Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy

By John E. Curran

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. This evidence can take into account a number of internal and external factors that might differentiate a person, and can do so drawing on the intellectual context in a number of ways. Ideas with potential to emphasize the special over the general in envisioning the person might come from training in dialectic (thesis vs hypothesis) or in rhetoric (ethopoeia), from psychological frameworks (casuistry, humor theory, and their interpenetration), or from historiography (exemplarity). But though they depicted what we would call personality only intermittently, and with assumptions different from our own about personhood, dramatists sometimes made a priority of representing the workings of a specific mind: the patterns of thought and feeling that set a person off as that person and define that person singularly rather than categorically. Some individualistic characters can be shown to emerge where we do not expect, such as with Fletcherian personae like Amintor, Arbaces, and Montaigne of The Honest Man’s Fortune; some are drawn by playwrights often uninterested in character, such as Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Jonson’s Cicero, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck; and some appear in being constructed differently from others by the same author, as when Webster’s Bosola is set in contrast to Flamineo, and Marlowe’s Faustus is set against Barabas. But Shakespearean characters are also examined for the particular manner in which each troubles the categorical and exhibits a personality: Othello, Good Duke Humphrey, and Marc Antony.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781644530535

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Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy

John E. Curran Jr.

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2014 by John E. Curran Jr.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-052-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-053-5 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Curran, John E., 1968– author.

Character and the individual personality in English renaissance drama : tragedy, history, tragicomedy / by John Curran.

            p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. I. Title.

PR658.C47C87 2014

822'.30927—dc23

2014017922

To the Graduate Students of

Marquette University English:

Herr Y&GL Boehler, Sarah My Lord Protector, The Doctor Iammarino-Fallhammer, Lady LD;

The Courageous Katy and the Surpassing Sareene;

The Memory of the Magnificent Donna Decker and Sarah Mayville;

All of You, Past, Present, and Future

Acknowledgements

This book is like my previous offerings in a number of ways. As with the two previous, I insist that this study lacks an ideological agenda, but anticipate being disbelieved on this score, and so, as with those, with this one I have worked mostly in isolation and been shy about consulting with others in my field. The exceptions have been some correspondences with Andrew Escobedo and Lisa Hopkins, but in this, too, this project is in my accustomed mode, for I’m used to being indebted to them both, and they always have my deep gratitude and admiration. This also marks my second go-round with University of Delaware Press, and I am once more very thankful to Dr. Mell and his team for their generosity and professionalism, and thankful too to be connected again, through them, with my beloved home state. And I am as before keenly aware of how my colleagues at Marquette and my wife, Carolyn, and our children, Ella and Cal, have enriched my life and made everything in it possible.

And yet this book is different in that its writing coincided both with tremendous upheaval in my family, my father’s passing in 2010 and the subsequent drastic changes we faced, and with my three-year office as our department’s director of graduate studies. Exceedingly brave though my grieving mother is, relocating her and reinventing our lives has been a long and painful process, and nothing lifted me up and carried me through it more than did the relationships I’ve developed with our grad students. I can only hope I was somewhat helpful to them as they navigated their studies and their careers, for their help to me was indispensable, and the experience of DGS-hood has led me to reflect on how you have all, throughout my Marquette years, affected me. A few of you I’ve cited above because, no matter how seldom we see each other, no matter how I’m deprived of your company, I feel you with me, and you shall always be among my very, very dearest friends. As for Katy and Sareene, your support in yet another transition of mine, taking over the editorship of Renascence from the excellent Professor Block, must be recognized. But this book is my testament to my bond with and my obligation to all MU English MAs and PhDs. When I was a grad student, Professor Nohrnberg showed me the true meaning of character. You, our grad students, have since illustrated it over and over. Thank you.

Milwaukee, 2013

On Translations and Documentation

All translations from Latin quotations are my own unless otherwise noted. For Loeb Classics editions, the provided translation has usually been consulted. Where possible, including with Loeb Classics editions, primary sources are cited according to traditional partitioning (e.g., book and line number) in addition to page number in the edition used. In the notes, secondary sources quoted in the text have the quote’s page number cited, sometimes followed by pagination for the larger relevant passage.

Introduction

[R]eperta personae est definitio: naturae rationabilis individua substantia.

—Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza;—read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. . . . We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

—Emerson, Self-Reliance

In this book I argue that English dramatists in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period sometimes constructed their plays primarily as analyses of character, as conceived in ways close to how we commonly understand it in our world. Many different factors went into what a writer (or several) might intend for a play and what extent psychology might have a part in that intention, as well as how, if it did have a part, psychology was to be rendered. As we will see, the frameworks available to authors for thinking about the human mind and heart were diverse, and appreciably different from our own. But we will find that in some cases the playwright(s) began with an idea of who a particular person is and built the play up from there. Moreover, we will find the frameworks that informed this building, while never so alien to us, could in some respects lend themselves to conceptualizing the person as an individual. The tools to conceive and execute individualistic characterization were not always seen as such, but they were there, and sometimes they were used for it. By individualistic characterization, I mean that the character’s distinctive inward and outward qualities are taken into consideration and portrayed as functional in how the character behaves in the action, and through this behavior moves it forward. These qualities and their distinctiveness might be made evident in a number of ways, with different emphases. A character might be made to respond to stimuli based on temperamental, biological, environmental, experiential, or social causalities, or on some combination of these, or on these in conjunction with the character’s imagined proper patterns of emoting, remembering, perceiving, foreseeing, desiring, believing, assuming, introspecting, self-identifying, self-protecting, relating to others, or reasoning logically or morally, or on one or many of these patterns in themselves. But whatever aspects of what we would call personality might be brought to bear, brought to bear they sometimes were. Some dramas of the English Renaissance not only feature but are founded on imagined individual personality—the force or conglomeration of forces that makes a person that person, and defines that person singularly rather than categorically. My purpose here is to examine specimens of this phenomenon and the ideas enabling them.

This is not an easy claim to make, but my conviction is that it’s more modest than may seem. To discuss character in the drama is to bring upon oneself the derision so often arrayed against A. C. Bradley’s lectures on Shakespearean tragedy, wherein he has struck many readers as handling the personae as though they were living people whose entire lives outside the play he could trace. But while Bradley’s remarks in my estimation generally repay thinking on, reviving his method is not my aim. If Othello’s feelings and actions do follow . . . inevitably from his noble character, for example, Bradley is somewhat remiss for not explaining in more detail how this can be so. In lieu of such reading, Bradley’s recourse is to assure us of the resonance of Othello’s eventually quite abnormal (let us hope) feelings and actions with normal life: "Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago’s communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. Ultimately, one suspects that Bradley is less interested in Othello’s distinctiveness than he is in Shakespeare’s; concern with how Othello’s ethnicity may or may not influence him appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean."[1] This seeming transference of attention from creature to creator tends to mark studies purporting to resist the wave of theory-oriented, and thus anticharacter, approaches dominating more recent decades. When such commentators as Harold Bloom, Tom McAlindon, Robin Headlam Wells, and Peter Holbrook set out to dispute poststructuralist or historicist camps, Shakespeare is their focus, and their project entails asserting how lifelike Shakespeare’s characters are and telling us what he uses them to tell us about ourselves as humans. Often insightful, and commendable in posing a challenge of sorts to the scholarly status quo, these efforts finally do not advance our understanding of character very far beyond Bradley. Like him, they are committed to Shakespearean exceptionalism; like him, they do not prioritize detail; and like him, (Wells excepted) they largely ignore intellectual context. Bloom demands, "Are there personalities (in our sense) in the plays of Shakespeare’s rivals?"[2] Well, perhaps there are. In fact, if there are, the case for personalities in Shakespeare would seem strengthened, and it is certainly strengthened if we can apply this elusive notion more concretely and provide some evidence for its existence.

Otherwise, we would seem at a plain impasse with the view represented by this statement of Harry Berger:

Speakers are the effects rather than the causes of their language and our interpretation: in the unperformed Shakespeare text there are no characters, no persons, no bodies, no interiorities; there are only dramatis personae, the masks through which the text speaks. At most the unperformed text offers material for an interpretation, a portrait, a set of portraits, that readers, actors, directors, and playgoers construct. Speakers don’t have bodies, age, insomnia, corpulence, or illness unless and until they mention them, and when they do it is usually in the service of some discourse in which states of the body are signifiers used to mystify moral effects as physical causes. Speakers don’t have childhoods unless and until they mention them.[3]

Without deifying Shakespeare or expounding on his illumination of our humanity, there is room to question this view, which I am supposing to be fairly hegemonic. A 2006 Forum in Shakespeare Studies asks contributors, Is There Character after Theory?, and the preponderance of opinion is that there isn’t—not at least in the way I am proposing to look at character, as the imagining and delineating of an individual mind. Similar are the essays of the 2012 volume Shakespeare’s Sense of Character, in which character exposition can move forwards, not backwards only by looking to theatrical performance. Coordinately, a 2009 collection titled Shakespeare and Character nullifies literary character throughout, with Camille Slights leaving a stern warning: to talk about fictional characters in academic circles has been for a considerable time now to risk dismissal as hopelessly old-fashioned and naïve, and probably politically reactionary.[4] And yet, Slights, having done much to expose us to the ways casuistry would have influenced the psychological paradigms of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, helps point toward individualistic character as an area of inquiry. It is an area I will pursue by following this lead, the idea of conscience, and intertwining it with others.

My feeling is that the political dimension Slights alludes to accounts for much of what has inhibited such pursuit; the issue of individualistic character has become bound up with that of subjectivity, and that in turn is part of the issue of historical phenomenology, which theory has made politically charged. To wit, we have immersed ourselves in the interrogation of Jacob Burckhardt’s thesis about the Renaissance breaking away from the Middle Ages by dint of a new and individualized selfhood. This interrogation has evolved many branches, of course, but in all it takes on political significance by constantly turning on the essentiality of the self. Theory has instructed us that there is no such thing as an essential self, and that the notion of one is a mirage cast by the power structure. The human mind being a contingent product of its material context, the turn from a medieval to a more modern mind, if a turn there be, mostly amounts to a deeper awareness and exploration of this fact of nonself. While I admit to a certain sympathy with Burckhardt’s idea and its proponents,[5] I also recognize the enormous benefits we have reaped from the various departures from it which theory has prompted. Among many is the hugely enriched understanding of Shakespeare and the drama that new-historicist and feminist readings have afforded us.

However, one thing I am trying to do is sidestep the subjectivity problem altogether. Whether or not Shakespeare was a humanist in our current sense and how that would implicate him in political ideology do not interest me here, nor does whether and how the drama evinces a changed subjectivity in the West. My work may have implications for the controversy (if such it can be called) but I am not engaged with it. To say that Shakespeare conceived Othello as an individual, that he endowed Othello with a distinctive personality, requires me to argue what is constitutive of personality in this case, how it is evidenced, and how the play depends on its particularity, but not required of me is a philosophical stance on the subject’s essentiality or a historical one on the phenomenological state of Shakespeare’s England. An individualistic dramatic character need not be predicated on an autonomous, stable self, and need not be measured by or shown symptomatic of any model of selfhood. John Jeffries Martin denies individuality to the Renaissance, enjoining us to dispense once and for all with Burckhardt’s idea as a relic of bourgeois humanism, while Richard Strier gives Burckhardt some renewed relevance in his account of Renaissance antiestablishment thought;[6] the debate marches on, and meanwhile the concept of individuality seems permanently entangled in it. Nevertheless my hope is to disentangle individuality from subjectivity and the philosophical, historical, and political issues entailed therein. For our purposes, individuality is a term useful for a matter of dramaturgy. It describes a mode of characterization whereby some plays were formed. It is related to the history of ideas, for incumbent on me is to prove that existing ideas of the time allowed dramatists to avail themselves of it. Chapman cannot be thought to have furnished Bussy D’Ambois with a personality unless what seem to be the constitutive parts of that personality derive from ideas Chapman could know. But the ideas I review are of that time, and I do not review them to claim anything about them other than that while they do not necessitate they do permit, and open prospects for, individualistic characterization.

When character has been treated it has seldom been treated in this way. Our tools, observes Elizabeth Fowler, for the study of literary character are surprisingly primitive, but perhaps this is not so surprising with regard to Renaissance drama, given the extremes to which commentary can go, from marveling at the ineffable and nigh magical liveliness of Shakespeare’s personae on the one hand to discounting the existence of characterological personality on the other. Fowler’s own tool of social persons, the identity-types that contemporary models of personhood attach to a character, lands us in the latter camp.[7] Into this camp I would also ultimately put J. Leeds Barroll, for his pioneering study of character bases Renaissance personhood on a transcendentalism that renders distinctiveness as ancillary to a fundamental urge to aspire: all humans look upward, and individuality is only the clearness or cloudiness of their vision.[8] When scholars do appear to lean toward individualistic character, sometimes their actual topic is our ethical response rather than the personae themselves,[9] and those that concentrate on the cohesion of character elements both overt and covert, while they offer worthwhile perspective, have different procedures than mine.

A sampling will serve to show this. For Howard Felperin, Shakespearean mimesis is generated in the fissures we sense when characters seem aware of or resistant to the literary conventions determining them, and the mimesis of the Jacobeans, such as it is, is generated from Shakespearean convention. Though this argument nicely posits a reconciliation between meta-theatricality and realistic psychology, it not only reinscribes Shakespearean exceptionalism, but it also, in its global application, embeds all character in a play’s self-conscious artifice, perhaps allowing for a kind of personality, but a quite limited kind.[10] Derek Cohen opens Shakespearean Motives with promise, anticipating Fowler’s social persons—the conflict between individuals possesses a social dimension incorporating society’s prejudices and ideals—but also uniting it with the abstract and metaphysical element of character, including how characters feel about their memories and their relationships and how they respond to change. Cohen, however, turns out to be a bit too respectful of the mysteries of Shakespeare’s art, resulting in isolated and largely thematic coverage of select plays.[11] My debt to Bert O. States’s book using Hamlet as a case study for a theory of character will be clear in the appropriate places, especially on consistency and then on humors psychology. But additionally, many of his statements about the muted but still detectable qualities of a multifaceted personality have made a strong impression on me, as this one:

Traits don’t necessarily announce themselves in deeds that are demonstrable or noticeable. It is true that some traits are quite noisy and dramatic . . . but others are virtually ‘invisible’ to our immediate awareness. In such a case we are apt to perceive trait-behavior . . . not as a monad but as a special aspect of an overall character unity composed . . . of a presence supported by known absences, or former presences, much as a face in profile is not seen as half a face but as a full face facing in another direction.

Where I depart from States is in his effort to postulate, like Felperin, an umbrella concept of character, as, convinced by much of his definition of what basically character is, I argue that it can happen in a variety of ways. Moreover, I would supplement the humors angle with a number of others (like Slights’s casuistry) from the Renaissance world, and greatly expand the data set—for at times States, reveling in Hamlet exclusively, runs into pretty pronounced bardolatry, referring to his awe at the delicacy of Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet.[12] Finally, there is Richard Levin’s clever article on overprotesting situations in the drama, which I will have call to mention repeatedly. Levin is compelling that overprotesting makes for one device the drama commonly employs to give off signs of hidden thought and feeling, and yet he has reservations about exploiting his notion to its fullest, for he rejects the unconscious.[13] As we will see, we do not need Freud to locate drives in characters that they do not comprehend. Without modern assumptions, we can find that what a character wants might be portrayed as multilayered, and too that more might be in that character beyond what she or he wants.

Space seems available, therefore, for a reevaluation. What if we can discover that in some cases a play’s structure, rhetoric, sources, and key underlining ideas seem geared to introducing us to a particular imagined person? What if we can identify instances, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, Elizabethan and Jacobean, wherein a play is hinged on the manner in which a particular person’s mind thinks and feels, as distinguished from others’? Then we do not have much of a global theory of literary character, nor of phenomenological history, nor of Shakespearean excellence. In fact, we do not even have much of a theory of how a given dramatist worked, for part of my argument holds that if Marlowe, say, approached characterization individualistically in one play, he had other designs in another. What we have instead is a sense of something possible in the drama, a potential sometimes achieved, not to represent personhood as Ibsen or George Eliot would do, but to represent a person as having a particularized personality, an interior and exterior nexus of who-ness roughly consonant with our vernacular meaning of it.

Madeleine Doran, whose magisterial Endeavors of Art stands as one of my chief inspirations, affirms that Renaissance critics had no word for personality,[14] and Christopher Gill’s researches on classical modes of psychology and their expressions in classical literature have learnedly and carefully admonished us not to conflate premodern with modern conceptions of personality. And yet Gill, in outlining the difference between ancient and modern frameworks as one of objective-participant versus subjective-individualist, is declaredly taking up the question of subjectivity and using for criteria such things as autonomy and self-awareness (to understand oneself as the possessor of a unique personal identity).[15] Hence his working definition of personality is technical, and he points out that we commonly use the term more loosely, as I am doing. But if philosophically loose, the more colloquial sense seems adequately descriptive. When we use phrases such as what makes someone tick, how someone is wired, or where someone is coming from, we are hitting upon personality as I am looking for it. Such phrases, if they are informed by models of psychology, do not refer to them precisely and are not dependent on them, nor though such phrases describe something preeminently defining about the person do they presume to theorize an essence in the mind or to capture it in its totality. But when we talk about personality, we are capturing something. Personality is something, or more often a collection of interacting somethings, salient about how a particular mind operates, and personality is also how this operation registers itself. If I say about myself that I’ve inherited from my father a proclivity toward worrying, and that the politically polarized and tense times I live in exert pressure on this part of me, and that this proclivity has affected my conduct in this rather un-stressful and quiet career I’ve chosen, and comes out in lectures I deliver to my teenage daughter, I am saying something about my personality. It involves my life history, my inherited traits, my designation in society, habits of my thought that come from who knows where, environmental forces, and relationship dynamics. It is by no means all of me, but anyone setting down a description of me would be likely to consider it and these factors playing into it and issuing from it.

When a character from Renaissance drama lends itself to an analogous description, a personality has been imagined, and by an individualistic character, I mean one endowed with a personality in this sense. By persona, I will refer to a member of a dramatis personae, and connote the most basic and outwardly recognizable marker of identity or role; by personage, I will refer to a figure with a name, from tradition or history. Hamlet’s persona would have to do with his status as a prince, with his generic role as a revenger, and with the mask presented to others in his world; Hamlet as a personage references the protagonist of the Amleth legends as well as the Hamlets in retellings of the story subsequent to Shakespeare’s. But Hamlet’s personality is what we perceive as in him and of him within Shakespeare’s play. The term persona, stemming from that for a theatrical mask, might actually be much less deleterious to premodern dramatic individualism than is often supposed. This much is proven by Boethius’ famous formula, this introduction’s first epigraph: a person(a) is the individual substance of a rational nature. His discussion even goes on to relate the etymology to individuality, as a theatrical mask is understood to allow recognition of the particular persons—individuos homines—represented.[16] But let us accept that personality, or any derivation of persona conveying individuality, is a term, like character, that Shakespeare and his colleagues would not have had at their disposal. It will nevertheless help us investigate what, as I hope this book’s evidence will demonstrate, they sometimes did.

This investigation into characterological particularity will itself proceed according to a principle of particularism—the sometimes will get especial emphasis. The ideas around which I organize my chapters build upon one another to provide for increasing complexity; into the idea of magnanimity I draw on in chapter 5 to discuss Shakespeare’s Marc Antony flows much of what I will have discussed in previous chapters. But on any one of these ideas or mix of them an individualistic character can be formed and assessed. The ideas in question come from Renaissance methods for representing the person. They are, in order of appearance: from logic, associated things, and thesis versus hypothesis; from rhetoric, ethopoeia, and the relative force of soliloquy and plot; from psychology, casuistry and astral-humoral influences, and their interpenetration; and from historiography, the tension between biography and exemplarity. Each chapter makes clear that these ideas can cut in different directions, as each idea suppresses individualistic character in some ways and facilitates it in some ways. Each chapter, in fact, is titled by the manner in which the idea at hand impedes characterization, so that I can explain therein how this impediment was sometimes resolved. Consequently, I sometimes examine cases where personality does not emerge alongside cases where it does. The contrast should serve to shore up my point that personality, while not necessary, sometimes manifests itself. Furthermore, sometimes this manifestation occurs where we expect it to—Shakespeare—but sometimes where we’ve mostly deemed it impossible, as with the Fletcherians. Whatever it is about Shakespeare’s art that outdoes that of other dramatists, I cannot put my finger on it and it has no part in my analysis. Rather, by demonstrating how individualistic character is woven into the fabric of different plays in different ways, including plays and ways in which we’re wont not to see it, I try to demonstrate its overall plausibility. This approach has the added advantage of not relying on an author’s general attitude or practice, which in turn avoids reliance on a kind of authorship situation. I do not track the evolution of individualistic character in a playwright’s career—though that were an interesting exercise—and I hold that it can show up in an author, like Jonson, typically averse to it, as well as in collaborations, or in plays that might be collaborations, or in collaborations the shares in which remain uncertain. Sometimes collaboration can muddle characterization, as it can disrupt plot, versification style, mood, or any element of dramaturgy. But sometimes a character’s personality is drawn with sufficient integrity, continuity, and vividness to show through no matter who the author is or how many there are.

Personality can also sometimes show through, I submit, despite textual vagaries, but here we must pause. My project would seem to call for some positioning on the nature of play-texts, for it is in literary text, not in theatrical performance, that I locate the entity I’m searching for. While recognizing it as controversial, I am influenced by the argument of Lukas Erne as to the literary nature of printed plays. For Erne, shorter, bad-quarto versions of plays like Hamlet are probably much closer to what an audience encountered in the theater than the longer versions, which were published in order to be read. Whatever our judgment of the bad quarto texts, and whatever the players actually used as scripts, to me, Erne helps validate approaching the plays as literature, with literary character capable of being a feature of them. As Erne has it, with Hamlet the heightened structural complexities in the long texts thus invite us to inquire into a character who conveys a strong sense of interiority and psychological complexity.[17]

But then, is this complexity negated if the longer texts disagree with each other, such that a coherent sense of Hamlet’s personality is precluded? Many scholars would have it so, and one remarkably confident attestation appears in James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, a book I otherwise cherish. Shapiro proclaims that Hamlet’s two long versions develop different Hamlets, the Folio text being a sanitized, less morally conflicted revision of Q2. Mistakenly acclimated to a cobbled-together blended text, We’re left with a Hamlet who is confused—but not the confusion Shakespeare intended. But since help from separate-text editions is on the way, In a generation or two, Shapiro predicts, "only scholars interested in the history of the play’s reception will still be reading a conflated Hamlet. Hamlet’s troublesome all occasions" soliloquy in IV.iv, the fullest block of Q2 text absent from the Folio, gives Shapiro his prime evidence: the Prince’s self-condemnation for his unlikeness to Fortinbras’ army, off to their graves like beds over a trifling cause, strains the credibility of revenge so much that Shakespeare chose to strike it, losing a complex Prince to gain a serviceable revenge plot.[18]

But to me Shapiro seems a bit too certain about the two-Hamlets thesis. My own 2006 study on religious controversy in Hamlet, positing Hamlet as a Catholic-minded person living in a world governed by the rules of Calvinistic Protestantism, until Act V when he capitulates, would imply a much different possibility. The all occasions speech reprising the sentiment and situation of the Hecuba speech, the Nero speech, and the prayer-scene speech, with the gap escalating, in obviousness and absurdity, between Hamlet’s earnestness to accomplish meaningful, noble revenge and the existential and practical impossibility for such accomplishment, the Prince’s final Q2 soliloquy contributes to the theme of redundancy and preemption, but is not necessary for it. The chasm between Hamlet’s high aspiration and his claustrophobic predicament yawns throughout Acts I–IV, only made more of itself by what happens, most blatantly with the killing of Polonius, but in everything that unfolds. This includes all occasions, which is especially similar to Hecuba (at the close of II.ii), as Hamlet in each place measures his failure to enact something grand, he having a grand cause, against the grand (in his valuation) displays of those with no real cause at all. Though all occasions allows a fuller diagnosis, removing it hardly un-problematizes Hamlet, and if he disturbs us in all occasions, I do not think it is in a different vein than in previous utterances. Nor does the removal of all occasions make the changed Hamlet of Act V any less changed or smooth the rough edges there. Depriving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of shriving time after contriving their murder is retained in the Folio, and Hamlet’s self-justification, for that and for revenge, protesting (overprotesting?) perfect conscience, is not made more comprehensible or laudable by a few extra Folio lines on damnation for not revenging and of apologetics toward Laertes.[19] Chapter 1 discussing the play only to set off my argument on Othello, Hamlet’s personality is not this book’s concern, though I’ll vouchsafe a few words on it. But for now I contend that an unstable text does not necessarily cancel individualistic characterization. In fact, if we can discern a personality coming across even through different versions of a play, this bolsters my claim all the more. With Othello and Bussy D’Ambois, for example, we will note certain differences between texts, but as with Hamlet, in my reading variants often further clarify rather than obfuscate character.

Thus endeavoring to bring out how individualistic character in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama occurs more frequently than has been thought, I also want to stipulate that I am not suggesting any limits to it by the parameters I’ve set in order to keep these chapters manageable. Of these, three deserve mention. First, while I restrict myself to the genres I feel are likeliest to contain it, I am not denying that individualistic character can obtain in comedy or romance. Though Janet Adelman’s 1973 distinction still seems authoritative on comic symbolism versus tragic psychology in characterization—in general, comedy demands that we not speculate unduly about character[20] —I do not judge inconceivable that comic or romance characters might be fashioned individualistically, and by incorporating tragicomedy in my project I imply as much. Second, apart from some use of Medea and Phaedra as models for the principles in chapter 2, I do not examine female characters. Such would require sallying into the mighty problem of whether and how a male Renaissance playwright could or would try to make the imaginative leap into a female psychology. My instincts, and my experience thinking about the Duchess of Malfi, Cleopatra, Beatrice Joanna, and any number of others, propose to me that female characters can be drawn with personality, and elsewhere I’ve treated The Double Marriage’s Juliana and Martia as such.[21] But to build the case is beyond this book’s scope. Third, it may be wondered why some of the usual suspects do not receive their due. Not only shall Hamlet get short shrift, but Macbeth and Lear won’t visit us, and neither will any personae of Middleton, though they were fine candidates. When I meet a study disclaiming comprehensiveness on something fascinating to me, I struggle with impatience, for, why not try to be comprehensive? But the whole thrust of my argument being the open possibility of individualistic character, I’ll forgive myself such a disclaimer. I hope future research will vindicate my belief that this is an inexhaustible mine for discovery. There are many more characters to find, and many more things to say about the characters we have found.

Finally, I want to venture that, if my approach to individualistic character seems philosophically or psychologically vague or noncommittal, this too goes to my intention—my darker purpose, perhaps. I do not have a people are all the same in their special-ness sermon to preach here, but a corollary of this book is that while Renaissance dramatists portrayed personality only intermittently, and with much different assumptions than our own about how to do so, we should be hesitant to congratulate ourselves for our modern science of the mind. A few years back a New Yorker article on psychiatric pharmacology and the ambiguities of diagnosing behavioral disorders had this to conclude:

Depressed patients in psychotherapy do no better or worse than depressed patients on medication. There is little evidence to support the assumption that supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes. What a load of evidence does seem to suggest is that care works for some of the people some of the time, and it doesn’t much matter what sort of care it is. Patients believe that they are being cared for by someone who will make them feel better; therefore, they feel better.[22]

The human mind tends stubbornly to assert itself against generalization and categorizing. It is a tendency that sometimes Shakespeare and his contemporaries bent themselves to depict.

Notes

1. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1920), 191, 194, 187. Bradley was corroborated, though guardedly, by J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Reappraisals Examined (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), 1–10, 97–110; Leo Kirschbaum, Character and Characterization in Shakespeare (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), 1–6, 145–58.

2. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 5, 1–17; Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus Theory (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 6–11; Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27; Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–41. Also much different from my approach are studies nominally on Shakespearean character that ahistorically use it to test principles of psychology; see, for example, Bernard J. Paris, Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and Roman Plays (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1991); Piotr Sadowski, Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare’s Mature Tragedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).

3. Harry Berger, Jr. Discourses and Psychoanalysis, in Making Trifles of Terrors, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 220–21.

4. Forum: Is There Character after Theory?, ed. Raphael Falco, Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 21–74. Falco himself says, Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic texts support a determination of character, and, more to the point, of character criticism (23), but the essays following are decidedly against him; see esp. Alan Sinfield, From Bradley to Cultural Materialism, 29. Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and from the Stage, ed. Yu Jin Ko and Michael W. Shurgot (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). See Ko, Introduction, 11. Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2009). See Camille Slights, "When Is a Bastard Not a Bastard: Character and Conscience in King John," 214. For general remarks on the issue of character criticism see Introduction, 1–18.

5. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990), 98–104 (section on Personality in Part II, The Development of the Individual). Burckhardt’s omission of Renaissance philosophy is addressed by Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963), 1–6, 140–45. For a thoughtful critique but ratification and expansion of Burckhardt see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–54, 73–81. See also the general remarks on the Renaissance shift in subjectivity, toward an enhanced sense that the world within was more real than the world outside, by Anthony Low, Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), x, ix–xiii, 183–202.

6. John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004), 15, 1–20; Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1–26. Strier puts it effectively: Obviously there have always been individuals, but there has not always been individualism—an ideology that placed a value on distinctiveness and personality (4). Burckhardtian individualism for all its supposed shortcomings has proven tenacious, and has been applied in a bevy of instructive and constructive ways. For an interesting example, see the account of Nashe’s authorship situation in Stephen S. Hilliard, The Singularity of Thomas Nashe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 3. For a twist on capitalistic individualism, finding community in economic self-interest but also the individuating of Theophrastan economic types as they navigate it, see Jill Phillips Ingram, Idioms of Self-Interest: Credit, Identity, and Property in English Renaissance Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25–26, 99–115 (on Merchant of Venice). Though attributed to the advent of print rather than a change in subjectivity, individualism also seems substantiated by Meredith Anne Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–18. See also the remarks on how in late medieval Europe, Independence and self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized, in Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 15–16.

7. Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3, 1–31; see also Fowler, Shylock’s Virtual Injuries, in Forum, 56–64. Fowler’s approach is somewhat anticipated by Robert Weimann, Society and the Individual in Shakespeare’s Conception of Character, Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 23–31. However, Weimann is also laying the groundwork here for his emphases on the performative; see, for example, his The Actor-Character in ‘Secretly Open’ Action: Doubly Encoded Personation on Shakespeare’s Stage, in Shakespeare and Character, 177–93.

8. J. Leeds Barroll, Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 22–66.

9. See, for example, E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 4–29; Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 3–34; Ruth Lunney, Rewriting the Narrative of Dramatic Character, or, Not ‘Shakespearean’ but ‘Debatable’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 66–85.

10. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 68–87, 169–70.

11. Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988), 19, 21, 9–21.

12. Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 33, 36.

13. Richard Levin, Protesting Too Much in Shakespeare and Elsewhere, and the Invention/Construction of the Mind, English Literary Renaissance 37 (2007): 337–59.

14. Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 233.

15. Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 11, 1–18; for personality, 1. See also Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 325–407 (subjectivity), xiv–xv (personality).

16. Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestrorium, in Boethius, trans. S. J. Tester et al. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classics, 1973), III.1–29, 84–87. For a representative etymological account of persona, character, and personnage, see Andre G. Bourassa, Personnage: History, Philology, Performance, in Shakespeare and Character, 83–97.

17. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 236, 192–244, esp. 234–37.

18. James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 319, 303–20.

19. For reference see The Three Text Hamlet, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New York: AMS, 1991), 188–90 (Q2’s all occasions), 246–49 (Q2 and Folio, V.ii). See John Curran, Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency: Not To Be (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 146–50.

20. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 6, 3–11.

21. John Curran, Declamation and Character in the Fletcher-Massinger Plays, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 23 (2010): 94–96, 106–08.

22. Louis Menand, Head Case: Can Psychiatry be a Science?, New Yorker (March 1, 2010): 71, 68–74.

Chapter 1

Stock Types?

We will begin by asking whether dramatists were at all capable of thinking of their personae as individuals. Did their education or practice make them likely to invent characters that were other than members of identifiable types? Perhaps even if they were capable, the all-important principle of decorum would have made them unwilling to imagine their creations as individuals, as a matter of habit or as a matter of following the rules. As G. M. Pinciss argues, following M. C. Bradbrook, the ancient and ubiquitous law of decorum dictated that working with stereotypes or stock figures would have been seen as both the right and the necessary approach; Renaissance playwrights had to create figures who are more than abstractions . . . but who are less than completely defined individuals. Building character on the basis of widely accepted types provided the playwright with an essential shortcut for establishing the general shape and dimensions of his creations.[1] But more recently, Aaron Kunin has gone much further and claimed that Renaissance dramatists had no choice, because of the intrinsic nature of character itself, but to fashion their personae as types: he defines character as a formal device that collects every example of a kind of person. In the process of collection, the moral and literary senses of character dovetail: a character inevitably posits an ideal.[2] While Kunin seems a bit extreme, there is much to lend him support in two important influences behind Renaissance drama, the interrelated traditions of rhetorical logic and Theophrastanism. But if we examine these influences and then turn to plays foregrounding the ambiguities of the general and the special, we shall encounter complication. In some cases, dramatists not only make an issue of categorization, troubling the assumptions we make in pigeon-holing people, but they also navigate the issue so that individualistic characters can emerge.

The Dialectic of Generals and Specials

That Renaissance writers were disinclined to conceptualize an individualized idea of characterization seems evidenced by the pioneering work of Joseph Hall. In his 1608 Characters of Virtues and Vices, modeled after Theophrastus and setting a significant Jacobean trend for Theophrastan sketches,[3] Hall pauses at his halfway point to explain that the two parts of his project involve different sorts of writing. At very least, the shift from virtues in the first part to vices in the second calls for a shift in tone: my style shall seem to some less grave, more satirical. Hall asks us not to get distracted by the humor in the descriptions of the vices, and to restrict our laughter to that of disdain (106). Entailed in this coaching of his reader, I think, is Hall’s awareness that his sketches of viciousness are more apt to be entertaining than those of virtue, and this is most likely because the vicious ones are more properly Theophrastan[4] —they paint more of a picture, offer more in the way of vividness and detail. The ancient master of morality, as Hall calls Theophrastus (90), had created, for Hall, a perfect genre for didacticism, in that it reveals through description all the beauty of virtue and ugliness of vice. Virtue would be loved, and vice hated, if only they could be seen. But into his apology for slipping into the satiric mode with the Vices, Hall encodes a sense that virtue is actually quite difficult to describe with any precision. Having closed his Characters of Virtues, he declares that they speak for themselves and need no further commentary, and that we shall like them better when enabled to contrast them with the deformities we are about to be shown with the Vices (106). It seems that we could still use some help envisioning the Virtues clearly, and that we shall be drawn to them most powerfully when we see what they are not. The definitions of what they are might well not grab us.

Indeed, each of the Virtues Characters tends to pile up statements about its exemplar that, while couched as descriptors of a person, sound more like general moral sententiae or loci communes. The Happy Man, for example, walks ever even, in the midway betwixt hopes and fears; resolved to fear nothing but God, to hope for nothing but that which he must have. . . . He is not so engaged to any earthly thing that they two cannot part on even terms (104–05). In the Virtues Characters we get eloquent riffs on the basic precepts—mostly those of Christian Stoicism[5] —that any man who wants to be good would try to internalize, but what we do not get much of is how a particular happy man might speak or think. We get no specific utterance or action or personal accoutrement to illustrate the concept, and we do not get any indication that a given virtuous man’s thoughts would or could extend outside the parameters dictated by the given governing principle. That is, not only would the thoughts of the Humble Man never violate the principle of humility, but they also seem incapable of applying the rules of humility to himself in any distinctive way. The countenance of the Faithful Man facing worldly trouble changes not, for he is not so sure he shall die, as that he shall be restored (94); the Valiant Man is so ballaced with wisdom, that he floats steadily in the midst of all tempests (96). Hall’s Virtues Characters, then, would seem to bear out Barroll’s observations about the effect Renaissance transcendentalism would have had on ideas of the person: since all humans aspire for the One, the Truth, individuals would be differentiated only by their kinds and degrees of failure to distinguish between sign and symbol.[6] Conversely, the more emphatically a person adhered to virtue, being able to see and conform to the Truth, the less she or he could be imagined as having a distinctive mindset. When crosses afflict the Patient Man, who knows the world for a mirage, he sees a divine hand, and so all things befall him alike (97); he is able to see what all humans should see. Virtue seems to collapse the person into what ought to be the universal standard, the original cast of the species homo.

Vice, however, seems to fare no better in offering prospects for individualization. In Hall, kinds and degrees of deviation from a transcendent norm do not really distinguish people from each other, so much as establish certain groups into which the satiric descriptions of the Characters firmly place their subjects. The Vices Characters, while at times just as precept-laden as the Virtues, are nevertheless punctuated with flourishes of scene-creation, as with the Malcontent: When his friend carves him the best morsel, he murmurs, ‘That it is a happy feast wherein each one may cut for himself’ (111). In a similar vein we get a picture of how the Ambitious might register ambition through observable behavior:

When his country friend comes to visit him, he carries him up to the awful presence: and now, in his sight, crowding nearer to the chair of state, desires to be looked on, desires to be spoken to by the greatest; and studies how to offer an occasion, lest he should seem unknown, unregarded; and if any gesture of the least grace fall happily upon him, he looks back upon his friend, lest he should carelessly let it pass without a note: and what he wanteth in sense he supplies in history. (122)

Such flourishes, however, are in a way just as void of particularistic characterization as the sententiae of the Virtues. Just as sententiae pile up in the Virtues, so in the Vices do detailed images and scenes accumulate only to embroider, not to differentiate—to add copiousness to the same theme, never to vary it.[7] Just as any individualistic sense of the Happy Man gets lost in the precepts expressing an ideal, any individualistic sense of the Vainglorious gets lost in the associations surrounding a stereotype. We imagine him only insofar as he is reconfirmed in membership in his group. At times in the Vices Characters—as when the Vainglorious, summarized as being ever on the stage, is compared to a Spanish soldier on an Italian theatre (119)—their matrix of stereotyping comes to the fore, but it is always there. The Vices Characters operate on a kind of reverse-mode of medieval realist philosophy, wherein species are not only real, existing outside the mind, but their existence is more real than that of the individuals they encompass. Whatever the Vainglorious does or says proves him a vainglorious man. No matter how egregious his behavior or how easily we can picture it, it serves only to help define the category of vainglorious men.

The generalizing endemic in Hall holds pretty consistently in other noteworthy Theophrastan Characters of the period. As with Hall, Characters deal exclusively in the general, asserting it either through precept or through stereotype. For Nicholas Breton’s Characters upon Essaies, wherein he collected thoughts on such concepts as Wisdom, Peace, and Truth, charactering these concepts meant merely attaching personal pronouns to them; consequently, his descriptions of kinds of worthies in The Good and the Badde, though ostensibly treating different castes of people, classified mostly by vocation, are not descriptions at all but strings of precepts, and of metaphors that illuminate only precepts. A Wanton Woman is the figure of Imperfection, as Her pleasures are fansies, her studies fashions, her delight colours and her wealth her cloathes; her foil is A Quiet Woman, who is like a still winde, and skorns fortune and loues vertue.[8] Whereas Breton echoes the precept-ridden generalizing of Hall’s Virtues, the so-called Overburian Characters, significantly by and for dramatists,[9] develop the more vivid and detailed but stereotyped satire of Hall’s Vices. A representative of a group is laid before us, and while the details provided about a subject are often striking (or obscure, when they refer closely to contemporary life), and while the group to which a subject belongs is often defined with remarkable narrowness (A Fantastic Inns of Court Man; A Drunken Dutchman Resident in England), the subject has no existence apart from the group. That Theophrastanism opposes particularity also obtains in John Stephens’s Characters, which mixes precepts (Contented Man) and stereotypes (Wrangling Welsh Client).[10] It would seem, then, that a Theophrastan strain in the drama would definitively impede an individualistic characterization. Indeed, arguing the essentially Theophrastan tenor of all dramatic character until portrayed onstage, Leanore Lieblein puts it that "However bizarre, eccentric, or seemingly sui generis, or on the contrary however rooted in a specific social context, the Theophrastan Character remains a hypothesis."[11]

Lieblein’s statement might even more incisively convey her point if she used the term thesis instead, for in the tradition of rhetorical logic, a thesis was an indefinite and general question,