose character had combined noble grandeur with fatal imperfection" (67).The centrality of ideas to Brutus's character yields, as Vivian Thomas argues, a tragedy exploring the practical implications of competing modes of conceptualizing experience, in which "personal and political images and self-images" are "subjected to telling ironies," so that we see the "deficiency in [End Page 75] Brutus" to be "not one of coldness, or lack of feeling, but [rather] his remarkable capacity to elevate the political over the personal, and his self-image as the repository and guardian of Roman democracy. Brutus's tragedy stems from his inability to step outside this perception of himself" (1989, 71, 77-78).
Generically, the task of making a tragic hero of Plutarch's Brutus seems to have awakened Shakespeare to the tragic potential of Lucianic, Erasmian philosophical satire: instead of conceptual rigidity or self-enclosure being an occasion for sensible laughter at learned folly rooted in culpable (and ridiculous) self-importance, it might instead appear as the lapsing of a noble, ethically sensitive mind into unwitting, involuntary, self-blinding self-love. Walling himself up in an image of principled consistency, the hero dismisses as irrationalism or weakness the flexibility competing moral prototypes would impress upon him; identifying his action with lofty ideals, he holds himself at a remove from, or tunes out, somatically marked ethical sense complicating or calling into question his projects. He thus lapses into some form of what Bucci describes as "dissociation" within "emotion schemas": either there is "a failure of connection of bodily experience and symbolic representation," or an "emotion schema" activated in "core consciousness," registered fleetingly, is not integrated in "extended consciousness," is not connected to a sense of continuous, autobiographical identity, or "some elements of autobiographical memory" may be connected "within an emotional schema, while others are blocked off" (2002, 779-80).27 Because such lapsing into dissociation, brilliantly dramatized in Brutus, is a constitutive possibility of any effort to rise above egocentric intentionality, Julius Caesar reveals the audience to be no less vulnerable than the hero, thus evoking a "pity and fear" that disrupts smug complacencies no less effectively than intimating the audiences' susceptibility to the deprecations of fate and nemesis did in ancient Greek contexts.
In Brutus's case, as Miles notes, making a tragedy of estrangement from the affections and practical sense aligns Shakespeare with contemporary assessments of Neostoicism: "Though less prone than Caesar to claim godlike status, Brutus too seeks to rise above humanity by achieving an impossible degree of consistency, rationality, and imperturbability. . . . It is an admirable ideal, yet its effect in practice is often to make him rigid, cruel, and (most of all) dishonest . . ." (1996, 135). Miles argues that the play's judgment of Senecan constancy mirrors, and was possibly inspired by, Montaigne's: "it is shown to be a flawed ideal, not humanly attainable, and therefore liable to involve its adherents in continual pretence and self-deception. In Montaigne's formula, it is 'a profitable desire; but likewise absurd'" (135).28
What distinguishes Shakespeare, however, is not a conventional assessment of Neostoicism, but rather a dramatization of how embodiment works [End Page 76] against dissociation, opening memory, as Bucci also argues, to affective, prototypic imagery (2002, 782-92). In Shakespeare, this imagery elicits a gratitude that delivers us from the ideological comforts of imperturbable consistencies by rendering ethical significance inescapable, inscribing it somatically in ways we can neither erase nor forget. The play begins with the tribune Murellus's rebuke to Roman commoners for enjoying, vicariously identifying with, Caesar's triumph over Pompey's defeated sons: "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! / O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, / Knew you not Pompey?" (I. i. 35-37). Insensibility, affective deficiency, follows from a particular kind of ethical-religious offense: "Run to your houses, fall upon your knees, / Pray to the gods to intermit the plague / That needs must light on this ingratitude" (I. i. 53-55). Murellus introduces the idea that gratitude is foundational to human (as opposed to senseless, block-like) identity, and that the lapsing of gratitude dehumanizes, doing such violence to nature by uprooting human moral physiology that it invites the divine forces governing nature to enact communal retribution (the plague).
Gratitude in a Roman context for Shakespeare and his contemporaries would be particularly associated with Virgilian pietas. Thus it is significant that Cassius's initial sounding out of Brutus involves a description of his saving Caesar from drowning that, holding up Caesar's frailty to ridicule, reverses the import of the simile he employs: "I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor, / Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder / The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber / Did I the tired Caesar" (I. ii. 112-115). As Robert S. Miola points out, Cassius alludes to the Aeneid II. 707-11, in which Virgil "presents the archetypal scene of pietas, memorialized on Roman coins and often celebrated by ancient writers such as Ovid (Met. XIII. 624-6) and Propertius (Bk. IV. I. 43-4)" (1983, 83). By Shakespeare's time the "original Virgilian passage and its moral significance" were "commonplaces of Renaissance humanism" (84), so that it is clear that Cassius "replaces the articulated emblem of pietas . . . with the unarticulated emblem of impietas . . ." (85). The shift in the object of ingratitude or impietas from Pompey to Caesar suggests not only that the denaturing of Rome's prototypical virtue is widespread, but also that susceptibility to the feeling, rather than a strict accounting of how much its object merits it, is the central issue. As Coppélia Kahn points out, fear of being moved by others or swayed by emotions is linked both to a patrician concern with autonomy and a masculine anxiety about being feminized, but, as Valida Dragovitch notes, to isolate oneself from affective bonds is to alienate oneself from the trope of Rome as a mother nurturing body and soul, to whom one is indebted for patterns of thought and feelings that are distinctively Roman (1997, 77-109; Dragovitch 1989, 91-111). [End Page 77]
Whereas the commoners have vicarious identification with the powerful and Cassius his resentment of being made small, "feminized," by Caesar's greatness to motivate ingratitude, Brutus has "no personal cause to spurn" Caesar, but also a "general" one that is abstract. It is not what Caesar has done, but for what he "may" do (II. i. 11, 12, 27). Brutus is not without gratitude—he says of Portia, "O ye gods! / Render me worthy of this noble wife!" (302-03)—but pietas toward an idealized Rome yields the delusion that affective signification can be restricted to, or regulated by, ideological signification. Thus, he proclaims, "Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers" (166), for he would oppose "the spirit of Caesar" in which "there is no blood" (167, 168): "Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds" (173-74). Brutus's own recourse to rhetoric, however, belies his aspirations: ideological murder only becomes psychologically bearable if one dematerializes the victims, turns them into abstract ideas. In this way, the self-enclosure of Lucianic-Erasmian schoolmen issues in the willful impassivity of political assassins, but the very need for rhetorical obfuscation suggests that somatically transmitted ethical sense, binding images to memory to emotion schemas rooted in ethical prototypes, can be evaded much less easily than the authority of one or another moral prototype jostling for dominance in guiding phronêsis. Having dissociated his extended consciousness from particular emotion schemas, Brutus disastrously underestimates the influence of personal passions and loyalties, as when he imagines that what Cassius calls "the ingrafted love" Anthony bears to Caesar (184) can be overcome by presenting the conspirators as "purgers, not murderers" (180), because he imagines that "bath[ing] our hands in Caesar's blood / Up to the elbows" (III. i. 106-07) can be viewed symbolically in ways that neutralize the natural repulsion such a sight engenders.
When Antony, in his first opportunity for an aside, contrasts the bloody hands of "these butchers" with Caesar's corpse, "thou bleeding piece of earth" (III. i. 255, 254), the ineptitude of Brutus's assumption that images striking the mind may be stripped of spontaneous, natural somatic marking and recoded as if part of an arbitrary, Saussurean sign-system is brought home to an audience that, while alerted to Antony's opportunism, seconds his horror. Whereas Brutus's oration renders Caesar into a succession of abstractions, Antony's incessantly calls attention to the body: "Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through; / See, what a rent the envious Casca made" (174-75). With demagogic cunning, Antony plays upon the crowd's susceptibility to gratitude to highlight as ingratitude the deeds of conspirators whose "private griefs" Antony professes to "know not" (213): "It is not meet you know how Caesar lov'd you: / You are not wood, you are not stones, but men" [End Page 78] (141-42). Indeed, Antony describes "Ingratitude, more strong than traitor's arms," as alone capable of "vanquish[ing]" Caesar (185, 186).
The efficacy of Antony's unscrupulous rhetoric suggests that Caesar's bloodied corpse moves the crowd by recalling them to gratitude (pietas) toward one likened variously to the father or mother of the nation (II. ii. 83-90, III. ii. 88-92, 129-37, 247-52); the material spectacle of the body works against Brutus's dematerializing, dissociative discourse. Kahn notes that "the assassination . . . resoundingly feminizes Caesar" (1997, 104), but that makes him all the more potent a political force. In effect, Antony's stagecraft gets the crowd to personalize their relation to Caesar. Patrick Colm Hogan notes that "emotional memories" may be evoked apart from memories of occasions or circumstances (2003, 179-84). Antony's use of Caesar's body and his imagery of a maternal and paternal Caesar evoke "emotional memories" of gratitude.
Because the sensory images associated with Caesar's assassination violate a sense of gratitude integral to corporeal subjectivity, because they are somatically marked by a "natural" call to pity that commands us to become "like a mother" to the Other's broken, bleeding body, they cannot be detached from affect and recoded as "sacrifice" or "purgation." On an emotional-moral level, the body will not accept it—and that includes the bodies of the conspirators themselves. Indeed, the conclusion of the play suggests that both Cassius and Brutus struggle to live up to identities that would make up for ingratitude and then succumb less to military conquest than to their own conviction that defeat is most likely what the gods would ordain. Noting Cassius's acceptance of bribes, Brutus demands, "shall one of us, / That struck the foremost man of all this world / But for supporting robbers, shall we now / Contaminate our fingers with base bribes?" (IV. ii. 21-24). After anticipating defeat on the eve of the battle of Philippi, Cassius, misreading ambiguous visual evidence as indicating the calamity he expects, slays himself while declaring, "Caesar, thou art reveng'd" (V. iii. 45), prompting Brutus, previously haunted by Caesar's ghost, to exclaim, "O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet! / Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords / In our proper entrails" (94-96). Stressing his own embodied, feminized vulnerability to affect (the "proper entrails" into which a Caesar re-embodied in memory "turns" his sword), Brutus would resolve himself, through the ultimate self-fashioning and dissociative gesture of suicide, into the kind of unmoving, abstract "spirit" or idea he sought to make of Caesar.
In Shakespeare's next tragedy, Hamlet, nature so resists the blunting of sense that moral physiology revenges itself upon dissociations of cognition, and thus identity, from somatic ethical responsiveness. Beginning with Barnardo's initial characterization of the ghost's "material" presence as an overturning of Horatio's theoretical resistance, "And let us once again assail [End Page 79] your ears, / That are so fortified against our story" (I. i. 31-32), modern, skeptical conceptual orders (Horatio's "philosophy") are associated with the desire to be "fortified against" disturbing ideas, which suggests that much early modern thought recuperates Hellenic philosophy's aspirations to make conceptuality a "fortress" against incursions of chance and emotional distress. Even a character as noble as Horatio is apt to follow the example of Lucianic-Erasmian learned fools in shielding themselves intellectually from all in "heaven and earth" that one's philosophy has not "dreamt of" (I. v. 166, 167). But what would "assail" "fortified" ears is precisely what needs to be heard for meaning, cast here as an archaic father not abiding with the dead, to disrupt consolidations of a new order in which systemic force and fraud, exemplified by Claudius's slick acting and Machiavellian court, so dissociate consciousness from emotion schemas as to render "stale, flat, and unprofitable" "all the uses of this world!" (I. ii. 133, 134). Hamlet has fallen out of love with "this world" (temporal, material, affective existence) because his mother's example suggests all human virtue and feeling are illusory show: "O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourn'd longer" (150-51). By casting radical doubt upon the solidity of any "referential process" linking sound and sense, image and emotion, memory and identity, and thus casting doubt upon any basis for gratitude toward herself, Gertrude puts into question whether there is anything in the "world" into which she has brought Hamlet that is worthy of gratitude.29
Lacking faith that "this world" may be conceived under the rubric of gratitude, Hamlet wants to die—"0 that this too sallied flesh would melt" (I. ii. 129)—for he cannot imagine a future marked by affective and ethical significance if this world is indeed "an unweeded garden / That grows to seed, [so that] things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (135-37). The ghost breaks up the "stale, flat" early modern world presided over by banal cultural fathers, Claudius and Polonius, by giving substance to Hamlet's most nightmarish suspicions, and thus revitalizes ethical registers of significance. The ghost imposes a task—setting "right" "time . . . out of joint" (I. v. 189, 188)—that confers upon the son an identity commensurate with that of the archaic, heroic father described by Horatio (I. i. 80-95): "If thou hast nature in thee, . . . / Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest" (I. v. 81-83). Hamlet does not trust the ghost because its message corresponds so closely to his revolt of sense against the new order, because its theatrical spectacle seems to authorize a reversion to forms of identity and conduct that, in promising a way out of despair of meaning, may be delusively self-destructive, and so correspond to what Horatio warns against—the possibility of the ghost "tempt[ing]" Hamlet "toward the flood" or "assum[ing] some other horrible form / Which might deprive [him] of [End Page 80] reason" (I. iv. 69, 72-73). Hamlet's acute sensitivity to the lure of conceptual self-enclosure, its flattery of self-certainty and self-importance, prevents him from falling into the role of a conventional theatrical revenger.30
Hamlet's noted cultural and conceptual pluralism—standing between pagan and Christian, heroic-archaic and Machiavellian-Renaissance worlds—stimulates his mockery of Polonius's exemplification of learned folly (Foakes 2002). As Stephen Booth remarks, Polonius exhibits "a one-track mind and sees anything and everything as evidence that Hamlet is mad for love (II. ii. 173-212; 394-402)," while Hamlet "spends a good part of the rest of the scene making Polonius demonstrate his foolishness" (1995, 31-32). Both Shakespeare and Hamlet situate Polonius as an object of Lucianic-Erasmian satire, which assumes familiarity on their part and the audience's with the philosophical core of such satire—that binding meaning to abstract conceptuality fortifies us against incursions of sense, rendering us ridiculous.
By juxtaposing Hamlet's teasing of Polonius with the corrosive cynicism of his exchanges with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—"I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth" (II. ii. 295-96)—Shakespeare contrasts the fatuous self-certainty of theoretical self-enclosure not with humanist phronêsis but with a cutting humor whose appeal to involuntary ethical sense is marked by despair. Nevertheless, far from identifying, like Macbeth, with a "poor player" whose acting manufactures signs "signifying nothing" (V. iv. 24, 28), Hamlet is led by the player's weeping for Hecuba to reflect upon how mental images of "a fiction, . . . a dream of passion" are able to induce "Tears in . . . eyes, distraction in . . . aspect, / A broken voice" (II. ii, 552, 555-56). Hamlet's actions suggest he understands that actors rely upon the somatic marking of mental images to engage or stimulate the referential process, to make art recall and thus reactivate the work of mothers and maternal nature in placing cognitive and emotional, nonverbal and verbal, systems in bidirectional, recursive "dialogue," thus reclaiming the possibility of meaning. Hamlet's reflections are thus consistent with Hogan's position that emotional excitation responds to the content of mental images, not judgments about their existence, and that not all "cortical processes are egocentric. Some are explicitly nonegocentric, such as imagining oneself in someone else's situation, adopting someone else's point of view" (2003, 187).
Contemplating acting leads Hamlet to consider that somatic ethical responsiveness cannot be outrun or rendered optional, and so he retrieves faith in practical rationality sufficient to devise a plot to test the ghost's veracity—i.e., to distinguish between a theatricality that flatters, manipulates, and deludes (as Puritans and other anti-theatrical critics argued) and a theatricality that ethically calls forth a somatically marked cognition whose resistance to the denaturing of sense, the dissociation of emotion schemas from consciousness, [End Page 81] elicits gratitude, wonder, and love—a natural basis for attitudes Erasmus grounds in Pauline theology. Noting that he has "heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been strook so to the soul, that presently / They have proclaim'd their malefactions," Hamlet resolves to "observe [his uncle's] looks," and if "'a do blench" he will "know [his] course" (II. ii. 588-92, 596, 597, 598).
Although Claudius abruptly walks out on the play, is described by Guildenstern as "marvellous distemp'red" (III. ii. 301), and is depicted as so overwhelmed by an "offense" "smell[ing] to heaven" that his "stronger guilt defeats [his] strong intent" (III. iii. 36, 40), Terence Hawkes notes that "Claudius's blankness in the face of the plain depiction of his crime in the dumb show has . . . famously exercised critics over the years" (2002, 182). While Claudius is no doubt revealed to be, as Hawkes suggests, "a man torn by the conflicting demands of criminal passion and remorse, and held to the flames by an obduracy which is also self-control" (183), his walking out on the play, after its dialogue makes manifest that the dumb show has been contrived by Hamlet to trap him, reveals spectacular loss of self-control. As Hamlet's response indicates, "O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds. Didst perceive?" (III. ii. 286-87), and as Horatio's reply, "Very well, my lord" (287), confirms, Claudius could not have acted in a less politic manner. That Hamlet's theater flushes out ethical corporeal subjectivity from one ensconced in corruption and guile attests to the subversive authoritativeness of a literary communication that can "tent [one] to the quick" (II. ii. 597).
Notably, words linked to images do more than the dumb show does alone.31 So Hamlet tells Gertrude, "[L]et me wring your heart, for so I shall / If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damned custom have not brass'd it so / That it be proof and bulwark against sense" (III. iv. 35-38). Without discounting his extravagant idealization of his father, his misogyny, his sense of inadequacy, or his venting of cynical aggression,32 we may see that Hamlet asks language to "wring" a "heart"—corporeal subjectivity or "penetrable stuff"—and so perform the redemptive work that Erasmus assigns to speech, while seeking to turn language against a "damned custom" that substitutes asocial self-fashioning for affective ethical response (see Russell 1995; Ferguson 1995; Kastan 1995). If Hamlet's words "like daggers enter in [Gertrude's] ears" (III. iv. 95), they do so not simply out of phallic aggressiveness, but at least in part as an antidote to the poison of denial and deceit with which Claudius has "fortified" all ears against somatic ethical appeals. As Bucci notes, while "verbalization is not the optimal means of expressing emotion, it is the optimal mode of communication with other people and of self-regulation and direction," and so finding the words [End Page 82] that express and clarify sensations, images, and memory is crucial to repairing the dysfunctional or dissociated referential processes of psychoanalytic patients—"building connections within an individual between emotional experience and words, and building connections between individuals in the shared discourse" (1997, 217). Not to colonize Gertrude, but to grant her subjective freedom against the tyranny of a "monster custom" that "all sense doth eat," Hamlet posits a "custom" "That to the use of actions fair and good / . . . likewise gives a frock or livery / That aptly is put on" (160, 164-65). Aspiring to a maternal relation with his mother, Hamlet would guide the referential process toward an "attunement" of thought and feeling (221), repairing the damage wrought by Gertrude's habituated dissociation of emotion schemas registering ethical sense from extended and even core consciousness. When Hamlet declares that "use almost can change the stamp of nature" (168), the "almost" suggests that he is not so much embracing a "constructed" notion of subjectivity as the "product" of habits as he is returning to Aristotle's insistence that practice modifies substance, that habits may alter, not abrogate, nature's "penetrable stuff."33
As the complexities of the rest of the play indicate, Hamlet's ability to affirm and appeal to embodied ethical subjectivity does not resolve tragic conflict, but establishes its context. Gertrude's aside upon learning of Ophelia's madness, "So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt" (IV. v. 19-20), not only acknowledges her measure of responsibility for the events leading to Ophelia's destruction, but discovers somatic ethical responsiveness through experiencing its being "assailed" and moved. Fear of "spilling" what is inside confirms that there is something that might "spill" out. Tragedy emerges from practices of construing habitual, customary fortifications against incursions of sense as indicating that one has no "stuff" to "penetrate." Such fortifying signifies, of course, the opposite.
In Othello, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, Shakespearean tragedy probes the psychic, social origins of damaged or blocked referential processes that yield variants of Lucianic-Erasmian self-enclosure but inspire pity and fear rather than satiric laughter (indeed, Othello lifts Polonius's "one-track mind," no less than fear of cuckoldry, into a tragic register). King Lear takes despair of meaning to its ultimate point before Cordelia's disinterested, absolute love allows, as Robert Lanier Reid argues, "Lear's best self" to be "shaped by Cordelia," so that she becomes "her father's mother" (2000, 140); and in Macbeth, as Jan H. Blits notes, Macbeth's effort to "destroy . . . the guilty conscience" that haunts him, to repudiate moral physiology through declaring war on nature, "destroys both his conscience and himself" (1996, 3). In Macbeth, we see how endeavoring to strip cognition of somatic marking issues in dehumanization and madness; in characters devoid of compunction [End Page 83] —Iago, Edmund—we see how "Nature," taken as "goddess" and "law" (King Lear I. ii. 1) can only breed monsters if dissociated in memory or ideology from the attunements of the referential process that link maternal image-schemas with ethical prototypes motivating and regulating the work of practical reason.
In Hamlet, however, the hero's ultimate confidence in the inescapable force of somatic ethical responsiveness allows him a measure of triumph. By trusting that "guilt / Spills itself in fearing to be spilt," Hamlet verifies the ghost's accusations and so puts himself sufficiently on guard to intercept Claudius's letter to England. He uses theater not only to resolve his own doubt, but also to make a witness of Horatio, just as he preserves the original of the King's letter for Horatio (V. ii. 26). While Hamlet's exercises in practical reason have a Machiavellian adroitness, and even a cold, hard edge, as when he declares Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's deaths to be not "near [his] conscience," for they are the "reward" for "their own insinuation" (58-59), this allows him to achieve his primary objective, to so represent things to Horatio, and thus to the audience, that the truth reveals itself with spontaneous, subversive authority. In agreeing to the fencing match, he provides Claudius an opportunity to overreach himself, to dramatize his own guilt, so that Laertes is led first to moral reservations about serving as Claudius's tool (296), then to self-accusation (307), and finally to vindication of Hamlet (312-18) and exposure of Claudius: "—the King, the King's to blame" (320). As Claudius is undone by the fruits of his own treachery, Hamlet secures his fame and cuts down villainy by appealing affectively to others within the play in a manner analogous to the play's communication with and engagement of the audience's own interrelated ethical sense and practical reason. By delineating how Hamlet manages to make the sense of his story prevail against "monster custom" and "fortified ears," the play assumes an authority as subversive and as potentially reformative as Hamlet's own.
Donald R. Wehrs is associate professor of English at Auburn University and author of African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values (2001). He has published essays on postcolonial literature and theory in MLN and New Literary History and on British and European fiction in SEL, CLS, and The Eighteenth Century.
Endnotes
1. All Shakespeare citations refer to Shakespeare 1974. See esp. Hegel (1967, 736-45; 1975), Knight (1949), Wilson (1951), Russell (1995, 39-50).
2. Wiltshire (2001); see also Everett (1995, 252-53), for a discussion of the role of Hamlet in generating the Bildungsroman.
3. Also see Richardson (1999, 168-70), Kinney (2001, 30-34).
4. See Hogan (2003, 29-58); also Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Crane and Richardson (1999).
5. See esp. Erasmus (1997, 39: 592-609). Drawing on Aristotle's De Anima, Plutarch's De liberis educandis, and Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae, Erasmus argues in his colloquy, "The New Mother," that mother/child intimacy contributes not only to [End Page 84] health but also to intellectual and moral development. Also see Plutarch (1927, 12-17).
6. Also see Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 235-89, 468), Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), Rowlands (1999), Churchland (1995), Kosslyn and Koenig (1995).
7. See esp. De Anima Bk. II, ch. 5, Bk. III, ch. 3-7, 10-11, in Ackrill (1987, 174-76, 191-200, 204-05), Rhetoric, Bk II, in Aristotle (1932, 168-343), Irwin (1988, 290-95).
8. See Nussbaum (1994,19-88; 1986, 264-317), Irwin (1988, 303-88). Also see Plutarch, 'The Education of Children," "On Listening to Lectures," "How a Man May Become Aware of his Progress in Virtue," in Plutarch (1927, 4-62, 204-59, 400-57), and "On Moral Virtue," "On Brotherly Love," in Plutarch (1939, 18-87, 246-325).
9. Also see Oatley (1992), Stein and Levine (1991), Ortony (1991).
10. See Auyang (2000, 27), Nussbaum (1994, 48-101, 102-39, 316-401; 2001, 139-237).
11. Also see Hogan (2003, 40-41). On Aristotle's account of the shaping of soul by habits of desiring the good, see Irwin (1988, 181, 200, 207, 223-76).
12. See Levinas (1969, 201-09, 216-19; 1981, 34-38, 99-109).
13. See Damasio (1994, 205-22), Levinas 1989; 1969, 194-201, 240-47, 302-04; 1981, 51-59, 65-72, 83-93, 102-13).
14. See esp. Chanter (2001), Irigaray (2001), Perpich (2001), Brody (2001), Chalier (1982).
15. Kristeva (1996, 62; 2001b, 57-81). On egocentric intentionality, see Levinas (1969, 109-21, 175-77; 1981, 61-72). On the role of "appraising" the effects of what we encounter upon our projects in triggering emotional responses to what we encounter, see Hogan (2003, 140-41, 144-48).
16. Kristeva (1987, 34; 2000, 52-64, 94-106; 2001b, 78-81, 89-93); also Nussbaum (2001, 174-235). Kristeva associates Hannah Arendt's affirmation of rational agency, of "life as a narrative," with the maternal cast of Arendt's thought (see Kristeva [2001a, 46-47]).
17. See Erasmus (1984, 42:51-52); also Kristeva (1987, 139). In the Enchiridion, Erasmus argues, "Divine wisdom speaks to us in baby-talk and like a loving mother accommodates its words to our state of infancy. . . . It lowers itself to your lowliness, but you on your part must rise to its sublimity" (Erasmus 1988, 66:107). Actual mothers, as "The New Mother" (1997, 39: 592-609) stresses, naturally imitate the divine pattern and so engender an analogous emulative gratitude; good teachers motivate their pupils by assuming a similarly "maternal" role (1985, 26: 325, 334-35).
18. Also see Plutarch, "On Brotherly Love" and "On Affection for Offspring" (1939; Cicero (1913,14-17).
19. On Seneca, see Miles (1996, 40-57); on Erasmus and Stoicism, see Miles (1996, 64-68).
20. See Boyle (1981, 17-25), Rummel (1986, 7-9, 74-75, 89-121); see the hermeneutical principles articulated in the Enchiridion (Erasmus 1988 66:34-43); Folly's satire on scholasticism in Praise of Folly (1986b, 27:126-35); the critique of stylistic self-enclosure in the Ciceronianus (1986a). On methodological opposition to [End Page 85] closure and commitment to pluralism in Erasmian humanism, see Kinney (2001, 37-41).
21. Preface to Erasmus' translation of Lucian's The Cock; quoted in C. Robinson (1979, 167-68). On Lucian's influence upon Erasmus and his Italian predecessors, see Marsh (1998), Zappala (1990), C. Robinson (1979). On Lucian's relation to Hellenic philosophy, see Branham (1989) and Jones (1986).
22. For Erasmian satire upon conceptuality estranged from moral physiology, see Erasmus (1997, esp. "Rash Vows," 39: 37-43; "In Pursuit of Benefices," 39: 45-52; "Military Affairs," 39: 55-63; "The Soldier and the Carthusian," 39: 329-43; "The Shipwreck," 39: 352-67; "An Examination Concerning the Faith," 39: 421-47; "The Old Men's Chat, or The Carriage," 39: 449-67; "The Well-to-do Beggars," 39: 469-98; "A Pilgrimage for Religion's Sake," 40: 621-74; "A Fish Diet," 40: 677-762; "Cyclops, or The Gospel-Bearer," 40: 864-76).
23. See Thompson (1971), Mansfield (1979, 110-14), Magnusson (1999, 61-90), Bennett (2000, 24-54, 71-77), Streuver (1992), and Baldwin (1944).
24. See Reid (2000), Stockland (1997), Birkinshaw (1992), Butler (1992), Crains (1991), Palmer (1987), Miller (1986), Woodridge (1983), Hassel (1980), Aoki (1979-1980), and Greenfield (1968).
25. See Bennett (2000, 17-21, 28-29, 52-54, 101) for a discussion of theater as a site of moral testing and renewal; also see Altman (1978).
26. Bennett (2000, 88-101), Kastan (1999, 201-20), Heinemann (1980).
27. Bucci draws on Damasio (1999, 82-106, 168-233), for the notions of "core" and "extended" consciousness.
28. See Miles's discussion of the vogue Neostoicism enjoyed in the Western Europe in the late sixteenth century, and his discussion of Montaigne's progress from sympathy with to skepticism of Neostoicism (1996, 63-109). On Shakespeare's relation to Montaigne, J. Robertson (1909) remains the starting point. Zurcher (2003) suggests that Shakespeare's assessment of neo-Stoicism is more positive, arguing that Stoic integrity and autonomy offer a model for revolt against tyranny in The Winter's Tale (910-15). While there is certainly a meditation on Stoic patterns of revolt, the tyranny Paulina and Hermione oppose is the product of Leontes's asocial consistencies, his obdurate walling himself off from somatic ethical responsiveness in ways that alienate him from practical rationality, as indicated most tellingly when Paulina (for Zurcher the most Stoical of characters) expects that the sight of his infant daughter will have a greater effect in bringing Leontes back to sense that any argument: "We do not know / How he may soften at the sight o' th' child: / The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades when speaking fails" (II. ii. 37-40). Zurcher also argues that Pericles, Prince of Tyre presents ideal Stoic integrity as being realizable only in death (2003, 921), which would seem to suggest reservations about it on Shakespeare's part.
29. Jacqueline Rose takes to task criticism she sees complicit in the play's making "the mother cause of all good and evil," making "her failings responsible for a malaise in all human subjects . . ." (1994,167). While there is no lack of maligned and noble women in Shakespeare, the process of vindicating wronged women and exposing male folly is one of comedy or romance, Here, the basis for gratitude [End Page 86] toward the maternal is called into question by actions that render suspect any investment of love, any ascription of meaning, and thus the maternal interactions that lead to such investments and ascriptions. Precisely because feminine-maternal bonds are so crucial to the affective and rational lives of people of both sexes, the consequences of their violation or denial are the stuff of tragedy.
30. On Hamlet's and the play's violations of revenge tragedy generic conventions, see Pearlman (2002), Foakes (2002), Levin (2002), and Kasten (1995).
31. Crane observes that "uncertainty" on Hamlet's part "about whether Claudius is more likely to reveal his inner secrets through looks or through speech may explain why Hamlet uses both a dumb show and spoken lines in his mousetrap, offering both visual and auditory stimuli" (2001, 132).
32. See Russell (1995), Ferguson (1995), and Kastan (1995).
33. For alternative accounts of constructing subjects lacking internal natures, see Pye (2000, 105-29), and Crane (2001, 116-55). Whereas Crane's groundbreaking cognitive reading sees Hamlet despairing of ascertaining an "inner self" in ways that lead him "towards a performative theory of self-fashioning" (141) and lead the play toward positing only the tragic alternatives of "a secret inner space liable to corruption and decay and a hollow shell formed by ritualized social gesture" (147), the reading here suggests that flushing out somatic ethical responsiveness from Claudius not only justifies the ghost, but also offers Hamlet some hope that there is an ethical "affective core" (Bucci 2002, 770) in Gertrude that might be "touched" or "moved" through somatic, visual, and verbal invocations. Thus, the exercise of practical reason against Claudius is lifted out of the sphere of mere personal revenge. The task of bringing the truth to light becomes a soldierly, heroic exercise of duty irreducible to Machiavellian cunning or the "puffed up" self-glorifications of a Fortinbras. See (IV. Iv) and Crane (2001, 147) on Fortinbras's "essential hollowness" and thus aptness as "the quintessentially performative subject."
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