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The anatomy of cognition: thinking moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
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The anatomy of cognition: thinking moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
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THE ANATOMY OF COGNITION: THINKING MOMENTS IN SPENSER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON by Steven Aaron Minas A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2022 Copyright 2022 Steven Aaron Minas ii “There was, in truth, an energy in the age, an energy of thinking” -S. T. Coleridge (“On Dramatic Poetry”) iii Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance of several important individuals. I would like to thank Heather James for inspiring this project. Her suggestions and conversation have achieved their own form of metamorphosis in the following pages. Emily Anderson has been a guiding light throughout. No one could ask for a more supportive, encouraging, and dedicated mentor. In her understanding of the relationship between art and thinking, Susanna Berger has been an invaluable interlocutor. I especially appreciate her assistance in contextualizing some of my arguments. As my advisor and chair, I cannot fully thank Rebecca Lemon for everything that she has given to me and this project. Not only has she meticulously engaged with my work at every stage, but also allowed me to pursue my own paths in realizing it. Rebecca is a model of erudition and generosity that I hope to emulate one day. I would also like to thank my mother for opening her desert home to my family while I finished this project. The quietude and natural beauty afforded me much pleasure, no doubt aiding in the enjoyment of the writing process. To my wife, Catherine, I owe everything. Without her encouragement and poetic sensibility this book (and my life) would be much the poorer. And to our son, Gianluca, I thank him for infusing everything with joy and passion. His example is our future. iv Table of Contents Epigraph…………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iii List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………………….....v Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Prologue: The Question of Style: From Rhetoric to Thinking………………………………......vii Introduction: What is Called Thinking in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton?...............................1 Section I: Prooimion: On Philosophical Thinking; or, The Philosophical Poem from Parmenides to Spenser…………………………………………..35 Chapter 1: Spenser’s Philosophical Song: Mutable Thinking in The Faerie Queene…………...41 Section II: Prooimion: On Representational Thinking: The Soliloquist and The Inserter…………………………………………………………………………………….……..86 Chapter 2: Exceptional Thinking in Macbeth and Richard III: A Theory of Soliloquy…………90 Chapter 3: The Shakespearean Aside: The Grammar of Thinking in The Winter’s Tale………125 Section III: Prooimion: On Poetic Thinking and the Freedom of the Poet……………………………………………………………………………………………..155 Chapter 4: “The Heat of Milton’s mind”: Allusion as a Mode of Thinking in Paradise Lost….158 Epilogue: Sidney’s Energia and Thinking Beyond the Renaissance…………………………..187 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………210 v List of Figures 1. “Allegory of Grammar and Style,” from Antoine Furetière’s Nouvelle Allegorique ou Histoire des Derniers Trobules au Rouyaume D’Eloquence, 1658……………………..vii vi Abstract The Anatomy of Cognition: Thinking Moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton refines the notion of thinking in relationship to literature and human knowledge more generally. By identifying three modes of what I call “literary thinking” in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, I argue that literature provides an alternative to psychological and philosophical definitions of thinking, which are traditionally based on notions of logic, reason, judgment, and understanding. While not antithetical these modes of thinking, literary thinking, however, tends to be elliptical, counterfactual, emotional, playful, and ultimately subjunctive. Its various modes offer connotative possibilities rather than denotative answers to what it means to be human. But just as important as providing a taxonomy and genealogy for understanding literary thinking, I make the claim that literature affords in these modal instances a means of expanding what Bernard Williams calls “ethical consciousness.” Moving the question of thinking from its traditional place in epistemology and psychology to literary poiesis (making), I return thinking to its ethical context; that is, a means of changing the world. vii Prologue: The Question of Style: From Rhetoric to Thinking Figure 1. “Allegory of Grammar and Style,” from Antoine Furetière’s Nouvelle Allegorique ou Histoire des Derniers Trobules au Rouyaume D’Eloquence, 1658. viii I. “No art at all”: The Rise of Expressiveness Polonius: I will be brief: your noble son is mad. Mad call I it, for to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad? But let that go. Queen: More matter with less art. Polonius: Madam, I swear I use no art at all. (2.2.91-96, Hamlet) 1 Despite his claim to brevity and to “no art at all,” Polonius cannot help but repeat “mad” four times in as many lines. But Gertrude, recognizing Polonius’s inability to get to the point, responds by emphasizing “matter” over “art,” and in doing so undercuts Polonius’s verbose speech. This brief exchange between two Elizabethan dramatic characters highlights not only a stylistic difference, but also the emergence of a personal and meditative style that came to dominate much seventeenth-century English poetry and prose. While Gertrude’s brief remark to Polonius does not provide an elaborate example of the new style, it does suggest what was at stake in the shift: matter or things over art. 2 The emergence of this new, meditative style 1 Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare Second Series), ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). All references to Hamlet are from this edition unless otherwise noted. 2 One of the causes of this stylistic shift, which I briefly mention below, is Peter Ramus’s prioritizing or “heightening” of dialectic (i.e., logic) over rhetoric, which ultimately reshaped the “art of thinking.” In his attempt to reduce Aristotle’s logical redundancies, Ramus relegated invention (pars inveniendi) and disposition (pars iudicandi) to dialectic, effectively making invention not only the finding of topics or arguments to speak well, but also to think well. Ramus’s reform, in other words, meant that “finding what to say includes, overlaps, is the same as, finding how to say it” (380). Such a shift meant that poetic imagery became a matter of logical cause, the ends driving the means. Poetic decisions (or thinking) related to imagery were thus functional rather than decorative or ornamental. Metaphysical imagery was more complex and “dense” than earlier imagery because it built its imagery out of logical arguments, laying one image down after another, like thinking. See Rosemond Tuve, “Imagery and Logic: Ramus and Metaphysical Poetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 3, no. 4 (1942). See also Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and John Guillory, “Marlowe, Ramus, and the Reformation of Philosophy,” ELH 81, no.3 (2014): 693-732. ix demonstrated a fragmented or analytic “process of thinking” that eschewed “premeditated harmonies” and “carefully turned phrases and clauses.” 3 The meditative style was not a style conceived in advance and arranged systematically around such formal elaborations as parallelism, alliteration, repetition or prolixity, but a style that “depicted the actual process of discovery.” In this process of discovery, “the act of invention is inherent in the work itself.” 4 Despite its tendency to brevity, difficulty, and disjunctiveness, the emergent style of invention allowed writers to focus on expressiveness. “The motions of the soul, not their states of rest,” Morris W. Croll once stated, “had become the themes of art.” 5 Shakespeare, in his later work, was a master of the expressive style. What was arguably initiated in Hamlet reaches fruition in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, stylistically two of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. The Winter’s Tale, in particular, provides a case study in expressiveness. Leontes’ unprovoked outburst at seeing Hermione and Polixenes intimately talking, for example, illustrates Shakespeare’s concern for “matter” (what Leontes’ calls “affection” [1.2.138]) rather than art, for the “process of thought” rather than “carefully turned phrases and clauses.” 6 Shakespeare, in other words, does not belabor or foreground the thought of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale like he does Othello. In Othello, Iago’s “motiveless Malignity” provides the causal buildup of Othello’s jealousy. 7 Like Richard III, Iago is a master strategist. Through aside and 3 John M. Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and Certitude in Milton and His Near-Contemporaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 26. 4 Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth, 105. 5 Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1966), 208. 6 “Affection” is one of the most discussed words in all of Shakespeare. Its meaning in Elizabethan England ranged from “gentle feeling” and “liking” to “irrational behavior” and “a person’s disposition.” See Hallett Smith, “Leontes’ Affectio,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1963); Maurice Hunt, “Leontes’ ‘Affection’ and Renaissance ‘Intention’: Winter’s Tale I.ii.135-146,” Studies in English, New Series 4 (1983); and Laurence Wright, “When does the tragic-comic disruption start?: The Winter’s Tale and Leontes’ ‘affection,’” English Studies 70, no.3 (1989). 7 Samuel T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2:315. x soliloquy he plots step-by-step how to ensnare Othello. Consequently, Othello’s suspicion does not manifest itself expressively—that is, naturally or intuitively—but instead develops through deception and lies, i.e., Iago’s art. It takes over three Acts for Othello to fully achieve what could be called a “crisis of knowledge”: Othello: What dost thou think? […] Show me thy thought[!] […] Iago: Why then I think Cassio’s an honest man. Othello: Nay, yet there’s more in this: I prithee speak to me, as to thy thinkings, As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words. (3.3.107-136) 8 As the interrogative mood of this exchange as well as its focus on “thinking” and knowledge clearly illustrate, Othello does not “know” jealousy himself. Jealousy is not natural to Othello but thrust upon him by the machinations of another. His speech is inquisitive and explorative, not expressive of latent feelings. Everything that has led to this moment has been plotted by Iago, which is why Othello desires “more” from him. Representation in Othello is thus causal, logical, and necessary, the result of calculated rhetoric or mimetic art. But in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare represents emotion and thought in a completely new form. Leontes’ crisis of knowledge is immediate. It is expressed rather than plotted. Thinking or feeling, which are the same thing in the dramatic representation of internal states, manifests as plot in The Winter’s Tale. At only 109 lines into the play, we get: Leontes: [aside] Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, But not for joy, not joy. This entertainment 8 Othello (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series), ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). xi May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent—’t may, I grant— But to the paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practiced smiles As in a looking-glass. (1.2.109-118) 9 As Chapter III argues, there is nothing quite like these lines in Shakespeare. 10 Not only do they insert themselves “publicly” through an aside, but they also come out of nowhere. Except for the brief remark several lines earlier, “At my request he would not” (1.2.85), which identifies Leontes’ growing realization that perhaps Hermione possesses some intimate sway with Polixenes, there has been no indication of jealousy. If anything, Shakespeare prepares the audience for a different sort of play. But as the above lines and the subsequent exchange with his son, Mamillius, demonstrate, there is something rotten in Sicilia. Leontes’ outburst reveals a causa sui (self-generating) jealousy that is not simply dramatic, but expressive. His repetitive (“too hot, too hot” and “not for joy, not joy”), alliterative (“paddling palms,” “pinching,” “practiced”) and confused language is active rather than passive, personal rather than controlled. In these lines, Shakespeare substitutes Leontes’s “tremor cortis,” or the active expression of jealousy that discovers itself in the act of invention, for Othello’s “Soft you, a word or two before you go” (5.2.336), which identifies a causal explanation that relies on past events to explain itself (sine qua non). Representational kinesis rather than representational mimesis has become the modus operandi of this particular art. The stylistic shift in Shakespeare’s late plays, which can also be observed in other works of the period ranging from Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580/1595) and John Donne’s Elegies 9 The Winter’s Tale (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series), ed. John Pitcher (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 10 Although these lines do not compare in difficulty to the lines that follow (1.2.138ff.), they nevertheless mark the unexpected emergence of a “thinking style.” xii (ca.1590-1612) to Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642) and René Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641), has been identified by various critics as “anti-Ciceronian,” “Senecan,” “Attic,” “Metaphysical,” “Mannerist,” as well as “Baroque.” All of the these descriptors identify a self-conscious rejection of the ornamental, controlled, and periodic style of Cicero and the general rhetorical tradition of late-Medieval and Renaissance humanism. 11 While this is observable in many literary works of the period, such a general statement needs qualification. Specifically, the term “style” requires brief explication before moving to a definition of what I will be calling for reasons enumerated below, the “thinking style.” 12 II. On Style: Dominant and Emergent Apart from the term “form,” with which it is closely related, there is perhaps no more difficult, contested, and “treacherous” term in literary studies than style. 13 Its long history, common usage, and wide applicability makes it a difficult term to define succinctly. 14 Despite these descriptive challenges, style remained in the early modern period closely related to rhetoric and the formal structure of a work of art. 15 It commonly referred, as it still does today, to “the way something is 11 See Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose” in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 207. For the influence of the scientific revolution on this stylistic shift, see Steadman, “‘New Philosophy’ and Seventeenth-Century Style,” in The Hill and the Labyrinth. 12 The only use of the phrase “thinking style” that I have come across appears as “denkstil” (thought style) in the work of the philosopher of science Ludwig Fleck. Fleck’s notion of “thought style,” which appears in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; originally published in 1935), had a deep impact on Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), specifically on Kuhn’s use of the word “paradigm,” which could easily be translated as a term meaning “scientific style” or “discourse style.” See Babette Babich, “From Fleck’s Denkstil to Kuhn’s Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes and Incommensurability,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17, no. 1 (2003). 13 Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700 (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1955), 6. 14 After Aristotle’s Poetics, the first extant treatment of style was Demetrius’s On Style (2 nd c. BC), which introduced the four styles (grand, elegant, plain, forceful) to rhetorical discourse. 15 Nancy L. Christiansen, Figuring Style: The Legacy of Renaissance Rhetoric (University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 36. xiii done or made: not the what, but the how; not the method, but the manner.” 16 According to George Puttenham, for example, “style is a constant and continual phrase or tenor of speaking and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of [the work of art] and not properly to any piece or member of a tale, but is of words, speeches, and sentences together a certain contrived form and quality, many times natural to the writer, many times his peculiar by selection and art.” Style, in other words, is not just a “few words or sentences,” but the entire work, which reveals the personality or mind (mentis character) of the writer. 17 In both rhetorical and poetic theory, style can also denote “levels of discourse correlative to the speaker, audience, subject matter and the characters and actions represented.” In this last sense, style was often identified with ornament and decorum. Both characteristics often determined “levels of style” (genera discendi), which “were closely linked with literary genre and social hierarchy.” 18 Style provided a sort of “horizon of expectation” not only for the author, but for the reader as well. 19 In its broader, cultural sense, which is where style opens the door to the generalizations discussed below, style could also be said to “define communities of people who dress and read similar books, as well as communities that make similar poems.” 20 Style reflects, in this sense, 16 Jeff Dolven, “Style,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene et al (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1369. In Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dolven meditates on the differences between early modern and contemporary notions of style through the work of Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara. 17 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Corenll University Press, 2007), 233. See also Richard Sherry’s chapter on “Elocution” in A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Gainesville: Scholar’s Facsimile and Reprints, 1961). Puttenham echoes Sherry’s observation that “the mighte and power of eloquucion consisteth in words considered by them selues, and when they be ioyned together. Apt words by searching muste be founde oute, and after by diligence conueniently coupled. For there is a garnyshynge, euen when they be pure and fine by them selues, and an other, whe[n] they be ioyned together” (18). For an overview of Renaissance rhetoric and style books, see George Miller’s thorough “Stylistic Rhetoric and the Analysis of Style: An Annotated Bibliography,” Style 14, no. 2 (1980): 75-102. 18 John M. Steadman, Redefining a Period Style: “Renaissance,” “Mannerist,” and “Baroque” in Literature (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1990), 3. 19 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 20 For a disciplinary parallel, see Fleck’s use of the term “Denk-Kollektiv” (“thought collective”) in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. xiv general artistic trends, interests, and habits. This makes style a cultural “syntax” that “expresses the way in which a society feels, responds, thinks, communicates, dreams, escapes.” As Hamlet noted to the players, style can “hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature” (3.2.21-22). It reflects the “varying modes of consciousness in different eras.” 21 Traditionally, this description of style falls under what scholars call a period’s “world view” (Weltanschauung). 22 But it is this last sense of style as analogy or semblance between art and the world that the personal and expressive style opposes. 23 In the early modern period, style (elocutio, but also lexis, hermeneia) manifested itself in several dominant but different stages, which were traced by Wylie Sypher in his influential study, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400-1700 (1955). 24 Sypher, however, like many historians of his generation, was working under an old paradigm that tended to synthesize rather than particularize its deep learning. 25 One reason for the generalizations across the arts was the interpretive method adopted by Sypher. To treat various styles within a single period such as the early modern, Sypher appropriated terminology from art history for use in his analysis of literature, calling such a venture analogical 21 Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style, 16-17. 22 For a classic account that has received significant criticism for its narrow and misleading argument, see E. M. W. Tillyard’s, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (New York: Vintage Press, 1959). See also Arthur Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of and Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936). 23 Many scholars attribute the analogical breakdown (micro/macro) and subsequent stylistic shift to the influence of the scientific revolution. Michel Foucault, for example, distinguishes in the early modern period between two epistemes: “semblance” (similitude) and “representation.” Semblance dominates up to the sixteenth century as the “world view.” In the shift to representation, however, language no longer signals a correspondence but “enter[s] a period of transparency and neutrality.” See Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970). 24 For the classical definition of elocution (i.e., “the adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the matter devised” [Rhetorica Ad Herennium 1.2.3]) and the general canons of rhetoric (e.g., inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio) see Cicero’s De Inventione and De Oratore, Rhetorica ad Herennium (attributed to Cicero and the most widely read classical rhetorical text of the Renaissance), and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. See also Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1553). 25 Sypher’s analogical “verification,” which could be termed “historical syncretism,” annuls distinctions so that general patterns and “styles” emerge. xv “rapproachment,” hence the terms “Renaissance,” “Mannerism,” “Baroque,” and “late-Baroque,” none of which originated in the literature of the period and for that reason have never fit well (except for perhaps Renaissance) in literary studies despite the attempt by some to adopt their use. 26 Granted, Sypher was discussing art, architecture, music, as well as literature, but the broad descriptive terms—terms, I should add, that are still somewhat ubiquitous—do not always correspond to the subtleties of individual difference across literary works, especially when those works adopt various generic forms. The shift from an ornamental rhetoric (renaissance) to a meditative and personal style (baroque), in other words, was not just a singular, monolithic shift across all the arts, but instead a diffusive shift, affecting some in different ways and at different times than others. As mentioned above, the literary critical terms that are more specific and thus congenial to the changes in general style of the period include “metaphysical,” “wit,” “anti-Ciceronian,” “Attic,” “Senecan,” and “meditative” as well as “concettismo” (conceitism), “conceptismo,” and “culteranismo” (Gongorismo). 27 These terms isolate features of literary works at the level of 26 Although applied to the literature as well as the art and architecture of the period (roughly 1350-1600, depending on language and country), “Renaissance” did not become a stylistic (or even period) term until 1855, when Jules Michelet coined it in Histoire de France. Burckhardt later appropriated it and made it famous in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The term “Baroque” has an ambiguous etymology. In his seminal study, Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966; originally published in 1888), Heinrich Wölfflin notes how the term could derive from several different words including “barocco, with its suggestion of ‘absurd,’” as well as from the Portuguese “baroque,” meaning “rough-shaped pearl.” Wölfflin also notes the close affiliation in modern usage of baroque with “bizarre,” “ridiculous,” and “abnormality” (23). René Wellek, however, notes the near absence of “baroque” as an adjective describing literature before 1914. See “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 73. 27 On these and related terms such as “fragmentary,” “hyperbole,” “excess,” “personal,” and “expressive,” see Croll (1966), Steadman (1984, 1990), Praz (1958), Wellek (1963), Martz (1991), as well as Herbert Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), Marjorie Hope Nicholson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the ‘New Science’ on Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1950); Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Lyric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); and Barbara Kiefer Lewalksi, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). xvi diction, syntax, figuration, and imagery. They mediate structure, argument, tone, and style. As nomenclatures derived mainly from literature itself, they provide descriptors to identify development and changes within the historical continuum of literature. 28 They capture, in other words, an “emergent” element in culture. “In authentic historical analysis,” Raymond Williams argued, “it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance.” 29 For Williams, what resides “within and beyond” the dominant culture are “residual” and “emergent” elements, what for the sake of the following argument will be called “styles.” The former, “residual” (an element similar to the archaic), “has been effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process, not only and often at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.” 30 The latter, “emergent,” however, identifies “new meanings and values, new practices, [and] new relationships [that are] alternative or oppositional to the For studies of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian styles mentioned above see Mario Praz, Studi Sul Concettismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1946; reprinted Milan: Aesthetica, 2002); Frank Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); T. E. May, Wit of the Golden Age: Articles on Spanish Literature (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986); Steadman, Redefining Period Styles (1990); and Oliver J. Noble-Wood, A Tale Blazed Through Heaven: Imitation and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 28 John Dryden, for example, was one of the first (William of Drummond is frequently given first honor) to apply the term “metaphysic” to John Donne’s verse. And “wit” was a common term used in the period to discuss an author’s “originality,” “invention,” “conceit,” and even “mind” (Philip Sidney, for example, employs the term frequently in “A Defence of Poetry” [ca. 1580]). “Anti-Ciceronian” and “Senecan” are terms applied later, but both derive from within literature. Coleridge was one of the first to use “Seneca[n]” to describe works that were “strung together like beads, without any causation or progression” (See The Collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures 1818-1820 On Literature [Volume II], edited by R. A. Foakes [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 234.) “Meditative” carries religious overtones, and much work has been done on the relationship between religious practices such as prayer, confession, and avowal in connection with the poetry of which the term “meditative” has been applied. In his Arte of Divine Meditation (1606), for example, Joseph Hall adopts the term meditative for certain religious practices developed in St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1548), which poets like Richard Crashaw then modeled in their poetry. See Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, and Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Recently, David Marno has adopted Nicolas Malebranche’s notion of “attention” to argue that the religious poetry of Donne and others is a form of active prayer or “thinking.” See Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 29 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121. 30 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122. xvii dominant elements.” 31 What Williams’s taxonomy illustrates is that culture is not hegemonic or singular, but composed of processes (i.e., elements, styles) that are always changing, some functioning as tradition, others emerging as alternatives or opposition to the dominant. In the early modern period, one could argue that around 1600, Ciceronian was the dominant European style, with “Metaphysical,” “Wit,” “Meditative,” and “Attic” or “anti-Ciceronian” characterized as emergent. 32 Although emergent can be applied to any historical element or style characterized by “new meanings” and “practices,” in the early modern period it is especially helpful as a conceptual term to account for the broad explosion across poetry and prose of the new style, which could be analytical in Bacon and Descartes, meditative in Donne and Pascal, paratactic in Shakespeare, absurd and fantastic in Giambattista Marino, and transumptive in Milton. Emergent, in other words, identifies not only a single element or style within a culture, but also a coterie of similar counter-styles joined against a dominant style. 33 The allegorical frontispiece (see above, p. 3) to Antoine Furetière’s Nouvelle Allegorique ou Histoire des Derniers Trobules au Rouyaume D’Eloquence (1658), which depicts the Queen (Rhetoric) of the realm defending her “Academy” of “Eloquence,” captures the threat that the emergent styles (i.e., meditative and personal) posed to the Ciceronian tradition. Metaphors, Allegories, Descriptions, Puns, Exaggerations, Comparisons, Ironies, Antitheses, and other figures of style and thought threaten 31 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123-124. 32 One can already see in a work as early as Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus (1570) the movement away from a pure or strict Ciceronian style to a plain and “direct form of expression” (155). For an analysis of this shift, see P. Albert Duhamel, “The Ciceronianism of Gabriel Harvey,” Studies in Philology 49, no. 2 (1952). 33 The discussion of emergent style in relation to early modern art contains many parallels with the broad stylistic explosion in the early twentieth century known as Modernism. Modernism is a period term as well as a period style, but like Renaissance and Baroque it includes numerous emergent or counter-styles, including Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Vorticism, and the plain style in literature, and Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism etc. in the visual arts. In the mid-Forties, Modernism arguably became the dominant culture, with “pop culture” becoming emergent. xviii to overtake the traditional literary forms of Drama, Lyric, Sermon, History, and Moral Philosophy. 34 Furetière’s illustration provides a visual aid to understanding the complex interplay of styles during the early modern period. There was no single style, but instead a network of emergent styles surrounding and thus coming into contact with an established and ultimately fortified traditional style. In France, which is the location of the battlefield depicted in Furetière’s illustration, “The Academy” was able to hold off the emergent styles longer than any other European country. Although England saw a resurgence of Neo-Classicism after the Restoration (post-1660), the emergent styles of Shakespeare, Donne, Browne, and Milton (among others) had successfully infiltrated the traditional stylistic ranks. Much of John Dryden’s work, for example, especially his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), was an attempt to reconcile these various styles at a time when they could recognizably be identified as discrete and distinct; that is, residual, dominant, and residual. Recently, a rhetorical turn in early modern studies has taken notice of these emergent styles by demonstrating that even in the late sixteenth century, when eloquence was prized over expressiveness, there was grumblings of a “vulgar eloquence.” 35 Paula Blank, Jenny C. Mann, Carla Mazzio, Catherine Nicholson, and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, for example, have revealed that not only was the late sixteenth century much less rhetorically monochromatic than previously supposed, it was also a period that contained elements resistant to dominant stylistic norms. Identifying an “outlaw,” “eccentric,” “inarticulate,” “broken,” and “indecorous” style in many works of the period, they give new meaning and understanding to what constitutes a 34 J. A. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, xxxvi-xxxvii. 35 Sean Keilin, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). xix “period style.” 36 Where earlier terms such as baroque and even metaphysical functioned as large brushstrokes identifying trends and movements while excluding anything that did not fit, the descriptive terms of the “new rhetorical” school isolate textually identifiable moments of emergent styles. III. Thinking Style Despite the enlarged descriptive and conceptual vocabulary to account for the emergent styles, nothing has been put forward to bring the meditative, personal, and expressive styles back together under a working stylistic banner. In identifying critical and important differences, scholars have lost sight of the similarities, the joined sympathies and practices that draw these authors and their styles together. 37 Even as resistance to a dominant rhetorical style, these styles contain characteristics that align them with one another, especially stylistic elements that cross genres and disciplines. “Emergent,” as I suggested above, is an excellent conceptual term to account historically and culturally for these styles, but the term itself says nothing about their intrinsic nature; that is, what makes them emergent in the first place. For decades, at least in English studies, “metaphysical” seemed to work as a conceptual placeholder. Its descriptive focus on conceit, paradox, metaphor, and the fusion of thought and feeling—all of which 36 See Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996); Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University press, 2012); Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). For a more “bumptious, full-throated, and perhaps perverse” Renaissance, see also Richard Strier’s The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2. 37 As part of the need to reassess not only the canon but also important works of the past, what seemed necessary was to break down (or apart) the previous categories of meaning as well as value. But little constructive work on putting things back together in a more equitable and generous manner has been successfully attempted. Thinking, as I suggest throughout this study, is a rhizomatic (horizontal) as opposed to vertical term. It annuls transcendental (and logocentric) aspirations in favor of centrifugal movement. xx highlight the terms sparagmatic as opposed to orderly inflection—made it an excellent term to cover a rather large body of diverse, emergent literature. New Criticism’s dominance, moreover, for over forty years ensured that the term “metaphysical” and Donne’s lyric poetry in particular stayed at the forefront of any discussion of early modern style. But as mentioned above, much recent (as well as older) work has exposed the limitations of metaphysical and what it implies. 38 There were many emergent styles that were not metaphysical. In fact, metaphysical as a stylistic marker is extremely limiting. Outside of the lyric, for example, metaphysical poetry hardly seems possible. Metaphysical poetry’s reliance, for example, on compression, complex imagery, and what Johnson critically identified as “discors concordia,” renders it ill-suited to drama or the long poem in general, both of which are “slow” genres of narrative and time. 39 This means that few of the major poets of the seventeenth century were truly metaphysical. 40 Milton’s early works often falls under the label, but that is stretching the term to almost meaninglessness. And Shakespeare, whose work overlaps with that of Donne, hardly bears comparison due to generic as well as fundamental stylistic differences. What has been termed Shakespeare’s “late style” varies widely depending on the play, and within the play the scene, character, and speech. Shakespeare’s late style might exhibit certain stylistics traits (parataxis, ellipsis, repetition, obscurity, etc.) that identify it with the baroque, anti-Ciceronian, and even metaphysical style, but one of its greatest and most powerful features is it eclecticism. Shakespeare is at his most 38 Samuel Johnson arguably inaugurates the condemnation of “metaphysical” in his “Life of Cowley.” One of the earlier twentieth century studies to provide criticism (or qualification) of the term metaphysical was Joseph Mazzeo’s “A Critique of Some Modern Theories of Metaphysical Poetry,” Modern Philology 50, no. 2 (1952). 39 This description of drama and the long poem as “slow” does not exclude moments, as discussed above in relation to Leontes and The Winter’s Tale, of surprise, wonder, and linguistic dexterity, let alone metaphor, parataxis, ellipsis, and all the other “thinking” elements. 40 Donne and Richard Crashaw, for example, stylistically define what constitutes “metaphysical” while close cousins such as George Herbert and Henry Vaughan can be more accurately described as “devotional” poets. Jonson, Herrick, Wroth, Milton, Marvell, Cavendish, Hutchinson, and Dryden (who can only be included conditionally due to chronology) should not be included under the label metaphysical poets. xxi playful in his last works, which means that something is occurring in the plays—aesthetically, cognitively, and mimetically—that the terms mentioned above do not adequately cover. So how do we talk about these emergent, radical, and in many instances deeply personal styles of writing that flaunt their expressive individualism without falling into the trap of reductive classification? Or worse, how do we avoid distorting these authors and their works as if they were a single expression of the sprit of the age? I propose that one way is through the term “thinking,” which accounts for a much greater variety of stylistic expression than the terms mentioned above. While the term thinking no doubt relates to the entire mental sphere of conscious or sentient, rational beings, when it comes to art and its description, thinking carries different connotations that are specific to certain kinds of activity, modes of analysis, as well as styles. Thinking, in other words, is not simply the activity of the intellect, but a discriminable dimension of the artwork itself. Thinking is therefore central to representation, argument, and poiesis. It denotes a wide variety of activities or processes that oppose ornament, decorum, and for the most part method, all of which derive from external constraints rather than individual expression. In the thinking style, as mentioned above, “the act of invention is inherent in the work itself.” One does not go outside the work to “find” material nor does one try and “hide” the work under a veil of artlessness (sprezzatura), but instead discovers it in the creative act itself. As a means to create, thinking no doubt occurs in the rhetorical tradition mentioned above, but in such works, thinking does not occur as process; that is, as representative or constituent of the achieved art itself. Thinking is concealed in these works, not revealed. Part of the purpose of classical rhetoric and the tradition it generated was to disguise artistic making under the cover of “art.” To reveal the labor of art would have been to expose art as “artifice,” xxii which Plato had already done through his concept of ideas or forms (eidos). 41 But for those after Plato, art was téchnê or craft, consisting not only in the mastery of materials, but also the rules that apply to those materials (this is why virtue [aretê] and other moral qualities are considered téchnê [skill]; they derive from habit and custom, not personal will; they are learned, not “expressed” behavior). 42 Aristotle’s definition of mimesis suggests such an understanding. Art, specifically dramatic art, is imitation or fidelity to a corresponding reality (action) rather than a subjective or arbitrary expression of personality. For Aristotle and nearly two thousand years of critical commentary, art consisted in making its creation invisible to its viewers. Because thinking constitutes as well as reveals artistic labor, it functions more connotatively to describe the emergent stylistic shift of the period. It applies, in other words, to a wider variety of works of art than the conventional terms discussed above. Authors can and do exhibit a thinking style whether they write in verse or prose, whether they focus on dramatic or non-dramatic genres, whether they are poets or philosophers, and whether they write in English, French, German, or Italian. 43 Unlike its stylistic synonym “meditation,” thinking implies more than just solidary prayer, devotion, or attention; it also suggests what Erasmus in his Adagia (1508) called “a secret natural force [occultum vim],” which can give thinking a social dimension that meditation lacks.” 44 Where “meditation” (and “devotion,” its close cousin) suggests a specific occasion or object of poetry, whether God, penitence, or prayer, thinking denotes a wider range of cognitive activities. Even in its most private or solitary moments, thinking is a 41 Art is thrice removed from true form. It is an imitation of an imitation of the original. See Book 10 of Plato’s Republic for a discussion of mimesis and copy-making. 42 For Aristotle, téchnê is a knowledge/skill that can be taught. See Aristotle’s Metaphysics 981 and Nicomachean Ethics 1140a. 43 “Thinking style” need not be the exact phrase used by non-english speakers. Its meaning can be carried through to other phrases/terms/approximations such as “style de pensée” or “denkstil.” 44 See Jenny C. Mann, The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 1. xxiii poly-spheral activity, moving between personal thoughts and public action. Part of thinking’s labor or activity reveals itself in such movement. Thinking can also capture the exploratory and often strange (i.e., wondrous) nature of works like Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), which illustrates the activity of a “magnifying” mind. In such a work, the personal is not given over to the scientific, but instead rendered visible to the public as discovery. “Here,” Hooke seems to say, “is what study, labor, and making look like in observable and printed form.” Rather than motion in linguistic images or figuration, Hooke provides the pictorial equivalent of thought through detail and diagram. One feels while looking at the illustrations that one is proceeding deeper and deeper into the nature of things; that is, into the process of life and its most biological level. The familiar is mixed with the unfamiliar just as light is mixed with shadow. There is movement in the juxtaposition of contrasts. Like Spenser’s arachnid, Aragnoll, in his mock-epic Muiopotmos (1590), Hooke captures his objects in a “spectacle of care.” 45 Such connotative elasticity suggests that thinking is a useful word for describing and accounting for the stile moderno of the period. It subsumes many of the personal and cognitively inflected practices of wit, meditation, metaphysical, devotion, and expressiveness while also moving in directions unknown or ill-suited to those practices and styles. But more important than its usefulness and its attendant applicability is the fact that thinking is a term that the authors of the period themselves used to describe the processes of the mind. 46 In Hamlet, for example, terms like “think,” “thinking,” and “thought” are brought to the very forefront of the action of the 45 For a reading of the phrase, “spectacle of care,” and its significance as an instance of thinking, see Chapter I below. 46 According Scott Newstok, “across [Shakespeare’s] plays, terms like ‘think,’ ‘thinking’ or ‘thought’ outnumber ‘feel,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘felt,’ by a nearly 10:1 ratio.” See Newstok, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons From a Renaissance Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 3. xxiv play, occurring over sixty times in the play. 47 The skepticism and cognitive splendor of Hamlet, which ironically drive the “tragedy of thought’ forward, all derive from his belief that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2.249-250). “Thinking too precisely on th’ event” (4.3.40), in other words, constitutes the ethos, mythos, and the pathos of Hamlet. The inward (not outward) extension of action, the development of character, and the emotional sympathy generated from the confluence of these features all collapse in Hamlet’s first soliloquy of the play: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter, O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely, that it should come to this, But two months dead, nay not so much, not two, So excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother, That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly, heaven and earth Must I remember, why she would hang on him As if increase and appetite had grown By what is fed on, and yet within a month, Let me not think on’t; frailty thy name is woman, A little month ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body Like Niobe all tears, why she, even she, O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer, married with my uncle, My father’s brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules, within a month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galléd eyes She married, O most wicked speed; to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets, 47 The tally is based on G. R. Hibbard’s Oxford edition of Hamlet (1987), which takes as its “control text” the First Folio. xxv It is not, nor it cannot come to good, But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. (1.2.129-159) 48 By declaring halfway through the soliloquy, “Let me not think on’t,” Hamlet reveals that to think means to come to terms in the moment with what has transpired in Elsinore. Thinking, in this sense, is giving form to emotions rendered inchoate, unformed, by the death of his father. Thinking not only draws out the implications of previous events, it develops the emotions related to those events. But in his attempt to deny this process, Hamlet extends his thinking through “explorative” means. Rather than endorsing habits of thought and then proceeding to prove them, which would exemplify what Joel B. Altman calls the “declarative style,” Hamlet’s “intellectual energies are devoted to discovery.” 49 He questions, interrogates, and imagines instead of explains. Prior to this soliloquy, Hamlet was melancholic, an ironist with his words at best, but in thinking through his thoughts and treating himself as his own interlocutor, he invents his character, specifically the emotions and thoughts that we identify as distinctly Hamlet. 48 I have intentionally quoted the Q2 version of this passage, which under John Dover Wilson’s editorial hand is lightly punctuated. This version illustrates more clearly than the Folio and most modern editorial versions Hamlet’s thinking aloud. See Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 41. 49 See Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of the Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 24. Altman distinguishes in the early sixteenth century two paradigms of dramatic representation: declarative (explanatory) and explorative (interrogative). He defines explorative in contrast to declarative as drama “conceived in the interrogative and not declarative mood; therefore its intellectual energies are devoted to discovery, not explanation, and its structure tends to be fragmented into quaestiunculae [little questions] budding off the main question, not episodes proving an assertion. The play can expound fully both sides of the question because it functions within an ethically neutral environment, not one that seeks to represent, in however attractive a fashion, the prevailing realities of the outside the world” (24-25). While no one would claim that Hamlet creates an “ethically neutral environment” in his soliloquies, he nevertheless uses them in an exploratory manner; that is, he does not try and prove something he already knows (to declaim), but instead tries instead to explore what he knows and does not know. Skepticism no doubt fuels Hamlet’s search/discovery, not the desire to begin from a “neutral,” what Altman also calls “ambivalent,” point. Altman’s distinction between declarative and explorative, however, anticipates the shift in style and representation of the Elizabethans. What matters in the distinction, in other words, is the “ratiocinative activities” of the explorations (229). xxvi Hamlet’s soliloquy bears all the features of a self-reflexive, personal, and fevered attempt to illustrate the processes of thought. 50 But unlike Shakespeare’s earlier attempts at interiority and those of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, Hamlet’s soliloquies engage a different style and therefore art of representation. Not only do they avoid the declarative and rhetorical style of many Elizabethan soliloquies, they exhibit a highly developed attunedness to the flux and flow of consciousness. Like Yeats’s “widening gyre,” the current of Hamlet’s soliloquies turn upon themselves, increasing their mass as they generate eddies of meaning. 51 Moreover, they do not seek to prove or argue from premises already established, but unfold their own exploratory vortex of activity, which does not resolve itself in answers but constantly defers such answers to another “thinking moment.” Hamlet’s deferral, a much-discussed aspect of his character and the play in general, becomes the only means for him to discover and thus reveal to himself the underlying desire to “speak all” (parrhesia), which we learn in the first line of the soliloquy is sexual in nature. 52 The marriage of Claudius to Gertrude has “sullied” Hamlet and his thoughts. The word “sullied,” which has a long contested editorial history beginning with the Q1 reading of sullied as “sallied” 50 Hamlet’s technique of thinking to himself, which Shakespeare continues to develop through other soliloquists including Macbeth, Cleopatra, and Leontes, aligns with what Michel Foucault identifies as “practices of the self.” At various times Foucault has called these practices “hermeneutics of the subject,” “government of self,” “care of self,” “the discourse of self-disclosure,” “technologies of the self,” and “parrhesia” (the Greek term for these general practices is “epimeleia heautou” and the Latin “cura sui” [6]). In each of these techniques, Foucault identifies a person’s desire to govern, control, and interpret themselves either to themselves or to a group, usually a group in power. “In all societies,” according to Foucault,”[there are] techniques which permit individuals to effect by their own means, and with the help of others (or under the direction of others), a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct; and this, in a manner so as to transform themselves, to modify themselves and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of enlightenment; to become a sage, a sorcerer, to break through to the light, to immortality, to insensibility.” The motivation for this behavior and practice was the ancient Greek dictum, gnothi seauton (“know thyself”), which in practice meant truth-telling, specifically telling the truth about oneself. See Foucault, Speaking the Truth About Oneself, edited by Henri-Paul Fruchard and Daniele Lorenzini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 4. 51 See William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, The Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scriber, 1997). 52 According to Foucault, “the task of analyzing one’s own thoughts or desires has always been more important in matters of sexual faults than a desire for any other kind of sin […] Sexuality is related to the obligation to hide what one does and the obligation to decipher what one is.” See Speaking the Truth About Oneself, 2. xxvii (apparently another spelling for “sullied”) and the First Folio as “solid,” means defiled or tainted. 53 For Hamlet to begin thinking with such a charged word suggests that Claudius’ hasty marriage to Gertrude has cast a sickness over everything. This sickness occurs (that is, as soliloquy) before Hamlet meets the Ghost of his father and learns the truth of what has transpired, which suggests the delay that ensues after the meeting with the Ghost is not really a delay to act, but a fundamental feature of Hamlet’s character. Contrary to Rachel Eisendrath’s powerful suggestion that “the Ghost becomes [for Hamlet] an image of potential psychic disturbance,” Hamlet’s problematization of the self and psyche occurs before any external stimulus. 54 Although the Ghost gives Hamlet reason and cause to take action, a different kind of action, suggested by Hamlet himself (“Let me not think on’t”), has already commenced; namely, thinking. 55 Action in Hamlet as well as in Hamlet is thinking. Whether or not this makes for good art—T. S. Eliot famously suggested that it did not—is not really the issue here. 56 What is the issue is that Hamlet has given the play a new inflection, one in which thinking becomes the locus of activity. 53 I refer to the note in Dover Wilson’s edition of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) wherein he examines the authority and meaning of “sullied” in the various quartos and First Folio (151). Wilson further discusses “sullied” vs. “solid” in The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Problem of its Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) and Chapter 2 of What Happens in Hamlet. In his Arden Edition (Series 2) of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), Harold Jenkins uses “sullied,” arguing that sullied “stresses as the contrast to ‘self-slaughter’ (l. 132) the resolving of the baser element into the higher, whereby Hamlet might return from melancholy to normal health” (187). Though he employs “solid,” G. R. Hibbard nevertheless has an excellent note on the issue in his Appendix (E) to his Oxford edition of Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 54 In “The Long Nightwatch: Augustine, Hamlet, and the Aesthetic” (ELH 87, no. 3 [2020]), Rachel Eisendrath makes this argument in order to distinguish between Augustine’s notion of soliloquy, speaking to one self, and Hamlet’s. While insightful and in many ways correct, Eisendrath neglects the fact that Hamlet’s fist soliloquy (see above)—that is, his first exploration of self and the creation of the play’s aesthetic concern with its representation— occurs before Hamlet meets the Ghost. The soliloquy, in other words, gives birth to Hamlet’s self and its problems, not external/outside circumstances. By separating himself from the social action of the play, Hamlet collapses that space into his own thinking (internal and external cease to exist in this sense). It also, as I suggest in Chapter II with regard to Macbeth, leads to his undoing, as all soliloquies of “exception” do. 55 For the locus classicus of Hamlet as a “thinking play,” see A. W. Schlegel, “Criticisms of Shakespeare’s Tragedies” (Lecture XXV), in Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London: George Bell & Sons, 1904). 56 See T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” in The Sacred Wood. xxviii The collapse of thought and action in Hamlet suggests one consequence of the emergent thinking style. 57 The old distinction between vita contemplativa and vita activa, which developed in antiquity and remained intact through much of the Medieval period, begins, both conceptually and mimetically, to breakdown in the literature of the period, giving credence to what Croll and others identify as the period’s concern with “the motions of the soul, not their states of rest.” 58 In Elizabethan drama, contemplativa, which I define in its more modern sense as “thinking,” becomes an “activity,” both in the cognitive sense and in its political (praxis) sense. The Shakespearean “character,” in other words, whether as an individual, subject, or private consciousness, no longer acts in a world divided between inner and outer, contemplation and action, but instead acts in a porous, in-between zone. 59 Both the character and the language that gives the character form, “violently sway” in such a liminal space, generating the movement as well as the change characteristic of the fragmented, discordant, and elusive thinking style. 60 57 Drawing out the unexplored implications of Richard Halpern’s work on tragedy (Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017]), I suggest that thinking, in this sense, could also be understood as the “eclipse of action.” Thinking, in other words, is a different name for the “production” or “labor” of what Halpern identifies as the condition and salient feature of “political economy.” For an expanded discussion of this, see Chapter II below. See also Blair Hoxby’s reassessment of the role of pathos in early modern drama. The focus on pathos, in other words, moved plays inward, minimizing outward (i.e., political) action. See Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 58 In making the claim that thinking and action collapse in the literature of the period, I suggest a [qualifying] counterpoint to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), her great treatise on vita activa. Arendt is correct in arguing that the seventeenth century sees a revaluation of the hierarchy of contemplation over action. But it is at this precise historical moment, however, that the two concepts collapse on each other before modernity takes over and “gives priority to action over contemplation.” See Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule, Action Versus Contemplation: Why the Ancient Debate Still Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 30. 59 Shakespeare, for example, is in the habit of collapsing many conceptual distinctions, demonstrating that the distinctions we take for granted—i.e., subjective/objective, truth/error, inside/outside, high/low, and public/private— do not really exist in the way we think that they do. Shakespeare is not a relativist (or a skeptic), but a realist, a thinker who knows, as does Milton, that concepts are not generated in vacuo, but in relation to one another. Concepts are not fluid, but transactional (e.g., evil informs good just as much as error informs truth. Exchange and contact, in other words are involved). Often, as Chapters II and III suggest, the lack of conceptual distinctness becomes clear in the changes that Shakespeare’s characters undergo. In moving from ignorance to wisdom, for example, characters realize (anagnorisis) their truth, but that realization is only available in and through the thinking that generates the activity/change in the first place. 60 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 30-31. Among Wölfflin’s many insights into the “movement” of baroque art is his argument that “the most direct expression of an artist’s intention is the sketch. It represents what appears most vital to him, and reveals him actually in the process of thinking” (30). Since many of Shakespeare’s quartos were xxix Movement, in this sense, is the distinctive feature of the thinking style. In the following study, I look at several devices that function as “moments” of this movement: the soliloquy, the aside, the stanza, and allusion. The soliloquy and aside, for example, function as liminal devices of cognitive movement that render the private and social distinction obsolete. Both devices illustrate that Shakespearean characters are embodied consciousnesses, acting, laboring, and making (homo faber) across social spheres. Where Heraclitus and Aristotle identify character as fate, a causal effect of choices habituated over time, character in Shakespeare is thinking, which is not causal but always changing. Telos, in this sense, is antithetical to Shakespeare’s art. While oracles, omens, witches, and supernatural phenomena abound in Shakespeare and suggest some sort of providential destiny for the plays, it is the energy, motion, and ultimately the change within characters that constitutes the action of the plays. It is the “becoming” and not the “become” (i.e., the result or end) that comprises plot in Shakespeare. Hamlet never “finishes” his thinking; he only abandons it in death. Act, action, doing, deed, and labor are all aspects or constituent parts of the process of thinking. Thinking functions not only as the impetus of change but change itself. As a form of action as well as making (poiesis), thinking identifies a process and power that collapses “before” and “after” into a single, present moment of doing. Where terms like metaphysical, baroque, and meditative capture the complexity and personal or inward nature of the period’s art, they fail to capture the invention (from invenire, “to discover”) and ultimately the movement of the art. Thinking constitutes both the act of creation and the created thing itself. It is both the either transcriptions of Shakespeare’s “foul papers” or reconstructions from an actor’s (or actors’) memory, one could argue that they constitute a “sketch” or “essay” (i.e., attempt) rather than a polished or published work of art. The quartos are closer to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of Vitruvian man than they are to his finished paintings such a “The Last Supper” of “Mona Lisa.” xxx “life-blood of the master spirit” as well as the object “embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” 61 61 John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 492-493. 1 Introduction: What is Called Thinking in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton? I. Thinking in Literature: A Genealogy The term thinking might seem a common and overly familiar word to describe an important stylistic marker of early modern literature, but over the last decade there has been a significant increase in published work on the topic of literary thinking, suggesting that the term has become something of a buzzword in contemporary literary discourse. 1 Titles such as Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004), Thinking Poetry (2013), Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (2016), Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay (2019), and Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (2020) demonstrate a pointed interest in the relationship between literature and thinking. 2 In early modern studies, the attention given to thinking is equal if not greater than other literary periods. Since Shakespeare has been a focus of cognitive criticism 1 Although I primarily refer to published books in my analysis, academic articles also illustrate a similar if not greater interest in the relationship between thinking and literature. For example, an MLA International Bibliography search yields 3,454 results for articles (and dissertations) published between 1926 and 2019 that have the keywords “thinking” and “literature” (including the names of individual poems, novels, or plays) in the title. But, if the search is narrowed to 2000-2019, the result is 2,786 titles. This shows a staggering increase in interest in thinking and literature over the last two decades. The numbers demonstrate that of all the articles published on thinking and literature in the last 100 years, 80% were published in the last 20 years. 2 Some of the book publications that I draw on include Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), Peter Nicholls and Peter Boxall’s Thinking Poetry (London: Routledge, 2013); Reginald Gibbons’ How Poems Think (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2016); Ranjan Ghosh’s and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld’s Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Amir Eshel’s Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay (Stanford University Press, 2019); James Edward Ford III’s Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory, and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); and Andrea Gadberry’s Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Additional books that engage thinking but that use related terms have also emerged. Examples that influence the following argument include Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of the Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Sean Silver’s The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Nikki Skillman’s The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (University of Chicago Press, 2018). 2 over the last three decades and many of the issues addressed in disciplinary debates over mind vs. body, embodied cognition, and the structure of consciousness go back to works of seventeenth-century epistemology, thinking has been central to early modern studies since its inception. 3 While a term like thinking’s natural disciplinary province might be philosophy, cognitive science, or psychology, where synonyms such as mind, cognition, consciousness, reason, understanding, and judgment are studied and employed, thinking also possesses a rich history in literature and the arts, namely through such cognitively inflected terms as “wit,” “metaphysical,” “imagination,” “fancy,” “poiesis,” “conceit,” “trope,” “figuration,” and “metaphor.” 4 But where philosophy depends on a more restricted sense of thinking based on logic, and psychology and cognitive science favor pre-hoc (fast and instinctual) forms of thinking rather than post-hoc (slow and deliberative), literature tends to explore and embody thinking through a wide range of senses, not all of which involve argumentation, calculation, proof, or even clarity. 5 Thinking, in this literary sense, often demonstrates “the vital necessity of incomplete, inconsistent, [and] nonsystematic thinking.” 6 As Hannah Arendt suggests, thinking is not about knowing, but about 3 For work on Shakespeare and cognition see Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Anthony Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 2006); Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2011), Paul Cefalu, Tragic Cognition in Othello: Beyond the Neural Sublime (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). There are additional studies that address Shakespeare and embodied cognition, cognitive blending, mindreading, and other arguments drawn from cognitive studies and neuroscience that are outside the scope of this study. 4 Along with these hallowed terms of the discipline, scholars have also suggested that the very units of poetry such as “syntax,” “meter,” “rhythm,” and “rhyme” also identify thinking in verse. See Reginald Gibbons’ How Poems Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), Simon Jarvis’s Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) for examples. 5 See Amanda Anderson, Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 15- 38, for a discussion of how modern psychology’s understanding of thinking as primarily instinctual poses a challenge to morality. The contemporary work of psychology that has brought these distinctions into popular consciousness is Daniel Khaneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013). 6 Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, 5; italics in original. 3 the process of meaning-making, which in separating itself from “knowledge” allows for a more universal definition of how thinking works. 7 The scope, not to mention the activity, of literary thinking, in other words, extends beyond many traditional accounts of thinking or what philosophers and psychologists might identify as thinking. Unlike the “clear and distinct ideas” of philosophical method advocated in Descartes’ Meditations, for example, literary thinking can be free, playful, uninhibited, and even emotional. 8 It does not proceed by traditional rules of thought, nor does it adhere to systematic rigor. 9 Literary thinking embodies an openness to thought, language, and imagination that is alien, for the most part, to system, method, and a quest for certainty. Because of this aversion to method and certainty, many early modern writers found Peter Ramus’s methodological reforms conducive to their poetry, which “reduc[ed]” Aristotle’s logic to “better forme” and became in the process a “short cut” for the creation of poetry, specifically the finding of matter (topics) or what is called in classical rhetoric inventio. 10 Not only did Ramus’s reform adapt and thus appropriate invention and disputation for dialectic, it also streamlined the process of thinking. Despite the attempt by Christopher Marlowe and other Cambridge playwrights to malign Ramus and his logical reform by parodying him in their dramatic works, Ramus nevertheless influenced how poets thought in their poetry. 11 As 7 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. John Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 163-164. 8 René Descartes, Discourse on Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 22. 9 Cartesian thought must be distinguished from Cartesian style. What Descartes argues about thinking and the mind does not necessarily reflect the style or manner in which he presents his argument. See Gadberry, Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 10 For the first quotation and a dramatic depiction of Ramus defending his reforms, see Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre of Paris, ed. Edward J. Esche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For second quotation, “short cut,” see Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 143. 11 In addition to Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, see The Pilgrimage of Parnassus, an anonymous collection of three plays performed at Cambridge University between 1598 and 1602, for the casting of Ramus in the role of “Stupido.” 4 Rosemond Tuve argues, “[the poet] who wished to think, write or speak had mastered the art of inventing his matter once he had learned to ‘find argument’ from the regular dialectical places. Poetry too is dialectic.” 12 Such a rhetorical shift meant that poetic imagery became a matter of logical cause, the ends driving the means. Poetic decisions, related to imagery were thus functional rather than decorative or ornamental. Ramus’s visualizing epistemology, in other words, provided poets with a means to structure their thinking that did not rely on traditional rhetorical methods, but instead built itself out of logical arguments, which meant laying one image down after another in the manner of thinking. II. Literary Thinking in Critical Discourse: Renaissance Due in part to thinking’s elasticity and the general movement in literary studies away from poetic (i.e., structural, linguistic) to affective and cultural concerns, thinking has gained significant traction within the discipline to explain, discuss, analyze, and understand works of literature. As William Empson might have argued, thinking has become a “complex word.” 13 It allows critics to do a lot with very little. The problem, however, is that where there is interest and abundance there is also disagreement and variegation. A lack of uniformity and consistency as to the meaning or use of the term thinking nevertheless persists. But such a state was not always the case. The term thinking once carried a somewhat uniform meaning in literary studies. Scholars such as Sharon Cameron and Angus Fletcher laid 12 Rosemond Tuve, “Imagery and Logic: Ramus and Metaphysical Poetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 3, no.4 (1942), 382. 13 According to Empson, “the basic idea is that, as the various meanings within one word, and their interactions, are often tricky to analyse out, and yet the speakers often interpret a use of them with confidence and speed, there is likely to be an inner grammar of complex words like the overt grammar of sentences” (6). And, “a word may become a sort of solid entity, able to direct opinion, thought of as like a person; also it is often said (whether this is the same idea or not) that a word can become a ‘compacted doctrine,’ or even that all words are compacted doctrines inherently (45). See Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, ed. Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini (Oxford: Oxford University, 2020). 5 down a significant amount of the conceptual and disciplinary terrain for literary thinking several decades ago. 14 In Colors of Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (1991), for example, Angus Fletcher provides a working definition of literary thinking when he identifies it as an aspect of noetics: Noetics names the field and the precise activity occurring when the poet introduces thought as a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem. If poetics shows us the ways by which a poet arranges his poem so that it will cohere poetically, as a thing made, then noetics shows us how thoughts, ideas, reflections, memories, judgments, intuitions, and visions are involved in the fundamental process of the making of the poem […] The field of noetics covers all such aspects of the representing process, ranging from realism to Joyce and Woolf, where thought deliquesces into random fluxions of the stream of consciousness. Noetics in principle covers all of the operations of thought, both detachable (allegorical ‘ideas’) and nondetachable (narrative and thought invisible woven). 15 The term noetics, which derives from the Greek word nous, “reason,” and noein, “to think,” provides an umbrella descriptor (and area of study) for two types of thinking covered in Fletcher’s definition that are central to understanding the basic notion of literary thinking. 16 Both of these descriptions of thinking will be discussed in greater detail below as two of the three modes I identify in this study, but it is important to have a working definition of literary thinking at the outset in order to delimit some of the conceptual field covered in this introduction. The most common of the two types of thinking Fletcher mentions is representational thinking. Representational thinking can be the familiar type of thinking “in” literature that 14 Earlier studies no doubt exist, specifically Continental sources such as Max Rieser’s Analysis of Poetic Thinking (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969; trans. Herbert Schueller), but Cameron and Fletcher, two influential scholars working on different historical periods and for the most part on different genres (Cameron on the novel and Fletcher on poetry), were the first Anglophone scholars to treat thinking comprehensively; that is, in book-length studies: Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) respectively. As discussed below, T. S. Eliot was arguably the first to broach the subject of literary thinking at length, but his remarks are relatively scattered across individual essays and lectures. Nothing systematic was ever undertaken and therefore Eliot’s use of the term thinking was never fleshed out nor consistently employed. 15 Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, 3. 16 For a comprehensive account of its use by Greek philosophers and thinkers, see F. E. Peters’ entry for “nóêsis” in Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967). 6 appears as inner monologue, soliloquy, omniscient narration, and other forms of what cognitive critics call “nested mental states.” 17 It is a form that intentionally captures (arrests) thinking, usually as a means of disclosing inward thoughts or providing insight into motive and action. 18 Representational thinking is also a mode of narration, which allows novelists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to capture the flux and flow of consciousness. As a mode of cognitively inflected mimesis, representational thinking goes back to Greek epics, drama, as well as other forms of early literature such as the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and the Hindu Ramayan. The second type of literary thinking, “poetic thinking,” is what Fletcher means by “thoughts, ideas, reflections, memories, judgments, intuitions, and visions,” which “are involved in the fundamental process of the making of the poem.” This type of thinking is an activity that exposes the work or labor of making a poem and that often manifests itself at the level of diction, figuration, argument, and many other textually identifiable moments. Since poems as well as novels and plays are made objects, noetics identifies specifically what type of thinking occurs in the making, whether as ideas, representation, or other forms of thinking. For many contemporary readers, Fletcher’s understanding of literary thinking as “a discriminable dimension of the form and meaning of the poem” might seem commonplace. Poets, after all, must “think” in some fashion or another to create. In general, poets are no longer thought to be “inspired,” what was classically understood by Plato and others to be the result of 17 For example, see Lisa Zunshine’s use of “nested mental states” and related terms such as “mentalizing” in “The Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA 130, no. 3 (2015). See also Zunshine’s discussion of the representation of fictional consciousness in Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006), specifically Part I. 18 Representational thinking possesses close ties and techniques with the representational thinking of the visual arts. Paintings such as Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation (1632), and Georges de la Tour’s The Repentant Magdalene (1635-1640) all capture and thus “represent” thinking. For work on thinking and the visual arts, see Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Hanneke Grootenboer, The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 7 “the breath of God” (from inspirare, “to breath into”) or furor poeticus (ecstasy). 19 In post- classical theories of poetry, poems are not pre-conscious creations, but deliberate works of skill and craft (téchnê) that require mental effort. But for much of literary history, poetic invention was the province of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. In classical rhetoric one defined the creative process through the five canons of inventio, memoria, dispositio, pronuntiatio, elocutio. 20 Along with grammar and logic, rhetoric was a central feature of Ecclesiastical and secular education. It taught not only elocution, developed mental habits, and provided the means of communication for “what is known” (logic) and “what is symbolized” (grammar), it also taught discipline. 21 It was the social arm of the Trivium, giving individuals a public voice. This general assimilation of rhetoric to nearly all aspects of education and civic duty meant that rhetoric defined for over a millennium and a half the execution as well as analysis of poetry. Not only was rhetoric synonymous with style and creativity, but with general virtue as well. 22 By the early seventeenth century, however, much of the rhetorical landscape had changed. Due in part to the efforts of such thinkers as Juan Huarte de San Juan, Pierre Charron, and Francis Bacon, poetic “making” (poiesis) had become a faculty of the mind. 23 In this 19 As Grahame Castor notes in his seminal study, Pléiade Poetics: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Thought and Terminology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), there was a return to theories of divine inspiration in the Neo-Platonism of the sixteenth century. See specifically Marsilio Ficino’s commentaries on Plato’s works as well as his original Platonic Theology where he develops a theory of furor poeticus. 20 For example, a poet or orator would find suitable material (inventio), often through memory (memoria) or based on study, and arrange (dispositio) it so that it could be expressed in the best possible manner (elocutio). 21 See Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, ed. Marguerite McGlinn (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), 9. 22 Unlike Plato’s dismissal of rhetoric as flattery and lies (cf. Gorgias), the sixteenth century understood ethics and rhetoric to be intertwined. According to Paul Oskar Kristeller, ethics and rhetoric are the two core activities of Renaissance Humanism. See “The Moral Thought of Renaissance Humanism,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; expanded edition). Peter Mack also notes that “the progammes of humanist education derived from Guarino and Erasmus, which spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century, inculcate virtue through Latin grammar, literature and rhetorical exercises” (1). See Mack, “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Reading in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 19, no. 1 (2005). 23 For the “classification of the arts and sciences according to three divisions of the mind” see Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios (1575), Pierre Charron’s De la Sagesse (1601), and Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605) (219). According to J. E. Spingarn, “underlying [Bacon’s] utterances is a general classification of the arts and sciences, according to the three divisions of the mind inherited from the traditional psychology: history is referred to the 8 psychological shift, poetic invention was no longer to be “discovered” in nature, but instead “an independent product of the human mind.” 24 As J. E. Spingarn notes, where “critics of the sixteenth had dealt with literature as an external phenomenon [and] isolated the work of art from its position in space and time,” critics of the seventeenth century “attempted to deal accurately with the relation between the creative mind and the work of art; [they] began to analyze the content of such terms as wit, fancy, and taste.” 25 Thomas Hobbes, for example, in his famous “Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert” (1650), clearly separates poetic creation from rhetoric when he enlists “Fancy” to describe the process involved when “any work of Art is to be performed.” 26 “Fancy,” according to Hobbes, “needs no more then a swift motion over [her ‘materiales’] [s]o that when she seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest place, into the future and into her self, and all this in a point of time, the voyage is not very great, her self being all she seeks.” 27 Not only does the shift from rhetoric to traditional psychology demonstrate the mind’s involvement in the creative process, it also illustrates the underlying activity in such a process. Whereas rhetoric emphasized structure, order, and execution and was based on persuasion, an externally directed activity that “isolated the work of art from its position in space and time,” Fancy emphasized internal “motion,” the active and deliberate drawing on one’s own powers of memory, philosophy to the understanding, and poetry to the imagination.” Key to this analogical reclassification is the understanding of poetry as imagination, for “Bacon uses the term ‘imagination’ to indicate the mental processes which transforms the prosaic ‘what happened’ in the [Aristotelian] ‘what might or should happen.’” Later, as we see below, Hobbes adopts some of Bacon’s principles, especially his division of the Arts according to faculties of mind, but renames ‘imagination’ as ‘fancy.’ See Spingarn’s “Introduction” to Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century: Volume I, 1605-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), x-xi. 24 Castor, Pléiade Poetics, 86. 25 Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Volume I), xxviii. 26 Thomas Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Volume II), 59. 27 Thomas Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant’s Preface,” 59. 9 mind. 28 Memory (“materiales”) is still critical to creation for Hobbes, but rather than a receptacle for invention to simply sort through what it needs like a cabinet or a room, Fancy draws what she needs from “her self.” 29 Her motions, in other words, are self-generating and self-willed. 30 Hobbes, like Bacon in his description of imagination, highlights the activity of poetry, the making rather than the structure, the latter of which, as rhetoric, might be beneficial as a tool for the education and teaching of poetry, but is to be distinguished from the process of poetry itself. 31 Thinking occurs, in other words, as a part and parcel of the poetry itself. It is an activity, specifically a cognitive process (whether as wit, fancy, or imagination; theses terms are still used interchangeably at the time), which can be identified and therefore analyzed. 28 It takes nearly a century for a clear distinction between fancy and imagination to be made in English critical thought. This distinction, however, becomes critical to Coleridge’s understanding of the “esemplastic” or synthetic powers of the imagination. Drawing on Scottish (Alexander Gerard) and German (F. W. Schelling) sources, Coleridge develops and influential organic as opposed to mechanical (i.e., Lockean) theory of imagination. According to Coleridge, fancy is nothing “other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE.” Fancy, in other words, “must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association,” whereas imagination [“secondary” imagination, that is] “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” See Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, ed. Adam Roberts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 205-206. For a discussion of Coleridge’s theory of imagination and its relationship to the development of critical theory, specifically to the theory of expressiveness, mechanical and associative theories of mind, etc., see M. H. Abrams’ seminal work on the subject, The Mirror and The Lamb: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). See also I. A. Richard’s early work, Coleridge on Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934), and James Engell’s The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). A recent discussion of Coleridge’s conception of the imagination and its relationship to the mind (specifically reason) can be found in Peter Cheyne’s Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 29 The mind and specifically memory as a cabinet or architectural structure goes back to Simonides (See Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Book XI). For modern scholarship on the subject, see Francis Yates’s The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Mary Caruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; second edition 2008); and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 30 Davenant attributes this activity to “Wit” rather than “Fancy,” but both importantly fall under the category of “thought” for Davenant: “Wit is the laborious and lucky resultances of thought, having towards its excellence, as we say of the strokes Painting, as well as a happinesse as care. It is a Webb consisting of the subt’lest threads; and like that of the Spider is conservatively woven out of our selves […] Wit is not only the luck and labour, but also the dexterity of thought, rounding the world, like the Sun, with unimaginable motion” (20). See Davenant, “Preface to Gondibert” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Volume II). 31 Hobbes suggests as much when he famously says, “Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgement and Fancy: Judgement begets strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem.” See Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant’s Preface,” 59. 10 III. Literary Thinking in Critical Discourse: Romantic Although it is now critical commonplace to treat poetry as an aspect of thinking, it still took several centuries for theorists to work it out and to account for the relationship between what the mind perceives and what it creates. Where eighteenth-century critics like Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley-Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury), and Mark Akenside continued to equate certain aspects of poetic creation with faculties of the mind like imagination, it was not until the Romantics that a fully developed account of the internal processes of creation was articulated and developed. “The change from imitation to expression, and from mirror to the fountain, lamp and related analogues,” M. H. Abrams explains, “was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemology—that is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception which was current among romantic poets and critics [. . .] The analogies for the mind in the writings of both Wordsworth and Coleridge show radical transformation. Varied as these are, they usually agree in picturing the mind in perception as active rather inertly receptive, and as contributing to the world in the very process of perceiving the world.” 32 This conceptual shift from the mind as passive to the mind as active, which can be understood as a shift from a mechanical to an organic theory of the mind, enabled poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge to develop a theory of poetry that placed the mind, specifically the imagination, at the core of expressive activity. This concept of the imagination differed from the early eighteenth-century empirical tradition in that “the primary source and subject matter of a poem […] are the attributes and actions of the poet’s own mind.” 33 This “efficient cause” moved the creation of poetry away from the “formal cause” of Aristotle (imitation of an action) and the neo-classical 32 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 57-58. 33 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 22. 11 “final cause” (“the effect intended on the audience”) to the “impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking expression, or the compulsion of the ‘creative’ imagination which, like God the creator, has its internal source of motion.” 34 What was only hinted at in Bacon and Hobbes, the motion of imagination and fancy, is given full treatment as origin and cause in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge and many of their contemporaries. The mind of the poet and specifically the imagination is fundamentally active, amalgamating, dissolving, and recombining all that it perceives. 35 The Romantic theory of poetry not only changed the understanding of poetry from a reflection of the world derived from principles of unity and harmony to an internal expression of self and consciousness, but it also changed the critical discussion of it. What was critical commonplace from Aristotle to Johnson—i.e., the unity, pleasure, didacticism, and propriety (decorum) of a work as well as its analogical relationship to nature—falls by the wayside with the Romantics. Feeling, thought, and expression are paramount. The emergent elements of personal, meditative, and indecorous expression that were first developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, had become the dominant forms of Romantic theory. Additionally, and most important for the following study, is the focus on the mind’s role in this process. If the imagination qua thinking creates, the object of critical discussion ceases to focus exclusively on the canons of rhetoric or even on schemes and tropes, but on the active processes 34 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 22. 35 While perception was necessary for a Romantic like Wordsworth who drew so much of his material from Nature, it only served to occasion, after long deliberation (that is, thinking), the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which was importantly “recollected in tranquilit7” (82). Wordsworth not only locates all cause for creation within the poet, but he also indicates that its final form (as art or poetry) derives from the active participation of the “thinking” mind. Poetry is not just the expression of feeling, but the labor involved in shaping that feeling into poetry. For Wordsworth, what distinguishes the poet from “other men” is the poet’s “promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner” (78). A poet, in other words, does not need external stimuli, but instead relies on their own internal compulsion, much like a spider in spreading its filaments. See Wordsworth’s Preface (1802) in Lyrical Ballads, edited by Michael Masson (London: Longman, 2007). 12 that begets poetry. Rather than the achieved result, the cause becomes the raison d’etre of critical discussion. From Wordsworth’s Preface (1800/1802) and Hazlitt’s and Shelley’s lectures and essays, the imagination is understood to be “th[e] faculty which expresses objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power.” 36 Dynamism rather than decorum is the engine of the Romantic theory of poetry. IV. Literary Thinking in Critical Discourse: Modern The first modern critic to develop a theory of poetic thinking was T. S. Eliot, who despite his reservations about the ability of poets to think in their poetry, nevertheless articulated what such a process or activity would entail. 37 For Eliot, poets did not think so much as “feel thought” in their poetry. The thinking that readers commonly identify in poets like Dante or Shakespeare, for example, is not thought but “the emotional equivalent of thought.” 38 Poets, in other words, 36 William Hazlitt, “On Poetry in General,” in Lectures on the English Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 5. 37 Although “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) begins Eliot’s interest in poetic thinking, he does not systematically engage the topic until the Clark Lectures (Cambridge University) of 1926. Between the Clark Lectures and the Turnbull Lectures (University of Virginia) of 1933, which now comprise the posthumous The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1993), Eliot devoted a significant amount of his criticism to the topic of thinking in literature. Several publications stand out, with Eliot’s BBC series of radio talks specifically addressing the topic of “Thinking in Verse.” The relevant essays or publications from these years include “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” (1927), “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), “Dante” (1929), and the radio talks from 1930 later published in The Listener: “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry (March 12, 1930); “Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne” (March 19, 1930); “The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw (March 16, 1930); “Mystic and Politician as Poet: Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, Milton (April 2, 1930); “The Minor Metaphysicals: From Cowley to Dryden” (April 9. 1930); “John Dryden” (April 16, 1930). Thanks is due the editorial effort of Ronald Schuchard for collecting and annotating (along with his co-editors) all of Eliot’s published and unpublished material from this period. 37 Although Eliot reviews many of the recently published books on Shakespeare in the essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” was initially given publicly at the invitation of the Shakespeare Association in March of 1927 and published as a pamphlet for the Association in September of 1927. See the headnote to the essay’s notes in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (Volume 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927-1929), edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 256. 38 Eliot, Selected Essays, 135. 13 possess a quality of “sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of senses thinking,” which is not intellectual but emotional. 39 What we call thinking in poetry is nothing but the “verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.” 40 In Eliot’s sense, the poet is never concerned with thinking per se, only with the representation of it verbally, which when achieved is not thinking but “the emotional equivalent of thought.” In making this distinction between thought and sense, Eliot wants to distinguish what philosophers do when they think from what poets do in poetry. As I demonstrate below, there is no fundamental distinction between thinking in poetry and other disciplines nor is it a problem with the word “thinking” per se, but a problem with misunderstanding thinking’s role in the creation of literature. Despite Eliot’s suggestion that poets do not think in their poetry, a rather large body of twentieth- and twenty first-century criticism argues otherwise. Some of the earliest and most influential accounts of poetic thinking come from outside literary studies, specifically in the work of Martin Heidegger, whose What is Called Thinking? (1968), Discourse on Thinking (1969), and extensive lectures on both Presocratic philosophy and the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin argue that poetry and philosophy “spr[i]ng from the same source—which is thinking.” 41 But within literary studies, as mentioned above, much contemporary work, which has coincided with the interest and development of cognitive approaches to literature, has 39 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1922), 23. 40 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 289. 41 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Volume I, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 8. One of Heidegger’s greatest contributions to the discussion of thinking and literary thinking in particular is his exploration of thinking’s (denken) etymology. Hannah Arendt has also been a powerful interlocutor on the topic of thinking, specifically its relation to judgment and moral considerations. Most important for how I develop the notion of “poetic thinking” below, she makes an important distinction, which she derives from Kant, between thinking and knowing. See Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment,163. 14 contributed to what might be called a “poetics of literary thinking.” 42 Scholars such as Amanda Anderson, Terence Cave, Mary Thomas Crane, Lisa Zunshine, Simon Jarvis, Gordon Teskey, and Helen Vendler have extended many of the ideas developed in the earlier work of Cameron and Fletcher. Their work continues the notion that literature embodies a form of knowing/knowledge while at the same time developing Romantic and contemporary notions of literature as a form of non-systematic exploration, the play of the mind in the act of discovery, whether through metaphor (figuration), argumentation, or representation. Some draw their insight specifically from philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and other disciplines, while others remain strictly within the field of literary criticism, using the very units of poetry (grammar, meter, figures of speech) to illuminate textual thinking. Consequently, a sense of “what is called thinking” in literature and literary studies has expanded exponentially, reaching almost Malthusian proportions. A working framework or taxonomy is therefore necessary to illuminate the labyrinthine topic of literary thinking and its importance to literary studies. V: Thinking Moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton What I propose in the following study is to make sense of our contemporary literary uses of thinking by applying some precision (as well as explanation) to the term and its various senses, specifically as it applies to poetry and the work of three early modern poets. 43 In Spenser, 42 In this study, I approach thinking from a linguistic, philological, poetic, philosophical as well as a social perspective, while only relying on several references to cognitive criticism, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, psychology, and other approaches that address specific operations of the mind. These are valuable and informative approaches, and many literary critics have benefitted from them, but in illuminating works of literature, the aforementioned approaches yield greater insight and have shared a much longer history with literary studies. 43 Several decades ago René Wellek attempted a similar enterprise when he noted a problem with the word “criticism.” According to Wellek, “‘criticism’ is so widely used in so many contexts—from the most homely to most abstract, from the criticism of a word or an action to political, social, historical, musical, art, philosophical, Biblical, higher, and what-not criticism—that we must confine ourselves to literary criticism if we are to arrive at 15 Shakespeare, and Milton, poets chosen as much for their differences as for their similarities, thinking arguably arrives, as suggested in the Prologue, as a fundamental dimension of the style and content of the work. What draws Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton together, as well as other writers outside the scope of this study, is not religion, political affiliation, or ideology, but style. All of these writers exhibit their own “thinking style.” The thinking style, however, is complex as well as individual, and it appears variously in poets and writers. But one thing is clear: the thinking style occurs “in” texts as authorial thinking. Literary thinking is not an activity that we as readers do, which is what I would call “instrumental thinking,” but discriminable moments occurring in literary texts. 44 Instrumental thinking uses texts as one would an object. The prepositions “with,” “through,” and “about” often occur in instrumental thinking through such phrases as “thinking with literature,” “thinking about poetry,” and “thinking through the novel.” Authorial literary thinking (henceforth simply “literary thinking”), however, occurs as textual or embodied thinking in the work itself, and not thinking imposed on a text by a reader. But as a reader, we can nevertheless identify those moments of stilled motion as if they are “raisins” of thinking baked into the text; or, conversely, as if they are extended moments of thinking interwoven, like Ariadne’s thread, into the text for us to follow. In order to clarify, distinguish, and manage what constitutes literary thinking, I undertake three objectives in the following study. First, I identify in this introduction three modes that define what constitutes literary thinking, which I call philosophical, representational, and poetic manageable distinctions.” See Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 21. 44 Much appreciative, critical, and theoretical writing that takes literature as its object of study falls under the model of “instrumental thinking.” When critics refer (often in titles to their works) to phrases such as “thinking through literature,” “thinking with literature,” or “thinking about literature,” they describe a type of thinking that sees literature as body of knowledge, something with which to read, interpret, and engage. 16 thinking. These modes are also identified in the prooimion (preface, prologue) to each chapter that further defines and contextualize the individual modes. In identifying and defining these modes, I provide a lexical taxonomy for literary thinking. Second, which constitutes the bulk of the study (Chapters I – IV), I apply the three modes of thinking to the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Each poet and their work represent one of these modes, which does not mean, as will be discussed below, that they only “think” in one of these modes. What it does mean, however, is that the example I draw on for each author happens to be a particularly strong example of one of the three modes of thinking. I could easily apply all three modes of thinking to a single poetical work and thus a single poet, especially in the case of either Shakespeare or Milton, but by focusing on individual poets working in different genres, I am able to illuminate the range of literary thinking as well as its various manifestations across a relatively large period. Third, I locate these modes within the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton through what Gordon Teskey calls “thinking moments,” or discriminable loci of thinking within a work. 45 The focus on “moments” allows for precision as well as flexibility across authors and individual works. Where a thinking style differs, as in Spenser and Shakespeare, one can still ascertain “moments” of thinking. In each “moment,” a text or performance both stops and moves; it is both stasis and kinesis. As a linguistic image (i.e., “snapshot”) of what Eliot famously identified 45 Teskey provides a working definition of “moment” that I apply throughout the book: “By ‘thinking moments […]’ I mean moment in the two sense of the word that are distinguished in Hegel’s German by the use of the neuter and the masculine articles: first, there is a moment in our usual sense of the word, a moment of arrest, and instant within which, so long as it lasts, nothing seems to move or change, inviting us to grasp a state of affairs before it slips away. ‘Just a moment,’ we say, when we are in the heat of a discussion […] It is the other sense of moment, the more technically philosophical term for a destabilizing element in a totality, that has peculiar force in Hegelian philosophy. It derives from the Latin moveo and implies motion or development within a larger whole, effecting some change in that whole. The two meanings of moment twist together opposite things in a dynamic situation: instability and stasis, movement and arrest. This is hardly peculiar to Hegel’s philosophy. It is what every moment in any poem feels like, where each image, each word, each syntactical unit, each rhythm, may seem to be perfectly itself even as it is becoming other than itself. See Teskey, Spenserian Moments (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 2019), 287-288. 17 as a “still point of a turning world,” it captures the activity of thinking. 46 These moments appear in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton as stanza, soliloquy and aside, and allusion respectively. In each of these formal conventions/devices, thinking manifests itself and can be isolated for analysis and discussion. These three objectives contribute to a reassessment and explanation of what constitutes thinking in poetry and why it matters. While thinking is a valuable and essential term of literary studies and the humanities in general, its wide use has led to some confusion. Scholars sometimes “speak past one another” in their use(s) of thinking. But in distinguishing between uses or modes, what Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian would call “explanations,” within canonical literary works—works, that is, that are read, commented on, and appreciated by a wide variety of critics and scholars as well as general readers—I hope to narrow the gap of misunderstanding, which does not mean lessening the connotative richness of thinking, but instead consolidating its value to the study of literature. 47 VI: Three Modes of Literary Thinking So, what are these three modes of literary thinking and how are they illuminated, defined, and instantiated in the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton? Let us begin with one of the oldest modes of thinking in poetry, “philosophical thinking,” which arguably originates in the work of 46 T. S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943). 47 Two points that Kramnick and Nersessian make about “form” can also be applied to the term thinking. First, thinking should not be confined in its use or various connotations. Terminological and lexical elasticity suggests disciplinary vigor, not crisis. And second, the term thinking offers a great deal of exegetical power to literary studies. Kramnick and Nersessian see the second point as one of “explanation.” In literary studies we measure the relevance of research “by asking whether or not it has provided satisfactory explanations for the questions it has set out to ask.” The various uses of thinking by critics, in other words, depend on the questions being asked, and their success is a mark of their ability to square the explanation with the question. See Jonathan Kramnick and with Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” in Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 2018). 18 the Pre–Socratics, many of whom dwelt on the nature of things in verse-form. 48 In general, philosophical thinking can be defined as discursive argument. 49 For example, it can appear as Epicureanism in an epic poem like Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (1 st century BC), melancholia in a poem like George Chapman’s The Shadow of Knight (1594), or as political context in a novel such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). It can also occur as religious faith in a devotional poem by George Herbert or as parable in a short story by Franz Kafka. Aristotle’s early discussion of thought in the Poetics referred to such thinking as dianoia (dia [through] + nóos [perception, thought]), or “the capacity to produce pertinent and appropriate arguments.” 50 Dianoia constitutes a “discursive and syllogistic reasoning” that in the context of tragedy informs not only the speech and rhetoric of characters, but also their beliefs, making it what Northrop Frye called the “theme” or “meaning” of a work of art. 51 In literary studies, “philosophical thinking” often appears under such labels as “allegory,” “epigram,” “hymn,” “confession,” “philosophical poem,” “metaphysical poetry,” and “novel of ideas,” but the general understanding of philosophical thinking as applied to a work of literature is that in some shape or form it advances a philosophical argument. 52 Most post-classical 48 Parmenides and Empedocles are the most frequently cited and discussed of the Presocratics. None of their work survives entire, but large fragments of their philosophical poems (both of which were titled by later scholiasts as “On Nature”) are collected in Early Greek Philosophy: Volume V, Western Greek Thinkers, Part 2, edited and translated by André Laks and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 49 There is surprisingly little literature on what could be called the genre of the “philosophical poem,” but in her study, “Cosmic Matters: Spenser, Donne and the Philosophic Poem,” Ayesha Ramachandran attributes part of this difficulty to the fact that many of the examples are Neo-Latin poems (See “Prooimion: On Philosophical Thinking” below). See Ramachandran, “Cosmic Matters,” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, edited by Yulia Ryzhik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 143-144. 50 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b, quoted in Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, edited by F. E. Peters (New York University Press, 1967), 37-38. 51 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957), 52. 52 George Santayana provides the classic definition of the philosophical poet in his 1910 study, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019). According to Santayana, not only do Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe provide “systems of thought,” they also provide comprehensive visions of life, identified by Santayana as “naturalistic” (Lucretius), “supernatural” (Dante), and “romantic” (Goethe). What distinguishes philosophical poets from other poets is their ability to imaginatively hold and suspend an experience in thought while also providing a philosophical vision of the world. This ability affords comprehensiveness and range, or a 19 examples take a didactic or instructive form that occurs in genres such as epic, romance, hymn, and later the novel. By the late-sixteenth century, the philosophical poem had become not only an identifiable form, but a popular form as well, consisting of various (or hybrid) genres, which Jean Edouard du Monin’s outlined and defined in his allegorical poem, Discours Philosophique at Historial de la Poesie Philosophique (1581). 53 Many of the works discussed by du Monin took as their primary subject “the discovery of the nature of things—[that is,] the order underlying the natural world, the microcosm of the individual, the cosmos itself.” 54 In early modern Italy, most philosophical or philosophically inflected poems were written by philosophers, theologians, grammarians, and not by what one would strictly call “poets.” (e.g., Boiardo and Ariosto wrote romances, not philosophical poems). Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, for example, were known for their philosophical, religious, and astronomical works as well as for their poetry. Their philosophical poetry thus represents an extension of their work in other fields. While accomplished, especially in the case of Campanella, their poetry never achieved the central place in their work that the non-poetic works did. In England, however, it was the reverse. Few, if any, thinkers or philosophers turned to poetry to express their ideas (John Dee, Francis Bacon, and Simon Forman, for example, did not write philosophical poetry. And Hobbes was not a poet, but a translator of poetry.) 55 The same complete as opposed to individual vision of life. Such imaginative reach, universal appeal, and understanding are the philosophical poet’s strength and lasting value. 53 Along with Chapman’s “The Shadow of Night” and “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense” (1595), examples of English philosophical poems include Spenser’s “The Four Hymns,” John Davies “Orchestra,” Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and Donne’s Anniversaries among many others. 54 Ramanchadran, “Cosmic Matters,” 144. 55 One of the main exceptions to this claim would be the philosophical poetry of Margaret Cavendish (e.g., Philosophical Fancies [1653]) and her fictional prose (e.g., The Blazing World [1666]). Cavendish was no doubt a philosopher of first rank whose primary works were philosophical, scientific, and political in nature, but she also turned her attention to poetry and fiction as a vehicle for many of her ideas and arguments. For a discussion of genre 20 courtiers (statesmen), professionals (playwrights), and religious thinkers that produced most of the poetry in England during the early modern period were also the authors of most its philosophical poems. Among this rather eclectic group of English Renaissance poets, the most distinguished philosophical poet was the “sage and serious” Spenser, whose Faerie Queene remains to this day an underrated work of philosophical argument. 56 That the poem historically has been read more for enjoyment than its “darke conceit” is commonplace, but its philosophical import has been influential on readers as diverse as Milton, Keats, and Wallace Stevens. 57 Although Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso standout as the most conspicuous influences behind the structure, genre, and theme of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), it was classical poets such as Ovid and Lucretius and contemporary continental thinkers such as Bruno in Italy and especially Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas in France who provided Spenser with models of how to infuse poetry with philosophical thinking. 58 In The Faerie Queene, both the allegorical tradition of chivalric romance and philosophical poetry meet, providing the poem not only with a symbolic mode of narration but a discursive argument as well. and argument in Cavendish, see Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and The Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998). 56 Milton, Collected Prose (Volume II), 514-517. 57 See William Hazlitt’s famous quip that if “[you] do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with [you],” in Lectures on the English Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 56. For a discussion of the history of The Faerie Queene’s readers (reception), see Vlema Bourgeois Richmond, ‘The Faerie Queene’ as Children’s Literature: Victorian and Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2016); and Catherine Nicholson, Reading and Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene’: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 58 Most scholarship links the influence of Du Bartas on Spenser to his short, “philosophical poems,” including The Ruines of Rome and The Teares of the Muses, the former of which quotes as translation a passage from Du Bartas. But since I am discussing the notion of philosophical thinking, specifically a theory of mutability, and not the genre of the philosophical poem, I am able to argue that The Faerie Queene demonstrates an influence as well. For support of my position, see Peter Auger, Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For an earlier account of the relationship between Du Bartas and Spenser, see E. R. also Gregory, Jr., “Du Bartas, Sidney, and Spenser,” Comparative Literature Studies 7, no. 4 (1970): 437-449. The scholarship on the relationship between Bruno and Spenser is quite old, going back to the early days of “source” and “influence” studies that were integral to establishing Spenser criticism in the twentieth century. See in particular Ronald Levinson, “Spenser and Bruno,” PMLA 43, no. 3 (1928): 675-681; Angelo M. Pellegrini, “Bruno, Sidney, and Spenser,” Studies in Philology 49, no. 2 (1943): 128-144; and more recently, Douglas Brook-Davies, “Bruno,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 21 Despite Spenser’s attempt to define his epic in the “Letter to Raleigh” as a poem intended “to fashion a gentleman” and based on Aristotle’s virtues, Chapter I argues that Spenser actually provides a less conspicuous though more profound philosophical argument in the form of a theory of mutability, which he weaves into the entire structure of The Faerie Queene. From the early “wanderings” of Redcrosse and Una (Book I) to Guyon’s encounter with Mammon (Book II) on through to the final “fragments” of the poem, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, Spenser never ceases with his concern for mutability. Since the 1920s, it has been critical commonplace to treat the Garden of Adonis (Book III) and the Two Cantos of Mutabilite as the most philosophically rich loci in Spenser’s vast and sprawling romance. While other loci also provide examples of philosophical thinking, the Garden of Adonis and Two Cantos stand out for their focus on change and mutability as well as genealogy and history. 59 But what criticism has failed to account for is the way Spenser adopts a specific thinking style in his attempt to draw various doctrines (including Pythagorean, Platonic, Christian, Lucretian, and Ovidian) into a poetic theory of mutability. The thinking might not be paratactic, elliptical, or allusive as in Shakespeare and Milton, let alone doctrinal as in Dante, but as Teskey and others have demonstrated, it contains it own energeia or momentum that generates its own moments of profound thought. 60 As I argue in Chapter I, this energeia manifests in the form of the stanza. 59 Edwin Greenlaw was one of the first and most influential scholars to bring philosophical attention to Spenser. See “Spenser and Lucretius,” Studies in Philology 17, no.4 (1920): 439-464; and “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’” PMLA 45, no. 3 (1930): 684-703. See also Chapter I for a discussion of Greenlaw’s relationship to Spenser criticism. 60 Spenser is no doubt an allusive poet, but his use of allusion, as Harry Berger Jr. argues, is what one would call “conspicuous allusion,” which “present[s] stock literary motifs, characters, and genres in such a way as to emphasize their conventionality; displaying both their debt to and their existence in a conventional climate—classical, medieval, romance, etc.” Milton, however, as Chapter IV argues, is an “allusive thinker.” Rather than nodding to the reader through allusion, Milton works through allusion for himself. It is author-directed, not reader-directed allusion. See Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 154. 22 In addition to the thematic argument of Spenser’s philosophical thinking is a corresponding aesthetic mode, which is also philosophical and cannot be separated from the narrative itself. Spenser’s verse is kinetic, changing, and mutating. It is constantly in motion even as it dilates on events or rises to moments of philosophical abstraction as in the Garden of Adonis. In such moments, which C. S. Lewis famously identified as “allegorical cores” and Northrop Frye as “scenes of recognition,” one identifies the confluence of philosophical argument and its prosodic instantiation. Spenser, in other words, infuses the very grammar of his verse with mutability. The Spenserian stanza, in particular, captures thinking in stilled moments even as it propels the narrative forward. As Teskey notes in his description of moment, Spenser uses the last line of his stanzas (something which he added to the Italian ottava rima), the Alexandrine, to generate “freedom of movement and room for development.” Many of Spenser’s final stanza-lines “force[] us to pause and hear each passing stanza as a unit.” The pause opens the poem up for development, what in Romance frequently occurs as dilation. There seems to be, in such moments, a flourish of imagination, where Spenser, as he tries to “disembark,” finds himself enthralled by the richness of his cognitive gathering. The “endlesseness” or “ongoingness” of Spenser’s style, in other words, is not simply the result of the romantic mode, but a justification, an embodiment, and a vehicle for its theory of mutability. Spenser was arguably the only English poet before Wordsworth who was able to sustain an extended philosophical argument that instantiated that argument at the level of diction, rhythm, and imagery. Milton was no doubt a philosophical poet, but his argument was overt, a product of his poem’s prophetic voice. In Spenser, however, mutability is not only what John Hollander called an “undersong,” something occurring beneath the narrative level of the plot and that carries a 23 rhythm or undulation with it, but also the experience of the poetry itself. Argument, style, and rhythm in Spenser form what Deleuze would call a rhizome of mutability. 61 While philosophical thinking has been central to notions of literary thinking for millennia, arguably the most common type of thinking in literature is what is called representational thinking, the second type of literary thinking explored in this study. Fletcher, in his description of noetics, notes that “literary works tend to carry their thought indirectly, by showing or expressing the thoughts of some Other, some person whose story is being told, and these expressions appear to preempt the place of thought as a direct philosophic or dianoetic aim of the work.” 62 Although representational thinking can inform the argument (dianoia) of a work, it often manifests itself as constructed or staged thinking, which means that it seldom appears in works of literature without the reader being aware that it is thinking. 63 In this sense, representational thinking functions a “conspicuous thinking” that the author intentionally creates as an identifiable moment (or moments) of thinking. The most influential and arguably popular form of representational thinking is the dramatic soliloquy. A Shakespearean soliloquy, for example, performs many types of representational thinking. It can illustrate a character that thinks about the future, as with Macbeth, or a character that reflects on their love for another, as with Juliet. It can also demonstrate villainous plotting through characters like Richard III and Iago. Because of its seemingly inexhaustible ability to illustrate a variety of mental processes as well as emotional states, the soliloquy has been viewed as a great tool of dramatic interiority. A large body of 61 John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 148-149. 62 Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, 15. 63 Examples of course could be found where representational thinking fails to surface, so to speak, but one of the primary functions of representational thinking is that it is recognized as such. It is representational because it intentional thinking and therefore manifests itself as thinking. 24 criticism has examined the relationship between soliloquy and inwardness, self, and the development of modern subjectivity, but much recent criticism, specifically cognitive criticism that concerns itself with “mind reading” and “mentalizing,” has looked to the novel rather than drama for the representation of inner thought. 64 In her ongoing study of the relationship between morality and literature, Amanda Anderson, for example, argues that the novel “has a special capacity and license to convey the phenomenology of the thinking life.” 65 With its ability to develop and chart character behavior and situate personal experience within social as well as domestic contexts, the novel, according to Anderson, “helps writers present forms of inner experience that are extremely difficult to capture in other media or in academic genres of the human sciences.” Setting aside its fictionality, what separates the novel from philosophy and the sciences is its ability to convey thinking across time, specifically “the dynamics between [. . .] punctual events and the longer processes that surround them.” 66 I cite Anderson at length because nearly all her novelistic insights about representational thinking can be applied to drama as well. Since drama provided the novel with many of its conventions such as interior monologue (soliloquy, aside), recognition scenes, and dialogue, plays also exhibit ruminative, private, and extended periods of “moral time.” The difference, of course, is the performativity of drama. Drama must enact its representational thinking, whereas prose need only represent it. This significant difference means that representational thinking in 64 On the importance of soliloquy to the creation and development of interiority see Katherine Eisaman Maus’ Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1995), James Hirsh’s Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), and A.D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin’s Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 65 See Anderson, “Thinking with Character,” in Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 131. 66 Anderson, “Thinking with Character,” 138. 25 drama often blurs the boundary between private and social spheres, which makes it in many instances a subversive art form. 67 Chapter II examines this liminal feature of representational thinking by looking at the Shakespearean soliloquy. Literature on the soliloquy and specifically Shakespeare’s soliloquies is extremely large, but as instructive and illuminating as much of it is, none of it has adequately accounted for how soliloquies actually make things happen in plays. Often, soliloquies are treated as their etymology suggests, singular voices talking to themselves (solus [alone] + loqui [speak), when in practice soliloquies are often both the action of the play, such as in Hamlet, as well as the loci of private activity that shape, form, and influence the action of the play. In many of Shakespeare’s characters, the soliloquy opens up a representational space that allows them to become what Giorgio Agamben, Sigmund Freud, and A .C. Bradley refer to as “exceptions,” individuals who stand outside the rule of society. Such characters not only dominate the stage in private thought, but they also extend their exceptionalism to the social world of the play, which allows them to suspend the order of action and ultimately become the “rule” of law, what is known colloquially as tyrants. The first play in which Shakespeare develops the “exceptional” potential of the soliloquy is Richard III. In the opening lines of the play, Richard III famous flaunts his exceptionalism. He announces not only his physical status as “not shaped for sportive tricks,” but also his political design to “prove a villain.” But more important, the soliloquy instantiates Richard as a formal exception; that is, as an individual who through language has given form to his own representation. The soliloquy, in this sense, captures exceptionalism in the making. Where 67 Many modern playwrights including Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal have exploited this aspect of drama. See Brecht’s “A Short Organum for the Theatre” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), and Baol’s Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985). 26 Hamlet delays and dilates through thinking and thus influences the action of the play by drawing the play into his mind, Richard’s thinking moves centrifugally, extending outward to shape the social world of the play. The soliloquy, in other words, become the primary means of suspending the order of the play, allowing the exception, Richard, to become the rule. While Richard III inaugurates Shakespeare’s great exceptions, Macbeth arguably pushes exceptionalism to its imaginative limits. No Shakespeare character exploits the imaginative potential of the soliloquy like Macbeth. Unlike Richard, Macbeth collapses the entire reality of the play into his private thought-world. From his opening encounter with the Witches, Macbeth’s exceptional trajectory is the opposite of Richard’s. Rather than moving out from the soliloquy, he draws everything towards his imagination, collapsing time and space into what Angus Fletcher calls a “prophetic moment.” In such a moment, Macbeth “crosses” to the future, drawing the future back into his present. From that “shoal,” he sees everything. And in seeing, he acts on what has been transmuted in his imagination, which is the murder of Duncan (and others). Reality, or the social action of the play, is the horror of Macbeth’s imagination, which is what makes him Shakespeare’s most exceptional character. In both Richard III and Macbeth, the soliloquy functions as a liminal space of negotiation between private thoughts and social duty. In this space, which “excepts” them from society, they develop states of mind and feeling that influence the action of the play. Despite this movement between social spheres, the soliloquy, however, remains a discrete locus, a space outside the social order of the play. It depends, in other words, on a division between public and private spheres to generate the exceptionalism necessary to undermine the play. But in the aside, no such division between social spheres occurs. The aside collapses public and private into a single moment of thinking. 27 Chapter 3 develops on Chapter 2 by looking at the overlooked convention of the aside, specifically in relation to Shakespeare’s great romance The Winter’s Tale. I examine, in particular, one of the most famous asides in Shakespeare, Leontes’ outburst that begins, “Too hot, too hot” (1.2). Usually, critics take one of two approached when discussing asides. Either they conflate the aside with the soliloquy and therefore define it as a “short soliloquy,” or ignore it altogether (for example, only one monograph on the aside exists, and it treats the classical use of the aside in Greek and Roman drama). Both approaches consequently underestimate and misunderstand the form, function, and representational value of the aside. Despite the similarities between the soliloquy and the aside, there are fundamental differences between the two. Where the soliloquy often functions as the unfolding of premeditated thought, the aside tends to be more spontaneous, contextual, and gestic. We get a sense in an aside of actual thought and emotion as it develops rather that the staged thinking of soliloquy. Most important, the aside always functions as a private form of social thinking. This distinction between the soliloquy and aside has all sorts of implications for the representational structure not only of the public sphere but also private sphere, which are both rendered porous through the aside. The aside, in other words, draws the speaker into a network of meaning shared by multiple characters onstage. Playing off Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “the singular plural,” I suggest that the aside is an “us” and “we” convention. Rather than a singular “I,” the utterance of an individual to herself (or imaginary other), the aside generates meaning that is plural, moving back and forth between two spheres like a shuttle. The final type of poetic thinking is perhaps the most difficult to define through description, as it poses the widest range of uses. To put it simply, however, poetic thinking occurs as authorial thinking in the text, but unlike philosophical and representational thinking, it 28 is not planned out beforehand. In many ways, poetic thinking is the closest form of literary thinking to the act of cognition itself, representing as well as embodying, in the words of J. H. Prynne, the “energies of language under pressure.” 68 Where representational and philosophic thinking are attempts to argue and capture thinking, poetic thinking embodies the process of choosing, comparing, negotiating, exploring, experimenting, speculating, and anticipating that constitutes cognition. In his discussion of Wordsworth’s “philosophic song,” for example, Simon Jarvis suggests that Wordsworth’s poetry provides “a different kind of thinking [ . . . ] that instead of being a sort of thoughtless ornament or reliquary for thinking [ . . . ] is itself a kind of cognition.” Jarvis argues, in other words, that not just Wordsworth’s argument but also his verse, the making of it through meter and rhythm, is a form of cognition, “with its own resistances and difficulties.” 69 Poetic thinking at its most basic constitutes the making of poetry; it is not the poem, which as poema is finished and complete, but the process of marshaling language, ideas, figuration, and argument to the act of creation. Just as with the other models of thinking, specifically what I distinguished as instrumental thinking above, philosophy has contributed significantly to the conceptualization of poetic thinking. Heidegger, in particular, looms large in contemporary discussions of thinking, as he formulates a theory that is defined by poetic practices and that challenges nearly all traditional accounts of thinking in Western philosophy. In his distinction between calculative and meditative thinking, for example, Heidegger provides in the latter a paradigm for poetic thinking, suggesting that “meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor 68 See Prynne’s chapter, “Poetic Thought,” in Thinking Poetry, ed. Peter Nicholls and Peter Boxall (London, Routledge, 2013), 14. 69 Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, 4, 224. See also his “Prosody as Cognition” in Critical Quarterly 40.4 (1998) and “Thinking in Verse” in The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Maureen N. McLane and James Chandler (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 29 to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.” 70 Consequently, poetic thinking provides several different examples of thinking that are antithetical to logocentric models of thinking or thinking based on reason and logic as well as an understanding that language and speech can [adequately] represent reality. Poetic thinking does not attempt to capture thinking (as in the manner of representational or philosophical thinking) but simply lets the process of thinking unfold. In such a process, subjectivity and objectivity merge in the work of art so that they collapse the distinction between content and form. Like “stream of consciousness” in the novel or “action painting” in the visual arts, both of which take the brakes off thought, so to speak, poetic thinking requires an ethos of wandering that does not try, as Teskey argues, “to get out itself at its destination, disembarking so to speak, on an answer to thought that is not itself part of the thinking, that is, of continual questioning. The entangled moments are on paths that lead nowhere because the idea of a destination to thinking is foreign to the wisdom that is gathered on these paths.” 71 Teskey’s description of poetic thinking, which is Heideggerean in its suggestion that thinking involves “paths,” “gather[ings],” and “entangled moments,” derives from his analysis of Edmund Spenser’s poetry. But in Chapter IV, I apply such non-teleological thinking to Milton, specifically his use of allusion. Where Spenser no doubt embodies, as Chapter I argues, the flux and flow of philosophical thinking, Milton consolidates his thinking in moments of transumptive allusion. 72 In this sense, Milton’s poetic thinking is fairly identifiable as thinking, but nearly 350 70 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 53. 71 Gordon Teskey, “Thinking Moments in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies XXII (2007): 114. 72 Transumptio (L.) or metalepsis (Gr.) means “to change the sense” or “to refer to a thing by means of another thing that is remotely related to it,” what Puttenham calls by its personified named, “the far-fetched.” Drawing on Johnson’s observations about Milton’s erudite use of allusion, Angus Fletcher calls attention to Milton’s “transumptive style” in Allegory: A Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 241. See 30 years of criticism has disagreed over how allusion functions in Paradise Lost. By suggesting that allusion is not reader-oriented but author-oriented, I not only turn allusion on its head, making it a creative rather than ornamental aspect of poetry, but also identify allusion as the driving force of Milton’s poetry. In allusive moments, one finds Milton thinking with poetry; that is, working through the past to account historically for the present purpose of his verse. While Milton identifies the “nightly visitations” (9.21) of the Muses as compositional aides, these gestures are generic, a requirement of argument and song (not to mention theodicy). Milton’s mind, as Samuel Johnson once observed, is the true repository of his poetry, but such poetry requires activation and impulse, which finds form in poetic thinking. Such thinking, however, which appears as allusion in Paradise Lost, does not demonstrate poetry that is thought out in advance or poetry with a clear objective. Instead, it discloses a contingency that sees Milton moving through his thoughts. Milton might have been a monolithic thinker, certain of his desires and calling, but in the execution of his poetry, he reveals a molten mind. The earliest and certainly one of the most famous loci of allusive thinking for Milton, and one that I chose because it undermines much of what has been argued about the passage, occurs in the opening lines of the poem. In summoning the Muses, Milton moves through several “haunts,” which is a convention going back to Hesiod and other epic poets in their search for the origin of their song. But Milton, in allusive fashion, extends his search beyond decorum. Milton’s grammatical unit of choice for expansion is the conjunction “or,” which allows him to serialize his thinking, letting it go (Heidegger’s Gelassenheit), so to speak. And in doing so, Milton suggests that the only cause and origin for poetry is the poet themself. In this sense, Milton distinguishes in poetic action between what is called thinking and thought. Thought is also John Hollander’s The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 31 associated with answers, ends, and destinations (such as truth), and to have a thought means to “disembark” from thinking. Poetic thinking, however, involves “paths,” roads, and trajectories that “lead nowhere.” In the proem to Paradise Lost, Milton begins in typical epic fashion, but finds himself unable to contain the generative thinking behind the compositional moment. The result is a lavish sparagmos (rending apart) of all epic decorum. Milton’s mind is too heated for the confines of tradition, using allusion as the vehicle of such poetic recalcitrance. VII: Why Thinking The title of this Introduction echoes Martin Heidegger’s influential series of lectures on thinking, What is Called Thinking? (Was Heisst Denken?). Like Heidegger’s title, which plays on two senses of “called,” “What is called thinking” (a description of thinking) and “what is called to or for thinking” (a response/obligation to thinking), my title also suggests two senses. First, I refer to what is called thinking in literature by critics, readers, and authors. This sense of the question addresses the two models of what is called thinking that I distinguish above. “Instrumental thinking” and “literary thinking” are what critics “call” or identify as thinking in literature. This sense is taxonomical or lexical; it identifies uses and defines those uses through description and example. The other sense, and the sense with which all other notions of thinking in literature depend, is what is called thinking “in” literature, or the activity of thinking within the text itself. This literary sense of thinking, as I argue throughout this study, is fundamental to literature and the cognitive turn of the last several decades. Despite the burgeoning interest in the cognitive element of literature, literary thinking as thinking has been under-theorized. Terms such as “mind-reading,” “metarepresentation,” and “cognitive blending” might identify how literary works mirror or represent cognition, but in 32 doing so they often reduce the study of literature to scientific explanations. The use of the term “cognition” over “thinking” in such studies demonstrates, for example, the interest in the faculty of the mind and its ability to anticipate, deduce, and hold multiple stories together (i.e., the idea of thinking as knowing, knowledge, or practices of certainty) rather than with the process of thinking itself, which is often messy, illogical, piecemeal, as well as highly imaginative (i.e., thinking as understanding, which can emotional[/empathetic], and thinking as meaning-making, which can be personal and not logic-oriented). Nowhere in her two important studies of cognition and literature, for example, does Lisa Zunshine mention the imagination, the central faculty of poiesis. 73 Such an omission suggests that the process and activity of poetic thinking has been sacrificed in cognitive studies to mechanics or epistemology. In other words, cognitive studies seeks to explain and examine the result of literature as if it were an autopsy rather than illuminate the process in which the body came into being, which can often be a form of critique, historical analysis, ideology, or feeling among myriad provocations. Each generation of scholars, critics, and readers must find new ways to talk about their objects of study, and in the last decade, thinking has become the term to encompass a great deal of critical thought, specifically related to poetry. In outlining the various uses of poetic thinking, the main object of this study is to clarify what thinking means to literature. Thinking provides a varied description of cognitive processes that allow authors to engage in a variety of creative acts. In other words, thinking and creating are analogous activities but with fundamental differences. Thinking, as this study illuminates, carries with it inflections of critique, analysis, and resistance as well as a host of other associations including uncertainty, ambiguity, and 73 Neither Why We Read Fiction: Theory of the Mind and the Novel nor Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) indexes imagination. These are extremely informative books, specifically the former, but one can see the emphasis (and bias) on concrete scientific terms (i.e., cognition) to explain literature versus the difficult, expansive, and poetic terms “thinking” and “imagination.” 33 ambivalence, the latter triad not often thought to be the province of either creativity or invention. Thinking, moreover—and this is where it becomes anathema to the classical understanding of invention (inventio) as the finding of material (topics) for composition—often seeks its own end in itself. As Heidegger, Teskey, and others have suggested, poetic thinking does not pursue ends or results, but instead gathers along paths. These paths, which are often personal, expressive, and can take the form of any of the three modes of thinking enumerated above and analyzed below, are the poems we read. As achieved art, we can admire, enjoy, as well as wrestle with them knowing that their form and meaning is the activity of thinking. Poems are not “absolutely dead things” or the artifacts that we perpetuate in print, performance, and education, but a linguistic moment of the mind in the act of creation. Throughout this study, I emphasize moment over image, artifact, text or other static names for “poem.” While important, the aforementioned names do not capture the spatial and temporal activity of moment, which “twist[s] together opposite things in a dynamic situation.” Poems are not simply objects, but processes that in their active form provide opportunities for meaning. If they were flat and deterministic—that is, non- figural—they would not illicit the interest across various individuals, languages, and cultures. Central to this process and its “energeia,” or power of actualization, is thinking. I therefore take the multivalency of thinking in literary criticism and its embodiment in literature as a sign of a renewed hope and belief that literature still matters to community, change, and the life of the mind, but also to the creative life of the imagination. In focusing my analysis on literary thinking rather than instrumental thinking, I hope that thinking will become a companion to, even coconspirator in, the renewal of what the imagination can offer, namely alternatives to the given. As philosophical, representational, and poetic thinking demonstrate, authors are not always in the business of “holding a mirror up to nature”; they also provide ways 34 to change what that mirror reflects as well as imagine what might be possible if literature itself was a form of reality, a way of being and existing in the world. Thinking may have taken the mantel from imagination, but imagination gave the mantel “its local habitation and a name” (5.1.1847) in literature. 74 74 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 35 Section I: Prooimion: On Philosophical Thinking; or, The Philosophical Poem from Parmenides to Spenser “Where philosophy and [poetry] mesh, where they are litigious toward one another in form and matter, these echoes of origin can be heard. The poetic genius of abstract thought is lit, is made audible. Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode.” —George Steiner The birth of Western metaphysics and the birth of the philosophical poem occur as a simultaneous event. 1 Like Milton’s good and evil, metaphysics and poetry, “as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.” 2 The poem that introduced these “twins” into Western culture was Parmenides’ “On Nature,” which was also the first work of any kind to equate “thinking” with “being”: “For it is the same, to / think and also to be” (B3, 39). 3 Parmenides is the first philosopher for whom thinking and being are coterminous activities, which in their dependence on one another give each other form or existence. Without Being, thinking could not occur, and without thinking, Being could not “be.” According to Parmenides, To think and the thought that “is.” For without what is, in which [thinking] is spoken, You will not find “thinking.” For nothing else <either> is or will be Beside what is. (B8, 35) 1 In her a reassessment of Hesiod’s influence on Presocratic philosophy, Maria Michela Sassi argues that Hesiod’s use “of human generation to describe physical processes will have a long afterlife in the Presocratics’ reflections on the cosmos.” In other words, because Hesiod endows his cosmogony with “logic,” an ordering and patterning that structured myth and gave coherence to the natural world from which the Presocratics drew on, he could arguably be considered the first Western philosophical poet (The Birth of Philosophy in Greece, trans. by Michele Asuni [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018], 35). 2 John Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II: 1643-1648, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 514. 3 All references to Parmenides are taken from Early Greek Philosophers, Volume V: Western Thinkers, Part 2, ed. André Laks and Glenn W. Most (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 36 Not only does Parmenides make an ontological claim that happens to be an epistemological one as well (Being [or ‘to be”] means thinking [or “to think”]), he does so in poetry. Although other philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclites preceded Parmenides, he was the first philosopher to put philosophy in verse. 4 In uniting philosophical argument with poetic meter, the Presocratics ushered in a style of poetry that became quite common in classical antiquity, both in Greek and Roman traditions. 5 Despite Plato’s later charges against poetry and the subsequent separation by many philosophers of the search for pleasure (poetry) and the search for knowledge (philosophy), philosophical poetry flourished. 6 The most famous philosophical poem of antiquity, and one that is still read and discussed in relation to other long poems such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Apollonius’s The Argonautica, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a poem that draws on the philosophical work of Democritus and Epicurus to make a predominantly materialist (i.e, Atomist) argument. For George Santayana, Lucretius was one of three archetypal Western philosophical poets, and the only one in antiquity who could be said to put forward a “complete vision of life.” Lucretius, as the following chapter argues, is a critical 4 Since poetry preceded the 5 th century consolidation of philosophy as a discipline, namely through the establishment of Plato’s Academy, poetry gave authority to what was at the time radical speculative thinking. See Sassi, The Birth of Philosophy in Greece, on Homer and Hesiod’s poetical authority and the use by the Presocratics of their form. See also Hermann Fränkel’s pioneering Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy: A History of Greek Epic, Lyric, and Prose to the Middle of the Fifth Century, translated by Moses Hadas and James Willis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) and André Laks’ The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, trans. Glenn W. Most (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 5 Surprisingly, little work in Philosophy or Classics has focused on the poetical element of the Presocratics. Heidegger, of course, dedicated several sets of lectures to the Pre-Socratics and Parmenides in particular, but recent scholarship approaches them as thinkers, not as poets or even “philosophical poets.” One of the few exceptions is Tom Makenzie’s Poetry and Poetics in the Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 6 Giambattista Vico suggests that successful philosophical poems are “impossible.” According to Vico, “there is proof that the nature of poetry determines that it is an impossible thing for someone to be equally sublime as both a poet and a metaphysician. For metaphysics abstracts the mind from the sense; the poetic faculty must immerse the entire body in the senses. Metaphysics rises to universals; the poetic faculty must dive deep into particulars” See Vico, The New Science, ed. Jason Taylor and Robert Miner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 344. 37 presence in Spenser’s poetry, specifically The Faerie Queene. But before making this argument, a brief excursus on the nature of philosophical poetry and in particular philosophical thinking must be attempted. Unlike elegy, epigram, ode, hymn, and especially epic (all classical genres), the philosophical poem does not have a determined generic form nor does it have what might be called a poetics. 7 It is a hybrid poem, which is clear in the adjectival construction, “philosophical poem.” 8 One of the main reasons for this is that the philosophical poem (or the plural, “philosophical poetry”) is not determined by poetic form but by content; that is, argument (i.e., “discourse,” from which we get “discursive poetry”). All of the aforementioned poetic genres can be considered philosophical if they contain a corresponding philosophical argument. What makes a poem “philosophical” is its mode of thinking, what Aristotle calls in a slightly different context its “property,” which determines the nature of an object through a specific quality rather than definition (i.e., essence). 9 In antiquity, most philosophical poems possessed a “scientific” property. Their argument derived from natural philosophy and often focused on the “nature of things.” Subsequent scholiasts, for example, titled Parmenides’ and Empedocles’ two poems “On Nature.” In the early modern period, the type of thinking found in a philosophical poem varied widely. It could be theological, scientific, ethical, even erotic. But despite the differences, the 7 The hymn constitutes the closest “genre” to the philosophical poem. What prevents it from being exclusively philosophical is its treatment and concern with a wide variety of subjects, not all of which are argumentative, speculative, moral, scientific, etc. But because it is a poem of praise and honor, it is suitable to philosophical argument. 8 In this sense “philosophical poetry” resembles other such adjectival genres of poetry such as “political poetry” and “love poetry,” both of which are determined by their content (argument) for definition. 9 See Aristotle’s Topica I.v for a discussion of “property” as one of the four “Predicables.”: “A property is something which does not show the essence of a thing but belongs to it alone and is predicated covertibly by it” (102a). See Aristotle II: Posterior Analytics and Topics, ed. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 283. 38 same argumentative property always identified it as a philosophical poem. If a poem, for example, were a narrative poem, the argument would fit the story; if lyric, it would fit the emotion; if dramatic, it would fit the action. 10 The most successful and influential philosophical poems maintain a balance between the argument and the imagery, diction, and figuration that allows them to yoke feeling and thought, rhythm and argument. The argument, in this sense, is part of the poetry rather than an independent feature grafted onto it. In many cases, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene is certainly one of the most successful, the form of the poem manifests the argument at the level of prosody as well as figuration. 11 Although no study of the philosophical poem qua poem exists, it nevertheless possesses characteristics, traits, and inclinations that identify it as distinctly philosophical. 12 It thus possesses a style and form that can be analyzed. The most important characteristic is what is known as “philosophical thinking,” which constitutes the activity of the argument (its “discursivity”). Arguments can be isolated and discussed, like Epicureanism in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, Thomism in the Dante’s Commedia, or Godwinism in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam, but what makes an argument move through the poetry is its philosophical thinking. 10 Philosophical poems that were not able to achieve a formal and argumentative synthesis have not been served well by time. They no doubt exist, but their important and influence on subsequent poetry must be considered minimal. 11 In English, the philosophical poem flourished in the Elizabethan period. Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman, and Donne all composed philosophical poems, many of which are the cornerstone of any anthology of the period’s poetry. The interest in philosophical poetry continued through much of the seventeenth century, most notably in the work of Henry Vaughan, Margaret Cavendish (Philosophical Fancies [1653] and The World’s Olio [1655]), Lucy Hutchinson (Order and Disorder [1679]) and Milton. Despite the rise of “New Philosophy” and specifically the explosion of philosophical speculation in prose, whether in Bacon and Hobbes (or Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Spinoza), philosophical poetry maintained devoted practitioners as well as followers. Alexander Pope’s choice to write Essay on Man (1733) in verse indicates that even in the early eighteenth century, philosophical poetry was still viewed as a valid and important form of poetry. More modern examples include William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) and Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” (1942). 12 A strong indication that the “philosophical poem” has not been adequately treated nor conceptualized as a genre is the fact that it does not appear in such encyclopedic studies (i.e., taxonomical) as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) nor in such publicly accessible receptacles as Wikipedia (the French Wikipedia, however, has a long and rather thorough entry on “philosophical poetry”). The closest to a true study of the “genre” is George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought (New York: New Directions, 2011). 39 Emerson once coined the phrase “metre-making argument” to identify the “thought” that makes poetry come alive, and while for him this underlies all great poetry, metre-making argument is essentially thinking, the underlying cause and generation of the argument. 13 Where Santayana, the only scholar to attempt a survey of the “philosophical poet,” identifies the central features of philosophical poetry as comprehensiveness, universality, and range, such characteristics are extremely reductive almost to the point of eliminating most modern and contemporary examples of philosophical poetry such as Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery’s poetry, neither of which is comprehensive nor universal. 14 What has become the trademark of much modern (i.e., post- Romantic) philosophical poetry is therefore not the argument per se, but the style of argument, the shape and form the argument takes in its execution. As intimated above, the most important poet in this tradition is Edmund Spenser, the poet who brought philosophical thinking to the forefront of English poetry. Spenser’s contribution to the philosophical poem is both stylistic (formal) and argumentative. Spenser composed what are arguably more pure or “distinct” philosophical poems in his Four Hymns, but as suggested above, the philosophical poem is diverse (adhering to no genre) and allows for significant experimentation. 15 Spenser, in other words, developed a more ambitious type of philosophical poem in The Faerie Queene that thinks as it unfolds. While composing a poem about mutability, the argument of his poem, Spenser’s poem produces what this study calls philosophical thinking, the oldest of the three modes of literary thinking. The wandering and dilation are not simply romantic conventions in this sense (though they are 13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essay and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 450. 14 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 9. 15 For a discussion of genre and philosophical poem in Spenser’s Four Hymns, see Philip B. Rollinson, “A Generic View of Spenser’s ‘Four Hymns,’” Studies in Philology 68, no.3 (1971), and Jon Quitslund, “Thinking About Thinking in the Foure Hymns,” Spenser Studies 24 (2009). 40 undoubtedly that as well), but Spenser moving through the “mental space” of his poem. 16 In this sense, Spenser does not think like Milton, that is archaically, but archaeologically, which means in and through layers, sediments, and as I suggest below, rhizomes. Spenser, in this sense, is a horizontal thinker, moving outward (or backwards through history and genealogy) in his argument rather than upwards (to truth, certainty, or God). His philosophical bent is one of processual change rather than choices, which is another fundamental difference between Milton and Spenser. Spenser does not choose but moves; his poetry is kinetic rather than transumptive. The primary vehicle of Spenser’s theory of mutability and the movement of his verse is his stanza, which acts as the engine that moves the poetry along. The stanza, in other words, is where philosophical thinking occurs in Spenser, specifically in the pooling of stanzas around what C. S. Lewis calls “allegorical cores,” the dense series of stanzas that are conscious moments of thinking. 16 Coleridge first applied “mental space” to Spenser’s poetry. See Lectures 1818-1819 (Volume 2), ed R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 410. Isabel G. MacCaffrey has since developed and explored this metaphor in her study, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 41 Chapter 1: Spenser’s Philosophical Song: Mutable Thinking in The Faerie Queene In the constitution of the universe I distinguish four great elements earth, water, fire and air back of them a hyper-special power a vibratory movement, a wandering force no simple entity having nothing at all to do with any kind of divinity associations and disassociations combinations and permutations according to moment and place. -Kenneth White (from “The Etna Letters”) 1 “What is even more remarkable in this work is the fact that [it] deals with a subject of never- ending interest, perhaps the most important in nature, one which has engaged the minds of all the great philosophers and one concerning which an extraordinary number of books have been written. I refer to motion [moto locale], a phenomenon exhibiting very many wonderful properties, none of which has hitherto been discovered or demonstrated by any one.” Louis Elzevir (from the “Introduction” to Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences) 2 “Everything is formed out of connections, densities, shocks, encounters, concurrences, and motions” -Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) 3 “Kinesis (n.): a movement that lacks directional orientation and depends upon intensity of stimulation” -Merriam-Webster Dictionary 1 Kenneth White, The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 2 Quoted in Angus Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21—23. 3 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (1.633-4), quoted in Ryan J. Johnson’s The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 85 42 Spenser is a kinetic thinker. Rather than dwelling on the language, the verbal dexterity or ambiguity inherent in a word, line, or stanza, Spenser’s poetry moves briskly through its argument. It is not self-reflexive or centripetal, but centrifugal. The action of the verse is not internal to the words, but external, in “concrete” and “physically exact” words that lead the reader through the poetry. 4 Almost any stanza of The Faerie Queene will illustrate this movement, but the third stanza of Book I provides an instructive example: Vpon a great adventure he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gave, That greatest Glorious Queene of Faery lond, To winne him worship, and he grace to haue, Which of all earthly things he most did craue; And euer as he rode, his heart did earne To proue his puissance in battell braue Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne; Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and sterne. (1.1.3) 5 These lines exhibit what Edwin Greenlaw called “liquid melody” and Empson a “steady” and “untroubled flow.” 6 Their fluidity generates a continuous movement that carries the reader along at a sustained clip. There is no tangled or contorted syntax as in Donne, or subordinated clauses as in Milton, but a clear and direct description that completes its thought in each line before moving to the next. Even the rhymes, which are constructed out of alternating and couplet rhymes (ababbcbcc), force the reader along in the passage. Six of the nine rhyme-words above, for example, are verbs, an astonishingly high degree in English verse. 7 Except for the sixth and 4 J. B. Lethbridge, “The Poetry of The Faerie Queene” in Spenser in the Moment, ed. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 179. 5 For all Faerie Queene quotations, see The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al (London: Longman, 2007). 6 Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 138; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), 33. For additional accounts of Spenser’s stanza construction and “movement,” see Paul Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), specifically Chapter II; Jeff Dolven, “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004); and Kenneth Gross, “Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004). 7 In her examination of sixty stanzas from The Faerie Queene, Catherine Addison notes 50% of the rhyme-words in Book II (7-50-80) are verbs and 48% of the rhyme-words in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (6.1-30) are verbs as 43 seventh lines of the stanza, which together convey Redcrosse’s intention “to prove his puissance in battell,” each line imparts a single detail: (line 1) Redcrosse’s purpose: an “adventure”; (2) the individual who directed the purpose: “Gloriana”; (3) the significance of Gloriana: “Queene of Faery lond”; (4) the purpose of the adventure: to receive Gloriana’s “grace”; (5) Redcrosse’s psychological desire: her “grace to have”; (8) the nature of the “battell”: trial by “foe”; and (9) the naming of the foe: “a Dragon.” 8 In the accumulatio of these lines, J. B. Lethbridge notes the influence of Biblical parataxis, arguing that “in the almost complete absence of subordination, [Spenser’s lines] give the strong impression of saying one thing at a time, concluding it, and then proceeding to another, whereby the next in one way or another adds to what has already been said by the first, but not, or not typically, by retrospective qualification, but by addition and expansion, rather than alteration and change.” Line three’s “Glorious Queene,” for example, expands line two’s “Gloriana” rather than changes or alters the description. And the final line’s “Dragon horrible and sterne” extends but does not change line eight’s “foe.” Each line is complete, like a brick in a pathway, but as Spenser adds stanzas, the foundation of his epic romance, he widens and extends the stanzaic pathway through the narrative, allowing the narrative to shift, change, and ultimately mutate. In the description of the “shadie grove,” for example, where Redcrosse and Una find themselves several stanzas later, the first change of course (or “erring,” what will later in this Chapter be called by its Lucretian name, clinamen, well, which when compared to the Spenserian stanzas of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, demonstrates “an extremely unusual phenomenon in English” (343). See Catherine Addison, “Rhyming Against the Grain: A New Look at the Spenserian Stanza,” in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 341. 8 Contrasting Spenser’s method of accumulatio with Milton’s illustrates a fundamental difference of thinking style. Milton, for example, would have qualified the adventure with numerous adjectives, perhaps even comparing the adventure to another. Gloriana, just like Eve, would have taken dozens of lines to describe. Milton would have lingered over Redcrosse’s psychological condition with great attention, drawing on his powers of description to demonstrate the importance of trial to virtuous behavior. And finally, the dragon would require an epic simile with at least five comparisons, one or two of which might go off course, highlighting the questionable nature of analogical thinking or just the process of poiesis itself. 44 “swerve”) occurs in the poem, but the same kinetic propulsion and paratactic accumulation moves the action forward: Enforst to seeke some couert nigh at hand A shadie groue not far away they spide, That promist ayde the tempest to withstand: Whose loftie tree yclad with sommers pride, Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide, Not perceable with power of any starr: And all within were pathes and alleies wide, With footing worne, and leading inward farr: Faire harbour that them seemes, so in they entred ar. (1.1.7) “Shadie grove” does not qualify “covert,” which would slow the experience of the line by “exercis[ing]” the reader’s “immediate judgment,” but extends it just as “loftie tree […] / Did spred so broad” widens “grove.” 9 Each line is distinct, yet expansive of the scene it describes. Spenser’s dilatory technique is not simply stilled (stasis), but active (kinesis), moving the narrative outward from the stilled point of action. What occurs as a pause in the narrative action is not, however, reflected in the action of the verse. Spenser’s stanzas contain what Donald Davie once called “articulate energy.” Their syntactical arrangement and construction, which limit enjambment (eight of the above nine lines possess an end-stop) and clausal subordination, generate their own force. But where Davie sees such movement in much Elizabethan literature “cancel[ing] itself out, like the dance in which the dancer ends where he started,” Spenser’s verse builds on itself, generating a poetics of process where objects, characters, ideas, and emotions are not static, but always already (immer schon) changing. 10 Rather than a plodding, circuitous movement through the poetry, the reader experiences the energy of creation, which is always in 9 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 33. 10 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1955), 47. 45 motion.” 11 Spenser’s process in the stanza, moreover, allows the stanzas to morph and mutate into “moments” as the narrative proceeds. And as these moments accumulate, in the sense of building individually complete and self-sustaining units of thought or poetry, they also change the narrative, giving it the effect of what Gordon Teskey calls an “array.” 12 The kinetic propulsion or “gravitational pull” of Spenser’s verse in The Faerie Queene no doubt aids in the ease and enjoyment of the poem. 13 But inclusive of the verse’s movement is an argument that finds the pace and momentum of the poetry congenial to its development. Spenser’s verse, as many have noted, is philosophical. 14 Form and content function symbiotically not only to create a rich array of moments and storylines, but also to unfold a philosophical argument, what Wordsworth called in “The Recluse” a “philosophical Song.” 15 While developing an extending the epic tradition, The Faerie Queene yokes two dominant strains of Spenser’s literary past: the chivalric romance and the philosophical poem, the latter of which is a heterogeneous form that experiments with various genres as it moves between the particular and the universal. 16 The Faerie Queene becomes, in other words, the most sophisticated and ambitious philosophical poem of Renaissance England. 11 As Harry Berger Jr. reminds us, “forms are the sole embodiment of force, and part of the energy they embody, part of the reality they express, must be that of the very human process, the course of experience, whereby they are created.” See Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 135. 12 According to Teskey, “The Faerie Queene is a poem of moments. The episodes of a narrative poem comprise the plot, which is itself an arrangement of the story or myth. The moments in The Faerie Queene comprise not a plot but an array. The array is the field of allegory, and the connections made between the parts of this array, so that it seems to be one and not many, are interpretations, which is to say, just the sort of readings that an allegorical work is designed to elicit.” See Teskey, “Notes on reading The Faerie Queene: From Moment to Moment,” in Spenser in the Moment, 219. 13 Kenneth Gross, “Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza,” 29. 14 See Evelyn May Albright, Spenser’s Cosmic Philosophy of Religion (1929; New York: M S. G. Haskell House, 1970); Elizabeth Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser,” Representations 51 (1995): 47-76. 15 William Wordsworth, “The Recluse” (1.231), in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). 16 See Ayesha Ramachandran, “Cosmic Matters: Spenser, Donne, and the Philosophic Poem” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, ed. Yulia Rhyhik (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 143-144. 46 But if The Faerie Queene is a philosophical poem and Spenser a philosophical poet, what exactly does Spenser argue in his poetry? Does he espouse a philosophical system along the lines of Lucretius, Dante, or Goethe, three poets that George Santayana famously identified as “philosophical poets”? 17 Is Spenser, for example, an “Atomist,” a “Thomist,” or a “proto- romantic”? The simple answer, which will be the subject of the following chapter, is yes, Spenser is a philosophical poet and does provide a philosophical argument or method in The Faerie Queene, but such an argument is not what one would traditionally call a “belief system” or even a doctrine. It is not, in other words, philosophical poetry that provides a fully developed conception of the universe or a comprehensive view of life. Even the term “metaphysical poetry,” which was used by Dryden to describe the poetry of the generation after Spenser and that was maligned by Johnson for its unnatural representation of “the operations of intellect,” does not capture the nature of Spenser’s philosophical thinking. 18 With its union of feeling and thought as well as its “psychological curiosity,” metaphysical poetry is primarily the province of lyric thinking rather than narrative thinking. 19 Its thinking occurs at the level of wordplay, imagery, juxtaposition, verbal tension (including paradox, irony, and ambiguity), and conceit. It is, as many have identified, not only finely wrought poetry, but also witty poetry, or poetry highly conscious of its verbal reflexivity. Concision is the hallmark of metaphysical poetry. Spenser’s poetry, on the other hand, is expansive, syncretic, and kinetic. 20 Although recent critics have rightfully joined Spenser and Donne as “thinking poets,” their styles and to a 17 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Boston: MIT Press, 2019). 18 For a discussion of metaphysical poetry, see Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Introduction to his selection, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). 19 Ibid, xiv. See Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 20 Even critics tying the thinking project of Spenser and Donne together note the stylistic differences. As Yulia Ryzhik notes in her introduction to Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, “Donne’s verse was rough where Spenser’s mellifluous, stark and short where Spenser’s was florid and expansive. Spenser’s poetic persona was retiring, Donne’s was brash. Spenser thought allegorically, Donne metaphorically” (5). 47 certain extent their subject matter diverge considerably. 21 As an allegorical poet, Spenser’s philosophical thinking is closer to what Aristotle called dianoia or “theme.” Its thinking is diffusive, radiating out from the narrative like ripples in a pond. Rather than a system, Spenser advocates a method, which is ostensibly formal in nature and incorporates and espouses many doctrines. As Jeff Dolven argues, method “was a modus operandi—via and ordo were common synonyms—by which diffuse materials could be apprehended, organized, and conveyed to others. It offered a model of thinking and a procedure for teaching.” 22 For Spenser, method is both formal and argumentative, linguistic and conceptual, which allows Spenser to be a promiscuous thinker and a multiplex poet. Assuming that Spenser’s philosophical position is “Neoplatonic,” “Aristotelian,” “Pythagorean,” “Augustinian,” or even “Lucretian” runs the risk of simplification as well as miscategorization. As A. Bartlett Giamatti once observed, “many of the[] studies concerned with Spenser from the ‘history of ideas’ approach sooner or later run afoul. For these scholars try to impose on Spenser an intellectual or ‘philosophic’ consistency or unity which is simply not there.” 23 Spenser, in other words, like many poets of his generation and period, was eclectic, borrowing from a great deal of classical, medieval, and contemporary poetry, but also philosophical, religious, and historical material as well. Spenser possessed what Wilson Scott-….. calls and “international style,” which drew from European sources such as Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Du Bartas, and Marot, but also a native style influenced by Chaucer, Gower, and others, which has led some scholars to associate his work with early Baroque. 24 21 See Spenser and Donne, ed. Yulia Ryzhik. 22 Jeff Dolven, “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004), 18-19. 23 A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 233. 24 See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013). 48 While harmonious and what might be called an overtly architectonic, The Faerie Queene yokes a great deal of disparate material together, which threaten to break like Guyon through the artifice. Spenser is thus a much more Ovidian than monolithic thinker. His thinking takes form as his narrative unfolds. The ideas develop, in other words, organically, out of the thinking of the poetry rather than as something thought-out beforehand and then represented in and through the poetry. 25 Spenser does have an argument with corresponding ideas, principles, and beliefs, but it is not imposed on the poetry. Instead, it develops out of the poetry like condensation. Despite Giamatti’s wise words, scholars have nevertheless produced important and insightful interpretations of Spenser’s Faerie Queene with a single philosophical position in mind. Many of these studies reveal a great deal about how Spenser “works,” and we would be much impoverished without them. But these studies often neglect the larger and more obvious picture, namely the actual poetry and process of reading it. To read Spenser is not to feel bombarded with Aristotelian virtues despite their appearance in bold letters at the beginning of every Book (e.g., Holiness, Temperance, Chastity), but instead to feel the transformative (trans- [across, through] + formo [appearance, shape, form]) kinesis of his verse. The reader’s mind is moved and shaped in the process of reading. Where Dolven understands Spenser’s method as teaching the reader a lesson, a pedagogical “scene of instruction,” I see this as Spenser involving us in the very process of metamorphosis that his poetry so aptly represents. 26 We change as the poetry changes. In this sense, The Faerie Queene is not simply an aesthetic artifact, but an active pedagogical 25 Teskey provides a succinct account of this approach to Spenser’s thinking: [I]n The Faerie Queene Spenser does his thinking as he goes along, arriving often—as it seems, by accident, as a result of some particular instance he has seized on—at a deeper formulation that that which he began but also a stranger formulation. See “Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene” in Spenserian Moments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 301-302. For a discussion of Spenser developing alternative positions as he goes along, see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 26 Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 49 tool of creation and change mirroring but also ostensibly embodying the forces at play in the external world. Although Spenser does not have a philosophical system, he does have an argument. The law of mutability constitutes the dominant philosophical argument of the The Faerie Queene. For Spenser, mutability not only covers the metaphysical, but also the material, spiritual, and intellectual. As a principle of change that develops or manifests “against a background of advancing time” as motion, process, and force as well as growth and decay, mutability addresses relations between persons, places, objects, and ideas. 27 Like a deity, which it becomes in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609), mutability gives reason for cause and effect. Mutability is the before and after, the beginning and end in “continuall” change. Mutability also constitutes at the poetic level a principle of art. Just as mutability draws new from old and old from new in the natural world and ensures that Nature moves along its course, the poet preforms a similar function, taking raw material of the past (tradition) and generating something new. Mutability becomes, in this sense, the guiding principle of poiesis, or making. The nature of Romance, for example, with its mode of ongoingness, dilation, digression, and interlaced structure, makes it a genre and form suitable to mutability. 28 Romance, as Spenser conceives it, builds mutability into its structure. It instantiates, in other words, what it preaches. The following chapter demonstrates that mutability in The Faerie Queene functions as one of the oldest and most common types of thinking in poetry, namely philosophical thinking. 29 27 See John Louis Lepage’s “Cantos of Mutabilitie” entry in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 28 See C. S. Lewis’s discussion of “digression” in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 193-194; Eugène Vinaver’s account of “interlaced” structure in The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 71; and Patricia A. Parker’s discussion of “dilation” in Inescapable Romance: Studies in a Poetic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 54-63. 29 The pre-Socratics, specifically Empedocles and Parmenides, are examples of philosophers who composed in verse. See André Laks, The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, trans. 50 Where soliloquy and other devices such as inner monologue function as representational thinking and allusion or simile function as instances of “poetic thinking” (i.e., moments of authorial “making” [poiesis] within the poem itself), philosophical thinking underlies all aspects of a poem, from language and convention to characters, scenes, and plot (narrative). Philosophical thinking can be isolated in moments that overlap with representational thinking as in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, but when scholars speak of a philosophical poem or philosophical poetry (or a philosophical poet) they often mean a more a capacious sense of the term that can be applied to an entire poem or “system of thought.” Spenser’s “Four Hymns,” for example, have often been categorized as philosophical poems because they express a clear connection to Platonic ideas about beauty and love. In adopting Plato’s ideas as the subject of his poems, in other words, Spenser generates philosophical poems. But in The Faerie Queene, which is a narrative poem with characters, scenes, episodes, and alternating locations, philosophical thinking appears at conspicuous moments. In these moments, Spenser’s philosophical method, what he identifies by its more medieval names as “darke conceit,” takes over, imbuing the poem with its metaphysical richness. 30 Although Spenser’s depends a great deal on Plato for several doctrines in The Faerie Queene including the notion of “the poet’s revelatory furor,” the moral virtues of beauty, truth, and goodness, as well his allegorical understanding of the relationship between the ephemeral world of shadows and the transcendental world of ideas/forms, he nevertheless departs from Plato in many significant ways. 31 Rather than relying on a philosophical system, Spenser, like Glenn Most (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) and all eight volumes of Early Greek Philosophy (Loeb Classical Library), ed. André Laks and Glenn Most (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 30 See Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” in The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al., 714. Hamilton glosses “darke conceit” as Sidney’s “idea or fore-conceit,” the latter of which is discussed at length in the Epilogue below. 31 Kenneth Borris, Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6. Readers of Spenser have long identified the Platonic strain in his poetry, going so far to call him “Platonicke Spencer.” Spenser’s primary mode of poetic argument, allegory, is, in fact, conducive to Platonism. 51 many of his poetic contemporaries, made his own, which meant demoting “system” or vertical thinking (i.e., arborescent thinking) to “method” or horizontal thinking, what Deleuze and Guattari might call “rhizomatic thinking.” 32 Rhizomatic thinking produces the type of narrative we experience in The Faerie Queene. While The Faerie Queene no doubt possesses its “temples” or structures that “rise out of the earth in the form of sacred groves,” the narrative in general follows a “labyrinthine” pattern, or “pathless wandering.” 33 Not only is the narrative changing, but digressive, erring, dilatory, and endless. There is no center or fixed point of central meaning let alone action. Temples such as the House of Holiness, the Bower of Bliss, and the Garden of Adonis function as “gratified desire,” “allegorical cores,” and “scenes of instruction,” but everything that surrounds them is in motion. 34 Even the temples are subject to change from within, as the Bower of Bliss is destroyed by Guyon and the Garden of Adonis functions like a vernal particle accelerator, “eterne in mutabilitie.” In The Faerie Queene, there is no “beginning Both allegory and Platonism are “master discipline[s]” that function on multiple levels. Both signify in their surface or sensible world, for example, a secondary moral or ideational world. More important, Platonism is a syncretic philosophical system that “bridge[s] different sciences, to reconcile competing philosophies, and to enfold contemporary arguments into its ancient traditions of text and commentary.” Unlike Aristotelianism, which provided Spenser with a fully fleshed-out ethical vocabulary, Platonism is a “doctrinally elastic program.” Less rigid and strictly materialistic than Aristotle’s program, Platonism allowed Spenser to move from material to spiritual and from particular to abstract with ease. Its inclusive nature gives it immense explanatory power, especially in allegorically charged poetry where multiple levels of argument are collapsed at the level of narrative. See William Junker, “Plato and Platonism,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 274. For additional studies of Plato’s relationship to Spenser see Rober Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960); Enid Welsford, Spenser: Fowre Hymnes, Epithalamion: A Study of Edmund Spenser’s Doctrine of Love (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967); Elizabeth Bieman, Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Jon L. Quitslund’s Spenser’s Supreme Fictions: Platonic Natural Philosophy and ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 32 The Faerie Queene is a horizontal narrative, always moving outward, often in quest as well as in error (wandering). Not vertical, it avoids static moments of identity (“to be” constructions) or focusing on a single object, like Gloriana. As Wilson-Okamura quoting Helgerson argues, “the [faery] world is one in which the monarch is comparatively weak: Gloriana ‘never appears in the poem and exercises only the loosest and most intermittent control over its action’ [ . . . ] Spenser, [moreover,] never shows them at court” (Spenser’s International Style, 26). 33 Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 12- 13. 34 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, 13. 52 or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” 35 While structured around Books and Cantos these formal features only serve to identify the thinking, not produce it. The thinking in The Faerie Queene exceeds the formal, even the argumentative, limitations placed upon it. It is situated thinking, but not contained thinking. It is mutable thinking that develops through the experience of reading from stanza to stanza 36 Mutability is ubiquitous in The Faerie Queene. A reader would be hard-pressed to find a Canto without it. Not only does it appear locally as “wanderings,” “errings,” “thresholds,” “crossings,” and “moments,” those discrete activities and processes of change, but also as scenes and books. It functions on both the micro and macro level, infusing The Faerie Queene with a spirit of movement and change. This dual-level argument allows Spenser to critically engage the most vexed philosophical problem of his age, and one that itself was undergoing change, namely the relationship of the individual to the cosmos. And fundamental to the question of cosmos is the question, “What is motion?,” what Louis Elzevir in his introduction to Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638) called “the most important [subject] in nature.” 37 Motion, movement, and mutability all exhibit the same principle of difference, meaning that what came before, whether as place, object, thought or emotion, is not the same as what comes after. The Faerie Queene never steps in the same river twice. Mutability also functions in The Faerie Queene as a fluid, elastic, and facilitative argument that incorporates disparate philosophical positions. Platonic, Pythagorean, Aristotelian, 35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25. 36 Claire Colebrook’s description of Deleuze’s conception of thinking provides a good example of what I mean by “mutable thinking”: “Thinking, then, is not something that we can define once and for all; it is a power of becoming and its becoming can be transformed by what is not thinking’s own—the outside or the unthought. Thinking is not something ‘we’ do; thinking happens to us, from without. There is a necessity to thinking, for the event of thought lies beyond the autonomy of choice. Thinking happens” (38). See Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002). 37 Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, 21-23. 53 Lucretian (“Atomist”), and Christian thinking (among others) are not anathema to mutability but congenial to it. All are fundamentally “mutable” (more on this below), which is why they find form and function in the Faerie Queene and why scholars have seen them as integral, even central to Spenser’s thinking. By addressing and ultimately subsuming (transuming) these commonly recognized aspects of The Faerie Queene, mutability becomes the philosophical core of the poem. To illustrate that Spenser’s primary philosophical position is mutability I will necessarily use the term mutability in a wider sense than Spenser has occasion to in The Faerie Queene. 38 Since Spenser is a poet moving freely across various schools of thought, doctrines, and aesthetic principles, all of which highlight that mutability is central to the poem, he does not define mutability as a philosopher might. He is not concerned, in other words, with “clear and distinct ideas” of mutability, but instead with movements, turns, transfers, transformations, tropes, dilations, imagery, and diction that all identify through illustration, embodiment, and to a lesser extent argument, mutability as fundamental to life as well as to the poem. Although an allegorical poet, Spenser typically prefers the concrete to the abstract and the particular to the general. In Mutabilitie’s defense to Nature, for example, she is specific rather than vague in her ability to affect change: Ne is the water in more constant case; Whether those same on high, or these belowe. For, th’Ocean moueth stil, from place to place; And euery Riuer still doth ebbe and flowe, Ne any lake, that seems most still and slowe, Ne Poole so small, that can his smoothnesse holde, 38 For example, where Spenser uses terms like “return,” “change,” “again,” “wheele,” “grow,” “increase,” “endlesse,” “decaye,” “alter,” “sundry,” “variable,” “Tyme,” and “continuall” to identify mutability, I employ interpretive, conceptual, and critically abstract (perhaps “secondary” might be better) terms like crossing, transfer, swerve, dilation, movement, force, kinesis, potential, metamorphosis, expansion, contraction, moment, instruction, and others. 54 When any winde doth vnder heauen blowe; With which, the clouds are also tost and roll’d; Now like great Hills; and streight, like sluces, them vnfold. So likewise are all watery liuing wights Still tost, and turned, with continuall change, Neuer abyding in their stedfast plights, The fish, still floting, doe at randon range, And neuer rest; but euermore exchange Their dwelling places, as the streames them carrie: Ne haue the watry foules a certaine grange, Wherein to rest, ne in one stead do tarry; But flitting still doe flie, and still their places vary. (7.7.20-21) It is not just “water,” one of the four general elements Mutabilitie controls, but the “Ocean,” “River,” “lake,” and “Poole.” In descending order of size and strength, Mutabilitie provides specific examples of change. And if various water-types are not enough to persuade the case in her favor, Mutabilitie includes her control over the “living wights” that inhabit or depend on the water. The “fish” and “water foules” “doe at random range, / And neuer rest.” “Their dwelling places,” which now includes “streames” (a fifth water-type), “vary.” Mutability is not just a general principle of life, but a principle that inhabits life’s entire range, from large (macro) to small (micro). As we will see below, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie are not simply an abstract treatise on mutability, but an illustration of Mutabilitie’s life-force, her entanglement at all levels (mental, physical, spiritual) in creation. As the DNA of The Faerie Queene, mutability need not, at least by its author, be defined, only instantiated. The very lack of a clear argumentative “through-line,” however, has led scholars and critics to fall back on the identifiable patterns or doctrines within the poem and hold them up as the philosophical core of the poem. They are not wrong to do so. Plato is key to Spenser, but so is Aristotle, Augustine, and poets such as Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Chaucer. But this chapter is not an argument about influence. It is an argument about 55 philosophical thinking in Spenser’s poem and how he goes about it, which is rather traditional. “Every student of Spenser,” Edwin Greenlaw argues, “is aware of his practice of combining in a single passage matters drawn from widely different sources. It is part of his theory of art, and part, of his practice as a thinker. It is, moreover, characteristic of the Renaissance—this combining this building through materials drawn from many sources.” 39 In his use of material, in other words, Spenser is not unique. He is a product of his time. Like the exemplary humanist reader, Spenser gathers literary and philosophical “flowers.” “He both samples and devours,” Heather James reminds us, “classical books for the honey of good counsel and reputation.” 40 But what this practice of selective gathering does across an entire narrative poem is develop a metaphysical principle and aesthetic method. It generates an explanation and theory of the poem in the process of creating it. By thinking mutably—that is, by digesting another’s honey— Spenser composes (regurgitates) a poem in and of mutability. (The poem is as much a result of tradition as it is a poem expanding tradition.) 41 Although mutability stretches across the entire poem as a narrative principle and aesthetic method, there are textually localized points in the poem that function specifically as conspicuous moments of mutability. Two of those moments are the Garden of Adonis and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, the focus of philosophical thinking in the following chapter. 42 39 Edwin Greenlaw, “Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie,’” PMLA 45, no. 3 (1930), 684-685. 40 Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 40. 41 See T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920) for a description of this process of expanding tradition. 42 Like others, I follow Greenlaw in drawing attention to the Garden of Adonis and Two Cantos of Mutabilitie as loci of mutability. See also William Sessions’ entry on Lucretius in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 442. 56 I. Mutability, Metamorphosis, and Motion in The Garden of Adonis Between 1920 and 1936, modern Spenser criticism was born. 43 During these years Edwin Greenlaw published nine articles on Spenser, one monograph, and edited several of the eleven volumes of the Spenser Variorum (1932; the final volume was published in 1945). Evelyn May Albright, responding to Greenlaw’s work as well as H. M. Belden’s, published five articles between 1926 and 1929, mainly on the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie. Charles G. Osgood, Greenlaw’s co-editor on the Variorum, added “Virgil and the English Mind” (1930) and “Spenser and the Enchanted Glass” (1931) to the already mounting number of studies. 44 And in 1936, the terminus ante quem, two important works were published: Jewel Wurstbaugh’s survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship on The Faerie Queene, Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship, and C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, the latter of which arguably inaugurated the “allegorical turn” in Spenser Studies. 45 What is most noticeable and important 43 1920 marked the publication of two articles by Edwin Greenlaw, both of which appear in the same issue of Studies in Philology 17 (1920): “Spenser and Lucretius” and “Spenser’s Influence on Paradise Lost.” In the subsequent decade and a half, a curious explosion of articles, many of which were in conversation with one another, appeared as a result of Greenlaw’s work. Brents Stirling’s comment in the opening paragraph of his article, “The Philosophy of Spenser’s ‘Garden of Adonis’” (PMLA 49, no. 2 [1934]: 501-528) provides a historical description: “[Spenser’s] Odyssean voyage during the last decade and more among the pages of scholarly journals has left him cast now on the shores of simple Lucretian materialism, now in the bog of abstruse Neo-Platonism. He has even been observed steering a consciously charted course between opposing rocks of dilemma, to say nothing of having sought refuge and instruction among the pre-Socratic Greeks.” For additional articles from this period, see Evelyn May Albright, “Spenser’s Cosmic Philosophy and Religion,” PMLA 44, no. 3 (1929), “Spenser’s Reasons for Rejecting the Cantos of Mutability,” Studies in Philology 25.2 (1928), and “On the Dating of Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie’ Cantos” Studies in Philology 26.4 (1929): 482-498; William P. Cumming, “The Influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie’ Cantos,” Studies in Philology 28, no. 2 (1931); A. E. Taylor’s “Spenser’s Knowledge of Plato.” To illustrate that the interest in Spenser influences was already underway at a slightly earlier date, see J. J. Jusserand’s “Spenser’s ‘Twelve Private Morall Virtues as Aristotle Hath Devised,’” Modern Philology 3, no. 3 (1906) and W. F. DeMoss’s “Spenser’s Twelve Moral Virtues ‘According to Aristotle,’” Studies in Philology 16, no. 1 (1918). 44 As Catherine Nicholson notes in Reading and Not Reading “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), interest in Spenser as a “rite of disciplinary passage” was due to what “one contemporary resentfully dubbed ‘the Greenlaw trust’—an expansive network of former students, advisees, colleagues, and collaborators cultivated over the course of his career as editor of Studies in Philology and Modern Language Notes, dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina, [and] professor of English at Johns Hopkins University” (15-16). 45 See Jewel Wurstbaugh, Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936) and C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). As a British scholar, Lewis 57 about these years is the growing interest in Spenser’s sources, specifically his philosophical sources, which no doubt derives in part from work on the Variorum. 46 Perhaps the most surprising and radical argument to come out of these early years of twentieth-century Spenser criticism is that the chief philosophical sources for Spenser were not philosophers, but poets. 47 Greenlaw’s 1920 study, “Spenser and Lucretius,” for example, was one of the first sustained studies to locate Lucretius and mutability at the center of The Faerie Queene. Greenlaw finds in The Faerie Queene a philosophical position that not only supplements the Platonic position “of conduct and policy,” but arguably supplants it. Lucretius, according to Greenlaw, “dealt not with the supernatural kingdom with which men should establish relations but with the physical realm that hedges man about with a different sort of divinity. It flatly denied the supernatural, the realm of Platonic ideas; denied all mysticism, all revealed religion […] It was closely akin, ready to establish fruitful contacts, with the new science which in Copernicus, in Galileo, in Newton, and ultimately in Darwin and his followers, was to transform modern life a much thought.” Lucretius, in other words, is the real lies slightly outside the American tradition discussed above. Lewis does not even acknowledge Greenlaw or Osgood’s work (except for the Variorum) in his study. Lewis himself, however, shows considerable influence not only on the work of the “Allegorists” (so named by Frank Kermode in his 1962 lecture “Spenser and the Allegorists”), but on nearly all modern scholars working on the historical aspect of Spenser’s poetry. 46 No decade of criticism can be reduced to a single method or focus of study, especially of a poet as diverse and complex as Spenser, so I do not disagree with the two critical strains identified by Foster Provost. I do feel, however, that he overlooks the “sources” tradition and thus overemphasizes the “moral allegorical” tradition (inaugurated by Edward Dowden in “Spenser: The Poet and Teacher” [1884]) and the “mythico-historical” tradition (Greenlaw, “Spenser’s Faery Mythology” [1918]) that he identifies as informing the allegorical studies of the late- 1950s and 1960s. See Foster Provost, “Treatments of Theme and Allegory in Twentieth-Century Criticism of The Faerie Queene,” in Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondersmith (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975). 47 See William P. Cumming, “The Influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Spenser’s ‘Mutabilitie’ Cantos,” Studies in Philology 28.2 (1931); Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (London: Ashgate, 2005); Suprinya Chaudhuri, “Mutability, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Power” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Ayesha Ramachandran, “Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics: Scepticism and Cosmic Process in Spenser’s Cantos,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, and “Cosmic Matters: Spenser, Donne, and the Philosophical Poem,” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets. 58 philosophical force behind much of The Faerie Queene’s metaphysics and philosophy of nature. 48 While Lucretius has been critical to the renewed philosophical interest in Spenser, so too has Ovid, whose influence on Spenser has never been in doubt. 49 Ovid, as many have noted, was the Renaissance poet’s poet. He was the poetic source that all Europeans poets ransacked for classical material. He was also a great poet of love, whose two poetic sequences (Amores and Ars amatoria) stand at the pinnacle of Latin erotic literature. Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spenser’s younger contemporaries, drew heavily on Ovid. Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Amores (All Ovids Elegies) and his incorporation of Ovidian material in “Hero and Leander,” for example, remain powerful adaptations. And Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet are heavily indebted to Ovid. 50 Like Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare found in Ovid a kindred spirit; a poet who mixed love, tragedy, and comedy with prodigious inventiveness and wit. 48 Edwin Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” 439-440. 49 There has been something of a recent “Lucretian turn” in the humanities. In English Studies, Stephen Greenblatt’s bestseller, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton: 2011), has done the most to make Lucretius widely visible to many readers. In several recent articles, Ayesha Ramachandran has brought considerable learning and insight to the relationship between Lucretius and Spenser. In her attempt to “recover the erotics of Lucretian materialism,” Jessie Hock has argued for Lucretius’s importance to lyrical poets as diverse as Pierre Ronsard, Remy Belleau, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and Margaret Cavendish (The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021], 7). Outside of English Studies, however, there has been an even larger effort to see Lucretius as a central thinker (and not just a poet) of the classical world. Many scholars locate the work of Michel Serres, specifically The Birth of Physics (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018; originally published in 1977), as the beginning of the turn. Thomas Nail has made it his philosophical mission in Lucretius I: And Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to “reinterpret [De Rerum Natura] as an absolutely contemporary [text]: a Lucretius for today” (2018, 1). 50 For the influence of Ovid on Shakespeare see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); A. P. Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid: ‘The Metamorphoses’ in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 59 Ovid was also the Latin poet who provided an alternative, one could even say corrective, to Vergil’s imperialist agenda in The Aeneid. Unlike Vergil, Ovid was critical of Augustan Rome, and exiled for a “carmen et error” (“a poem and error”), a sudden change of events that some scholars liken to Spenser’s “exile” to Ireland. 51 Despite the New Historicist identification of Spenser in “the role of spokesman for Elizabethan imperialism,” Spenser, as Syrithe Pugh argues, “responds continually to th[e] nexus of counter-Augustan ideas in Ovid.” 52 Spenser’s poetry, in other words, develops in such a way as to afford “an alternative model of poetic authority which bypasses the Virgilian poet’s reliance on monarchical power.” 53 It was Ovid’s “handling of the theme of love,” specifically “perpertual lovemaking,” that most influenced Spenser’s theory of mutability. 54 Lucretius and Ovid as well as other philosophical sources come together most conspicuously in two specific and critical moments in The Faerie Queene: the Garden of Adonis passage, which appears at the mid-point of Book III, and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, the latter of which was appended to the original six books and published in 1609. The Garden of Adonis is arguably one of the most discussed passages of The Faerie Queene and serves to highlight what makes Spenser a brilliant and sophisticated poet. In the garden, Spenser not only creates arguably his finest locus amoenus (pleasant place), but his most philosophically rich passage. In just under twenty-five stanzas, Spenser runs the gamut, so to speak, on Eastern and Western philosophical and literary traditions, moving from Biblical (stanza 30), Platonic (31), and Augustinian (35) to Ovidian (36-37, 45-49) and Pythagorean (38) doctrines. What unites these disparate doctrines is 51 See Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 52 Syrithe Pugh, “Ovid,” in Spenser in Context, 228. 53 Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, 1-2. 54 Syrithe Pugh, “Ovid,” 231, 233. 60 the notion of mutability or change. The soul’s migration in and out of bodies mentioned in stanza 38, for example, is compatible with the growth and decay of natural flowers as well as Plato’s Myth of Er. All depend on a notion of mutability, whether spiritual, natural, or metaphysical. There is, in other words, a fundamental transfer of form (rather than, as we shall see, substance) at work in all these doctrines. Nothing, even Christianity, is static. Mutability, Spenser argues, underlies all aspects of the world, both in life and death. In highlighting mutability across various doctrines, Spenser seems to be moving, as many of his later contemporaries were to do as well, from the notion of substance or fixed, eternal meaning and belief, to process and change, or a self in formation, i.e., consciousness. 55 As Harry Berger explains, “the change from substance to process, from ethico-metaphysical to a psychological definition of personality; the transfer of emphasis from memory, which records and discovers, to rational imagination, which creates,” constitutes the beginning of the “emergence of the self from person; its disengagement from a mysterious and constraining Otherness. One has only to think of Montaigne for whom existence was passage, not being, for whom the stuff of experience was not seen to be issuing from but as culminating in a form which would fix it in its very dynamism.” 56 The Garden of Adonis is such a “fixed” place of “dynamism” and “passage” that illuminates not only the flux and flow of Nature, but consciousness as well. In the first two stanzas of the section, Spenser identifies the garden as the “first seminary / Of all things,” but as we shall see, this is only a first step in a “continunall” process of life: In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres, Wherein dame Nature doth her beautify, And decks the girlonds of her Paramoures, Are fetcht: there is the first seminary 55 See Prologue for a discussion of this change or shift at the stylistic level. 56 Berger, Revisionary Play, 137. 61 Of all things, that are borne to liue and dye, According to their kynds, long worke it were, Here to account the endlesse progeny Of all the weeds, that bud and blossome there, But so much as doth needs be counted there. It sited was in fruitfull soyle of old, And girt in with two walls on either side; The one of yron, the other of bright gold, That none might thorough breake, nor ouer-stride: And double gates it had, which opened wide, By which both in and out men moten pas; Th’one faire and fresh, the other old and dride: Old Genius the porter of them was, Old Genius, the which a double nature has. (3.6.30-31) Spenser begins with a wide view, a description of the setting and place of the garden. Like Milton was later to do in his description of Eden, Spenser works his way into the garden from the outside, the perimeter. But unlike Milton, Spenser describes a garden in which no characters actually traverse or move. The garden of Adonis is outside the temporal and spatial structure of the narrative, like a mythological inset. 57 Without characters to contextualize, give shape, and ultimately live in its place, Spenser must situate the reader, which he does through prepositions such as “In” and “wherein.” With “sited” (i.e., placed) in stanza 31, the reader officially enters, both visually and mentally, the space of the garden. Even though, as Berger points out, words such as “flowres,” “weeds,” and “thing” are fairly nebulous or “mystical,” the sense of place is nevertheless present. 58 The “Fruitfull soyle of old” and two the gates of the garden, which Genius presides over, give a sense of spatial topography. The garden is, at least ostensibly, delimited, with a circumscription that the mind can hold as a recognizable garden that Spenser 57 There have been a variety of terms to describe Spenser’s “stilled points of movement,” or loci that function as dilatory moments of thinking. A brief list of terms applied to these loci/moments would include Lewis’s “allegorical cores,” Frye’s “houses of recognition,” Fletcher’s “temples,” Dolven’s “Scenes of Instruction,” Parker’s “dilation of being,” and Teskey’s “thinking moments.” 58 Berger, Revisionary Play, 142. 62 then fills with various doctrines of change. Where Milton seeks (or “thinks”) origin and then proceeds to describe through detailed, physical description the lush and unimagined landscape of Eden, Spenser excavates, as Teskey suggests, the historical past of the garden, which gives its stanzas a rather stratified or layered feel, as if Spenser were turning the pages of a philosophical record like Guyon does with the Antiquitee of Faery Lond in Book II. 59 Despite the garden’s guided tour across Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian doctrines, mutability remains at the center of each stanza. In the opening stanza (30), for example, Spenser announces a description and exploration of a “physical allegory,” which constitutes the processes of nature. 60 The principle of life and death, growth and decay, is the fundamental principle of organic life. It is mutability at its most basic. Like Lucretian atomism, it names a life-force underlying material existence. The two gates identified in the following stanza (31), one “yron” and the other “bright gold,” inform us that everything is in perpetual movement, “pas[sing]” “in and out” like atoms that form and unform as matter. It is in the garden, moreover, which importantly “needs no Gardiner,” that souls “grow afresh” before being “sent into the chaungefull world agayne.” Although Genius, the porter of the garden and a Janus-like “celestiall power,” gives the souls new “hew[s]” (forms), he seems an ancillary figure who presides over the process of generation but who does not actually affect the process itself. The souls or bodies, in other words, will always “retourne, where first they grew,” and “like a wheele arownd they ronne from old to new.” At the level of form and structure, these opening stanzas illustrate Spenser’s particular kind of philosophical thinking, which often pools at central moments in the text to become a 59 Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments, 302: “Spenser […] is not an archaic but an archaeological thinker. He is temperamentally an investigator and a haunter of ruins, the remains of high culture, marked and indeed half effaced with the passage of time.” See 2.10 for Guyon’s reading of the Antiquitee of Faery Lond. 60 John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 271. 63 thinking moment. In these moments, the action is not so much stilled as widened, which allows the poetry of the sequential stanzas to turn back on themselves like and eddy. Since Spenser employs a stanza that completes itself through an end-stop, he can hook them onto one another in such a way as to generate stilled action, what have traditionally been identified as “dilations” and that correspond to the central moments of the text known by such names as “allegorical cores” and “scene of recognitions.” Unlike an epic poem written in blank verse, Spenser can use the formal constraints of the stanza to delimit sections of his poetry, what George Puttenham identified as “resting place[s],” making each stanza a distinct unit that is part of a larger unit. 61 In his description of the stanza, Puttenham uses a masonic metaphor to compare stanzas to bricks in a wall whose alternating rhyme creates a “band” or “connecting force” “to hold in the work fast and maintain the perpendicularity of the wall.” 62 But a more congenial metaphor for Spenser’s stanzas, especially in the Garden of Adonis, is the botanical one. The stanzas are not so much bricks as flowers. 63 In these floral stanzas, which are importantly linked through their stems (argument) to the larger plant, or “thinking moment,” Spenser can dilate on his theme. Like the humanist bee mentioned earlier, Spenser begins choosing among doctrinal flowers, composing a commonplace book of mutability. In these opening stanzas, for example, Spenser employs doctrines that are present in both Genesis and Plato’s Republic. They are the basic components (i.e., myths) of the story and nature of life. But more importantly they establish a force and method that inhabits the garden and that Spenser then proceeds to unfold through a 61 George Puttenham, The Art of Poesy, edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 155. 62 George Puttenham, The Art of Poesy, 178. See also Whigham and Rebhorn’s gloss on “band” in their Word Glossary, 443. 63 For a powerful reading of Spenser as botanical scholiast, see Heather James’s “Flower Power” in The Spenser Review 44.2.30 (2014). See also James’s inclusion of this article in Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespearean England, Chapter I. 64 sequence of connected stanzas. As origin stories, they are easily gathered, combined, and mutated by Spenser in the process of thinking his garden. By the time Spenser has waded through six stanzas, the garden has become concretized in mind and well as in form. The garden image, in other words, “has solidified; it is closer to matter; the image and the thing it represents are harder to pry apart.” 64 The movement from stanza -to-stanza has become formalized. The garden has become delimited as an object of thinking. Spenser can now begin moving between flowers, which illustrates the underlying force of the garden at work. Where stanzas 30-35 walk us through a natural and organic garden, one in which bodies are nourished, grown, and released only to return, stanza 36 announces a shift to the philosophical roots, so to speak, of the garden. In each of the subsequent stanzas, we can see Spenser moving from the concrete description of the opening stanzas “to a quasi-philosophical discussion of force.” 65 Verbs like “altred” and “change” take over for the substantive “flower, weed, men, [and] babes.” As Berger notes, “form is no longer the source of life’s energy. Form has become passive; the force breaks loose and asserts itself, revealing its source in death and decay.” 66 One of the strongest influences on these stanzas derives not from Plato, Aristotle, or the Bible, but from Ovid, who is the poet of metamorphosis, or mutability by another name: Daily they grow, and daily forth are sent Into the world, it to replenish more, Yet is the stocke not lessened, nor spent, But still remaines in euerlasting store, As it was at first created was of yore. For in the wide wombe of the world there lyes, In hatefull darknes and in deepe horror, An huge an eternal Chaos, which supplyes The substances of natures fruitfull progenyes. All things from thence doe their first being fetch, 64 Berger, Revisionary Play, 143. 65 Berger, Revisionary Play, 143. 66 Berger, Revisionary Play, 144. 65 And borrow matter, whereof they are made, Which whenas forme and feature it does ketch, Becomes a body, and doth then inuade The state of life, out of the grisly shade. That substance is eterne, and bideth so, Ne when the life decayes, and forme does fade, Doth it consume, and unto nothing goe, but changed is, and often altred to and froe. (3.6.36-37) Like Ovid’s Chaos, which is described at the opening of the Metamorphoses as “a huge, rude heape, and nothing else” (1.7), Spenser’s Chaos is also “huge.” Although formless, it generates the very “substance” from which “all things […] doe their first being fetch.” Biblical echoes of a formless “abyss” (Genesis 1.2) can also be detected in Spenser’s description, but Ovid’s emphasis on Chaos as the origin of matter, what some thinkers including Ficino called “first matter” (i.e., “incorporeal potentiality, lacking form and magnitude”), catches Spenser’s sense of “eternal” Chaos as the origin of “All things.” 67 As Hankins puts it rather succinctly, “from Chaos comes ‘matter’ which supplies the ‘substaunces’ of Nature’s offspring.” 68 In addition to Chaos and its role as the origin of matter, Ovid seems to influence Spenser’s notion of “substaunce,” which “is not changed, nor altered, / But th’only forme and outward fashion.” Ovid tells a similar tale of changing form in the final book (XV) of the Metamorphoses, putting the speech in the mouth of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras: No kind of thing keeps aye shape and hue. For nature, loving ever change, repairs one shape anew Upon another. Neither doth there perish aught (trust me) In all the world but, altering, takes new shape. For that which we Do term by name of being born is for to gin to be Another thing that that it was; and likewise for to die To cease to be the thing it was. And though that variably Things pass perchance from place to place, yet all, from whence they came Returning, do unperished continue still the same. 67 For a discussion of Ficino’s three stages of matter, see Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory, 260- 263. 68 Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory, 262. 66 But as for one shape, be sure that nothing long can last. (15.276-285) 69 Golding’s translation of this speech, which was published in 1567, no doubt influenced Spenser’s rendering of a similar principle of change and mutability. “Shape” and “Hue,” for example, are both words for “forme” that Spenser uses in the garden as well as other places in The Faerie Queene. But where Spenser, as Syrinthe Pugh explains, is talking about “matter” and “substaunce,” Pythagoras is talking about the “soul.” Metempysychosis “combines a poignant sense of the loss involved in the ageing and death of the body with an optimistic view of constant regeneration.” For Spenser, however, the bodies have yet to acquire souls, which means they are susceptible to “wicked Tyme.” It is only through Venus and the return of “the feminine principle,” or what Maureen Quilligan calls “the female perspective” of love and sexual intercourse, that the Garden maintains its “continuall Spring”: There is continuall Spring, and haruest there Continuall, both meeting at one tyme: For both the boughs doe kaughing blossoms beare, And with fresch colours decke the wanton Pryme, And eke attonce the heauenly trees they clyme, Wich seeme to labour vunder their fruites lode: The whiles the ioyous birdes make their playtime Emongst the shady leaues, their sweet abode, And their trew louves without suspicion tell abrode. (3.6.42) The diction notably changes in this stanza to a pleasurable, almost erotic description. One thinks in these lines of the anticipation in reading described by Roland Barthes’ as “a gradual unveiling.” 70 Words like “fresch,” “wanton,” “ioyous,” “playtime,” “sweet,” and most importantly “loues” clearly indicate that we are no longer in the philosophical mire of male abstraction, but female sensuality. This garden of “blossoms beare” not only replaces the earlier 69 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 70 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 10. 67 garden of growth and decay, matter and form, but transcends it, elevating itself by way of a “Mount” out of the Garden of Adonis. Right in the middest of that Paradise, There stood a stately Mount, on whose round top A gloomy groue of myrtle trees did rise, Whose shady boughs sharp steele did neuer lop, Nor wicked beastes their tender buds did crop, But like a girlond compassed the hight, And from their fruitfull sydes sweet gum did drop, That all the gorund with pretious deaw bedight, Threw forth most dainty odours, and most sweet delight. (3.6.43) The sublation of the “second garden” occurs because of Venus’ return. 71 Though not mentioned by name until stanza 40 (Spenser, it should be remembered, left Venus outside the garden in stanza 29 when he began describing it), the above stanza nevertheless reminds the reader that the Garden of Adonis is fundamentally feminine in origin and nature. As Maureen Quilligan argues, “the vision of the garden’s landscape is a vision of the female body.” Not only does the garden correct the “male viewpoint” and “silent[ly] eli[de] it as being a perspective not so much dangerous to, but potentially endangered by, the vision about to ensue,” it also offers the “Mount” of Venus as a metonymical symbol of “cosmic regeneration.” 72 Rather than moving up the “Mount,” as one might if it was phallic in nature, the reader is taken into its “gloomy groue” and “shady boughs.” We enter, in other words, “a small, protected, intimately enclosed space”; a bower (“Arber”), that is, of layers, depth, but also tenderness, where of course Adonis resides, “hid from the world.” 73 71 I take this notion of a “second garden” from Harry Berger’s Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, ed. David Lee Miller (New York: Fordham University press, 2020), 223. Berger, however, goes much further in distinguishing between the two gardens, which I find problematic as the Garden of Adonis is a single, conceptual garden despite the metaphorical and cognitive sublation that I describe above. 72 Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 193. 73 Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 262. 68 Once Spenser identifies and begins to describe this “second garden,” Venus and Adonis become the primary focus as well as force of mutability in the garden. 74 Not only does “the effect of allegory change[] with the introduction of the mons Veneris,” so does the inflection of the philosophical argument. 75 Where in earlier stanzas matter and form struggled in hazy abstraction and “wicked Tyme” “mow[ed] the flowring herbes and goodly things,” inside Venus’s bower of bliss “gr[ows] euery sort of flower.” Venus has transformed the vernal space of the garden into a locus of conservation. Mutability, in other words, is “by succession made eternal.” A stark contrast to the initial garden’s mutability of form, Venus’s bower is materially fecund, regenerative, and curatorial. Rather than philosophical concepts, it names and then qualifies its inhabitants and their attending myths. This sense of mutability as being materially regenerative, both in the garden itself as well as in the “Poets verse,” occurs in the litany of Ovidian flowers. The “sad louers” turned flowers are described as “Fresh,” “Sad, “dearest,” “Foolish,” and “wretched,” which are adjectives applied to persons, not concepts. In describing this shift of material “forms,” Spenser seems to be reminded, in mid-composition, of their loss, and through metrical incompletion, honors them. The truncated fourth line of the stanza (“And dearest loue […]”), Heather James observes, “reads metrically and metaphysically as a gasp or deep breath drawn by the poet and reader before they move on to the next in the long line of beautiful, dead youths in pastoral and Ovidian verse.” 76 For once, Spenser halts the movement of his verse. He pauses, in the act of creation, and in pausing names all that he cannot name. The half-line stands empty, available not only to all those “sad louers” present in his memory, but to all those he forgets or has yet to know. It is one of those spatially as well as temporally collapsing moments 74 Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 218. 75 Berger, Resisting Allegory, 223. 76 Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England, 35. 69 of poetic mutability (a gap or lacuna that functions as a supplement) that allows a poet to do several things at once. In this case, it allows Spenser to suggest in a single moment the act of transumption or “leaping over,” respite, and perpetuity while naming flowers. But the most precious of all the floral lives preserved by Venus is Adonis, who is not preserved as a flower as he is earlier in the book (3.1.34.5), but instead “Lapped in flowres and precious spycdery.” Adonis has been “transformde” by Venus into what Spenser called in “Muiopotmos,” a “spectacle of care.” Though the phrase “spectacle of care” has often been interpreted in the context of Spenser’s Complaints as the negative in a dialectical relationship of life and death, or good and evil, “care” can also have a more nurturing sense, suggesting “a view to protection, preservation, or guidance” (OED 4a). This sense of care is not only an allusion to Vergil’s “cura,” which suggests “care or spiritual charge of the soul,” but also to the English noun “curate,” a sense that connotes “one who has a charge” (OED 3) and whose later verb sense means “to look after and preserve” (OED 1). In preserving and caring for Adonis, Venus ensures that he will live “eterne in mutabilitie”: And sooth it seemes they say: for he may not For euer dye, and euer buried bee In balefull night, where all things are forgot; All be he subiect to mortalitie, Yet in eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall, Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie: For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing giues to all (3.6.47) This is the most conspicuous discussion of mutability in the Garden of Adonis. It also serves as an origin story of Adonis as “Father of all formes.” Spenser collapses everything about the garden as a locus of change, metamorphosis, and mutability in this apotheosis of Adonis. “Change,” “succession,” “perpetuall,” “transformed,” and “formes” are made synonymous with 70 mutability. They are the processes and activities as well as the states and “formes” that identify mutability as a force of life. But so are the Veneral activities of regeneration, preservation, and care, which importantly allow Adonis to become the progenitor of forms. “Nature,” Greenlaw notes, “dissolves everything back into the first-bodies (i.e., matter substance), but does not annihilate these first-bodies, else Venus could not bring back into the light of life the race of living things.” 77 The relationship between Venus and Adonis suggests that Nature (Venus) and mutability (Adonis) are mutually dependent figures not only in a literary ecology of flowers, allusions, and metamorphoses, but also a metaphysical ecology of processes, motions, and movements. Without nature there is no mutability, and without mutability or change there is no nature. This dialectical relationship becomes the center of Spenser’s most extended discussion of mutability in The Faerie Queene, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: II. Kinetic Thinking in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie Although the word “parcell” in the title page of Two Cantos of Mutabilitie could mean, as Andrew Zurcher suggests, “‘a short passage of a book’” as well as an “extract from a larger work (a ‘part’), or a short, possibly libelous poem that might, at some future date, be anthologized in a book,” the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (hereafter Mutabilitie Cantos) have been seen, at least since their publication with the first six books of The Faerie Queene in 1609, as part of the larger poem. Whether they were initially circulated among friends and then found their way into the hands of the printer or just manuscripts left unfinished at Spenser’s death in 1599, they nevertheless fit thematically, structurally, and aesthetically into the philosophical argument at the heart of The Faerie Queene, which more than anything indicates that they were written with The 77 Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” 454. 71 Faerie Queene in mind. Even “Constancie,” “that elephant in the room of Spenser criticism,” aligns with the overall philosophical thinking of the poem. 78 Most modern studies of the Mutabilitie Cantos take one of two approaches that are both summarized in Gordon Teskey’s account of the allegorical violence informing Mutabilitie’s claim to the sovereign throne: The entire project of The Faerie Queene may be described as an improvisatory quest for the formal patterns of relationship which sustain judgments of value in human affairs. Commentary on the poem has understood its task, therefore, as adjudicating the claims of optimism and pessimism on it. The issues raised by Mutabilitie, however, lies deeper, in a question of the very basis for such judgments of value. Is that basis to be found in a metaphysics promoted by the authority of visual forms or in something else for which that authority is a pleasing but illusory veil? This other thing, which allegory discloses in its negative moments, is the experience of the body, in the clearing or agora of political life, living under the threat of destruction. Spenser’s Mutabilitie evokes this experience by diverting our attention from metaphysics to genealogy, from the contemplation of the universe as an order of forms, to the memory of its violent emergence in time. Teskey distills decades of commentary into a lucid account of what is at stake in Spenser’s poem. The Faerie Queene can be read as either a metaphysical discussion on the nature of things (“forms”) or as a genealogical account of the violence and events that generate “mythical history.” 79 One could summarize, somewhat anachronistically, these positions as the Lucretian and Deleuzean or the Hesiodic and Nietzschean. Both positions, as Teskey notes, are offered as possibilities in the Mutabilitie Cantos. Much modern criticism, including Teskey’s allegorical analysis, however, has taken the Nietzschean and therefore historical reading of the Mutabilitie Cantos, which means not only prioritizing allegory and history but sovereignty, succession, and therefore power. The issues at stake in contemporary Elizabethan England make this reading 78 Christopher Burlinson, “Spenser’s ‘Legend of Constancie’: Book VII and the Ethical Reader,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, 79 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 170-171. Harry Berger’s comment could stand for all historical readings: “The Mutabilitie Cantos provide the most concise and complete embodiment of Spenser’s historical consciousness.” See “The Mutabilitie Cantos: Archaism and Evolution in Retrospect,” in Revisionary Play, 245. 72 extremely persuasive, especially as an analogy (and allegory) of the “troubled past of the Tudor monarchy,” which “haunts the scene like [an] unwanted guest, instituting a powerful suggestive confusion between history and myth.”: 80 I am a daughter, by the mothers side, Of her that is Grand-mother magnified Of all the Gods, great Earth, great Chaos child: I greater am in blood (whereon I Build) Than all Gods, though wrongfully from heauen exil’d. For, Titan (as ye all acknowledge must) Was Saturnes elder brother by birth-right; Both, sonnes of Vranus: but by vniust And guilefull meanes, through Corybantes slight, The younger thrus the elder from his right: Since, which, thou Ioue, iniurously hast hel The Heavenes rule from Titans sonnes of might. (7.6.26-27) Mutabilitie’s account of her genealogy, which Spenser importantly interpolates since she does not appear in any classical genealogy of the gods, whether in Hesiod or later in Ovid, is one of several she makes (cf. 7.16) that illustrates the violence at the heart of its history. Her “hereditary rights,” which are recounted from a memory that has been forgotten by those in power (i.e., the Olympians), are shrouded in violence, death, and usurpation. “In Hesiod,” Supriya Chaudhuri suggests, “the gods are locked in an endless struggle over sovereignty […] Implicit in Mutabilitie’s own assertion of the genealogical imperative is a set of concealed references to Hesiodic histories of violence, pain, rapacity: Kronos swallowing his own children, being tricked and deposed by Zeus, and Zeus swallowing Metis, so that Athene is born from his head.” 81 Jove’s response to Mutabilitie’s genealogy is shrewd, for he does not acknowledge the lineage 80 Supriya Chaudhuri, “Mutability, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Power,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, 180. 81 Chaudhuri, “Mutabuility, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Power,” 193. 73 she “claimes,” but instead adds Mutabilitie to a line of “ambitious” overreachers who tried to take the throne for themselves; an example, in other words, of the victor writing history: Will neuer mortall thoughts cease to aspire, Iin this bold sort, to Heauen claime make, And touch celestiall seates with earthly mire? I would haue thought, that bold Procrustes hire, Or Typhons fall, or proud Ixions paine, Or great Prometheus, tasting our ire, Would have suffiz’d, the rest for to restraine; And warn’d all men by their example to refraine. (7.6.29) Jove’s demotion of Mutabilitie to “mortall thoughts,” “earthly mire,” and “all men” indicates that he takes her threats to be unfounded, for she is not one to “touch celestiall seates.” He is a God, and she a “mortal” and “foolish gerle” (6.34). But more important than even her ontological devaluation is her moral reclassification as a “bold” and “proud” threat to cosmic order. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Mutabilitie has been thrown in with all the rabblerousers of classical mythology. But where Satan fails to garner the comparison to “great Prometheus” (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of Milton’s intentional elision), Mutabilitie does, which poses significant problems for Jove’s claim since Prometheus was a friend to man and in the Aeschylean tradition the begetter of science and learning. The yoking of both Prometheus and Mutabilitie illustrates the other primary concern (and fear) at the heart of early modern European culture, which The Faerie Queene is deeply invested in exploring. The rise of New Science (represented by such figures as Tycho Brache, Giordano Bruno, and later Galileo), which Mutabilitie stands allegorically in relation to, was seen by the old guard (theologians for the most part) to be an unwelcome incursion of magic and blasphemy. The issue, in other words, of where “mortals” stands in relation to celestial harmony and order (the microcosm and macrocosm trope), not to mention beauty, goodness, and truth, is at stake in 74 this challenge to belief and knowledge. If Mutabilitie reigns, then everything is thrown into question. In this sense, Mutabilitie is not only a genealogical threat to order, but a metaphysical threat as well. And as a metaphysical threat, she becomes by proxy an epistemological threat; that is, a crisis of knowledge. The underlying force of Spenser’s allegory is therefore not genealogical, which is arguably localized as historical and therefore human events, but metaphysical. Or, more accurately, the metaphysical claim of Mutabilitie is inclusive, partly because it is a larger cosmological argument, of all other arguments that The Faerie Queene makes. What was only nominally mentioned in the Garden of Adonis becomes central to the Mutabilitie Cantos. Mutabilitie is a force of nature, not only as a “Titanesse” seeking to dethrone Cynthia, but also as a material, metaphysical, and kinetic force. Teskey himself veers in the metaphysical direction of The Faerie Queene when in a later reading he asserts the fundamental question of the Mutabilitie Cantos to be, “What is a thing?” 82 “What is a thing?” addresses precisely what is at stake in The Faerie Queene as it is a question that engages both the metaphysical and creative principles underlying the poem. “Mutabilitie,” according to Teskey, “denies the thingliness of things because they are subject to change over time: ‘Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare’ (7.7.56).” Mutability, in other words, questions identity as being a matter of essence, or substance, something that never changes or dies. In questioning “thingliness,” moreover, Mutabilitie identifies precisely how poetry works. Poetry as poetry and not as a poem, which is a made thing (“the thing done”), is a “thing” in the making, and therefore always changing. 83 It is protean and mutable since its beginning is inchoate and its end always 82 Gordon Teskey, “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, 29. 83 See Coleen Ruth Rosenfeld’s discussion of Ben Jonson’s parsing of “poeme” (the poem or made “thing”), “poesy” or skill (poiesis, or making), and the “Poet” (maker) in Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 2-3. 75 deferred, or in Paul Valery’s sense, “abandoned.” 84 What was called earlier in the chapter the kinetic or rhizomatic element (thinking) of poetry demonstrates that “thingness” in poetry is a matter of process, not art. Spenser was at the cusp of a shift from imitation and static representation to poiesis and kinetic representation, a move commensurate with a similar shift in the sciences from “the world to be known to the knowledge of the world.” 85 A thing is only a thing in motion, not stasis, identity, or vertical thought. “With its continual turnings, its versification,” Teskey argues, “poetry is about things in the world of transformation: metaphor and metamorphosis.” These elemental questions of verse consequently rise to the level of theme and argument in the poem, asking “what is a thing, if it can change?” 86 If a thing’s essence is that it changes and never dies, or is eternal in change, a different sense of the meaning of the Mutabilitie Cantos comes to the forefront, a sense that is compatible with the Christian ending of the Cantos; that is, with a sense that “all shall rest eternally / With him that is the God of Sabbath hight” (7.8.7-8). No longer are we concerned with a Titanomachy and the appeal to genealogy, let alone violence, but instead with kinesis and clinamen, movement and swerve, or in poetry thinking and metaphor. But before kinesis makes its appearance in the trial on Arlo Hill as the underlying metaphysical principle of change, Mutabilitie begins with an opening stanza arguing her genealogical right to sovereignty. The structure and order of Mutabilitie’s claim is important, especially as it reveals the secondary status of her genealogical claim: Then weigh, o soueraigne goddesse, by what right These gods do claime the worlds whole sovereignty; And that is onely dew vnto thy might 84 Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, ed. Jackson Matthews and trans. Denise Folliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958). 85 Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 165. 86 Teskey, “Night Thoughts,” 32. 76 Arrogate to themselves ambitiously: As for the gods over principality, Which Ioue vurpes vniustly; that to be My heritage, Iove’s self cannot deny, From my great Grandsire Titan, vnto mee, Deriv’d by dew descent; as is well knowen to thee. (7.7.16) Mutabilitie’s plea to her genealogical rights makes it succinctly clear that her claim is legitimate based on historical grounds, and that these historical grounds are common knowledge (“Ioue’s self cannot deny”). The historical plea thus makes sense as an opening remark; that is, as something one would initially say to clear the air before getting into the thick of it, so to speak. In fact, Mutabilitie only spends five lines on her opening defense, which took her fifteen lines to execute earlier. And Mutabilitie’s original defense was not advanced or solicited by herself, but by Jove. Jove makes the genealogical overture when he demands, “Speake fraile woman, speake with confindence, Whence thou art, and what doost thou her now make? (6.6.25). “Whence” is the operative word here. It is an adverbial command (“from where, from what source are you?”) to origins (genealogy), not a command to ontology or metaphysics (“from what being or substance are you?”). So, when Mutabilitie begins her second defense on Arlo Hill, she is simply reiterating what she has already claimed (“as it is well knowen to thee”) before moving to her metaphysical claim to sovereignty: Yet mauger Ioue, and all his gods beside, I doe possesse the worlds most regiment; As, if ye please it into parts diuide, And euery parts inholders to conuent, Shall to your eyes appear incontinent. And first, the Earth (great mother of vs all) That only seems vnmov’d and permanent, And vnto Mutability not thrall; Yet is she chang’d in part, and eeke in generall. For, all that from her springs, and is ybredde, How-euer fayre it flourish for a time, 77 Yet see we soone decay; and, being dead To turne again vnto their earthly slime: Yet, out of their decay and mortall crime, We daily see new creatures to arize; And of their Winter spring another Prime, Vnlike in forme, and chang’d by strange disguise: So turne they still about, and change in restlesse wise. (7.7.17-18) The active language of verbs finds us back in the philosophical loam of the Garden of Adonis. “Chang’d,” “spring,” “decay,” “turne,” and “arize” signal a shift in Mutabilitie’s argument from historical to metaphysical concerns. Although the nouns constitute the subjects as well as the objects of change, Mutabilitie’s insistence is not on objects, but the process that informs their change. “Change” is the opposite of “vnmov’d and permanent.” It is movement, but specifically movement that renders things (rerum) incomplete, en media. Matter (materia) or things (rerum) is always in a state of becoming. In this sense, mutability denies matter or substance an essentialness. “Being” is exposed as “becoming.” In this opening hymn to metaphysical mutability, “Change” announces itself as the underlying principle of life. Along with “turne” and “spring,” the latter of which functions not in its seasonal sense (i.e., as “Prime”) but in its verbal sense as “begets” or “grows,” verbs of motion and movement surround the nouns like electrons swirling around a nucleus. The nouns do inform, however, the quantitative argument as they are the entities of change. Mutabilitie strategically begins with “Earth (great mother of vs all),” arguing that even she who “seems vmov’d and permanent” is really enthralled to “Mutability.” The argument from Earth rather than Chaos or another cosmological substance allows Mutabilitie to argue from concrete, experiential examples; that is, examples that all those sitting on Arlo Hill and the surrounding countryside would be able to witness (not in change, but as natural evidence of that change) at that very moment. But more important, at least from a rhetorical point of view, the 78 appeal to Earth’s mutable status would be an appeal to Nature, the presiding judge of Mutabilitie’s case. Mutabilitie’s argument is thus an argumentum a fortiori; an argument, that is, from great to small, from macro to micro, and from cosmological to atomic. She makes her large claim, and then provides the supporting details, moving exponentially smaller, but also building, accumulating, and dilating on change. Spenser, as several critics have noted, learned this technique and principle of change from Lucretius, who in Book 5 of De Rerum Natura, the great cosmological Book of the epic, begins with earth and the other elements: To proceed, and make no more delay with promise, First please observe the earth and sea and sky; These three, a threefold nature, Memmius, Three forms so unalike, so interwoven, One day will give way to destruction; all the mass And mighty engine of the world, upheld For many centuries, will crash in ruin. (5.91-97) 87 Setting aside the apocalyptic tone of this passage, Lucretius, like Spenser, identifies a fundamental principle of life in this passage, stated briefly in the opening Book of the poem: “nature / Resolves all things back into their elements / And never reduces anything to nothing” (1.215-217).” 88 Nothing (no-thing [nunc-rerum]) can be annihilated, but only changed or folded and unfolded. For Lucretius, this principle explains why death should not be feared or understood to be an ontological annihilation. As Thomas Neil explains, “living and dying are two names for the same kinetic process of weaving [exordia, 3.31] […] All of nature is in continuous 87 All translations of Lucretius are from Ronald Melville’s edition of On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 88 The five principles of Lucretian materialism are: 1.) nothing comes from nothing; 2.) nothing is destroyed into nothing; 3.) matter is invisible; 4.) nature is porous; and 5.) all matter is either conjunctive or eventual. All principles appear in Book 1 of De Rerum Natura. See Thomas Neil’s discussion of these principles in Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Chapters 4-6. 79 motion. Death therefore cannot possibly be static, passive non-existence. There simply is no such state in nature. Death is, as the epic tradition describes it, like a river (Acheron) that flows continuously with the rest of nature—in constant transformation […] Death is the expenditure and decomposition that all matter is continuously undergoing. Life comes from death.” 89 “Destruction” and “ruin,” therefore, are just necessary stages in the “weave” of existence, part of the process of becoming, which does not end but constantly folds back on itself in change. Since matter is always in motion, nothing truly dies or ceases to exist but instead transforms. Life and death, growth and decay, are folded into the same process. At the core of the Lucretius’s philosophy of nature is an ontology of motion. 90 Motion and movement inform and sustain all change. In Book 5, Lucretius spends over a thousand lines illustrating this process of change. What were outlined in Book I of De Rerum Natura as principles are given description and expansion, similar in many ways to the manner in which Spenser gives expansion and illustration to the virtues in each of his books. These principles, which were first articulated after the Hymn to Venus at the opening of Book 1, constitute the fundamental argument of De Rerum Natura. They reach their most succinct and elegiac note late in Book 5: Time doth change the nature of the world; One state of things must pass into another; Nothing remains the same. All things move on. All things does nature turn, transform, and change. One thing decays, grows faint and weak with age; Another grows, and is despised no more. So therefore time the whole nature of the world Changes, and one state of the earth yields place to another. So that what it bore before it cannot bear, But can bear what it did not bear before. (5.828-837) 89 Thomas Neil, Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion, 85. 90 Thomas Nail, Lucretius: An Ontology of Motion. 80 Not only does the principle of change or mutability dominate this passage, so does the idea of motion. They are linked as coterminous and codependent. There is no change without motion, no motion without change. “Change,” “pass,” “move,” “turn,” “transform,” “decays,” and “grows” are synonyms as well as coevals in the process of becoming. Additionally, “Time” is brought in as the necessary backdrop, the durational canvas in which these processes unfold. Mutability, in her final flourish and appeal to her metaphysical claim, intones a similar if not exact argument. Lo, mighty mother, now be iudge and say, Whether in all thy creatures more or lesse CHANGE doth not raign and beare the greatest sway: For, who sees not, that Time on all doth prey? But Times do change and moue continually. So nothing here long standeth in one stay: Wherefore, this lower world, who cany deny But to be subiect still to Mutabilitie? (7.7.47) As Ayesha Ramachandran argues, the origin of this passage has frequently been attributed to Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but close analysis demonstrates its Lucretian origins. 91 Where Ovid turns Time into an image of the flow of rivers and the crashing of waves, Lucretius and Spenser turn Time into the agent of change. Rather than represented in nature as something observable, which is how Ovid’s natural similes function, Time becomes in Lucretius and Spenser the underlying force of nature, an invisible kinesis of change. “Time doth change the nature of the world” in Lucretius becomes “Times do change and moue continually” in Spenser. But whether it is Lucretius or Ovid that Spenser echoes in this passage, all of them are “concerned with mutability and the phenomenal world derived from Pre-socratic materialists.” 92 There is a tradition, in other words, behind their poetry that makes the metaphysical claim to 91 Ramachandran, “Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics: Scepticism and Cosmic Process in Spenser’s Cantos,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, 228. 92 Ramachandran, “Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics,” 229. 81 mutability a viable and authoritative one. Each poet manipulates the ideas to their purpose, but an important source nevertheless exists, which allows them to reflect not only on “cosmology and politics,” but also “metaphysical questions about the limits of knowledge, order, and authority.” And these questions, in turn, “undermine any claim to a transcendent order.” 93 For Ramachandran, “[Mutabilitie] symbolizes a radical de-centering, a collapse of the traditional, dogmatic, institutions that accumulate power and resist change.” 94 But in Nature’s decision, she is simply “put downe” (7.7.59) as less a threat than a known quantity in a predetermined system: I well consider all that ye haue sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changednfrom their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselues at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine. (7.7.58) This is not only an argument for necessity and fate informed by a Christian notion of “perfection,” but also an argument for order, harmony, and hierarchical rule. Mutabilitie is defined and described by Nature as being part of a process whereby things do not so much change as “turn[] to themselues at length againe.” What passes for change and mutability in nature and life are “things” “work[ing]” toward “their owne perfection,” which is revealed to be in the “vnperfite” as “rest[ing] eternally” / With him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight.” Nature thus exposes Mutabilitie to be a known and determined cause. She exists so that “being” may “dilate,” and in dilating “raigne ouver change.” But as Patricia Parker notes in her analysis of “dilate,” Spenser has other ideas in mind when ruling against Mutabilitie. As a term of “delay,” 93 Ramachandran, “Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics,” 230. 94 Ramachandran, “Mutabilitie’s Lucretian Metaphysics,” 230. 82 “deferral,” “difference,” “digression” and other senses related to prolongation, extension, emanation, and thinning out, “dilate” actually suggests that Mutabilitie’s undermines the promised end. She stalls it in a romance of wandering. Rather than things “fate[d]” to return to “Him,” Mutabilitie defers that end with a period of “exile, or process.” “Continual deferral or postponement is part of the sorrow of wandering,” but it also gives us an interim, which has no definitive end, but instead “endless variety.” 95 What ultimately makes Mutabilitie’s case persuasive and Spenser’s use of her as the voice of his philosophical argument is that she does not rely as philosophers and theologians do on the word of logos or the cosmic pattern of order, but rather on that of experience, life, and sense. In dilating “being,” Mutabilitie gives every “thing” its tangible meaning and purpose in change. The promise of “perfection,” while hopeful, remains aspirational, and not something that can be understood let alone proven beyond a doubt in a court of law. III. “A Spectacle of Care”: Philosophical Thinking in The Faerie Queene Both the Garden of Adonis and the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie are loci of thinking for Spenser. They are places where he condenses, isolates, as well as explores in thinking. In these loci, which importantly unfold in the method of pooled stanzas, “thinking happens.” The thinking, as the above discussion highlights, is fundamentally philosophical; that is, it addresses as well as conceptualizes the basic laws, principles, and/or meaning of the world. But rather than a didactic poem limited to the principles it expounds, The Faerie Queene examines the principle of mutability from a variety of angles and through “ensample,” some of which are not always apparent. In Book II’s Cave of Mammon episode (another thinking locus), for example, Guyon’s 95 Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance, 64. 83 choice to enter the Cave without the Palmer, whom he has “left beyond that Ydle lake,” poses a veritable quagmire of interpretations, one of which includes the notion that virtue consists in “trial […] by what is contrary,” no doubt one reason for Milton’s “error” in misremembering the passage. In entering the Cave of Mammon with only his “vertues, and praise-worthie deedes” (VI.vii.2), Guyon makes a choice that alters not only his character but also the narrative. This choice, which importantly occurs without the Palmer, allows Guyon to apply what he has learned under the Palmer’s tutelage; that is, to cultivate right reason, “the spark of divinity still remaining in the human mind.” But the absence of the Palmer also suggests that Guyon has conditioned himself in such a way as to be habituated to virtue, that is disposed to making virtuous choices. It is a moment of Aristotelian habit, a golden mean, the very mark of learned virtue. “The virtues,” Aristotle argues, “come about in us neither by nature nor against nature, rather we are receptive of them and are brought to completion through habit.” 96 In other words, one is not born virtuous but becomes virtuous through habitual choice-making (proaíresis, or deliberate choice), which in its purest and most distilled form excludes reason from it process. 97 Guyon, in this sense, has evolved, moved beyond an allegorical character attached (that is, separated from) to Reason, to become a “virtuous” character, one worthy of the name “Temperance.” Prior to the Cave of Mammon episode, Guyon was arguably not virtuous, at least in the Aristotelian sense, which Spenser mentions as his source for the “twelve moral virtues,” but instead a form of virtue that Milton would later categorize as “cloistered virtue,” or virtue untried. There is a shift in Guyon because of the episode that alters his character and ultimately exhausts his physical body. What 96 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (New York: Hackett Publishing, 2014), 21. 97 The distinction between Plato’s notion of virtue as an act of reason an Aristotle’s as an act of choice is summarized by F. E. Peters: “Two things are to be noted about choice: it is precisely this that brings human actions (praxis) within the realm of morality; secondly, by positing this voluntary act […], Aristotle moved discussions of morality out of the area of intellection […] into that of will.” See Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 163. 84 Spenser highlights in this and many other thinking moments in the poem is that change constitutes a necessary process of development, whether from good to bad, bad to good, birth to death, strength to weakness, etc. Virtue, which one would think the very opposite of mutable, is shown by Spenser to be a process of choice, that is, a habituated (i.e., willed) action that in the case of Guyon alters the state of moral character. 98 In this sense, Spenser dramatizes philosophical ideas, just as in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie he stages a trial between order (Jove) and disorder (Mutabilitie). I began this chapter with a discussion of Spenser’s “kinetic” poetry. Spenser is nothing if not a poet of movement and change. Nothing in Spenser is static. Nearly every moment involves a swerve from the path. And these swerves do not seem necessary, but rather internal to the poetry itself. They are natural alterations, in other words, following their own inclination and given form in the stanza. The Faerie Queene is not only a poem of moments, “allegorical cores,” and “endlesse” wandering, but a poem addressing in the very process of unfolding the fundamental principle of life: mutability. Mutability is not only a result of the poem, its aesthetic and experiential effect, but its subject, its method, and some might say its madness. It constitutes a dual register of style and argument, or form and content. Neither can be extricated from the other. They are symbiotic, which, as mentioned earlier, poses problems for not only the narrative, but also for the argument and meaning of the poem. When two elements are interwoven so tightly, their very unity becomes a barrier to understanding and interpretation. Despite the difficulties attending a holistic (i.e., comprehensive) understanding of such an encyclopedic work as The Faerie Queene, some things are certain. It is a monumental work of 98 Habit seems the very definition of static, unchanging, and “determined” behavior. But what Aristotle’s idea illuminates, and that Spenser dramatizes, is the process of habit, its internal action, which is not rote or automatic behavior, but choice-making virtue, a mutable process that moves from not virtuous to virtuous action. 85 the imagination, and it has something to tell us, which happens to be of a philosophical nature. I call this nature “thinking” because it identifies a non-teleological process of engagement and composition. Spenser does not tell us where he is going; instead, he thinks us along the way, expounding a theory of mutability that becomes the principle through which one experiences the poem. Transference, metamorphosis, and motion all condition the poem but do not govern it (that would be didactic or doctrinal, not “ensample”). We experience it as Spenser experiences it, similar that is to how Spenser portrays Clarion’s “careless” movement from flower to flower in the “Muiopotmos.” At the end, which is really the beginning (or middle), like in Finnegans Wake, mutability preserves us “eterne” in a “spectacle of care.” 99 99 I owe the Joyce reference to Gordon Teskey’s observation in “Nights Thoughts on Mutability,” 26-27. See Collen Rutherford’s Indecorous Thinking for a reading of Clarion’s “spectacle of care” as “an artistic production, a highly wrought display that exerts centrifugal, interpretive pull on the poem that it closes and that provides a reflection of the poet’s own ‘care’ in making that poem” (1-2). 86 Section II: Prooimion: On Representational Thinking; or, The Soliloquist and The Inserter The idea that an individual can think to themselves is as old as the breakdown of the bicameral mind and the emergence of consciousness. 1 Consciousness, by definition, is awareness of oneself (from L. conscius, “knowing with others or oneself”), which means perceiving, reasoning, and thinking, which also includes thinking to oneself. Thinking to oneself is thus an early and fundamental aspect of the human condition, and one of several mental capacities that distinguishes humans from other “sentient” beings such as animals. Although dating the emergence of consciousness out of discrete cognitive mechanisms is still controversial, the representation of such thinking in art can be dated more definitively in the ancient epics of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BC) and Homer’s Iliad (ca. 700-800 BC), each of which demonstrates “introspection” or what Bruno Snell calls “the discovery of the mind.” 2 In this sense, art is critical not only to understanding the evolution of the human mind, but also to its representation; that is, how the mind portrays itself in the act of thinking. Many scholars cite St. Augustine’s Soliloquies (387 AD) as the first systematic and extended representation of an individual thinking to him or herself. These soliloquies, which can be categorized more accurately as “inner monologues,” are important in the development of 1 See Julian Jaynes influential though contested history of this process in The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Mariner Books, 2000). 2 For a classic account of the evolution of consciousness, see chapter 7 of Daniel C. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991). According to Bruno Snell, “the intellect was not ‘invented,’ as a man would invent a tool to improve the operation of his physical functions, or a method to master a certain type of problem. As a rule, inventions are arbitrarily determined; they are adapted to the purpose from which they take their cue. No objective, no aims were involved in the discovery of the intellect. In a certain sense it actually did exist before it was discovered only not in the same form, not qua intellect.” See Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. by T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), vi. 87 interiority, subjectivity, and the self. 3 They are structured on the model of the Platonic dialogue with “Reason” as the sole interlocutor who questions Augustine (the “I”). Most important to Augustine’s self-knowledge, however, and that distinguishes his representation of thinking from earlier accounts in the monologues of epic poetry and drama, are the practices or modes by which he achieves his self-knowledge. Reflection, inquiry, and investigation constitute the modus operandi of Augustine’s representational thinking. 4 Like Hamlet, Augustine’s mood is primarily interrogative, moving back and forth between Reason’s questions and his own (Augustine’s) answers. 5 Although the Soliloquies are more philosophical than literary, bordering on a dialogic treatise, Augustine’s reflective desire to understand himself nevertheless achieves a significant step in the representation of what Matthew Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” 6 Augustine, in other words, was the first to fully conceptualize and thus realize what the activity of thinking to oneself might look like in mimetic form. 7 The full potential of these earlier practices, which the soliloquy is the most conspicuous, influential, and thus important, does not come to fruition until the early modern period and the work of the English dramatists in particular. There are earlier stages in the dream visions of 3 As Michael P. Foley points out, these terms are anachronistic, but nevertheless helpful in explaining what Augustine called a “return to oursleves.” See Foley’s “Introduction” to Augustine’s Soliloquies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 6-7. For an illuminating study of how Hamlet turns the problem of the self into the problem of its representation in a play, see Rachel Eisendrath, “The Long Nightwatch: Augustine, Hamlet, and the Aesthetic,” ELH 87, no. 3 (2020). 4 “At the same time, in accordance with my enthusiasm and love for investigating with the aid of reason the truth about those things which I especially wanted to know, I also wrote two books in which I questioned myself and responded to myself, as if we were two, Reason and I, although I was alone. Hence, I named this work the Soliloquies” (Retractions, 1.4.1; cited in Augustine, Soliloquies, 3). 5 For a discussion of the relationship between Augustine’s Soliloquies and Hamlet’s soliloquies, see Julia D. Staykova, “The Augustinian Soliloquies of an Early Modern Reader: A Stylistic Relation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?,” Literature and Theology 23, no. 2 (2009). Staykova specifically examines the influence of what she calls “pseudo-Augustinian apocrypha” (Meditations, Soliloquies and Manuel) on the practice of soliloquies in Tudor and early Stuart drama, using Hamlet’s soliloquy at 1.2.129-137 as a case study. 6 Matthew Arnold, “Preface to the First Edition of Poems (1853)” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longman, 1965), 591. 7 According to Foley, “Seneca mentions saying certain things to himself, and Pythagoras recommended a nocturnal examination of one’s deeds, but neither developed their inner monologues into self-standing composition.” See Augustine, Soliloquies, 3. 88 medieval poetry, the monologues and soliloquies of morality plays, the digressions of prose romances, and the early Christian religious practices of which Augustine’s is one of the most important, but it was in the soliloquy of Elizabethan drama that thinking was so to speak “caught.” It was not just Shakespeare’s plays, but also those of Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, and others that this “life-like” feature of representation took hold and was developed as a tool of thinking. 8 We owe to the dramatists of the period and specifically Shakespeare the greatest and most complex treatment of representational thinking. What we now take for granted in the novel and film was born in the playhouses of London. To think and to represent thinking as part of the daily life of the individual is largely a dramatic invention, though it evolves over time to become the entire aesthetic of works such as Joyce’s Ulysses. 9 The soliloquy, in this sense, shifted from an apostrophic tool of declaration to a magnifying glass of examination, investigation, and questioning, which was entangled in the social action surrounding it. 10 Thinking to oneself not only became a feature of nearly all dramatic art, it became the central means of developing character, furthering plot, and especially interrogating the spaces between private and social worlds. This last characteristic of the soliloquy, which constitutes the collapse of the notion of private and public as distinct spheres of activity, has been under-theorized, and is therefore, for the most part, the subject of the following chapter. I do not suggest, however, that the soliloquy becomes a social or public convention in Shakespeare’s hands, but I do argue that it generates a 8 It should also be noted that at a slightly earlier point the notion of thinking as representable or captured artistically appears in the visual arts. One only has to look at Sandro Botticelli’s Saint Augustine in His Study (ca. 1490) or Albrecht Dürer’s Melencoli I (1514) to understand a corresponding and almost zeitgeist-like interest in capturing thought. 9 On the dramatic structure of Augustine’s Soliloquies, see Foley’s Introduction. 10 As this “preamble” suggests and the chapter bears out, this social entanglement of the soliloquy is one of the primary differences between earlier uses of the soliloquy and Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare understood all human activity as part of a “stage,” that is life, none of which was so discrete (private) as to develop in a void. 89 formal space of exceptionalism, which means a space that undermines the order of the public sphere. Villainy, in this sense, is not a priori, but a product of human interaction. For Richard III, one of the two characters along with Macbeth that I discuss, the soliloquy provides the opportunity to shape the plot to his own means, making himself in this sense its playwright. But in this process, the soliloquy serves as the locus of his undoing; that is, the place where he simultaneously creates and destroys himself. While the soliloquy has been discussed and admired as a locus of thinking for centuries, the aside has been significantly neglected. In fact, the aside has received no single treatment in book-form by a Shakespeare scholar. In many ways, it is the most neglected of all of Shakespeare’s dramatic conventions despite it being a practice that occurs quite frequently in day-to-day life. We do not often soliloquize to ourselves when others leave the room, but we do talk to ourselves under our breath in the presence of others as well as converse with another person when there are other people in the room. The aside is more natural in this sense than the soliloquy and constitutes what I call a social form of private thinking. As devices of representational thinking, the soliloquy and the aside are surprisingly protean in their ability to shape, influence, and constitute dramatic action, what I for the most part consider the social sphere of any given play. Where Augustine’s Soliloquies and earlier forms of representational thinking, specifically thinking to oneself, were removed from action (examples of the vita contempletiva), Shakespeare’s “inner monologues” are entangled in a social web of their own doing. They are private, for sure, but they create a liminal space that conditions and is conditioned by external pressures. To soliloquize is not “to stand alone” and to speak an aside is not “to stand aside,” but to mentally hold two spheres of activity together, as if one is shuttling between them on a loom. 90 Chapter 2: Exceptional Thinking in Richard III and Macbeth: A Theory of Soliloquy “These deeds must not be thought” -Lady Macbeth (2.2.34) 1 “N’er well but when my thoughts and I / Do domineer in privacy” -Robert Burton 2 I: Shakespearean Exceptions Richard III is more than just a political exception whose physical deformity makes him stand outside the “sportive tricks” (1.1.14) of society. 3 Richard, in fact, is the only character in Shakespeare who appears alone at the opening of a play. Several plays including Henry V and Romeo and Juliet feature a choral prologue, but Richard’s opening soliloquy is unique, an exception, among Shakespeare’s plays. 4 Not only does Richard recount past events, “descant on [his] deformity” (1.1.27), and outline his villainous plot, he also calls attention to the fact that he is a soliloquist, boldly pronouncing just before Clarence enters, “dive, thoughts, down to my soul” (1.1.41). By standing alone and claiming his intent and how his body informs that intent, 1 All references to Macbeth and Richard III are taken from the Third Series of The Arden Shakespeare, unless otherwise noted. See Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) and King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Methuen, 2009). 2 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Angus Gowland (London: Penguin Classics, 2021), 14. 3 The general (legal and state) law that Richard suspends is monarchial primogeniture, but there are unwritten laws (divine laws) that he suspends as well (e.g., “thou shalt not kill”). 4 As D. J. Palmer argues, “Shakespeare’s use of such formal devices, of course, has behind it a long dramatic tradition reaching back to classical models, and Elizabethan dramatists were infinitely resourceful in adapting and experimenting with their conventional stock-in-trade. The Prologue (deriving from the comedies of Terence and Plautus) and the Chorus (deriving from the tragedies of Seneca), figures originally distinct in function, are essentially means of offering a perspective on the dramatic action.” See “‘We Shall Know By This Fellow’: Prologue and Chorus in Shakespeare,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 64, no. 2 (1982), 503. 91 Richard marks himself as an exception. Richard’s soliloquy, as this chapter argues, illuminates a fundamental feature of the dramatic speech act known as the soliloquy; namely, its ability to make exceptions of its speakers. 5 The soliloquy is the dramatic “state of exception” par excellence. Unlike dialogue, which constitutes the social world of a play and provides a unity to dramatic action and plot, the soliloquy separates a character from others, thus expanding and deepening the representational space of the stage. By generating and thus identifying (locating) a representational space detached from other characters, the soliloquy negotiates the development of interiority, subjectivity, and personal character even as this development is subject to social conditions and forces outside the space of the soliloquy. To put it in the legal language from which the phrase “state of exception” derives, the soliloquy suspends the order (i.e., law) of the social in favor of the private. 6 Additionally, as an exceptional state that often acts in opposition to the social by defining its limits, the soliloquy is that which cannot be subsumed. 7 The social exists as an identifiable sphere because a private world stands in opposition to it, shaping and extending what 5 I define soliloquy broadly as a private monologue that is intended by the speaker not to be heard by others onstage. Although soliloquies are often “overheard,” as in Romeo overhearing Juliet’s soliloquy in Act II, Scene II, they are nevertheless spoken as if they are private. If a character knowingly speaks to themselves in the company of others, then it is an aside. I make these distinctions because to elide the two terms, as many do, would be to lose the dramatic function of their differences. A more detailed discussion of the history of the soliloquy appears in Chapter III in relation to the aside. Recent studies of the soliloquy and Shakespeare include Lloyd A. Skiffington, The History of English Soliloquy: Aeschylus to Shakespeare (Lanham: University of America Press, 1985); James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of the Soliloquy (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003); Marcus Nordlund, The Shakespearean Inside: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Neil Corcoran, Reading Shakespeare’s Soliloquies: Text, Theatre, Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); and A. D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin (eds.), Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 6 See Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2005) for a discussion of the phrase, “the state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the laws of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept” (4). The italicized sentence replaces Agamben’s “exception” with “soliloquy.” 7 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13. 92 constitutes “the social.” 8 As Giorgio Agamben importantly notes, “the suspension of the norm [by the exception] does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order.” 9 In drama, in other words, the soliloquy does not quit or eliminate the social, but supplements it, functioning as the representational limit that defines the social. For tragic figures like Richard, Juliet, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Cleopatra, and especially Macbeth, the soliloquy marks them as linguistic, epistemological, and imaginative exceptions to the order of the play. 10 Through the soliloquy they develop “states” or “conditions of mind and feeling” (OED2b) that draw a proverbial line in the sand between social and private spheres. And when they cross over to the private, identified throughout the following chapter as the separate and solitary space of thinking, they become exceptions to the rule of society, making society, and in a larger sense reality, a condition of their private state. Just as borders are the hazy, controversial, and contested lines that determine an identifiable country or empire, the soliloquy determines what is and what is not social. Soliloquy is thus a form of exception. It functions as the recognizable shape or condition that a character generates in relation to those around them. In this sense, soliloquy is representational of exceptional behavior. It illustrates, or more accurately captures, exceptionalism in the making. When Richard claims, for example, that “[he], in this weak piping 8 I use the term “private” to describe the solitary space of the soliloquy because of its common association with the “social” or “public.” Where other terms would suffice (e.g., solitude, aloneness, and separateness), they lack the necessary dialectical relationship to the “social,” which is necessary for understanding performance and dramatic representation. “Private,” as I use it throughout this essay, means “kept or removed from public view or knowledge; secret; concealed (OED6). See also OED7a: “a conversation, communication, etc.: intended only for or confined to the person or persons directly concerned; confidential.” See Robert Burton’s use of “privacy” in the epigraph above. For a view of the private as related to the household, specifically as it is conceptualized in relation to the social/public, see Lena Cowen Orlin’s study, Private Matters and Public Concerns in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 9 Agamben, State of Exception, 23. To subsume the soliloquy or private world of characters would be to eliminate any notion of “the social,” just as subsuming the exception would make a law or rule meaningless. Society and law require for their existence that which cannot be subsumed, which defines it extreme limitations. 10 This argument can of course be extended to the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s comedies, but the examples drawn on below are primarily from the tragedies. 93 time of peace, Ha[s] no delight to pass away the time, / Unless to see [his] shadow in the sun / And decant on [his] own deformity” (1.1.24-27), he instantiates his exceptional status in the form of a speech act. While Richard’s machinations throughout the play make him a “political exception,” his speech nevertheless makes him a formal exception. Where dialogue, as suggested above, constitutes the social and political register of the play, the soliloquy generates a space of thinking that not only opposes the social, but also, as the play proceeds, becomes the dominant reality of the social. The exception, as Walter Benjamin noted, becomes the rule. 11 The term exception has a rich legal history that even it its earliest uses suggests a form of resistance to order and social norm. Exception comes from the Latin verb excipere, “to take out.” The noun exceptio, which corresponds to our common modern use of exception as “the action of excepting (a person or thing, a particular case) from the scope of a proposition, rule, etc.” (OED1), appears early in Roman legal theory. Cicero, for example, argues that some treaties are in existence [ . . . ] in which there is a special exception made that no one of them is to be received by us as a citizen of Rome. And if the exception prevents such a step from being lawful, it is quite evident that it is lawful where there is not such exception made. 12 This passage is often cited as the origin of the phrase, “the exception proves the rule.” (OED1b). 13 Cicero clearly uses exception to describe a situation or act where what is excluded proves the existence of a law or general rule (in this case a treaty). As Richard Holton argues, “to treat something as an exception is not to treat is as a counterexample that refutes the existence of the rule. Rather it is to treat it as special, and so to concede the rule from which it is expected.” 14 11 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (257). 12 Cicero, “For Cornelius Balbus,” in The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero (Vol. III), ed. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 325. 13 See Richard Holton, “The Exception Proves the Rule,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18.4 (2010), 370. 14 Holton, “The Exception Proves the Rule,” 369. 94 What lies outside the law, in other words, defines the limit of the law. Without criminals or those who stand in opposition the law, the law would be meaningless. More germane to the present argument is the use of exception (exceptio) in Roman law as “a plea made by a defendant in bar of the plaintiff’s action” (OED4). This use of exception reveals much about the formal quality of what makes Shakespeare characters exceptions by introducing the sense of “objection,” “denial,” and “dismissal.” 15 Where the common use of exception defines itself in relation to order, law, or State, this sense of exception takes on a specifically linguistic form. In the context of a dramatic play, the soliloquy functions as a form of plea, what Catherine Bates calls “complaint,” which identifies a character that is not whole or unified but “castrated, wounded, [and] split.” 16 Characters who are complete or “whole” (“un- cut”) exist harmoniously within the social order and therefore do not need to defend themselves. But in the soliloquy, an exception has been made, which allows the soliloquist to talk to themselves as if God or an “Other” were listening to them. 17 Stanley Cavell defines such denial in Shakespeare characters as the “privatization of the political.” 18 In this inward shift, what Cavell elsewhere calls “crisis of knowledge,” “a new intimacy, or wish for it, enters the world.” 19 Macbeth, for example, which will be discussed in greater details below, “secretes its own 15 For a thorough discussion of this use of exception (OED4), see Justinian’s Institutes (Oxford University Press, 1967), Book XLIV. 16 Catherine Bates, “Shakespeare and the Female Voice in Soliloquy,” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama, edited by A. D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 59. 17 In making this argument about the solitary space of soliloquy and the character’s manifestation of an Other, I am not ignoring the practical and somewhat conventional aspect of the soliloquy as a device intended (because partly unavoidable) for the audience to hear. I discuss this in greater detail below, but the audience can be seen as representative (i.e., as a physical manifestation) of the Other as well as the character’s conscience, which according to Christopher Tilmouth acts a kind of “second self.” For a discussion of conscience and Shakespeare, see Tilmouth’s “Shakespeare’s Open Conscience,” in The Renaissance Conscience, ed. Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 67-81. 18 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; updated edition), 228. 19 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, xiii, 224. 95 environment of a new intimacy, of privacy shared, a setting not exactly of world catastrophe but a catastrophe of privacy, hence of certain politics.” 20 This “catastrophe of privacy” is enacted and thus represented in the exceptional space of the soliloquy. As a place “shared” with the audience but concealed from other characters in the play, the soliloquy draws the character inward, towards thinking, but also outward, towards dramatic representation. Although a soliloquy is the personal and solitary space of the individual speaker, the solitary space is nevertheless publicly “seen” by an audience (or reader). 21 Cavell’s use of the phrase “privacy shared” also identifies the liminal status of the soliloquy as a space both personal, solitary, and intimate, but that is exposed, influenced, as well as shaped by the social. Cognitively and emotionally the soliloquy is a character’s own space, but dramatically it shares its privacy with others. Shakespeare criticism has been influenced by three dominant accounts of the theory of exception: one political, one psychological, and one literary. The work of Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) and Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) has largely defined the political use of exception as that which “suspends the juridical order.” 22 Beginning in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), but stated more explicitly and at length in State of Exception (2005), Agamben traces several “states of exception,” most notably the French Assembly’s decree of July 1791, Hitler’s 1933 suspension of the German constitution, and George W. Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act. In each of these cases Agamben argues that a state of exception defines not only “a special kind of law,” but also, “insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, [the] law’s threshold or 20 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 224. 21 As many critics have noted, soliloquies can be performed in many different ways, depending on their nature (content) and context (location in the play). In some instances, actors will draw the crowd into the soliloquy through eye contact, humor, or other verbal/physical means. The point of the above argument, however, is that the soliloquy, at least in the context of the action of the play, is an exceptional space separate and apart from the social world of the play. Whether or not an actor chooses to engage the audience, the space of the soliloquy nevertheless remains private to them in relation to other characters in the play. 22 Agamben, State of Exception, 4. 96 limit concept.” 23 In outlining a theory of exception, Agamben also outlines the historical transformation of the “juridico-political system” into a “killing machine.” 24 What Agamben’s study demonstrates, in other words, is that the state of exception has become a modern “paradigm of government,” a paradigm in which “the normative aspect of law can [. . .] be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a government violence that […] nevertheless still claims to be applying the law. 25 Agamben’s bleak assessment not only reveals much about the realpolitik surrounding our modern and contemporary world, but also the manner in which characters such as Richard and Macbeth anticipate these states of affairs. In many of Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Histories, the state of exception had long been the rule. 26 Freud’s psychological study of “exceptions” as individuals who “appeal [to] a special ground” and “claim privileges over others” has been equally influential in understanding the special or unique case of the exception. 27 According to Freud, patients who developed long- lasting neuroses that stemmed from childhood trauma often thought of themselves as exceptions. The trauma not only haunted them throughout their life, but left them at a disadvantage, which they importantly thought themselves guiltless. By turning themselves into the victim of the event or trauma, in other words, the individual developed a privileged status over others. This superiority manifested as neurotic exceptionalism. 28 23 Agamben, State of Exception, 4. 24 Agamben, State of Exception 86. 25 Agamben, State of Exception 87. Agamben revisits his theory of exception in Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 26 Several studies of Shakespeare influenced by Agamben and Schmitt include Ken Jackson’s “‘Is It God or the Sovereign Exception?’: Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Shakespeare’s King John,” Religion & Literature 38, no. 3 (2006); Rebecca Lemon’s “Tyranny and State of Exception in Richard III,” in Richard III: A Critical Reader, ed. Annaliese Connolly (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Timothy A. Turner’s “Othello on the Rack,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2015). 27 See Marjorie Garber’s use of Freud’s theory of exception in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1985), 32-34; and Alice N. Benston’s brief discussion of exception in “Freud Reading Shakespeare Reading Freud: The Case of Macduff,” Style 23, no. 2 (1989). 28 Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 591. 97 Because Freud loved literary examples, he chose in his description of exceptions to quote from the opening lines of Richard III, illuminating what he saw as the “exceptional” and neurotic behavior of some of his patients. For Freud, Marjorie Garber argues, “Richard III represents not so much a particular aberrant personality warped by accident of congenital deformation, as (or, but rather) the general psychological fact of deformation at birth and by birth, the congenital deformation that results ‘in ourselves,’ in ‘all’ of us, by the fact that we are born to certain parents, and in certain circumstances, incurring, inevitably, certain narcissistic wounds.” 29 Richard, in other words, is in all of us as some form of psychological “wound[] to our narcissism,” and in seeing or reading Richard III we are reminded of it and therefore sympathetic to Richard. 30 Exceptionalism is born from a “right to be an exception,” “since a wrong has been done to [us].” A. C. Bradley provides a third theory of exception that is a modification of Aristotle’s ethos, or a “specific moral factor in relation to an action.” 31 For Bradley, the common link between Shakespeare’s tragic heroes is that they have one quality in common: “they are exceptional beings.” 32 This means they are “person[s] of high degree or of public importance, and that [their] actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind.” Their nature, moreover, “is 29 Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 33. 30 Freud also notes in his discussion of Richard III our tendency to supplement Richard’s motives with our own. According to Freud, by not “say[ing] everything” and instead “merely giv[ing] a hint, and leav[ing] us to fill in what it hints at,” Shakespeare “engages our intellectual activity, divert[ing] it from critical reflection and keep[ing] us firmly identified with his hero.” In grammar we would call Shakespeare’s practice of “leaving things out” ellipsis, and such ellipsis develops the intrigue, sympathy, and compassion that we as the audience and reader have for characters like Richard. See Freud, “Some Character-Types,” 593. 31 Unlike modern notions of character as personality or individualism, Aristotle understood character to be a matter of choice (prohairesis). The psychological inwardness that we associate with modern “character” would have been anathema to Aristotle’s understanding of the term, which was ethical or a result of choice-making. For a discussion of Aristotle and character see Stephen Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 136-167. For a recent discussion of character and its Greek origin see Marjorie Garber’s Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021), 6-9. 32 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth (London: Penguin, 1991), 35. 98 exceptional, and generally raises [them] in some respect much above the average level of humanity.” Even though Shakespeare’s exceptions are, according to Bradley, “made of stuff we find in ourselves and within the persons who surround us, they are raised,” in Shakespeare’s tragedies, “above [us]; and the greatest are raised so far that, if we fully realize all that is implied in their words and action, we become conscious that in real life we have known scarcely any one resembling them.” 33 Bradley’s theory of exception attempts to account for the consistency across Shakespeare’s tragedies of the behavior, status, but most importantly flaw of all the tragic heroes. Like Aristotle’s understanding of ethos, tragic characters are not perfect, but nor are they ordinary, conforming, or weak-willed. What makes a character an exception for Bradley is a greatness (Aristotle’s megalopsychia, “greatness of soul”) that is defined and undermined by a tragic flaw (e.g., jealousy/desire in Othello, love in Lear, and ambition in Macbeth). For all of these characters, their ethos constitutes their hamartia. 34 In this sense, all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are exceptions. What separates them from other individuals is the very quality that determines their downfall. 35 While all of these theories of exception inform my use, I am primarily concerned with exception’s formal aspect; that is, with how Shakespeare represents exceptional characters. Shakespeare’s characters are not exceptions a priori, though Richard argues otherwise, but exceptions through act and argument. They become exceptions only in and through their language, which occurs in the representational and private space of the soliloquy. Where a 33 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 35. 34 For the classic account of hamartia (fatal flaw, failing [literally, “missing the mark”]), see Aristotle’s Poetics 1452a (Chapter 13). Despite its importance to tragedy and drama in general, Halliwell notes the difficulty of translating hamartia for modern readers, calling it the most “controversial idea” in the Poetics (Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 215). 35 Rebecca Lemon has recently drawn on several of these discussions of exception to develop a more Shakespearean and thus literary understanding of exception as a quality of malleability, which in its political form develops and facilitates tyranny. See Lemon, “Tyranny and State of Exception in Richard III,” 111-128. 99 classical character like Oedipus or Antigone, according to Aristotle, generates their exceptionalism through action or plot, Shakespeare’s exceptions do so through cognitive action. 36 Shakespeare’s characters, in other words, illustrate the motions of thought rather than the motions of hand. (e.g., action to Hamlet is thinking, whereas action to Antigone is removing her brother’s body from the battlefield). 37 This does not mean that Shakespeare’s characters do not physically or politically act, just that Shakespeare foregrounds and thus prioritizes character over plot, flipping Aristotle’s emphasis on plot over character on its head. Thinking, in this sense, functions as the fundamental or at least most influential type of action represented in Shakespearean tragic drama. The two characters that arguably define Shakespeare’s development of the soliloquy as a state of exception are Richard III and Macbeth. 38 Both typify the political understanding of 36 I do not discount the important and emotional monologues of Oedipus and especially Antigone, but their function, which one must consider in order to understand the differences between classical soliloquies and Shakespearean soliloquies, is rhetorical and directed towards the action (plot) of the play (they are not character-based, but plot- based monologues). In other words, classical monologues do not carve out a solitary space of privacy that challenges and shapes the social through deliberation, conflict, and imagination, but instead constitutes a product of and therefore extension of the social, i.e., plot. 37 Antigone’s monologue against Creon and sovereign law (450ff.) contextualizes the action, but her removal of Polyneices’ body constitutes the main (ethical and political) action of the plot and thus action of the play. It sets everything going, so to speak. Hamlet’s discourse with himself and others, on the other hand, constitutes the primary action of the play until Act V. In this sense, Act V’s action is the culmination and result of the cognitive action. 38 There have been several influential discussions of Richard and Macbeth in relation to one another over the last three centuries. Two early discussions, Thomas Whately’s brilliant analysis of Richard and Macbeth in Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1785) and William Hazlitt’s discussion in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), in particular, lay much of the groundwork for subsequent criticism. While Whately points out the similarities between Richard and Macbeth as primarily situational/dramatic (e.g., as soldiers, usurpers, murderers, and tyrants), he importantly highlights the “charactorial” differences, arguing that Shakespeare “ascribed opposite principles and motives to the same designs and actions” (10). Richard, in other words, is evil by nature, Macbeth by chance. Hazlitt, who not only mentions Whately’s study in his introduction (erroneously attributing it to George Mason) but also draws heavily on it, makes an important observation about the difference between the two that is fundamental to the argument below: “Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure self-will. There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his sleep; nor does he live like Macbeth in a waking dream. Macbeth has considerable energy and manliness of character” (See Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916 [22]). Imagination and its ability to project as well as compress time, as discussed below, is the fundamental difference between the two. The fact that Macbeth has a more “kind” nature than Richard no doubt informs his proleptic imagination, but its process, its ability to move in time and collapse thought and action is the primary difference in their otherwise exceptional natures. For an early overview of the critical discussion of Richard and Macbeth see Manning Smith’s “The Relation of Macbeth to Richard The Third,” PMLA 60, no. 4 (1945): 1003-1020. 100 exception as one who suspends law, but more importantly both use the form of soliloquy or what I call “representational thinking” to realize their exceptional status. As noted earlier, Richard is the first and only character to open a Shakespeare play with a soliloquy. This alone makes him an exception, but it is how Richard uses the privacy of the soliloquy to develop as a character that makes him such a powerful exception and one worth exploring in greater detail. Macbeth’s use of the soliloquy is unlike anything in Shakespeare. While Hamlet has traditionally been the locus classicus of Renaissance interiority, Macbeth extends Hamlet’s meditations on self, nature, and death to include an imaginative will-to-power arguably absent in any of Shakespeare’s other characters (Just as A.C. Bradley said of the relationship between Othello and Hamlet, one could also say of Macbeth and Hamlet. Had Hamlet possessed Macbeth’s imagination and power to realize his desires, Hamlet would have been over in a single Act). The thinking that occurs in Macbeth’s soliloquies, in other words, is of a different kind in Shakespeare. It is proleptic (not to mention “prophetic”) and generative almost to the point of being occult. Macbeth’s thinking does not turn on itself in a solipsistic gyre or move through logical procedures of proposition and argument. It does not emote or explain, but instead projects. It is thinking that instantiates reality through imaginative reach and realization. Macbeth thinks thought to the other side, which allows him to understand the consequences or results of his ambition. This proleptic feature of his thinking makes him an exception. But what is most unsettling about this type of thinking is that even as Macbeth knows what will happen, he nevertheless decides to go through with his actions anyway. The following chapter identifies the soliloquy not only as a state of exception, a locus that separates a character from others while allowing them to dominate the order of action, but also as a form (forma) of representational thinking. As this chapter and the next demonstrates, 101 representational thinking distinguishes itself from philosophical thinking and processual thinking by its form rather than content. The soliloquy is “staged” thinking; thinking, in other words, that is supposed to look like thinking. In this sense, representational thinking is endemic to drama, a way to portray thought and motive onstage. But rather than discuss abstractly what representational thinking is and is not, I have chosen to identify discriminable moments or examples of it through the soliloquies of Richard III and Macbeth. Even though Shakespeare’s plays are rife with exceptional behavior, ideas, and thinking in the form of soliloquy, Richard and Macbeth are arguably the soliloquy’s most charismatic and imaginative examples of exceptional behavior. 39 What unites these two in their thinking is their ambition. Both characters use ambition as the desire that informs and shapes their thinking (the origin of their ambition, however, is different and will be discussed below). While the following chapter outlines a theory of representational thinking in the form of the soliloquy, it also attempts to answer a question posed by Stephen Greenblatt at the beginning of Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics (2018): “How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne?” 40 The short answer: through soliloquy. The soliloquy suspends the order and harmony of their respective plays, allowing Richard and Macbeth to develop their tyrannical status. Their thinking and not their actions mark them as tyrants. Thought, in other words, precedes dramatic action, giving shape, meaning, and cause to it. Tyranny, in other words, would be what Hannah Arendt famously identified as a “banal evil” without the thinking that informs it. 41 Where Greenblatt seeks an answer to his question in historical and political “complicity,” or the “psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest,” 39 Characters frequently associated with the soliloquy and exceptionalism are Jacques, Juliet, Romeo, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, Lear, Leontes, and Prospero. 40 Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics (New York: Norton, 2018), 1. 41 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006). 102 the following chapter focuses on the representational and dramatic means of achieving their tyranny. 42 In other words, no study of exception or the soliloquy (or tyranny for that matter) as a form of thinking in Shakespeare can do without Richard and Macbeth. II: “I am I”: Forming Exceptionalism in Richard III I, that am rudely stamped […] [H]ave no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain. (1.1.16-30) The causal construction (“I/therefore”) of these lines illustrates Shakespeare’s appropriation of Thomas More’s biography of Richard. More’s infamous Distortum lines (“Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum” [distortion of character follows distorted countenance]), which Francis Bacon later adapts in his essay, “On Deformity,” become for Shakespeare’s Richard a sort of prayer, benediction, and admonition all wrapped into one. 43 In these lines and the rest of the opening soliloquy, Richard announces himself as a “deform[ed],” scorned, arrogant, and ambitious villain who will take the crown of England by any means available. This, however, is the traditional reading of Richard’s exceptionalism, one that was invented and perpetuated in the works of More, Edward Hall, and Raphael Holinshed. More, as suggested above, provided the most influential view of Richard as a “crooked-backed” “dissembler” in his History of Richard: 42 Greenblatt, Tyranny, 1-2. 43 “Deformed persons are commonly even with nature, for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature.” See Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 426. 103 Richard, the third son, [was] little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crooked-back, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured of visage and such as in princes called warlike, in other men otherwise. He was malicious, wrathful, envious, [ . . . ] close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, not hesitating to kiss whom he thought to kill, pitiless and cruel, not for malevolence always but oftener for ambition and either for the surety or increase of his position. 44 Although the Italian historian Polydore Vergil wrote the first history of Richard (Anglica Historia [1512-13, published 1534]), More’s account, with its vivid description of Richard’s “ill feature[s]” and “malicious” personality, arguably inaugurated what is now called the “Tudor myth,” providing the template for Shakespeare’s “subtle, false, and treacherous” Richard. 45 But if the Tudor myth made Richard a social and political exception, the Shakespearean soliloquy made him a formal one; that is, a character capable of becoming a political, psychological, and literary exception. In More, Hall, and Holinshed’s treatment, Richard has little voice. Although More, to his literary credit, does dramatize Richard in various scenes and help contextualize Richard’s villainy, Richard is for the most part described rather than represented. He lacks power and agency to speak or defend himself. But in Shakespeare, he is given language and the private space to “descant.” In his study, “The Invention of Richard of Gloucester,” E. Pearlman locates Richard’s transformation into a genuine villain, as opposed to an object of Tudor propaganda, in Shakespeare’s earlier treatment of Richard, King Henry VI, Part 3, specifically Richard’s extraordinary seventy-one-line soliloquy where “old characteristics slough away, and a new Richard—theatrical, scheming, wicked, ironic—springs suddenly to life”: 46 44 See Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Third, in Richard III, ed. Thomas Cartelli (New York: Norton, 2009). 45 Rebecca Lemon, Richard III: Language & Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 81. 46 E. Pearlman, “The Invention of Richard of Gloucester,” in Richard III, ed. Thomas Cartelli (New York: Norton, 2009), 334 104 Love foreswore me in my mother’s womb, And, for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail Nature with some bribe To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub; To make envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size; To disproportion me in every part, Like to a chaos or an unlicked bear whelp, That carries no impression like the dam. And am I then a man to be beloved? O monstrous fault to harbor such a thought! Then, since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o’erbear such As are of better person than myself, Ill make my heaven to dream upon the crown And whiles I live t’account this world but hell, Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head Be round implaed with a glorious crown. (3.2.153-171) 47 In these lines, Richard’s exceptional status is born. For the first time Shakespeare connects Richard’s body with his villainy. 48 As we progress through the lines, moving from his mother’s corruption of “frail Nature” and the “mountain on his back” to the important causal shift of “Then” followed by the conjunction “since,” Richard’s “misshapen body is no longer to be understood as a mere joke of nature but rather as the catalyst of his moral ambition.” Richard equates, in other words, his body with the origin of his desires, making the former the cause of the other. It is this “psychological causation” that leads Richard to “to prove a villain” and “set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3.2.193). 49 This early soliloquy of Richard’s, which Shakespeare revisits and condenses into a more strategic pronouncement at the opening of Richard III, marks Richard’s entrance into an exceptional state: the soliloquy. Where Richard had been sidelined and maligned, poked fun of 47 See King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 48 Pearlman, “The Invention of Richard,” 334. 49 Pearlman, “The Invention of Richard,” 337. 105 and nearly ignored for over two plays, the above lines inaugurate Richard’s exceptionalism and the soliloquy’s function as its form and vehicle. But as important and necessary as the above soliloquy is to the “invention of Richard,” it would take Shakespeare an entire play to develop and provide the solitary space for Richard’s transformation into a villain. In King Henry VI, Part 3, Richard identifies his exceptional status, opening, that is, the dramatic space of privacy that allows such exceptionalism to form, but in Richard III he embraces it and makes it not only a condition of his private world but the social order as well, what Benjamin and later Agamben identify as the exception becoming the rule. Such ownership of deformity, as both Garber and more recently Rebecca Lemon argue, allows Richard to turn deformity into a tool and justification for villainy. 50 Deformity, so understood, i.e., as the congenital source of villainy, becomes the spur for Richard’s ambition, informing Richard’s status as the exception who, in Freud’s sense, stands apart, and who in Agamben’s sense, “manages to undermine the law and the juridico-political order.” 51 But deformity, as Richard III suggests, is simply a pretext for Richard’s ambition, the true source of his exceptionalism and its attendant tyranny. Although Richard identifies his body as the origin of his villainy both in Henry VI Part III and at the opening of Richard III, his soliloquies form a different kind of exception, one in which Richard changes as he speaks to himself. The change is no doubt due to the nature and form of the representational space given to Richard in Richard III. 52 Such space, traditionally understood, provides evidence for the creation and development of the humanist individual or what contemporary scholarship calls “the modern 50 Lemon, “Tyranny and State of Exception in Richard III,” 112. 51 Lemon, “Tyranny and State of Exception in Richard III,” 112-113. 52 Margreta de Grazia makes the important point that in focusing almost exclusively on Hamlet’s soliloquies (i.e., “complex interiority”), modern readers have removed Hamlet from his own play. Hamlet, in other words, is no longer a play about a “dispossessed” son, but instead the playground of “an inner being so transcended that it barely comes into contact with the play from which it emerges.” See ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 106 secular subject.” Interiority, selfhood, inwardness, and subjectivity all derive from this view of the soliloquy as a space defined in opposition to the social. The soliloquy marks the emergence, in other words, of dramatic personhood and modern consciousness. But as Jonathan Dollimore has argued, such humanist individualism is displaced, not reinforced, in the drama of the period. 53 In early modern English tragedy, specifically Jacobean tragedy, human nature is mutable and socially conditioned, not fixed or hierarchical. Shakespeare’s plays, in other words, “repeatedly come back to th[e] antifoundationalist model of human subjectivity in which, however unnerving, uncanny, strange this might seem, it is nonetheless evident that the most heartfelt passions—love or hate—are drawn from superficies rather than depths.” 54 For a modern antifoundationalist like Foucault, who sees everything through lens of cultural forces, “the individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.” 55 Power, in this sense, does not derive from within but from without, shaping and giving form to the individual who wields it. In Machiavelli’s “philosophy of praxis” and Galileo’s decentering of “‘man’ and his ‘planet,’” Dollimore reminds us, “there is no abstract ‘human nature,’ fixed and immutable,” but instead a human nature that is historically determined by its social relations or power structures. 56 Dollimore’s argument has proven influential, especially in poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer readings of Shakespeare and his (later) contemporaries. Like Catherine Belsey, 53 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare ad His Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 156. Katherine Eisaman Maus also concurs with Dollimore, arguing, “the structure of personality is a ‘cultural artifact’ that derives from social structures, rather than anteceding or escaping them.” See Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (University of Chicago, 1995), 63. 54 Catherine Bates, “Shakespeare and the Female Voice,” 62. 55 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 98. 56 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 155. 107 Stephen Greenblatt, Katherine Maus, Raymond Williams and more recently Katherine Eggert, Dollimore views English Renaissance drama as a locus of secularization, a retreat from the cosmic, unified, and religious worldview. 57 But Richard, as the soliloquies already discussed demonstrate, is a tricky (and transitional) figure who has one foot in the old Vice-riddled world of medieval religious belief (e.g., in Act II, for example, Richard feigns piety in order to gain popular support) and the other in the new world of capitalist materialism. As Bates argues, Richard is a “castrated subjectivity,” a self split in two. 58 Despite owning what he identifies as his essential self, his “deformity,” Richard nevertheless questions that self and its ability “to prove a villain.” The soliloquy, in this sense, is not simply a site of ideological tension and therefore critique representing a world in the process of modernizing itself, but a formal site as well, one in which characters interrogate, plead, and in realizing themselves, undo themselves. While critique and change constitute the soliloquy’s content and raison d’etre, it is the soliloquy’s form that allows the exceptional to develop and thus challenge the social. Exceptions are born in the form of private thought. We see this transition from an immutable to a mutable self late in Richard III, specifically in the post-dream soliloquy. In this soliloquy, which importantly occurs after the ghostly visitations and just before he takes the battlefield, Richard experiences what one might call, anachronistically, an existential crisis: O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. 57 For a contrasting viewpoint, specifically on the secularization of post-Renaissance Europe, see Brain Cummings’ Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): “It is the contention of this book that the history of the self in the early modern period has been falsely constructed on an assumption of emerging secularism. We write as if an idea of the self could only come into being as a result of an emptying out of a religious framework. Instead, I look to see what happens if we do not make this assumption” (15). 58 Catherine Bates, “Shakespeare and the Female Voice,” 60. 108 What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why? Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? O, no. Alas, I rather hate myself, For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. (5.3.179-191) What was before only hypothetical, a causal “[therefore] I am determined to prove a villain,” is realized in the declarative “I am a villain.” Richard has moved from owning his body to owning his character. But where the opening soliloquy was clear, eloquent, and assured, the above lines are clipped, confused, and equivocal, not to mention repetitive (both “I” and “myself” are each repeated nine times). The sure, essential self has turned into a questioning self, one flummoxed by itself. And while the dream has no doubt unsettled Richard, it is the soliloquy—i.e, the formal space within the representational space of the stage—that manifests Richard’s conscience as a battle between two selves, “I” and “I,” “Richard” and “Richard.” The soliloquy not only instantiates Richard’s conscience, but moves his character along a spectrum of change, representing him at a point when he is no longer the fixed character of More, Hall, and Holinshed, but instead a fully voiced questioning self. The Tudor myth, which silenced Richard by only giving him a public role as tyrant and “deep dissembler,” has been replaced by a “castrated, wounded, split” and private Richard; a product, that is, of his own conscious undoing. 59 For the first time in the play, Richard doubts himself, reproaching himself “for hateful deeds committed by [him]self.” Partly foreshadowed in the conversation between the murders (“Where’s thy conscience now” [1.4.126]), conscience emerges in Richard as a judge he cannot 59 Catherine Bates, “Shakespeare and the Female Voice ,” 58. 109 escape. 60 Richard, in other words, is a character whose exceptional status develops in questioning that very status. Once he is back in the company of others, Richard can renounce “conscience as but a word cowards use,” but in his own thinking that is not possible. The self in dialogue with itself is the very definition of the exceptional. By capturing Richard at his most transitional and therefore vulnerable, the soliloquy illustrates not only the depths of human consciousness but also its motions. Hamlet, while a deep and far-reaching “thinker,” seldom seems “exceptional” even as he separates himself from others. His soliloquies, as the various quartos attest, can actually be placed in different parts of the play. In this sense, they function as “stock” thinking. Richard, however, makes the soliloquy exceptional, a necessary and organic challenge not only to the order of the representational stage, but also to the representational self. Although Richard precedes nearly all of Shakespeare’s great soliloquists, he nevertheless invents the space later inhabited as well as extended by many of them, most notably Macbeth, who can be seen as a Richard in full possession of a proleptic imagination. 60 For Richard, conscience only arises or activates itself in solitude. Only when he speaks to himself as an “Other” does Richard face his “accuser.” Conscience (con-scientia), it should be remembered, means, “knowledge shared with others,” or knowledge shared with a second scrutinizing self. Immanuel Kant sheds light on the function of conscience as it relates to Richard in Critique of Practical Reason (1788): “A man may dissemble as much as he will in order to paint his recollected unlawful behavior […] as something to which he was carried along by the stream of natural necessity, and in this way try to make himself out as innocent. But he finds that the advocate who speaks [o]n his behalf cannot silence the accuser in him when he is conscious that […] when he committed the wrong he was in his senses, i.e., he was in possession of his freedom.” Quoted in Catherine Gimelli Martin’s “The ‘Reason’ of Radical Evil: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Ethical Philosophers,” Studies in Philology 113, no. 1 (2016), 163. For further discussion of Renaissance conceptions of conscience see The Renaissance Conscience, ed. Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (2011). 110 III: “To crown my thoughts with acts”: Macbeth’s Transitive Imagination If deformity informs the origin of Richard’s exceptionalism, prophecy informs Macbeth’s. When Macbeth first meets the Witches on the heath, they greet him with a vatic utterance: I Witch: All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis. II Witch: All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor. III Witch: All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter. (1.3.48-50) In naming Macbeth, “king hereafter,” the Witches announce, “a prophetic moment.” As Angus Fletcher explains, “In prophetic hands, the three aspects of time [past, present, and future] condense into a single moment. The prophetic moment is that critical juncture when the prophetic order of history is revealed. [ . . . ] Prophetic tradition understands it as the ‘right time,’ the suitable season, the auspicious moment.” 61 Macbeth’s “moment,” in other words, has come. Each Witch reveals in the prophecy an aspect of Macbeth’s ambition. Macbeth knows that he is “Thane of Glamis,” but this is his past, for as we know from the previous scene, Duncan has made him “Thane of Cawdor.” Thane of Cawdor is, at the moment of the Witches’ prophecy, Macbeth’s present, though it remains cloaked in their “imperfect” speech (1.3.70). And Macbeth’s future, which is what truly gives Macbeth his “start” (1.3.51), has yet to occur. 62 Its 61 See Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 5, 45. Debapriya Sarkar also notes the historical condition of prophecy, arguing “[the Witches’] reveal possible futures that will retroactively become ‘prophecies’ if they are fulfilled in historical time.” See “‘To Crown my thought with acts’: Prophecy and Prescription in Macbeth” in Macbeth: The State of the Play (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 88. 62 A. D. Nuttall calls this moment (i.e., the “start”) in Macbeth “the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever, the place where the most is done in least time [ . . .] It lasts less than a second.” See Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 284. 111 naming, “king hereafter,” however, has brought the crown within imaginative reach and its historical possibility into an “overloaded present.” 63 The entire exchange with the Witches, which is intentionally and prophetically cloaked in “obscure presentation,” serves as the springboard, the converging moment (temporally, linguistically, cognitively, as well as physically) of Macbeth’s exceptionalism. 64 As the aside demonstrates several lines later, what follows the prophecy constitutes Macbeth’s internalization of it and the development of his thinking: 65 Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme—I thank you, gentlemen— This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is, but what is not. (1.129-144) 63 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, 5. 64 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, 4. 65 This aside is sometimes identified as a soliloquy, especially since the line previous to the aside indicates Banquo’s removal of Ross and Angus from Macbeth’s presence (“Cousins, a word, I pray you” [1.3.129]). Although this would seem the opportune time for Macbeth to think alone to himself, his remark, “I thank you, gentleman” (1.3.131), halfway through the aside suggests that he is still within earshot of Banquo, Ross, and Angus. Additionally, Banquo responds to Macbeth immediately after the final line of the aside, suggesting that he never left the stage. According to conventional definition, this is an aside, not a soliloquy. See Chapter IV for a detailed analysis of the aside as “a social form of private thinking.” 112 In this aside, which G. Wilson Knight calls “the birth of evil in Macbeth,” Macbeth begins to make causal connections, acknowledging to himself the possible truths of the prophecy. 66 The prophetic moment, what Macbeth calls “supernatural soliciting,” “cannot be ill,” for its predictions “hath given [him] earnest of success / Commencing in a truth.” Macbeth follows the logic of what Francis Bacon in “Of Prophecies” calls giving “grace, and credit” to some prophecies because they have proven true: “men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss.” 67 The conditional “If ill, why […] / If good, why” construction, which will reappear later in the Act, identifies the grammatical structure of Macbeth’s thinking and the evil that Knight identifies. The prophecy’s predictive “truth” turns what is “fantastical,” i.e., the crown and Macbeth’s “thought[s]” of murder, into “surmise,” or imaginative potential. But another way of describing what occurs in the aside is the development of Macbeth’s exceptionalism. Like Richard’s opening soliloquy, the aside reveals much about Macbeth’s private world. As we learn from his letter to Lady Macbeth and through their conversation in Act I, Scene VII, Macbeth has long harbored ambitious desires of becoming king. But until the Witches’ prophecy, Macbeth seems not to have acted on them. 68 Prophesy, which in Richard III functions as a “counter-discourse, running against Richard’s claims that he is in control of the 66 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2001), 174. The sense of Macbeth’s evil and privacy being coterminous can be illustrated through etymology. Privacy, privation, and deprivation all have the same root in the Latin verb privare (to deprive, take away) and its later use as the past participle privatus (withdrawn from society). Privacy is the lack of or taking away of society. Evil, in its moral sense, means not only “wicked” and “vicious” (OED1), but also a “lack of good” or “the opposite of good” (OEDII7a.). In all these senses of evil, which the OED importantly notes have become rather obsolete in modern colloquial use, there is a taking away and removal of what is positive, normal, and/or dominant. Privacy and evil are therefore linked as withdrawals from a positive or dominant other. 67 Debapriya Sarker, “‘To crown my thoughts with acts,’” 85. 68 See Kenneth Muir’s footnote on these lines (1.7.47ff.) in his edition of Macbeth (London: Methuen, 1964) for a discussion of the likelihood that “the murder was discussed [between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth] before the action of the play or in a lost scene.” See also A. C. Bradley’s influential analysis of the murder plot, “When Was the Murder of Duncan First Plotted?,” in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth (London: Penguin Books, 1991): 452-456. 113 plot,” sanctions Macbeth’s desires. 69 It conditions, informs, and ultimately encourages Macbeth’s exceptionalism even as Macbeth’s interpretation of their meaning is in error. The Witches’ speech act, their performative naming, in other words, affords Macbeth the opportunity to generate the form and space to disturb the order of the play. As important as the aside is to Macbeth’s recognition and therefore development of his desires, it provides only a glimpse of Macbeth’s exceptional state. The soliloquies, however, give us a full view of his interior and imaginative world. 70 Specifically, Macbeth develops in the soliloquy a form of exceptionalism that is not only oppositional to the order of the play, but proleptic, imaginative, and psychologically realistic. 71 Where Richard takes an entire play to develop into a “castrated” exception, Macbeth begins “split” (“My thought […] / Shakes so my single state of man” [1.3.141-42]). The two plays form a chiastic model of psychological development. 72 Richard moves from a heartless narcissist to a paranoid self-doubter (only to relinquish his doubt in battle), whereas Macbeth moves from a man highly sensitive to moral considerations to a murdering tyrant. 73 But because Macbeth begins at a more advanced stage (i.e., on the “spectrum of change” mentioned above) of psychological development, a stage no 69 Rebecca Lemon, Richard III: Language & Writing, 90. 70 Macbeth has six soliloquies: 1.7, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.3, and 5.5. There is textual evidence to suggest that the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech (5.5) is a long aside, but as with many of Shakespeare speeches, it depends on the staging of the scene. Given its importance to the play and its traditional classification as a soliloquy, however, it is included above as a soliloquy. 71 The natural order that Macbeth disturbs is symbolically represented, as many critics have noted, in the play’s natural imagery, specifically at the beginning of the play (e.g., the stage direction, “Thunder and lightning: Enter three Witches” [1.1] and Macbeth’s comment at 1.3.38, “So foul and fair a day I have never seen,” which echoes the Witches’, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” [1.1.9]). As Northrop Frye explains in relation to the “order-figure,” “the physical symbol of order is that of the stars in their course: rebellion is symbolized by comets, thunder and lightning, “exhalations,” and similar aspects of meteorology unusual enough to be called unnatural.” See Frye, Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 24. 72 The specific form of chiasmus is called antimetabole (anti [against, opposite] + metabole [turning about, change]) where a phrase is repeated in a successive phrase but in reverse order. 73 See A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, 386: “Macbeth begins as a man of acute, intelligent awareness and then grows or shrinks into a roaring monster.” See also Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics, for a brief discussion of the differences between Richard and Macbeth: 96-98. 114 doubt conditioned by his “milk of human kindness,” Macbeth’s soliloquies represent a degree of imaginative entanglement or realism lacking in Richard’s soliloquies. 74 Macbeth’s exceptionalism derives not from a clear sense of desire or purpose as in Richard (“since I cannot prove a lover / [...] I am determined to will prove a villain” [1.1.28-30]), but from an imaginative ambivalence that projects the present onto the future and the future back onto the present. Macbeth imagines being king, but in imagining understands at what cost. Ironically, Macbeth’s split, which is first noticed by Banquo as a “start,” collapses what Kant calls “inner experience” (empirical cognition of oneself, or self-knowledge) and objective reality. 75 The schism is readily apparent, for example, in the famous dagger soliloquy. 76 The dagger that ushers Macbeth forward, “is this a dagger which I see before me / [ . . . ] Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind” (2.1.33-38), is just as real to Macbeth as the dagger that he “draw[s]” from his side. In bringing the daggers together, one a “false creation” of his “heat-oppressed brain” and the other real, Macbeth collapses the distinction between the two, imagining the actual death of Duncan in the “gouts of blood” on the imaginary dagger’s “blade.” The dream world, in other world, makes the objective world a historical reality. The equivocation or movement between what is imaginary and what is real makes the imaginary, real, and the real, imaginary. Just as a 1325 statue ostensibly linked the imaginative killing of a king with the 74 Richard’s soliloquies, especially the early ones, are highly rhetorical and therefore somewhat artificial as representative of actual thinking. Macbeth’s soliloquies, conversely, are more natural because paratactic, convoluted, contradictory, and therefore evocative of natural mental phenomena. 75 “Start” also signifies what Aristotle would call a “recognition” (anagnorisis). Like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth experiences an early rather than a late recognition, which were common in classical drama. 76 In her study, Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), Katherine T. Kraus defines inner experience as “a person’s conscious mental states, such as occurrent sensory perceptions, thoughts, imaginations, feelings, desires and intentions for action, as well as memories of past states and their causal relations” (vii). 115 physical killing of one, Macbeth’s imagination collapses the distinction as well. 77 The dagger of the mind is also the dagger(s) that actually kills Duncan. 78 As the dagger scene clearly illustrates, Macbeth’s imaginative reach, what Philip Sidney calls “energia,” is his dilemma and damnation. He cannot get outside, to adapt a phrase from Freud, “the imaginative principle.” Even in scenes where Macbeth is not the only figure, Shakespeare nevertheless represents his singular response to events. The heath-scene and its immediate aftermath, for example, discussed above, demonstrate not only Macbeth’s “start,” his visceral response to the news of promised kingship, but also his imaginative response to it, which entails a long aside separating him, at least cognitively, from others. Where Banquo interprets the prophecies as “fair” and implores the Witches to tell him what the future holds (“say which grain will grow, and which will not”), Macbeth, rather than waiting it out, imagines the future in the now, identified ominously but suggestively as a “swelling act.” What exacerbates this exceptional feature of Macbeth’s thinking is that it occurs within the “prophetic moment,” which produces a crossing over, a movement in time and space that occurs in the present. As Fletcher explains, “the structure of the prophetic moment corresponds spatially to the temporal crossover defined as a moment. Thresholds are openings or doorways between two spaces. Moments are doorways between spaces in time.” Consequently, post- “heath” Macbeth experiences reality as “crossings,” or a series of moments where he can see the future in the now. Macbeth experiences reality and all its temporal possibilities (i.e., past, 77 Greenblatt cites this statute in Tyrant: “By the statute of 25 Edward II, c. 2, it was an act of treason: ‘When a Man doth compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King, or of our Lady his [Queen] of their eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do violate the King’s [Companion,] or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the Wife [of] the King’s eldest Son and Heir; or if a Man do levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, giving to them Aid and Comfort in the realm, or elsewhere (Statutes of the Realm, I.319-320; brackets are per the original’” (195). 78 To make it look like the “two chamberlains” (2.1.64) killed Duncan, Macbeth uses their daggers, which Lady Macbeth has to return them to Duncan’s room when Macbeth forgets to leave them. 116 present, and future) in his imagination as “present to the self.” 79 What are often identified by their common name as “hallucinations” (i.e., the dagger), “ghosts” (Banquo), or just prophetic foreshadowing, are Macbeth’s imaginative crossings, his “moments” (i.e., movements) in cognitive time. The earliest and most complete representation of this moment comes in one of the most powerful soliloquies in all of Shakespeare: If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly. If th’ assassination Could trammel up the consequences, and catch With his surcease, success: that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all, here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases, We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions, which being taught, return To plague th’inventor… I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’er-leaps itself, And falls on the’other. (1.7.1-28) Traditional understanding as well as critical analysis of this difficult soliloquy suggests that Macbeth has decided not to go through with the murder. 80 This reading is emphatically supported by Macbeth’s response to Lady Macbeth several lines later: “We will proceed no further in this 79 In the “‘solitary mental life,’” Jacques Derrida reminds us, “we no longer use real words, but only imagined words.” Words function in silent monologue as “signs,” but unlike when we speak out loud to someone, words in the solitary mind do not “indicate” lived experience, but rather express “significations that are ideal and certain (for they are presented to intuition)”; i.e., imagined. “The certitude of existence,” for Derrida, “has no need to be signified. It is immediately present to the self. It is living consciousness.” See Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 43. 80 Three readings, for example, illustrate a consensus. See Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), where Palfrey calls Macbeth’s soliloquy an attempt at “lulled hibernation, a wishful curling into the deep” (69); In “A Reidian Reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Exploring the Moral Faculty through Philosophy and Drama,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2013), Claire Landiss provides a penetrating reading of the soliloquy, arguing that by the end of the soliloquy Macbeth “no longer intends to perform the murder” (154); and Unhae Langis suggests, in “Shakespeare and Prudential Psychology: Ambition and Akrasia in Macbeth” (Shakespeare Studies 40 [2012]), that the entire soliloquy not only demonstrates Macbeth’s decision not to go through with the murder, but it also demonstrates his “weak will.” 117 business.” “Business,” of course, means the murder of Duncan; or, at a minimum, any further discussion of it. Macbeth, it seems, has come to his senses. But the soliloquy and its effect on Macbeth, what he generates and “does” in the soliloquy, suggests otherwise. From its double-conditional opening (“If it were done” and “If th’ assassination”) through the onslaught of “buts” and other equivocations, the soliloquy realizes the possibility and consequence of Duncan’s murder. The words “jump,” “leaps,” and “Vaulting,” moreover, all name and illustrate the crossing action of Macbeth’s imagination as it works through various scenarios. Macbeth’s imagination attempts to “leap” over “present time and over a future act also, so as to land upon the other bank of time, looking back to the bank where he stood before the action,” and in doing so, actually execute the murder. 81 The soliloquy demonstrates that intention (“th’ assassination”) is not built on forward action, something to be “done” in the future, but present realization. Macbeth wants the deed “done” without having to do it; that is, to “catch / With surcease, success.” Not only does the entire soliloquy illustrate what Fletcher means by the prophetic moment’s “crossing” of time and space, it also illustrates what Stanley Cavell calls “language as prophecy,” or “a kind of foretelling” wherein “a small group of generally small words [ . . . ] fall upon one another and discharge or expel meaning” that does “not exist until […] repeated.” 82 The repetition of “done,” for example, loads the term with complex connotative as well as syntactical meaning that allows Macbeth to play with time and action. “Done” is not only a completed mental action, the killing of Duncan in his mind (“If it were done [ . . . ] ‘twere well / It were done quickly”), but also a “deed that undoes doing.” 83 In thinking, in other words, 81 Harold Bloom, Macbeth: The Dagger of the Mind (New York: Scribner, 2019), 2. 82 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 232 83 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 234. 118 Macbeth does not need to do the actual deed, the physical act of killing Duncan. His thinking has already “done” it. Thinking collapses not only time, the “future in the instant” (1.5.58), but also thought and action. The conditional “If” draws the action (murder) into the mind as a possibility, a condition to be realized, but the repetition of “done” activates it (like the Witches’ prophecy, Macbeth repeats “done” three times as if it were a speech act meant to be performed and therefore “done”). This is what it means to think thoughts through to the other side and discharge meaning along the way. The murder is not “born, deferred, and somehow aborted” in the first lines, but nominally and imaginatively crossed in the thought’s doing, for doing and thinking are the same to Macbeth. 84 Macbeth puts himself in the doing of the murder without having “done” it. What follows in the wake of the soliloquy constitutes the burnoff or residue of Macbeth’s crossing. His reentrance into the social with Lady Macbeth is therefore not a decision to abstain from killing Duncan, but a complex postponement (for Macbeth only “does” when he thinks) of when and where. The murder’s already “done,” at least imaginatively; it just needs to be executed in historical time. The thinking here and elsewhere nevertheless generates what has been identified by most critics as Macbeth’s “evil,” “tyranny,” “disease,” “flaw” (hamartia), and “crisis,” or the conceptual and descriptive terms that capture Macbeth’s relationship to the play and its characters. These terms, however, are just the content, the meaning of Macbeth’s character. The soliloquy, on the other hand, actually realizes (i.e., represents) these terms as applicable to and constitutive of Macbeth. Without the soliloquy, Macbeth would be, like Holinshed’s Macbeth, an ambitious tyrant, not an imaginative exception. If Knight is correct in suggesting that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most “evil” character, he is evil because of the imaginative space afforded him by 84 Palfey, Doing Shakespeare, 69. In addition to his discussion of “language as prophecy,” Cavell also links “doing” and “thinking” in both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. See Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 234. 119 the soliloquy. For Macbeth to entertain possible futures and think “counterfactually,” he needs the exceptional space of the soliloquy, which dilates the present and allows him a moment to not only cross time with thought, but also cross from the social to private and back again. In suspending both the order of the play and its temporal progression, the soliloquy collapses Macbeth’s past, present, and future into a single moment. In bringing his future, with its “torrent of metaphysical possibilities,” into his present, Macbeth sees things more occultly than any other Shakespearean character. 85 In their ability to cross time and collapse subjective and objective experience, Macbeth’s soliloquies depart significantly from the traditional use of the soliloquy as a means of exposing, articulating, and moving desire forward in a play. Where traditional soliloquies (e.g., Richard’s opening soliloquy), which originated as apostrophes in epic poetry and later as single-actor monologues in pre-Aeschylean Greek tragedy, reveal rather than conceal the interior world, Macbeth’s soliloquies instantiate that inner world as the real world. Unlike his contemporary soliloquists, Hamlet, Othello, and Cleopatra, for example, Macbeth does not need to step outside his soliloquies (although he does) to realize his actions. His soliloquies realize the possibilities of the objective world (i.e., action) in their own thinking. They are not causal, in other words, but instantiatory. They are not plot dependent, but plot independent, or more accurately they are the plot. Where some critics see Macbeth as a “responding to external contingencies rather than playing out some internal necessity,” the soliloquies demonstrate otherwise. 86 Macbeth is both the external contingency and the internal necessity. Yes, the Witches name the desire and act as a 85 Amir Khan, Shakespeare in Hindsight: Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 93. 86 Khan, Shakespeare in Hindsight, 96. 120 psychological “trigger,” but Macbeth had long possessed the desire. 87 The “start,” the letter to Lady Macbeth, and their first conversation after the “If it were done” soliloquy all suggest an earlier desire not acted upon. The function of the Witches is therefore dramatic, what Kenneth Burke in his pentad called “Purpose” or “Motive,” not cause. 88 They serve a dramaturgical need to move thought (which for Macbeth, as we have seen, is also feeling or desire) into action, much like the ghost in Hamlet moves Hamlet to pursue the truth of what it claims. Cause (i.e., desire, ambition) and Action, however, are co-present in Macbeth when we meet him (they antedate the Witches). Even though Macbeth stops thinking to himself when speaking to others (asides excepted), the action of the play is the realization (i.e. crossing) of what he has already thought and therefore imagined. Imagination and reality are coterminous as “living consciousness” in soliloquy. The soliloquy as an exceptional space and “state,” in this sense, becomes a social reality. The distinction between thought (private) and action (social) collapses in Macbeth’s soliloquies as the two are fused in a single thinking (i.e., prophetic) moment. Unlike the planning and plotting of Richard’s or Iago’s soliloquies, for example, which use “I will” constructions to draw the future into their thoughts, Macbeth’s conditionals do the work: If’t be so, For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind; For them, the gracious Duncan have I murdered. (3.1.63-65) 87 In Shakespeare the Thinker, A. D. Nuttall argues that “the effect of the prophecy of the Weird Sisters is simply to translate thought into action. They are the trigger. A gun is fired that might have remained safely in the cupboard” (284). Nuttall also compares the Witches’ affect on Macbeth to that of a hypnotist, suggesting that “What the Weird Sisters do to Macbeth is oddly like what a practiced hypnotist can do to a subject, using post-hypnotic suggestion. The post-hypnotic ‘trigger’ can be trivial in itself. But its power is astonishing” (289). 88 See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 121 “If” once again allows Macbeth to imagine a reality for his present situation. It also functions as Macbeth’s favorite grammatical term for crossing. “If” allows his mind to dwell on the far side of the “bank” and look back at the actions of what he has done, thus giving his actions (i.e., thoughts) meaning, but more importantly a counterfactual reality qua reality. The soliloquies are thus a form of what George Puttenham, Philip Sidney, and other Renaissance theorists called poiesis, or making (“to form”). 89 Macbeth’s crisis, in other words, is not one of knowing in the epistemological sense, but of creation; that is, how to move from a feeling to the manifestation and realization of that feeling as a historical reality (in the case of the artist it would be how to turn an emotion into a material work of art, whether visual, linguistic, or musical). As the play proceeds, however, Macbeth ultimately succeeds in realizing his desire. Macbeth’s last and most famous soliloquy demonstrates that his exceptionalism is not simply one of transgression or tyranny, but imaginative fulfillment. Macbeth’s ruin is not a failure to achieve, but of getting what he has asked for, which is the exception becoming the rule. Once Macbeth “catch[es] the crown,” he begins, like sand grasped in the hand, losing it. She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. (5.5.17-27) 89 For a historical account of poiesis see Stathis Gourgouris, “Poiesis,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene et al (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 71-72. 122 Lady Macbeth’s death effectively ends Macbeth’s exceptionalism. Shortly after the soliloquy, Macbeth himself dies, speaking no more to himself about the past, present, or future “time,” for “Life” “signif[ies] nothing.” Macbeth is king, but kingship means “death,” specifically for the one he cannot name. In avoiding Lady Macbeth by displacing her, Macbeth signals the death of his imagination. There are no “If’s” here, no deeds to be “done” or “daggers” to be sheathed, but instead an emphatic ars poetica on nihilism. It is skepticism, in other words, at its highest pitch. Where privacy previously afforded Macbeth room to develop and instantiate his desires, this soliloquy kills them, denying his imagination any chance of imagining alternatives. The soliloquy is thus Macbeth’s last crossing, his final projection of thinking, which he attempts to slow down through repetition. “Tomorrow[’s]” “creep[ing]” succession constitutes an unwillingness to relinquish not only time, the moment, but also life, which is all the more significant because Macbeth lacks an heir. But as he proceeds, Macbeth realizes the emptiness of what lies beyond. Without succession or someone to live beyond him, purpose loses meaning and imagination. Macbeth’s imaginative reach has gone out, just like a candle. Shakespeare’s greatest character of visual imagination relinquishes his privacy and in doing so relinquishes his “hold” as an exception. The exception has proven the rule that “enough” is “enough” (5.8.34). IV: Exceptional Thinking and the Soliloquy Shakespeare is the great artist of change. His characters, as Hegel once remarked, are “free artists of themselves,” meaning they are given not only voice and reason, but also the space to realize their potential to be otherwise. That dramatic space, which previous dramatists treated as rhetorical and highly ornamental, a vestige of classical oratory and medieval moral instruction, constitutes the capacious and protean convention of the soliloquy. Shakespeare did not invent 123 what we today call interiority, but he did represent its complexity, its nuances, and most importantly its depth in such a way as to make it seem as if he did. Shakespeare achieved this revolution in representational thinking by turning the soliloquy into a “state of exception,” a locus of privacy that “suspends the order of the social.” The soliloquy, in this sense, is oppositional in nature, a dramatic convention functioning outside the “logic” of the play. Because of its “outsider” status, the soliloquy necessarily reveals itself—and arguably the social world of the play as well—to be in a “state” of flux, uncertainty, and most importantly becoming. It functions, in other words, to disrupt and ultimately suspend the order of the play through its shifts, pauses, and “leaps.” When Richard introduces himself as a “villain,” for example, we do not need to wait until Clarence’s death for proof; Richard has already introduced a register of “truth” into the social fabric of the play. Through a speech act, Richard supplements the play, giving birth to a state of exception that will alter subsequent action. The same occurs in Macbeth’s “swelling act” aside. Although Macbeth likely entertained thoughts of becoming king before the play begins, the actual thinking on it and the imaginative “crossing” discussed above do not occur until after his meeting with the Witches. Before the Witches, Macbeth’s exceptionalism was primarily martial, an arête worthy of Achilles. But after the Witches, his character (or more accurately his “mind,” since asides occur in the presence of others) removes itself from others, including his wife, and develops a private space of reflectivity. In this sense, the exceptional space of the soliloquy not only alters and changes Macbeth, but also the imaginative structure of the play. After Macbeth’s first soliloquy, the play ostensibly becomes the manifestation of its content; i.e., a nightmare. Unlike the lyric, which it otherwise resembles, the soliloquy demonstrates what at first might seem a paradoxical truth: its privacy is fundamentally political. Even in a play concerned 124 with such an apolitical emotion as love, the majority of Romeo and Juliet’s soliloquies, specifically Juliet’s, are in response to action and ideology that are dominant in the social order of the play. Her privacy is given form because it opposes her social existence. Juliet’s complaint, what I call her exceptionalism, like Richard and Macbeth’s, originates as a cognitive “split” caused by an external stimulus. As suggested above, soliloquies do not occur in a void, but are situated (i.e., political and social) responses. They are not the origin of character, but character’s development into something else. This dialectic between private and social not only transforms the speaker, but the social as well. By the end of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, nothing is in order. Instead, a terror dominates that was realized and given form in the exception that is the soliloquy. 125 Chapter 3: The Shakespearean Aside and The Grammar of Thinking in The Winter’s Tale Although it is by Shakespeare as a whole that we are affected, yet this whole can only be approached by the study of individual elements—by a scene, a passage, a certain manner of representation or a recurring element in drama. —Wolfgang Clemen 1 The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch the real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. -William James 2 That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law—this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly. -Bruno Latour 3 I. Introduction: Soliloquy vs. Aside Asides abound in Shakespeare’s plays. 4 They appear in early plays like Titus Andronicus as conspiratorial nods ad spectatores. Aaron’s revelation, for example, that “villainy / Does fat me with the very thought of it” (3.1.203-4), continues a tradition of self-conscious address that goes 1 Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. by Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987), 1. 2 William James, Writings: 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 448-449. 3 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5. 4 According to Alan C. Dessen, the use of “aside” as a noun is rare before the eighteenth century (the OED supports this), but it does appear as part of an “implicit verb phrase ([speak] aside]).” The point, Dessen argues, “is not that asides (in our sense) did not occur in performances of Shakespeare’s plays or those of his contemporaries (some of whom did use the term in a fashion readily recognized today). The phenomenon (or something closely akin to it) did exist, but Shakespeare apparently did not use the term as part of his working vocabulary [ . . . ] The norm in the early printed texts is silence, no signal whatsoever, even for what seem obvious aside situation.” See Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51-52. In another work, Dessen, along with Leslie Thomason, suggests that Shakespeare would often use the locution “to himself” to designate an aside. See A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), x. 126 back to the late-Medieval morality plays and Renaissance interludes. In such plays, a Vice-like character would frequently turn from the action of the play and reveal their thoughts to the audience. 5 Shakespeare’s most memorable villains including Richard III, Edmund, and Iago all develop and exploit this use of the aside. 6 The aside also appears in Shakespeare’s comedies as jest, bombast, and general comment. Following in the Roman comic tradition of “eavesdropping” asides, Jacques, in As You like It, remarks to himself after overhearing Touchstone, “O knowledge ill-habited, worse than Jove in a thatch’d house” (3.3.10-11). Jacques’s quip reveals not only a darkly humorous allusion to Baucis and Philemon’s “poore” entertainment of Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but also reveals a truth about Touchstone’s social position as a clown. In this scene, Jacques’s several asides function like a chorus, telling the audience what they already know. Asides like Aaron’s and Jacques’s are a dramatic convention that Shakespeare inherited from both the vernacular tradition mentioned above (i.e., English miracle, mystery, and morality plays) and the classical tradition, which included plays ranging from Seneca’s tragedies to the comedies of Terence and Plautus. 7 Both of these traditions used the aside in various ways, but in 5 See Francis Hugh Mares, “The Origin of the Figure Called ‘the Vice’ in Tudor Drama,” Huntington Library Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1958). Mares argues, for example, that it is the Vice’s “job to keep the audience amused in the halls of the action while other characters are off stage changing for another part [. . .] He is on intimate terms with his audience and cracks jokes with individual members of it. He acts as a presenter and chorus, introducing other characters to the audience and commentating on them aside” (13-14). The most comprehensive treatment of the influence of the vice-figure on Shakespeare remains Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). 6 On the differences between the Vice-figure and the Machiavel, see Katherine Eisaman Maus’s Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 35. Maus describes the Machiavel in contradistinction to the vice as not only “radical and politically motivated,” but also as a “sinister hypocrite” (35-36). 7 For a discussion of the influence of Seneca and Terence on Shakespeare’s plays, see John B. Altman, The Tudor Play of the Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) and Joseph A. Smith, “Roman Soliloquy” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy. The aside is both a convention and a device. I use both terms to discuss the aside, but convention tends to be the preferred descriptive. In Shakespeare’s Soliloquies (trans. by Charity Scott Stokes [London: Methuen, 1987]), for example, Wolfgang Clemen highlights the interactive nature of convention, and in doing so, suggests that convention gives permission as well as acknowledgement: “[convention] means an agreement between and author and h[e]r public, an understanding that certain modes of presentation, intended to achieve certain effects, will be 127 both traditions the aside almost always functioned as a device that the audience understood to be an expression of private thought, whether self- or audience-addressed. A character, in other words, would speak an aside, often by turning to the audience itself, and the audience knew that the words spoken were not addressed to another character onstage. While the aside also functions as a means for two characters to speak privately without being heard by others onstage, this type of aside occurs less frequently in drama. The aside, like the soliloquy, was understood to be a monologic rather than a dialogic convention. 8 The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays to include the aside as a stage direction was not the First Folio, which contained very few stage directions, but Nicholas Rowe’s six-volume edition of Shakespeare plays published in 1709. 9 Drawing on his extensive and successful career as a playwright, Rowe inserted stage directions at critical points in the plays, establishing for several generations how Shakespeare’s scenes might be organized and performed. 10 Rowe’s cataloguing of the aside, in particular, was one of his more conspicuous textual interventions. While soliloquies remained unidentified in Rowe’s edition because a character entering or leaving a scene alone provided the logical occasion for private thoughts, Rowe’s choice to accepted” (7). Although convention implies tradition and/or precedence, I find the term device more congenial (and therefore germane) to analyzing the function or use of the aside by Shakespeare. As often with Shakespeare, he turns a convention into a device when he exploits its inherent potential. 8 While this is a generalization, exceptions do occur. In my discussion of Leontes’ aside (1.2.109-ff.) below, for example, I demonstrate how a monologic aside turns into a dialogic aside and back again. For a taxonomy of the aside and its various uses, see James Hirsh Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 2003), 22. See also S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (London: P. S. King and Staples, 1944), 88-90; and John Halliday Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 137-140. Pfister, for example, distinguishes between three asides: monologic, ad spectatores, and dialogic. 9 For background on Nicholas Rowe and his edition of Shakespeare, see Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies: Commentators From Rowe (1709) to Boswell-Malone (1821) (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1986). 10 According to James Hirsh, “the traditional divisions of Shakespeare’s plays [into acts and scenes] are those established by W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright in the 1863 Cambridge edition.” See The Structure of Shakespeare’s Scenes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 11. 128 identify the aside in the margin, just as a scholiast might identify a key point in a medieval manuscript with a manicule, highlighted the dramatic importance of the aside. One reason for Rowe’s decision to call attention to the aside is that the aside is a much more difficult convention to identify in its printed form than in performance. Onstage, asides can be identified by an actor’s behavior. Physical gestures or facial expressions often signal whether an actor is speaking to another character or to themselves. But in printed form, the aside can get lost in the speech surrounding them. Many of Shakespeare’s characters, including Iago, Macbeth, Leontes and a host of others, for example, speak asides in the middle of speeches, which can make them hard to separate from the lines surrounding them. (Not all asides are as clear as Hamlet’s “A Little more than kin, and a little less than kind,” which exists as a single line and introduces Hamlet to the play [1.2.65].) 11 By identifying their locations in Shakespeare’s plays for the first time, Rowe, in other words, not only standardized what was and what was not an aside, he also called attention to their difference from soliloquy. In this sense, Rowe wrested the aside from Shakespeare’s plays, claiming, at least editorially, its importance to the understanding and enjoyment of the play. Yet as common as the aside is in Shakespeare’s plays and as important as it is to character development, plot, dramatic action, and the general dianoia (thought) of the play, the aside has for the most part been ignored in critical discussions of Shakespeare’s art. 12 The aside 11 I call attention to Hamlet’s famous first line because it has a somewhat contested history. The modern Arden editors (Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor), for example, do not identify it as an aside even though nearly the entire editorial history of the play identifies it as an aside. Thompson and Taylor do, however, mention this in their note, which suggests that they their editorial procedure plays lightly with stage direction, leaving it up to reader/actors to decide for themselves. 12 Unlike the soliloquy, the aside has not been extensively studied in relation to subjectivity, interiority, or selfhood. For example, Maus’s study, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, only mentions “aside” once (54). Interest in the aside, though scant, is usually found in studies of Shakespeare’s stagecraft, dramaturgy, and relationship to dramatic tradition (specifically studies before 1960). 129 is commonly given brief mention and if discussed at all, it receives no more than a page or two. 13 When it does receive mention, it almost always occurs in studies of the soliloquy. 14 The soliloquy is taken, and in many cases correctly, to be the richer and more dramatically powerful convention. It contains some of Shakespeare’s greatest art and provides memorable scenes that often stand synecdochally for the entire play. Juliet’s soliloquy on her balcony, for example, not only reveals her love for Romeo through a play on name and naming, but also her physical distance from him (together in love, but apart in body), something that is emphasized in more dramatic detail at the end of the play when Romeo mistakenly assumes Juliet is dead and drinks the poison. Soliloquies such as Juliet’s are common in Shakespeare’s plays and function as intense moments of subjectivity and personal development. Not only does Juliet’s soliloquy, for example, “scope out an alternative subjectivity,” it also revises what Catherine Bates calls the “phallic order.” As thought experiment, Juliet’s balcony soliloquy undoes normative speech, establishing an alternative ethical system. 15 It is in this sense of stepping outside the normative discourse of the play as well as action of the play that the soliloquy becomes a linguistic symbol of its speaker; a distillation, so to speak, of their ethos and therefore a locus to identify their character. Like Richard III and Macbeth’s use of the soliloquy discussed in the previous Chapter, Juliet’s use of the soliloquy makes her an exception to the order of the play. Although her 13 One of the few exceptions to this is Alan C. Dessen’s work on Shakespeare’s vocabulary, which I discuss below. 14 The soliloquy has a rich industry of its own within Shakespeare Studies. I therefore only mention influential studies. Additional studies will appear in notes below. See Morris LeRoy Arnold, The Soliloquies of Shakespeare: A Study in Technic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911); Lloyd A. Skiffington, The History of the English Soliloquy: Aeschylus to Shakespeare (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985); Wolfgang Clemens, The Soliloquies of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1987); James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies; and Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama, edited by A. D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 15 Catherine Bates, “Shakespeare and the Female Voice in Soliloquy” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy, 66. 130 parrhesiastic voice is not one of tyrannical exceptionalism, it is nevertheless one of erotic exceptionalism. 16 The aside, on the other hand, is a tricky device and functions differently than the soliloquy. Despite the similarities between the soliloquy and the aside, and the fact that some scholars classify the soliloquy as a species of the aside, there are fundamental differences between the two conventions. 17 Where the soliloquy often functions as the unfolding of premeditated or at least deliberate thought, the aside tends to be more spontaneous, contextual, and gestic. We get a sense in an aside of actual thought and emotion as it develops rather than the staged thinking of soliloquy. Most important, the aside always functions as a form of social thinking. Unlike the soliloquy, which is “disassociated from the action” of the play, the aside occurs in the middle of the action, with other characters onstage. 18 Romeo, for example, speaks an aside in the balcony scene mentioned above: “Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?” 19 In such a scene, which happens to have the fewest characters permissible for an aside, the aside allows private thought to circulate in a social space without that thought being revealed. By guarding his speech from Juliet, Romeo maintains his privacy while also maintaining his proximity to her. The aside is neither “a-side” (to the side) nor “a-part” from the action of the 16 For an illuminating study of Juliet as a parrhesiastic speaker, see Heather James’ “Shakespeare’s Juliet: The Ovidian Girlhood of the Boy Actor,” in Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 17 I discuss several of the scholars below but see in particular James Hirsh’s Shakespeare and the History of the Soliloquy. 18 J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 73. There are of course exceptions to this rule. Soliloquies can occur in the middle of the action, but only if all the characters onstage leave or if it is an eavesdropping scene, where other characters intentionally remain (or enter) the stage without the speaker’s knowledge. I discuss Malvolio’s “inset” soliloquy as an example below. I do not count “feigned” soliloquies under the category of “speaking to oneself.” 19 Although few modern editors cite this in the margins as an aside, it nevertheless functions as an aside. Rowe identifies it as an aside in his edition of the play. 131 play, but in-side it, allowing private and public thought to coexist. It is a social form of private thinking. Another potent and arguably more critical use of the aside as a social form of private thinking occurs in Macbeth. As discussed in the last chapter, Macbeth’s first thoughts to himself occur through several early asides. In a scene that includes not only Banquo but also Angus and Ross (1.3), Macbeth finds himself thinking and feeling his way into the implications of what the Witches have prophesized: Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme—I thank you gentleman.— This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? (1.3.129-135) Like many of Shakespeare’s middle to late soliloquies and asides, Macbeth peppers his with questions and conditionals. Macbeth begins, in other words, to open the prophetic space that collapses time in the play, making the past, present, and future a single moment in time. But in the aside (as opposed to his soliloquies), Macbeth takes the collapse of time one step further. He thinks across social space as well. The aside, in other words, allows Macbeth to disclose private thoughts to himself while in conversation with others. Dramatically speaking, the aside compresses what would take several steps (perhaps scenes) to develop if treated as discrete events. 20 In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet’s second soliloquy occurs immediately after his encounter with the Ghost (1.5.92ff.). The dramatic space of the play moves from social to private. There is a clear division and separation not only of persons but cognitive activity as well. 20 The aside no doubt contributes significantly to the economical power of Macbeth. As it is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, much of its brevity derives from its compression of time in the aside and soliloquy. 132 Thinking becomes monologic in the soliloquy. But in Macbeth’s early asides he draws the private into the social while allowing the social to continue as if the private were not looking on, eavesdropping, so to speak. Macbeth’s “I thank you gentleman,” which addresses Angus, Ross, and Banquo and is textually identified through dashes (and in performance through a nod or glance to the characters) as distinct from the rest of the speech, demonstrates just how the aside allows the cognitive movement between social spaces. Because of the aside, Macbeth can begin his march to murder and tyranny all while openly holding court with others. Because the aside takes place in the presence of others, it typically takes three forms: (1) a private exchange between characters not heard by others onstage; (2) a direct address to the audience; and (3) a self-addressed speech. 21 The first type of aside can and often occurs in an eavesdropping scene, such as in Twelfth Night when Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian spy on Malvolio reading a letter aloud to himself that he thinks is from Olivia. The three eavesdroppers talk and laugh amongst themselves but are not heard by Malvolio. This use of the aside occurs frequently in ancient comedy and was very influential on the development of the aside in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. 22 As mentioned above, one of the most famous examples of the second type of aside is Hamlet’s first words, “A little more than kin, and a little less than kind” (1.2.65). As the scene’s earlier stage directions indicate, Hamlet speaks the aside in the presence of Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude, Polonius, and several unnamed “Lords and Attendants.” Although the characters do not hear him, the aside conveys an ironic truth to the audience that illuminates Hamlet’s uncertainty about Claudius. An example of the final type of aside, which will be the focus of this chapter, is Leontes’ early outburst in The Winter’s Tale, which begins 21 A fourth form of the aside known as “interior monologue” does not develop until the late-seventeenth century. See Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of the Soliloquy, 22. 22 See David Bain’s study, Actors and Audience: A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), for a discussion of the “eavesdropping” aside in ancient comedy: 91-94. 133 “Too hot, too hot / To mingle friendship.” While this type of aside is sometimes identified as ad spectatores, it nevertheless functions as self-addressed. In this sense, it is the most private of all the “public” asides, generating an interior range that the others lack. 23 Like Macbeth’s “Two truths are told,” Leontes’ self-addressed aside opens the widest possible private space in an otherwise social dominated space, thus giving it much greater cognitive leeway to affect the action of the play. Despite these clear distinctions, it is surprising to find that recent commentary often conflates soliloquy and aside. 24 James Hirsh’s historical analysis of the Shakespearean and Renaissance soliloquy, for example, dismisses the difference, suggesting that to distinguish between the soliloquy and aside would be as “wrong-headed as trying to define ‘daughter’ and ‘professor’ so that they would be mutually exclusive. Just as some daughters are also professors and vice versa, some soliloquies are also asides and vice versa” 25 One of the main reasons that Hirsh conflates the two conventions is the use by many of Shakespeare’s characters of “guarded speech.” Hirsh suggests that a soliloquy could be “guarded” in an aside, meaning that the speaker could knowingly hide a soliloquy from others onstage. Hirsh uses this and other examples in his 23 Warren Smith has written an article on this type of aside, but Smith focuses on a limited use of it. According to Smith, “all of these asides appear to be aimed at, rather than addressed to, another character on stage—and the words are evidently not intended for his [or her] ears or any other character’s. The audience hears them, to be sure, but such asides are apparently not addressed to the house either.” Smith cites as an example Menas’ aside to Pompey (“For this, / I’ll never follow thy pall’d fortunes no more”) in Antony and Cleopatra, which if it were heard by Pompey who is still onstage when Menas speaks it, would certainly have meant his life. While this is indeed a self- addressed aside, it is “aimed” at another character. The use of the second person, whether singular or plural (i.e., “thy”), almost always identifies this use of the third type of aside. See Warren Smith, “The Third Type of Aside in Shakespeare,” Modern Language Notes 64, no. 8 (1949). In my identification of the self-addressed aside, I follow Hirsh’s definition in Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (22). 24 See Kate Aughterson, “‘Too hot, too hot’: The Rhetorical Poetics of Soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Late Plays” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama, and Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2006). In his study, The Shakespearean Inside: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Marcus Nordlund finds a way around the problem of definition and distinction, choosing to coin the neologism “inside” to provide what he calls “a convenient shorthand and umbrella term” for soliloquy and aside” (5). Nordlund’s data-driven study is extremely helpful, moreover, for an understanding of the direction (i.e., self-addressed/audience-addressed) of soliloquies and asides. 25 James Hirsh, “What Were Shakespeare’s Soliloquies in Plays by Shakespeare and Other Late Renaissance Dramatisist? An Empirical Approach” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English, 208. 134 study to argue that the soliloquy, aside, and inner monologue, the last of which did not become a dramatic convention until late in the seventeenth century, are the same. There is no reason to distinguish between the terms. For Hirsh, such distinctions only cause confusion. “Guarded speech,” however, is exactly how an aside functions. The aside affords private speech within the proximity of others. What Hirsh and others seem to deny is the importance of terminological distinctions, specifically distinctions that identify different dramatic functions. 26 To say that a soliloquy also occurs in the presence of others but under the guise of an aside is to strip the soliloquy of its function, which is a speech spoken to oneself when one doesn’t think others are around. If others are around, and one chooses to speak to oneself or to another character and “guard” it, then it is an aside. Asides, in this sense, are situationally different than soliloquies. They only occur in the presence of others (if they do not, they are not asides but soliloquies). The misuse of terminology has led to the undervaluing of the aside and more importantly to an inadequate understanding of what Shakespeare does with the aside. 27 Even though Alan C. Dessen makes the important and relevant observation that “readers today think (or think they know) what an aside is [even though] the actual use of the term by Elizabethan playwrights and playhouse annotators sometimes does not conform to such expectations,” a 26 While the lack of identification in the early quartos suggests that Shakespeare did not use (or even know) the terms “soliloquy” and “aside” (though he likely knew solus from his grammar school Latin texts), this does not mean that he did not understand the conventions and therefore the distinctions between the two. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s knowledge of dramatical terminology see Neville Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) and Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, 48. 27 A similar confusion exists between metaphor and simile that illuminates the danger of terminological laxity (metaphor functioning in this analogy as aside and simile as soliloquy). All similes are metaphors, yes; they transfer meaning from one object to another. But similes are comparative rather than substitutive, which means they function differently. Additionally, similes are often longer, more descriptive, and in the epic variety, richer than metaphor. (metaphor, like the aside, is traditionally short and fast). Epic similes and soliloquies in this sense resemble one another. They are the richest and often the most complex aspect of their respective poetry (in contrast to aside and metaphor, they are long and slow, so to speak). They also allow extraneous material into their poetry that would otherwise be excluded. Distinguishing between the two figures is thus critical as they identify differences in structure and meaning. 135 working definition of the aside is nevertheless possible, specifically a definition that sets it apart from the soliloquy. More than anything, an aside’s dramatic “use” tells us everything we need to know about it. Definitions, in other words, come from use and the effects of that use on the play. I belabor this terminological point not only to distinguish between soliloquy and aside, but also to illuminate the social dimension of the aside. Unlike soliloquies such as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” which changes position in the Q2 and the Folio, the aside is not an isotropic form, “walled off from the action and marked by reflexivity and psychological interiority.” 28 Rather, the aside functions, as Raphael Falco argues, anisotropically and is “linked along different axes to dramatic values beyond the confines of speech or inward contemplation.” 29 Where soliloquies could sometimes function as “moveable feasts,” or long, artful speeches inserted at various points in the plot, the aside depends on the “present action and [] constraints of plot events, past and to come.” These constraints “provide the multiple axes of the anisotropic linguistic field.” 30 The aside, in other words, is an entangled convention dependent on the relationship between circumstances generated in the social world of the plot and the effect those circumstances have on the mind of individual characters. Macbeth’s self-addressed aside, “Two truths are told,” for example, could only occur after his encounter with the Witches and at the moment when he hears the news of his double promotion from Angus and Ross. It is a situated or embedded moment of cognitive action that is environmentally as well as dramatically conditioned. The aside, in this sense, illuminates more clearly than the soliloquy the marked dependence of the social on the private and vice versa. Each conditions the other, which 28 Raphael Falco, “Tudor Transformations,” in Shakespeare and the Soliloquy, 29. 29 Falco, “Tudor Transformations,” 35. 30 Falco, “Tudor Transformations,” 35. 136 demonstrates, as Rowe seemed to understand in calling them out, the interplay of social and private relations. As I discuss in detail below, the aside functions as a thinking moment that addresses more than its utterance suggests. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bruno Latour, each of whom has contributed in various ways to an understanding of thinking as socially conditioned, I argue that the aside draws the speaker into a network of meaning shared by multiple characters onstage. Playing off Nancy’s notion of “the singular plural,” I suggest that the aside is an “us” and a “we” convention. 31 Rather than a singular “I,” the utterance of an individual to himself (or imaginary other), the aside generates meaning that is plural, moving back and forth between the private and social. Latour captures this dynamic and complex relationship between the social and private generated by the aside in his description of “network,” arguing that “to shuttle back and forth, we rely on the notion of translation, or network. More supple than the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity, the idea of network is the Ariadne’s thread of these interwoven stories.” 32 Latour’s use of the “shuttle” metaphor not only highlights the sharing function of the aside, but also the pluralistic network of a play. Like the shuttle, the aside moves thinking across two registers of thought that are not distinct in such a convention, but woven together, sharing aspects of each other, and informing the activity within each. It also gives voice, like Philomela’s shuttle, to those who might be marginalized or silenced by the social world. The aside, in this sense, is a voiced-shuttle of parrhesiastic thinking. 33 It ensures 31 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Bryrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 32 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3. 33 See Ovid’ Metamorphoses (Book VI) for the myth of Philomela and Tereus. See also Geoffrey Hartman’s essay, “The Voice of the Shuttle: Language From the Point of View of Literature,” in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 137 that a play is not exclusively social nor exclusively private, but the “uncanny, unthinkable, [and] unseemly” entanglement of both. 34 Once the socially conditioned and pluralistic aspect of the aside is acknowledged, it opens the convention to rich possibilities, possibilities that Shakespeare exploits most often and experimentally in his late plays. 35 In these plays, Shakespeare develops a kind of social thinking that departs significantly from the private thinking of the tragedies and earlier plays. The situation, action, and movement of the late plays, for example, generates thinking rather than the individual characters, who, like Hamlet, Cleopatra, or Macbeth, impose their private world on the action of the plays. Process (poiesis) rather than art (mimesis) becomes the representational mode of the late plays. The aside is one of the means through which Shakespeare generates this kind of effect in language. It moves with the action of the play rather than pulling away from it. As integrated thinking, the aside affords fluidity, the seamless motion of process. Asides are thus instances when characters reveal their social embeddedness, their existence as parts of a whole. While individuality, subjectivity, and interiority are still integral to Shakespeare’s late plays, the characters develop these qualities only in relation to others, and mainly through asides. No Shakespeare character illustrates the social embeddedness of the aside better than Leontes, as he is a character who seldom leaves the company of others and who is forced to speak in their company privately. 36 Leontes early asides, in particular, demonstrate not only the 34 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 5. 35 The late (or last) plays are conventionally understood to be Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. Several important studies identify a unique style in these plays. See Russ McDonald’s Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Catherine Alexander’s The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays (Cambridge, 2009). 36 Leontes speaks four identifiable asides (all appear in Act I, Scene II: 109, 137, 179, 214) and three soliloquies (1.2.85, 2.2.18, 3.2.150). Two interpretive approaches stand out for their influence on our understanding of Leontes’ aside and subsequent dialogue with Mamillius: one psychological, the other stylistic. The psychological approach has been the dominant approach over the last two hundred years. For the psychological analysis see Coleridge, 138 dramatic necessity of the aside, but its poetic ability to generate a pluralistic thinking. In the following chapter, I analyze two aspects of Leontes’ asides that demonstrate their social embeddedness, or “singular plurality.” The first aspect is what I call their contrapuntal nature. Contrapuntal thinking identifies an alternate or additional register of thinking that enters a space where there had previously been a singular register of thinking. In the case of Shakespeare plays, but specifically The Winter’s Tale, the singular register of thinking is the social space of the stage that characters inhabit (location, of course, may vary). This social space, which is simply the dialogic space of conversation and action, is usually organized around characters who enter and exit in a manner that allows for public discourse. Characters in such a space traditionally speak to one another in an open and direct manner. Even if a character lies in their speech (e.g., Richard III to Lady Anne [cf. 1.2.33-227]), the lying is nevertheless open. Dialogue, in this sense, attempts to create a visible public space “organized by nothing other than discourse itself.” 37 The aside, however, completely changes the dynamic of dramatic space. By introducing privacy into a social space and allowing the social register of thinking to continue, the aside generates contrapuntal thinking. The aside does not negate, disrupt, or even unsettle the social— though it does at times have that effect—but instead adds dramatic complexity as well as artistic verisimilitude to the scene. It introduces, in other words, a third dimension into the two- dimensional space of social discourse. Where the soliloquy cuts the social off so that the private dominates the stage, the aside simultaneously holds the two spaces of thinking in balance, which has the effect of surprise or what Shakespeare calls “wonder.” Tillyard, Goddard, Trienens, H. Smith, and Barton. For stylistic see Sutherland, Thorne, McDonald, Palfrey, and Augherston. 37 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 67. 139 Wonder is thus the second aspect of the aside that I explore. It is a direct result of contrapuntal thinking, providing the effect that gives the late plays their trademark “romantic” feel. Despite what criticism has argued for over a century, Shakespeare’s late plays explore a register of realism that is more closely related to the heterogeneity of everyday life than is often assumed. Even in a romance, A. D. Nuttall argues, “the realist writer is obliged to consult the real world with special care. Things that would not be there, would not occur, are excluded. The Winter’s Tale, indeed, is not an ordinary realist text, it is ‘marvelous realist.’” 38 The reason that many overlook the realism produced by such conventions as the aside is that it is disguised under the veil of wonder, which tends to obscure understanding rather than clarify it. But the dramatic experience of wonder simply identifies a moment when expectations are thwarted and/or the balance of social and private is revealed to be coterminous. Many have interpreted, for example, Iachimo’s speech to himself (2.2.11-51) as he moves through and catalogues Innogen’s room in Cymbeline as wonderous, a marvel of the exotic and forbidden. 39 But the entire scene relies for this effect on the aside, which allows Iachimo to speak privately as he moves through a public space. One of the important issues that this scene (and any other eavesdropping scene for that matter, including Romeo’s skulking outside Juliet’s window mentioned above) draws attention to when it comes to the aside’s movement is the notion of consent. Consent becomes part of the tension that the aside generates as it moves in and out of social spaces. But such tension is what makes the aside such an effective dramatic convention. By turning what is traditionally treated as 38 A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press), 357. 39 This is a perfect example of a speech that is frequently misidentified as a soliloquy but is in fact an aside (in fact, few editors provide a stage direction for the scene). The speech must occur as an aside since it occurs onstage with another character. Giacomo, in other words, knows he is not alone, so calling his speech a soliloquy (even though Innogen is sleeping) would be incorrect, since a soliloquy can only occur when a character thinks they are alone onstage. 140 two discrete spaces (i.e., the social and private) into a porous zone of cognitive interplay (i.e., tension, from the Latin, tendere, “to stretch”), the aside expands the boundaries of action and thought. While Innogen does not and would not give consent, the scene nevertheless illuminates the ability of the aside to sidestep the awareness of other characters. The potential for eavesdropping, in other words, rests in the character using the aside just as the potential for interiority, development, and imagination rests with the soliloquizer. Innogen’s bedroom scene creates wonder, in other words, because the aside allows two discrete activities to occur simultaneously. In this respect, wonder is not antithetical to realism, but part of it, just as shock, surprise, and enchantment permeate everyday existence. Because of its inclusive (“us,” “we”) rather than exclusive (“I”) nature, the aside builds communities of thought, inviting characters to participate in a social network of shared experiences, some of which prove outlandish, irrational, and unprovoked. But these experiences and interactions afforded by the aside illuminate the complexity of modern life. Social and private, domestic and public are codependent. Neither are discrete spaces but instead, as Stephen Greenblatt once observed, contact zones, loci of cultural activity. 40 And the dramatic aside not only points to this very activity, but also embodies it through cognitive movement from one sphere to the other. The dramatic aside, which has for centuries been an understudied literary convention, revels more about the nature of thinking than has often been assumed. 40 Stephen Greenblatt et al, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 251. 141 II: “Too hot, too hot” The primary stumbling block to understanding and appreciating the Shakespearean aside has been its function. Due, perhaps, to its ubiquity and close relationship to the soliloquy, the aside’s function in Shakespeare’s plays has been taken for granted. 41 But because of this critical laxity, the aside has become amorphous, a convention without clear outline or meaning. Not only has the aside become soliloquy in many recent discussions, it has also become a parenthetical “trespasser,” a disrupter of the play’s language. In a recent study of Shakespeare’s late style, for example, Kate Augherston argues that the asides (she calls all asides “soliloquies”) “disrupt or exceed the semantic, metrical or grammatical order, usually for intellectual or dramatic emphasis.” 42 “Rather than being subject to the plot,” Augherston continues, asides “sit[] slightly outside [it].” 43 As her data-driven article clearly demonstrates, Augherston sees the asides and soliloquies as textual evidence of Shakespeare’s tendency in the late plays to introduce “interruption” as a key feature or mode of the plays. 44 Unlike the asides and soliloquies of Shakespeare’s tragic middle period, which are presumably harmonious or at least consistent with the language spoken around them, the hypermetrical and disjointed soliloquies and asides of the late plays generate dramatic antagonisms within the verse. Drawing on George Puttenham’s notion of the “auricular figure,” Augherston suggests that “performatively and linguistically” the soliloquies and asides of the late plays function as insertours (trespassers). 45 41 Warren Smith counts more than 800 asides in Shakespeare’s plays. See “The Third Type of Aside in Shakespeare,” Modern Language Notes vol. 64, no. 8 (1949), 510. 42 Augherston, “Too hot, too hot,” 120. Augherston, like Hirsh, identifies nearly all the asides of more than three lines as soliloquies in the late plays. This misidentification not only distorts the data used to support her argument, but also places a private “auricular figure” in the service of a public one (soliloquies by definition cannot be addressed to anyone even if they are overheard by others). The aside, however, assures that what is identified as disruption is part of the naturalness of the social space. 43 Augherston, “Too hot, too hot,” 119. 44 Augherston, “Too hot, too hot,” 120. 45 Augherston, “Too hot, too hot,,” 120. 142 While it is true that Shakespeare displays a fondness for semantic wordplay as well as grammatical experimentation in the late plays, such disruption, however, could just as easily fall under the category of realism, a way of generating dramatic verisimilitude. Leontes’ famous outburst 109 lines into the play, for example, does not disrupt the play so much as draw two registers of thinking together: Leontes: [aside] Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, But not for joy, not joy. This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent—’t may, I grant— But to the paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practiced smiles As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere The mort o’the’ deer—O, that is entertainment My bosom likes it not, nor my brows.—Mamillius, Art thou my boy? (1.2.109-121) What I identify above as an aside is a conspicuous moment of contrapuntal thinking or the emergence in the play’s social space of another register of thinking. Rather than standing “a- side” from the action of the play, Leontes’ outburst coheres the social space by harmonizing disparate parts. The aside functions centripetally, in other words, drawing characters towards the center of action rather than outward and away as in the soliloquy’s centrifugal motion, which separates social from private. Like the nodes of a network, Leontes’ aside links characters, stretching, bending, and conjoining the scene so that it remains whole despite its moving parts. Counterpoint, in this sense, assures that the social space introduced at the beginning of the scene is not broken or disrupted in favor of the private. 143 As suggested earlier, counterpoint is a musical term that has been used in various ways by literary scholars to suggest multiple voices in a work of art. Similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic, counterpoint identifies “various themes [that] play off one another, with only provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, and organized interplay that derives from the themes.” 46 Thus, a contrapuntal convention like the above aside allows two or more registers of thinking to inhabit a single scene without separating the scene into public and private moments. It is also, as Peter Kivy argues, “a deepening of style.” 47 By successfully juggling “a complex function of two variables,” the style is enriched, so to speak, with additional voices, melodies, and sounds. Unlike pure dialogue, or dialogue that moves back and forth between characters, the aside provides dialogue and monologue, social and private thought. These registers or “themes,” as Edward Said identifies them, play off one another without resulting in confusion or cacophony. Different notes, voices, and opinions, not to mention philosophical points of view, are placed in concert with one another. As the above aside suggests, such contrapuntal interplay between social and private is essential to the action of Act I, Scene II. In this scene, not only does Leontes speak privately to himself, but he also moves back and forth between characters through the aside. When, for example, Leontes exits the privacy of the aside quoted above to address his son, “Mamillius, art thou my boy?,” Mamillius responds with, “Ay, my good lord,” indicating that Leontes has drawn Mamillius into a conversation that is importantly cloaked in the privacy of the original aside. But what is extraordinary, specifically as it demonstrates the contrapuntal nature of the aside and 46 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 59-60. 47 Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 206-7. 144 how Shakespeare deploys it for different registers of thinking within a social space, is how Leontes returns to his own private thoughts several lines into the conversation with Mamillius, paranoically observing, “Still virginalling / Upon his palm?” This sudden and private remark about Hermione’s behavior towards Polixenes illuminates the elasticity of the aside—its ability to shuttle between Leontes’ developing thoughts and the social world influencing and being influenced by those thoughts. Mamillius, in this sense, stands in dialectical relationship to Leontes. His presence feeds the already heated imagination of Leontes, forcing Leontes’s to look in two directions at once: inward for cause and outward for justification. Such cognitive dissonance or inability to reconcile his jealousy with his son’s facial features causes what seems, at least to many observers, Polixenes and Hermione included, schizophrenic behavior. This behavior becomes all the more apparent when Leontes once again engages Mamillius under the guise of the original aside, asking, “How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my boy.” At this point in the aside Leontes has pivoted in several directions that illuminate the cognitive mobility of the aside: 1.) he has spoken privately to himself about his bourgeoning jealousy; 2.) turned publicly to draw Mamillius into his interrogation of the justification of that jealousy; 3.) returned to his own mental suspicions with a remark about Hermione playing with Polixenes; 4.) and once again reengaged Mamillius about his parentage. But before he waits for a response from Mamillius, Leontes dovetails back into his private thoughts, beginning one of the most difficult passages in all of Shakespeare: “Affection!—thy intention stabs the centre Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams—how can it be? With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fewllow’st nothing. Then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains 145 And hard’ning of my brows. (1.2. 137-144) Like the initial “Too hot, too hot” outburst, this passage reminds one of a soliloquy. It ticks all the boxes, so to speak, of dramatic interiority. The melodramatic “Affection,” the ensuing question, “how can it be?,” and the syllogistic logic are the hallmark of what Matthew Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” If the passage had appeared on a cleared stage, it would have made a powerful though tangled apostrophe to “Affection.” But this is not a soliloquy just as the earlier outburst is not one either. The above passage occurs as the final lines of the extended aside (forty lines) that housed Leontes’ private thoughts as well as brief exchange with his son. While this passage has been discussed at length, most notably by Hallett Smith, for insight into the object of Leontes’ “Affection,” it has been neglected formally as the dynamic interplay between private and social thinking. 48 Perhaps because the passage appears nearly thirty lines after the beginning of the aside, it has caused many readers to forget that it is not spoken to Mamillius, but to Leontes himself, functioning as the continuation of Leontes’ private struggle with jealousy. What Shakespeare represents in this scene conforms to the complexity of how emotions, attachments, as well as delusions are formed. They appear out of nowhere and often in public encounters with others rather than the private seclusion of one’s own solitude. 48 Hallett Smith, “Leontes’ Affectio,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 14, no. 2 (1963), 163-164. Smith argues that syntactically “affection” refers to Leontes’ “perturbation of mind” and not, as others have argued, to “thy dam,” or Hermione. Affection, in this sense, identifies Leontes’ awareness that his state of mind has caused him to “communicat’st with Dreames” and to fix on “what’s unreal” (i.e., fantasies). Smith’s reading of “affection” as Cicero’s “affectio,” meaning “a sudden mental seizure,” rather than “lust” or “natural propensity,” has clarified a rather muddled passage, providing a firm foundation for subsequent critics. See also David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in ‘The Winter’s Tale,’” The Modern Language Review vol. 82, no. 3 (1987); and Anne Barton, “Leontes and the Spider: Language and Speaker in Shakespeare’s Last Plays” in Shakespeare: The Last Plays, ed. Kiernan Ryan (London: Longman, 1999), 25. Barton’s essay was first collected in Essays, Mostly Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), but was first published 1980. 146 For Leontes, the aside not only illustrates how he has been caught by his jealousy, but also how its hold on him extends to those around him. The aside, in other words, affords a moment of address and response that is not limited to the speaker, but to those who circulate like planets around them. The contrapuntal becomes, in this sense, polyvocal, addressing more than just its speaker. As Jean-Luc Nancy argues, “thinking addresses itself to the world, to history, to people, to things: to ‘us.’ Another ambition springs from this or, better yet, another more restricted, attempt: to allow thinking’s address to be perceived, an address that comes to us from everywhere simultaneously, multiplied, repeated, insistent, and variable, gesturing only towards ‘us’ and toward our curious ‘being-with-one-another,’ [ertre-les-uns-avec-les-autres], towards our addressing one-another.” 49 The critical phrase here, which sums up the notion of what Nancy and others mean by “singular plural,” is “being-with-one-another.” Echoing Levinas’s notion of the “self” addressing the “other,” Nancy suggests that thinking is not a singular activity directed towards the individual who does the thinking, but instead a plural activity that embraces the “us” and “we” of the social. In gesturing towards others in thinking, we truly think. “To mean,” which is another way of suggesting “to think,” constitutes sharing that meaning with others. 50 The purpose, if one can call it that, of thinking is not thought or the end of thinking (i.e., the “idea” or concept one achieves in the process of thinking), but acknowledgement and communication (Nancy plays on the word community and compassion to achieve this sense). This singular plurality, or what Latour calls, “shuttling,” from one to many and back again, demonstrates how 49 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xvi. 50 Arendt, for example, drawing on Kant’s distinction between Vernunf (Reason) and Verstand (Intellect), equates thinking with “meaning” and cognition with “knowing.” Reason or thinking does not seek understanding or what might be termed “intellectual closure,” but instead continually reaches for new questions, or, in the sense above, new people, others, which is meaning-rich process. See D. N. Rodowick, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 6. 147 the aside dramatically functions. It weaves, in the form of Leontes’ jealousy, a network of social and private. In this sense, the aside’s contrapuntal nature speaks not only to Leontes, but to those who do not hear him yet circulate in and out of his private space. Rather than trespassing and disturbing the social decorum of the public court, the aside draws Leontes’ jealousy and the social together, which the lines following the “Affection” speech indicate. In these lines, which occur just after Leontes reengages Hermione and Polixenes, both of whom have noticed his “unsettled” behavior, Leontes attempts to dispel any worries by bidding them farewell. But in the very moment of issuing his social pleasantry, Leontes’ draws the private back into the social fold, moving again between his private thoughts and his private interlocutor, Mamillius: To your own bents dispose you; you’ll be found Be you beneath the sky. (Aside) I am angling now, though you perceive not how I give line. Go to, go to! How she holds up the neb, the bill to him! And arms her with the boldness of a wife To her allowing husband. Exeunt Polixenes and Hermione Gone already! Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one! (To Mamillius) Go play, boy, play—thy mother plays, and I, Play too, but so disgraced a part. (1.2.178-186) As in the earlier aside, several levels of thinking occur simultaneously in this aside. First, before the aside even begins, Leontes tries to pass himself off as cool and collected, punning on “you’ll be found.” Then, before they leave, Leontes, who seems unable to keep his emotions out of his social discourse, retreats into another aside, but rather than addressing his “infect[ed]” “brain” he employs a fishing metaphor that has a villainous ring to it: “I am angling now.” Where the earlier aside was all emotion and little discursivity, this aside begins a logical progression of intent and 148 justification: “you perceive not how I give line.” But instead of providing what the audience and reader expect, i.e., the development of a plan or the explanation of what he is thinking in the manner of a soliloquy, Leontes moves back into the social, which he has importantly never left, only shifted registers of thinking, in order to draw Mamillius back into his privacy, “Go play, boy, play.” After his brief nod to Mamillius, which again indicates that the social and private overlap and are therefore coterminous in Leontes’ aside, Leontes proceeds for over a dozen lines to describe to himself the nature of cuckoldry in one of the longest asides in Shakespeare. Leontes’ natural though complex movement between social and private can be illuminated further if we compare it with Autolycus’s use of the aside later in the play. 51 Autolycus’s asides in Act IV conform to a traditional use of the aside, much in the comic manner mentioned earlier. In such uses, the aside functions briefly to entertain, remark, and inform rather than explore, interrogate, and dynamically develop interiority as well as character relationships. Although they allow Autolycus cognitive movement across social spheres in the manner of Leontes, they lack the critical inflection of Leontes’ contrapuntal thinking. For example, when Autolycus exclaims in a brief aside, Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance. Let me pocket up my pedlar’s excrement. (4.4.715-717) he acts as a confidant with the audience, not with himself. While self-addressed, it is an aside of information, a means of telling the audience what he plans to do and why. Such asides, as mentioned above, are the very heart of Roman Comedy, specifically New Comedy, and allow characters like Autolycus, who are often in a precarious position of their own doing, to maintain 51 See 4.3.32, 4.4.631, 4.4.642, 4.4.646, 4.4.719, 4.4.715. 149 a relationship with the audience as well as further the plot. It is not surprising, therefore, that we find this use of the aside in the second half of The Winter’s Tale, which is undoubtably its “comic” half. But like Leontes’s use of the aside and all other uses of the aside, Autolycus’ use maintains the inside-outside relationship of the aside, the “I” and “we” of singular plurality. Through a private aside, he can say things which if overheard, would no doubt lead to his “hanging.” In fact, as a “cutpurse” and a “tinker” (4.3.19), Autolycus’s asides reinforce his liminal status as a dissembler, someone who like Richard III continually plays a different role, sometimes by literally putting on new clothes. Autolycus, in other words, already moves in and out of social spaces which great deftness, but the aside becomes a tool to facilitate its success. He can declare his intention to be “honest,” like Iago, all while angling to do otherwise. Although nearly all Autolycus’s asides highlight the convention’s function as a social form of private thinking, they importantly lack the emotional range and exploratory power of Leontes’s asides. Autolycus’s asides, while functionally liminal, are not sui generis. They lack, in other words, the contrapuntal action of Leontes’ asides or the prophetic pull of Macbeth’s. Their register of thinking, in this sense, is limited in range and voice, but not function. Autolycus still simultaneously acts in two spheres—jesting, jabbing, correcting, and confiding—but he does so seamlessly; that is, without difficulty. His role as a comic figure requires a relative ease of movement. The private and social are entangled (“nested”) in Autolycus like a natural ecology. But in such a habitat, where information passes easily from private to social and back again, there is no room for the interrogative or conditional mood. Autolycus’s asides pose no resistance that leads to the conceptual and linguistic difficulty inherent in the earlier “tragic” plot. There is, in other words, no wonder in Autolycus’s asides. They make nothing happen. Their purpose is 150 conventional, and while they highlight the poly-spheral activity of the aside, they nevertheless do so without much inducement to wonder. As noted earlier, the sudden emotion Leontes displays in his asides and his subsequent exchange with others has historically contributed to much of the play’s difficulty. Just as the stage direction, ‘Exit, pursued by bear” (3.3.57), points to the fact that the Globe and other theaters were also home to bear-baiting entertainment, Leontes’ outburst also suggests another response other than difficulty; namely, wonder, which, along with marriage, is one of the primary characteristics of romance. The aside produces wonder mainly through its juxtaposition of social and private; the cohabitation onstage, in other words, of two registers of thinking. Wonder also often precedes knowledge and understanding. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, When we wonder, we do not yet know if we love or hate the object at which we are marveling; we do not know if we should embrace it or flee from it [ . . . ] Wonder depends upon a suspension or failure of categories and it is a kind of paralysis, a stilling of the normal associative restlessness of the mind. In wonder, ‘the mind comes to a stand, because the particular concept in question has no connection with other concepts. The object that arouses wonder is so new that for a moment at least it is alone, unsystematized, an utterly detached object of rapt attention. 52 Greenblatt’s definition of wonder eschews the aggressive terms often applied to it by some scholars such as “disruption,” “confusion,” and “destabilizing.” These descriptors have their place in certain accounts of wonder, namely the violence done to civilizations and races in the name of colonialism, but as an Aristotelian concept of curiosity and self-generating knowledge, wonder is not intrinsically a destructive force. 53 In Greenblatt’s description, for example, a 52 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 20. 53 For a provocative and critical account of wonder and its “colonial” relationship, see Alex Nava’s Wonder and Exile in the New World (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010), 13. For an Aristotelian account of wonder, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York, 1998) and R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr’s Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2006). 151 different emphasis on wonder is placed. Instead of destruction, wonder produces a “stilling” effect, which we see in Leontes’ response to his jealousy and those around him. This sense of the aside as holding Leontes and the two worlds of thinking or action together aligns with the Pre-Socratic notion of rhythm, which “moves beyond metrical and even temporal constraints.” 54 In his study of rhythm, for example, Vincent Barletta describes rhythm not as a Platonic harmony that keeps the universe in order, but instead as the very form that threatens to “undo the very logic of verbal utterance.” Rhythm, in this sense, is formative, intimate, and precognitive. It “persistently points to feelings and forces it cannot name.” 55 Leontes’ early interjection, “I have tremor cordis on me,” for example, captures and illustrates this very notion of rhythm as precognitive. In trying to give expression to his feelings, Leontes gives form to his rhythm. The various asides’ elliptical compression (“’t may, I grant” “’twere, / the mort o’th’ deer”) and repetitions (“not for joy, not joy”) suggest that Leontes has been “caught, like the flu,” by something. 56 Rather than pattern or refrain, the rhythm that holds Leontes is form, or the keeping of oneself in check. The heat figuratively called into being by “Too hot, too hot,” as well as the beat released on the tongue (and in the mind), serves to give form and shape to Leontes’ rhythm. Rhythm, or jealousy as it is identified in the context of the play, is thus wonder inducing. But the wonder generated by Leontes’ jealous aside is not the miraculous visual restoration of Hermione nor the physical return of Perdita, but a linguistic wonder. Wonder’s form and shape does not appear through a visual spectacle, but through an aural one. Hermione is one of the first to link Leontes’ language to wonder, responding to him in Act III with, “you speak a language 54 Vincent Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), xiii. 55 Barletta, Rhythm, xvii. 56 Barton, “Leontes and the Spider,” 35. 152 that I understand not.” Although Hermione identifies a confusion, a mystification at Leontes’s language and behavior, she nevertheless acknowledges it. She registers, in other words, Leontes’ feelings and emotions as they find form and rhythm in language, even as that language reaches its auditors fragmented and incoherent. Grammatically as well as conceptually, Leontes struggles to address his audience, which causes him to nearly deteriorate into complete skepticism with Camillo: Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia’s nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (1.2.290-294) The rhythm of the earlier asides continues in these public lines. The repetition, the circling back on itself as logic, and the blissful annihilation of meaning illustrate that Leontes’ is still rapt, caught by and in the wonder of his jealousy. But as the jealousy becomes manifest publicly, as it extends beyond the couched privacy of the aside, it begins to shape and influence the social, much like the exceptional soliloquies of Richard III and Macbeth discussed in Chapter II. The danger of Leontes’ wonder, its marvel of compressed privacy turned outward, is that it can easily (and does) morph into tyranny. III: Representational Thinking and Its Contents By looking at Leontes’ aside as a locus of thinking rather than a psychological or philosophical puzzle, a necessary shift occurs in the understanding of The Winter’s Tale and the late plays in general. No longer do we focus on what occurs in the speeches (asking, “what is Shakespeare saying in theses speeches?”; or “what is the meaning of this speech?”), but instead on the broader implications of how speeches function (asking, “what is Shakespeare doing with the aside?”). 153 We move, in other words, from a hermeneutic analysis to a formal one, and in doing so address the larger question of representational thinking. Almost all studies of thinking in Shakespeare, whether classic or contemporary, focus on the soliloquies (The aside, in this sense, falls by the wayside.) The soliloquy, as mentioned above, no doubt possesses some of Shakespeare’s greatest achievements in mimetic art. But the aside allows Shakespeare greater freedom in his representation of change by exposing the limitations of the soliloquy. We do not think, as the soliloquy suggests but attempts to undermine, outside of others or independent of their influence. Thinking is not a discrete activity capable of turning on and off when it likes, but a socially and environmentally determined process. Additionally, thinking is not always linear, logical, and denotative, but often disjunctive, irrational, and connotative. When we look, as we did in the last chapter, at the change from Richard III’s soliloquies to Macbeth’s, we begin to see Shakespeare developing a more natural approach to representational thinking that comes to fruition in his late use of the aside. Counterpoint is thus critical to understanding how Shakespeare represents thinking. It not only allows Shakespeare to collapse much of the play’s plot, dialogue, and thought into a single moment, but also allows him to capture the complexity of thinking; that is, the two-way street of thinking, which is both social and private. While thinking can and often occurs as private cogitation, this type of thinking is just one aspect of representational thinking. Shakespeare arguably perfected this type of thinking the middle tragedies; so much so, that the soliloquy often becomes the focal point of discussion. Conversely, the aside addresses others in its use of privacy. Since all asides occur socially, they derive their impetus and raison d’etre from their environment. Because they are a product of their environment, they speak with and to that environment. 154 A formal analysis of the aside also dispels it disruptive nature. As described above, much recent criticism has sought to explain or at least understand the difficulty of the late plays through such effects as ellipsis, parataxis, and ayndenton. But the difficulty, if one can call it that, is not stylistic but formal, the compression of various registers of thinking represented as process rather than discrete activities. The syntax, for example, of Leontes’ aside is not difficult in itself, but what makes it difficult is that it appears so quickly and in the context of social discourse. We would not have this response had Leontes been alone mumbling to himself onstage. Hamlet’s eloquent soliloquies pose greater conceptual difficulty for us than Leontes’ brief and passionate asides. But asides develop the complexity of thinking as it responds to itself and others, which is something that the soliloquy does only obliquely; that is, set apart. Such dialectical interplay between self and society makes the aside much more “real” than the soliloquy as a mode of representational thinking. 155 Section III: Prooimion: On Poetic Thinking To begin to think about poetic thinking means to begin to think about freedom. Freedom is the necessary condition of the artist. Without freedom, art would be mere repetition or worse, propaganda. For art to arise independent of constraint or necessity, it must be free realize itself. One could argue that freedom is the inalienable right of the artist. 1 Art and freedom go hand in hand. This does not mean that art produced under constraint, direction, or patronage is not genuine art, but instead an example of the artist’s ability to develop, generate, and find freedom under any condition. Art, like life, finds a way. When applying freedom to Milton and his work one is likely to think of freedom’s early modern cognate and the word that meant a great deal to Milton in both his poetry and prose: liberty (Latin, libertas). Liberty is Milton’s primary political, moral, and artistic “keyword.” Nearly everything he composed addressed man’s liberty to choose, liberty to believe, and liberty to disagree. But more important, liberty is a kind of power or what Milton calls in Areopagitica an “influence”: “it is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; that is that which Liberty hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; that is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged, and lifted our apprehensions, degrees above themselves.” As a means to “enlarge[]” and “lift[]” one’s “apprehension,” liberty if a form of what Satan calls in Paradise Lost “puissance.” Liberty is a power that endows all aspects of life, whether government, marriage, or the imagination with room for development, choice, and most important difference. 1 Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 156 Like the Greek word dynamis, there is in any work of artistic freedom the power of change; the ability, in other words, to move from one state (or choice) to another. Freedom and liberty ensure that art maintains its ability to be otherwise. Freedom and liberty are therefore central to understanding that the creation of a work of art consists in the ability to make choices. While genres, forms, and styles might influence an artist’s creative process, they are not to be understood as imperatives but rather as opportunities within which to express freedom. (They are forms of possibility, not demarcations or delimitations of it). Freedom ensures that the creative process remains a process of choice and not custom, convention, or habit. In the note on “The Verse” appended to the fourth printing (1668) of Paradise Lost, for example, Milton defends his use of blank verse, arguing that “th[e] neglect [….] of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recoverd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.” Milton condemns rhyme not because it is ill suited to an epic poem or because he finds rhyme to be difficult (“troublesom” seems to mean nuisance in this instance, especially since Milton proves he is more than a competent in rhymist in other genres), but because a true “Heroic Poem” must possess “liberty,” or the freedom of its own movement. Like Spenser, Milton’s verse is kinetic, but unlike Spenser, Milton employs blank verse to generate the force of his poetry. Blank verse, in this sense, “gives [Milton] license to wander and allows [his] freethinking tendencies to come to the fore.” By eliminating the “bondage” of rhyme, blank verse opens the poem up to Milton’s full powers of creation. As Gordon Teskey has argued, “Milton is the last major poet in the European literary tradition for whom the act of creation is centered in God and the first in whom 157 the act of creation begins to find its center in the human.” 2 The elevation of the artist to a demiurge-like creator allows Milton to give complete an utter freedom to himself. He makes the poem, despite the invocations to the Muses, specifically Holy light, about himself and the artist as creator. In this sense, Milton’s poetry is not just in competition with tradition but also with divine inspiration. In taking ownership of his poem and its manner of execution, Milton creates a distinctly free and thus personal poetry (No epic poem has as many nods to its author as Paradise Lost). And one of the most conspicuous characteristics of this “personal poetry” is the fact that it thinks; that is, makes its own choices along the way. The most influential and powerful example of this thinking occurs in Milton’s use of allusion, which has been one of the most contested and misunderstood aspects of Milton’s art. Where previous chapters discuss literary thinking as argument (Chapter I) and its representation (Chapters II and III), this chapter examines the processual or “cognitive processes” involved in making poetry. It addresses, in other words, the creation of the artwork in the process of composing it as opposed to its preliminary preparation in the mind of the poet. 2 Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 29. 158 Chapter 4: “The heat of Milton’s mind”: Allusion as a Mode of Thinking in Paradise Lost Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled. —Henry David Thoreau, “A Walk to Wachusett” I: Introduction: Cognitive Allusion Over 40 years ago Harold Bloom observed that allusiveness constitutes the distinctive characteristic of Milton’s style, but as John Leonard has pointed out in his survey of criticism on Paradise Lost, “there is no critical consensus as to what a [Miltonic] allusion is.” 1 In the critical disagreements over Milton’s use of allusion, which span the three and a half centuries since the 1 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 125; John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost: 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 266. Both A Glossary of Literary Terms (Boston, 2012) and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) define allusion (from the Latin, alludere, meaning “to joke” or “to play”) as “a reference to a person, place, or event, or to another literary text” (8). David Mikics’s A New Handbook of Literary Terms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) slightly qualifies allusion’s meaning, adding, “when a literary work engages in allusion, it refers to—plays with, makes use of—earlier pieces of literature” (11). Leonard, however, illustrates the problems of defining allusion along such narrow lines (esp. in relation to Milton) by tracing the genealogy of allusion, noting that until the middle of the eighteenth century, allusion commonly meant “imitation” as well as “pun,” “metaphor,” and “covert, implied, or indirect reference” (Faithful Labourers, 267). In an earlier essay, “Milton’s Jarring Allusions” (see Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum, ed. Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004]), Leonard also notes the confusion surrounding allusion and topos, arguing that “allusion and topos are distinguishable, […] but they are not always distinct. An allusion need not forfeit its status as an allusion just because it is also a topos” (74). The most comprehensive historical discussion of allusion and its terminological equivalents remains Joseph Pucci’s The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Although I depart significantly in my analysis from Pucci’s “full-knowing reader,” I do agree with his observation that “allusion has never invited consistency of conception or critical consensus” (4). 159 publication of his epic poem, Leonard notes how much interpretive responsibility has been foisted on the reader: “Allusion . . . by its very nature leaves readers free to draw their own conclusions. Milton’s allusions are often sites of conflict between critics because they offer themselves as interpretive keys, and yet the doors they unlock can lead to widely divergent and unexpected places.” 2 If we keep with Leonard’s metaphor, a large part of the disagreement among prominent critics and editors derives from the notion that allusion is seen as a “key,” a rhetorical mechanism that the reader must correctly identify and turn to unlock textual meaning. But in such a procedure, where allusion can serve a wide range of hermeneutical functions, critics with different interests will open different doors, causing divergent, sometimes even conflicting interpretations. The lack of critical consensus as to how to interpret Milton’s allusions derives in part from the identification of allusion as a cause/effect or author/reader dichotomy. Commonly identified with reference, echo, and borrowing among other synonyms, allusion functions as a device that the author deploys (cause) so that the reader can recognize and interpret it (effect). 3 Such a function has become the standard definition of allusion found in handbooks ranging from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratio to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. It’s the basis of how we read, edit, and teach textual allusion. In this general understanding, if a reader doesn’t recognize what is being referenced, it doesn’t function as allusion. An example of the critical disagreement over allusion appears in several glosses to Milton’s sole use of the term in his poetry. When describing Satan’s former name in Paradise 2 Leonard, Faithful Labourers, 267. 3 For a counterpoint to Pucci, see Gregory Machacek’s introduction to Milton and Homer: “Written to Aftertimes” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2011), 1–12. Machecek also distinguishes, as many scholars do, between allusion and intertextuality, but Machacek argues that intertextuality and allusion are “complementary concepts that, taken together, provide a more comprehensive view of literary relations than either of them alone” (6). 160 Lost, Milton notes: “Of Lucifer, so by allusion called, / Of that bright star to Satan paragoned.” 4 In his 1695 annotated edition of the poem, Patrick Hume glosses allusion as “likeness” and qualifies it with the Latin alludere, “to resemble.” 5 Alastair Fowler, who is usually thorough in his glosses, simply states “‘(1) literary reference’ and ‘(2) illusion (OED 1)’” without expanding on either definition. 6 Both Scott Elledge and Leonard gloss “allusion” as “metaphor,” a capacious explanation that attempts to cover the complexity of seventeenth-century allusion. 7 Last, while not defining what Milton might mean by allusion, Gordon Campbell identifies it as a reference to another line in the poem: “Satan—so call him now; his former name / Is heard no more in heaven” (5.658). 8 This earlier line of course anticipates Milton’s reference to Satan as Lucifer, but in pointing back to the earlier line, which also contains a gloss, Campbell notes an additional echo: “Know then that, after Lucifer from Heaven / (So call him, brighter once amidst the host / Of angels than that star the stars among)” (7.131–33). Campbell traces, in other words, multiple passages that refer to each other, with the last alluding to the former two. Such cross- references demonstrate the complexity of Milton’s allusions, but also their use as pun, refrain, and prolepsis within the text itself. 9 Despite their various glosses on Milton’s use of “allusion,” nearly all of the editors seem to suggest that allusion relies on a negotiation between author and reader. As Gregory Machacek 4 Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998), 10.425–26. All subsequent citations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically. Many of Milton’s early editors do not gloss “allusion” (e.g., Richardson, Newton, Todd) but instead gloss “paragoned” in the following line. Some modern editors follow this practice. See Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1991), Roy Flannagan (New York, 1993), Gordon Teskey (New York, 2005), and William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York, 2008). 5 Patrick Hume, Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1695). Hume also cites the similarity of lines 5.708-09 to the passage. 6 Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 563. 7 Scott Elledge, ed., Paradise Lost, (New York: Norton, 1975), 224; John Leonard, ed., Paradise Lost, (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 424. 8 Gordon Campbell, ed., John Milton: The Complete English Poems (New York: Everyman Library, 1992), 378. 9 Merritt Y. Hughes provides similar cross-referencing in his edition (New York: Hackett Publishing, 2003) but glosses it at line 426. 161 argues, “most [critics] assume that the hermeneutic dimension of allusion is the only one worth studying.” Anything else would be “inherently uninteresting.” 10 One of the few critics to develop a theory of allusion that sidesteps interpretation is Christopher Ricks, who sees allusion as a form of inheritance, that is, as a “way of dealing with the predicaments and responsibilities of ‘the poet as heir.’” 11 For Ricks, an author uses allusion to maintain a lineal relationship to the past and to generate new avenues of creativity. Allusion is both curatorial and productive; a good poet spends his or her inheritance with “energy and gratitude.” 12 While Ricks’s theory provides a powerful way to understand how poets such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson work (all of whom came after Milton), it limits the ways in which Milton uses allusion, which on the whole seems more experimental, improvisational, and eclectic. In this essay, I wish to show how Milton, rather than simply using allusion to ornament, illustrate, or spend his inheritance, also employs allusion as a means to think in his poetry. I am thus shifting the understanding of allusion from its function as a “club handshake, a sign of initiation into a secret (or not so secret) society” dependent on certain readerly moves, to a creative and meaning-making component of the poem itself. 13 Allusion in the latter sense ceases to articulate levels of initiation and instead directly contributes to the creation of the text. 10 Machacek, Milton and Homer, 36. Leonard outlines the recent debate over Milton’s allusion in “Milton’s Jarring Allusions.” Leonard sees Davis P. Harding and Alastair Fowler taking a traditional and influential position that identifies Milton’s allusions as working in “harmony with each other and with their larger poetic context” (71). Leonard identifies, however, two challenges to this position, one coming from two classicists, Charles Martindale and William Porter, who suggest that critics and specifically editors “overestimate the number of literary allusions in Paradise Lost” (72). The other challenge comes from critics such as John Rumrich, Julia Walker, and Leonard himself who “complain” that critics “admit too few allusion,” what Leonard argues is “a kind of unconscious censorship” (75). 11 Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9. 12 Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, 9, 12. 13 Marjorie Garber, The Muses on Their Lunch Hour (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 48. 162 One of the benefits of moving from a reader-focused to an author-focused theory of allusion is definitional. An author-focused theory does not need to disentangle the Gordian knot that is the complex relationship between allusion, reference, source, topoi, imitation, contaminatio, echo, pun, quotation, and appropriation. Whether, for example, Milton’s reference to “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” in the proem to book 1 (16) is an imitation, echo, appropriation of, or pun on Ariosto’s “cosa non detta in prosa mai, né in rima” matters little to the poetry itself. 14 In identifying allusion as a mode of thinking through and against texts, the terminological differences, at least for the author, do not really matter—they all collapse into the creation of poetry. In this transformational sense, allusion seems to function as a rhetorical figure, a “cog in the general mechanism of textual composition.” 15 This type of allusion occurs very early in Paradise Lost. Already in the proem to book 1, Milton is thinking through several sources for the Heavenly Muse: Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God[,] I thence Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount. (1.6–15) Milton deploys numerous allusions, topoi, and what might be called “translations” of earlier texts to locate a source for his inspiration. 16 As biblical locations for the Heavenly Muse, both “Oreb” 14 Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 59; and Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Emilio Bigi (Milano, 2012), 1.2. See Daniel Shore’s reevaluation of Milton’s indebtedness to Ariosto in “Things Unattempted . . . Yet One More,” Milton Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2009). 15 Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. Charles Segal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 28. 16 I follow Davis P. Harding in The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of “Paradise Lost” (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962) and identify allusion widely as “a protean device [that] may appear now 163 and “Sinai” work, as does the third reference, “Sion hill,” but by including numerous options, each of which suggests that origin or inspiration does not necessarily begin at a single point or from a single fount, Milton demonstrates the mental need to occupy various locations. And the various locations that Milton suggests for the Heavenly Muse are set apart and are more numerous than the single location of the pagan muses, the “Aonian mount” (i.e., Helicon). 17 In this final reference of the opening Muse-cluster, Milton alludes to Hesiod (Theogony 1–2) and Virgil (Georgics 3.10–11) and in doing so suggests that the biblical mountains of inspiration and the Aonian Mount be contemplated alongside one another as competing claims to poetic inspiration. 18 But the importance of these and other allusions for the present argument is that the identification of their meaning and significance by the reader is not necessarily as critical for the poem as is Milton working through them. As William Empson aptly stated, “It is tactful, when making an obscure reference, to arrange that the verse shall be intelligible even when the reference is not understood.” 19 Empson’s remark suggests that while allusion is often effective, pleasurable, and even useful if identified and correctly understood by the reader, it is not necessary to the enjoyment or the understanding of the poem. Most readers, especially with the aid of annotated editions of Milton’s poetry, will in fact identify the allusions discussed above, but the allusions are not dependent for “intelligibility” on their signification. in one disguise, now in another, ranging all the way from borrowed incident or direct quotation to the subtlest variations on old words, cadences, or rhythms” (1). 17 See William M. Porter’s discussion of Milton’s relationship to Hesiod and “the Aonian mount” in Reading the Classics and “Paradise Lost” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 44–53. 18 In Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Stephen Hinds provides a rich analysis of the classical “Importing of the Muse,” focusing specifically on Virgil’s relationship to Ennius. See 52–63. 19 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 167. 164 The issue is not where Milton finds the muses, but what naming various locations allows him to do. As “Spirit” (17) and the subsequent invocation to “Holy Light” in book 4 suggest, “inspiration does not really depend on place at all.” 20 Milton could have listed a half-dozen other locations without altering his concern for the origin of inspiration. But in naming sources ranging from the Bible and classical poets to Renaissance mythologists, Milton mobilizes his thought. This mobilizing partly explains Milton’s tendency throughout Paradise Lost “to crowd,” as Samuel Johnson says, “the imagination” with allusive description, but it also suggests “the ardor of [poetry’s] conception in the mind as a necessary part of its truth.” 21 As a writer who distrusted ornament and “premeditated harmonies” in favor of “simple, sensuous and passionate” poetry, Milton uses allusion to express—in the words of Morris W. Croll—“his idea when it is neare[st] to the point of origin in the mind.” 22 Whereas other epic poets compress their invocations and advance quickly to the initium, the cause of their song, Milton lingers for over 20 lines locating 20 David Daiches, “The Opening of Paradise Lost,” in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge, 1960), 63. 21 Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 436; and Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Parrish and Robert O. Evans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 210. 22 John M. Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: Discourse and Certitude in Milton and His Near- Contemporaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 26; Milton, “Of Education,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yales University Press, 1953-82), 2:403; and Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 209-10. Further references to Milton’s prose, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from this edition and cited in the text as YP. Ibid., 209–10. In his note on “The Verse” of Paradise Lost, appended to the fourth issue of the first edition (1668) of the poem, Milton suggests that “rhyme” is part of what he sees as the problem with the Ciceronian style: “Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme both in longer and shorter works, as have long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of not true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another, not in the jingling sound of like endings [. . .] This neglect then of rhyme [] is to be esteemed an example set of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poetry from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” (Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost 54-55). This passage contains several important points that warrant attention. First, the identification of Italy and Spain as the countries whose poets practice a nonrhyming verse is significant. Italy and Spain were the origin of baroque art in Europe. Baroque, as Morris Croll, Marjorie Nicholson, and others have argued, produced the disjunctive, expressive, and kinetic style that no doubt influenced Paradise Lost and of which Paradise Lost is an example. Second, Milton makes blank verse in the statement political. Not only does Milton sees rhyme as a “trivial” and an “[un]necessary adjunct or true ornament of [] good verse,” he also sees it as lacking the freedom and “liberty” of blank verse (Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 54). Poetry, in other words, should not be in bondage to “custom” or “constraint” but free to discover its own music and rhythm. 165 and then calling upon his muse. Milton, in other words, extends the moment of inspiration in thought to achieve a “syntactic sparagmos,” a rending apart of the smooth, clean, and orderly invocations of all other poets. 23 Unlike Virgil, Ovid, or Ariosto, who seek to bury their precursors in their inspirational claims to originality, Milton prefers a serial mode that appears syntactically, through the use of “or,” to make no point of origin possible except himself. 24 By alluding to the loci of the muses Milton generates the very poetry for which he seeks inspiration, thus bringing to the forefront of his verse the labor of making and his own participation in that making. But more important, the development that occurs as Milton moves from “Sinai” and “Sion” to what is “in [him]” (1.22) constitutes a kind of freedom, a poetics of choice. With the aid of blank verse, which Milton understands as identical with liberty from “bondage,” he undertakes to “wander with delight” (7.330). Such wandering, which “risk[s] error for the sake of freedom,” allows Milton’s “freethinking tendencies to come to the [poem’s] fore.” 25 Allusion, in other words, identifies the most conspicuous moments of freedom for Milton, where he is able to wander among options and alternatives. While Milton’s inability to substitute another archfiend for Satan, another first man for Adam, and another location for Eden are necessary restrictions on his poem, he can freely draw from an abundance of allusions to develop, change, and reimagine biblical source-text. Much like Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “creative repetition,” Milton’s allusions function as variation on “bare repetitions.” 26 He generates difference through allusion that alters the characters (Satan), loci (Eden), and 23 Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth, 25. 24 See Hinds, Allusion and Intertext, for a discussion of Latin poets and their claims to “newness,” 52–63. Also, Maggie Kilgour provides an insightful discussion of Milton and Ovid on originality in Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xii–xiii. On “modal proliferation” and Milton’s “habit of evoking . . . various other possibilities of composition,” see Daniel Shore, “Things Unattempted . . . Yet One More,” 197. 25 Henry Weinfield, The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2–3. 26 Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 19. 166 conventions (epic simile) he has inherited. And it is just such differences that demonstrate Milton thinking in his poetry. Allusion, in this sense, constitutes the most creative and mutable moments of the poem, the “thoughts” for Milton to “feed” on (3.37). In a widely influential reading of allusion, Gian Biagio Conte outlines the trope’s active role in literary production, identifying allusion as a figure that “absorbs and transforms not just a single work but whole series of texts.” Instead of imitatio or emulation, which identifies allusion in its passive role as “competition or improvement over the original,” Conte sees allusion as a process of assimilation that “centralizes language and accepts responsibility for the new sense of the whole.” 27 But in such a theory Conte, like many other theorists of allusion, assumes too much responsibility for the reader. 28 For Conte, a text “require[s] the cooperation of a reader as a necessary condition for its realization.” Producing texts means activating codes or strategies that predict the moves of its readers. Although Conte claims that allusion identifies an active dimension of the poet’s creativity, he nevertheless relegates such activity to the assumed identification and interpretation of it by the “Model Reader.” 29 By maintaining this marriage between author and reader, such a theory impairs the power of allusion to develop as a mode of thinking. And this impairment contributes to 27 Conte, Rhetoric of Imitation, 26. 28 Pucci’s Full-Knowing Reader would be a relatively recent example of an argument that centralizes the reader’s position with regard to allusion, and Jeff Dolven also calls allusion “a point of contact, and a call for interpretation.” Dolven’s brief definition denies allusion the very capacity that poets like Milton endows it with: action, energy, and the potential to be otherwise. See Dolven, Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 176. 29 Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation, 29, 30. Conte was writing in the mid-1970s when it was becoming critical practice to assert the importance of historical conditions to an understanding of the production and consumption of texts. Nevertheless, he overemphasizes such conditions as the author’s only motivation, thus working from effect to cause and imposing on allusion the mark of reader “expectation.” According to Conte’s theory, an allusion such as the description of the rebels angels “dig[ing] out ribs of gold” (1.690) could only be an instance of Milton “produc[ing] the competence of the prefigured reader” (30, n. 13, italics in original). Conte does not allow for the unintended, provisional, even exploratory use of allusion that would identify Milton wandering through his memory to develop Mammon’s character and posit the origin of man’s greedy desire to “ransack[] the centre . . . / . . . of their mother earth” for riches (1.686-87). 167 misunderstandings regarding Milton’s use of imagery and metaphor, which have arisen in Milton criticism over the last several decades. 30 A few important studies centering on thinking in literature, however, have helped to redress the lacuna, suggesting new ways of understanding how poets such as Milton work. In a series of articles dating back to 2002, Gordon Teskey, for example, has been exploring the relationship between poetry and thinking. 31 My argument for allusion as a mode of poetic thinking builds upon Teskey’s notion that a poet can think in a poem, but it also challenges his specific reading that Milton was not such a poet. In Teskey’s understanding of “thinking moments,” he asserts that “[poetic] thinking does not try to get out of itself at its destination, disembarking, so to speak, on an answer to thought that is not itself part of the thinking, that is, of continual questioning.” In a poem such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590/96), Teskey identifies thinking that “continually chang[es] its mind and giv[es] itself ampler room in which to explore.” Spenser does not plot but thinks as he goes along, “arriving often, as it seems, by accident . . . at a deeper formulation than that with which he began.” But Milton, according to Teskey, rather than creating thought in and through Paradise Lost, represents it in the poem. Milton, in other words, worked everything out beforehand. The problem with this argument is that it assumes that Spenser’s method is the only way to think in a poem, that is, without a “definite goal.” But thinking to Spenser is not necessarily thinking to Milton, and Teskey hits upon this point when he suggests that Milton is an archaic rather than an archaeological thinker. In identifying Milton’s concern for origins (hence “archaic”), Teskey suggests that Milton leaves no room for history, which does not begin 30 See especially the essays collected in The New Milton Criticism, ed. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge, 2012). 31 Gordon Teskey, “And Therefore as a Stranger Give It Welcome: Courtesy and Thinking,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003); Teskey, “Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 22 (2007); Teskey, “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); and Teskey, “Notes on Reading The Faerie Queene,” in Spenser in the Moment, ed. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015). 168 in a poem about the fall of man until the final three books of the poem. As I argue in the following sections, however, Milton does insert historical “remains” through allusion, specifically in the similes of the poem, and these allusions find Milton attempting to think through his poetry. Where Spenser thinks without a goal, rummaging and meditating upon history, Milton actively goes outside his poem to realize it. 32 Poetic thinking in Paradise Lost does not simply mean to espouse ideas or philosophic argument, but instead “to turn over in the mind, meditate on, ponder over, [and] consider.” 33 Thinking is thus a processual activity and the purpose of such activity in Milton’s allusions is not to reach an end or conclusion but instead “to hunt for additional evidence, for new data, that will develop the suggestion.” 34 Such activity, which does not always take the form of discursive or logical argument, includes “a wider variety of mental acts than may be allowed by the philosopher.” 35 Poetic thinking often manifests itself in contingent moments of uncertainty, speculation, and conflict that can lead to unexpected lines of thought. 36 In the invocation to Urania in book 7, for example, Milton’s allusions find him not only thinking about places, names, and their relationship to his poetic flight, just as in the opening invocation, but also generating questionable moral alliances. As Stephen M. Fallon demonstrates in his analysis of the passage, the allusion to Bellerophon allows Milton to “inoculate” himself from the possible danger of “presum[ing]” too much in “draw[ing] empyreal air” (7.13, 14). But in “recognizing Bellerophon’s error” and attempting to control his own descent to earth, Milton produces 32 Teskey, “Thinking Moments,” 114, 115, 117, 118. 33 OED2a. 34 John Dewey, How We Think (Mineola: Dover Publishing, 1997). 35 Angus Fletcher, Colors of Mind: Conjecture on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989), 33. between “meditative” and “calculative” thinking. For Heidegger, the meditative stance toward thinking maintains itself as an “openness to the mystery,” which he defines through the German word Gelassenheit as “calmness,” “composure,” and in its older sense as “releasement.” See Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper Collins, 1966), 53–55. 169 “surplus meanings,” which align him through “metrically identical” verses with the language of Sin. Just when Milton feels “safe [to] sing with mortal voice” (7.24), an anxiety about his blindness and its darkness draws an echo (“In darkness, and with dangers compassed round” [7.27]) from an earlier line that has Sin speaking about her condition (“With terrors and with clamors compassed round” [2.862]). 37 Where Milton actively seeks to govern or control his poem through allusion, he actually seems to lose control of it, erring if you will. Fallon’s reading thus highlights just how allusion finds Milton going beyond his intentions and exceeding his suggestions. Allusion opens up lines of thought that both enrich and complicate the narrative. These complications, however, do not lead to ambivalence, contradiction, or open-endedness as the so-called New Milton Critics have suggested, but point instead to the generative potential that can be interwoven into a poem that thinks as it goes along. 38 II. “The Promethean Simile”: Thinking Character In the Art of Logic (1672), published between the first and second editions of Paradise Lost, Milton explains that knowledge of “the internal form of anything, a form which is often most remote from the senses, is especially difficult” (YP 8:234). 39 To know anything or the cause of anything, Milton’s Ramist logic suggests, is nearly impossible, so to compensate we resort to description, which accommodates knowledge of things (forms) and their causes. 40 Description 37 Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 226-227, 230. 38 On the notion of Milton’s open-endedness, see, for example, Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 39 The original Latin reads, “Sed forman internam cujusque rei nosse, à sensibus, ut ferè fit, remotissimam, difficile admodum est.” See The Works of John Milton, 18 vols, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-1938), 11.62; hereafter cited as CM. 40 The whole of Paradise Lost seeks to determine “what cause / Moved our grand parents in that happy state / Favoured of heaven so highly, to fall off” (1.28–30). Thus, the description of Satan, his “dark designs,” Adam and Eve, and last the temptation all serve to elucidate this cause. As Milton argues in chapter 3 of the Art of Logic, “a 170 thus functions epistemologically, “defining a thing through other arguments, that is, explaining a thing in some way through any other available things” (313; italics in original). 41 For Milton and other epic poets, defining an object through other means often involves simile, where “unequal knowledge of things is made equal by virtue of a comparison” (270). 42 One such simile that illustrates Milton thinking through comparison occurs early in book 1: [Satan] extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream. (1.195–202) In comparing Satan to Titans, Earth-born giants, and Leviathan, the descriptive adjectives “long,” “large,” “huge,” “monstrous,” and the superlative “hugest” convey an image of Satan’s “bulk.” But it is with the secondary meaning of the allusions, however, suggested by the “fables” (line 197), that Milton’s thinking seems to be caught, not to mention complicated, by its own fecundity. 43 Milton gestures in his allusions toward numerous and conflicting accounts of rebellion and deception, which suggest additional resemblances to Satan that move beyond size to character. The choices of Briareos and Typhon, for example, allow Milton to work through thing is considered really to be known when its cause is grasped” (YP 8.222); “Scirique demum creditor cujus causa teneatur” (CM 11:30). 41 “Descriptio est definitio imperfecta, ex aliis etiam argumentis rem definiens. Id est, ex quibusvis aliis rem quoquo modo explicans” (CM 11:266). 42 “Unde insignis comparatorum id usus elucet; quo fit ut inaequalis rerum notitia comparationis vi aequalis reddatur” (CM 11:152). 43 While there seems to be some truth in Christopher Grose’s (Milton’s Epic Process: “Paradise Lost” and Its Miltonic Background [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973]) claim about Milton’s deliberate or “staged” difficulty in this and similar passages, the content (i.e., allusion) as opposed to the device of the simile is nevertheless the product of thought grappling with form. The staging, in other words, whether or not deliberate, provides evidence of thinking through content within the limitations of a convention. 171 various implications of Satan’s status as revolutionary, emancipator, and traitor. These suggestions constitute what William Porter calls the “centrifugal” motion of allusion, which he defines as allusion’s reference away from the text to its literary tradition where previous authors, myths, and histories converge. 44 In a poet such as Milton, centrifugal allusion often becomes transumptive of ornamental allusion. Satan, in such revision, which requires that Milton elide many of the conflicting stories behind the Briareos allusion, arises like a Phoenix as new metaphor, “another and the same.” He is “old and new, sharing but modifying the illustrious lineaments” of the tradition from which Milton draws. 45 For many of Milton’s early commentators, including Joseph Addison, James Falconer, and Samuel Johnson, Milton’s use of variation was key to his originality. 46 In drawing on disparate sources for the content of his imagery, Milton not only creates new representations, he affectively achieves what Johnson calls his particular ability to “astonish” readers. 47 But what is most significant about the above passage is what Milton excludes from it, an exclusion that illustrates the “simile think[ing] something other than what it speaks.” 48 When Milton alludes to Titans, Earth-born monsters, and Leviathan, he is charging his poetry with 44 Porter, Reading the Classics, 17. 45 See Ricks’s discussion of this Dryden passage in relationship to his notion of “the poet as heir”; Allusion to the Poets, 42. 46 In his weekly discussion of Paradise Lost for the Spectator (January-May 1712), Joseph Addison not only discusses the sublimity of Milton’s similes, but also the way allusion enables the similes to rise “to some very great Idea, which is often very foreign to the Occasion that gave Birth to it.” While Addison primarily has the reader in mind as he develops a theory of Milton’s heterogeneity, he nevertheless identifies allusion as a critical device of Milton’s imagery. See Spectator, no. 303 in Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Shawcross (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 172-73. See also James Falconer’s An Essay Upon Milton’s Imitations of the Ancients (1741). Following Christopher Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), Leonard calls attention to the importance of Falconer as an early exegete of Milton’s allusions. Unlike Martindale and Porter, who try and separate allusion from topoi (commonplaces), Falconer suggests that allusion often invites comparisons to more than one text. This “flexible and inclusive” sense of imitation, according to Leonard, generates “multi-layered allusions (allusions to allusions),” which in turn allows poets such as Milton to “claim epic status and engage in respectful rivalry” (Faithful Labourers, 282). 47 Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, 435. 48 Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 103. 172 potential. That potential, however, is sometimes concealed from the reader in the form of rejected allusions or allusions that do not serve any purpose but for Milton’s own exploration. Additionally, those chosen allusions are part of a lexicon from which Milton has numerous options, and the movement between choices allows him access to that lexicon. Milton’s concealment of Prometheus in the Titan allusion, in other words, serves as an important instance of his charged thinking, specifically thinking that involves more than just powerful deities who “warred on Jove.” As in the Bellerophon allusion discussed above, Milton’s thinking fills Satan with “surplus meanings.” It is not just the Titans of “monstrous size” that Milton suggests, but the one Titan in particular who resembles Satan in strength, intelligence, and guile. In many ways, Satan’s association with Prometheus is perfectly appropriate given that a long tradition of Christian theological thinking had afforded “sufficient sanction” for the pairing. 49 One of the main features for this sanction is the notion of hubris, what Satan himself identifies as “pride and worse Ambition” (4.40). 50 Milton likely had in mind several specific literary treatments of Promethean hubris as he was thinking through Satan’s character. In Hesiod’s account of Prometheus in the Theogony and Works and Days, for example, Prometheus is the “shifty” and “quick-scheming” (metis) trickster who deceives Zeus with ox bones covered in fat. 51 He is also the heroic Prometheus who steals fire in a fennel stalk and gives it to man. The latter action causes Zeus to create Pandora (all-gift), the woman who “wrought baneful evils for 49 Harding, The Club of Hercules, 40. 50 See R. J. Zwi Werblowsky’s study, Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan (London: Routledge, 1952), for a detailed discussion of hubris and its relationship to Greek and Christian culture (xviii). 51 Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2018). See Neil Forsyth’s discussion of Hesiod’s relationship to Satan’s history in The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 30–35. Forsyth, however, focuses his discussion on the “ambiguities” of Typhon’s literary history, leaving little space for any discussion of Satan’s relationship to the Titans. To my knowledge, no critic has explored the significance of Prometheus to the simile. 173 mankind.” 52 Milton alludes to this action and the creation of Pandora when describing Eve’s beauty: More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods Endowed with all their gifts, and O too like In sad event, when the unwise son Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnared Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire. (4.714–19) Prometheus’s appearance in the final line of the passage (“him”) suggests that the classical myth offers an analogue to Satan (Prometheus), Adam (Epimetheus), and Eve (Pandora). The “sad event” refers to Epimetheus’s (“son / Of Japhet”) acceptance of Pandora, which like Adam’s fall, comes about in part because of Pandora’s “fair looks.” Milton’s passage as well as Hesiod’s two accounts makes Prometheus “the agent who brings about a split between gods and men.” 53 Milton identifies this split in his second Prolusion as a loss of “harmony”: “the fact that we are unable to hear this harmony seems certainly to be due to the presumption of that thief Prometheus, which brought many evils upon men, and robbed us of that happiness which we may never again enjoy” (YP 1:238–39). 54 This same agency is what Satan represents in Christian theology as well as in Paradise Lost. As an intermediary between God and man, Satan brings “knowledge of good and evill” (YP 8:254), a “gift,” however, like “authentic fire,” that disrupts the “harmony” that man once enjoyed with God. 52 Hesiod, Works and Days, 95. 53 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 198–99. 54 “Quod autem nos hanc minime audiamus Harmoniam sane in causa videtur esse furacis Promethei audacia, quae tot mala hominibus invexit, & simul hanc foelicitatem nobis abstulit quâ nec unquam frui licebit, dum sceleribus cooperti belluinis cupiditatibus obbrustescimus” (CM 12:156). Prometheus significantly appears in three of Milton’s seven Prolusions. See First Prolusion (YP 1:238–39), Third Prolusion (YP 1:244), and Seventh Prolusion (YP 1:287). 174 Despite his contribution to man’s suffering, Hesiod’s Prometheus provides Milton with the locus classicus of the noble, morally defiant, and guileful Prometheus that tradition inherited and later modified. 55 At various points in Paradise Lost, Satan resembles Hesiod’s Prometheus. Satan’s plan, for example, to seduce man is not announced by him, but adroitly placed by him in the mouth of Beelzebub. Satan knows that in accepting what Beelzebub offers rather than decreeing the plan himself, he will carry the support of the fallen angels. Additionally, Satan’s execution of the fall involves Promethean “fore-thought.” He determines that by seducing Eve rather than Adam, he will likely have more success. The second literary work Milton likely has in mind is Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, a play that depicts a defiant yet suffering Prometheus. Near the play’s opening, for example, Prometheus, laments to the sun: “Look, with what indignities / I am tormented, to endure / these trials for endless years! / . . . Alas I groan for my present suffering / and for that which is coming: where can one fix / a limit to these sorrows?” (93–100). 56 Most commentators on Satan’s soliloquy at the opening of book 4 note the Promethean echo: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell” (4.73–75). Based on testimony from Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, scholars have determined that Satan’s soliloquy was likely written earlier than the poem and intended by Milton to be the opening of a proposed play, possibly the play outlined in the Trinity Manuscript. 57 But what is also relevant to Milton’s thinking of Prometheus in the above simile is the imagery of Prometheus at the opening of Aeschylus’s play. Prometheus, like Satan, finds himself located “at 55 See Mario Praz’s discussion of “The Metamorphoses of Satan,” in The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 55–94. Praz not only notes the importance of Richard Crashaw’s translation of Giambattista Marino’s The Massacre of Innocents (Strage Degli Innocenti) to Milton’s portrait of Satan, but he specifically highlights the Promethean elements. 56 Aeschylus, Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 57 Helen Darbishire, The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable, 1965), 72. 175 the furthest bounds from earth / . . . a wilderness where no mortals live” (1–2). The play makes much of this scene, especially Hephaestus’s ambivalence and delay in locking Prometheus’s “adamantine bonds” (6), bonds that Milton describes as Satan’s “adamantine chains” (1.48). Given the similar depiction of Hell, which is described from Satan’s perspective as a “dismal situation waste and wild, / A dungeon horrible, on all sides round” (1.60–61), this evocative scene no doubt appeared to Milton as he turned to describe Satan’s figure. But a third literary work lies behind Milton’s allusion that perhaps explains why Milton chose not to name Prometheus. 58 In Spenser’s “Mutabilitie Cantos” (1609), Mutabilitie attempts to take Mount Olympus in a manner reminiscent of all those who “warred on Jove,” but in doing so, she receives Jove’s stern rebuke: Will never mortall thoughts cease to aspire, In this bold sort, to heaven claime make, And tough celestiall seates with earthly mire? I would have thought that bold Procrustes hire, Or Typhons fall, or proud Ixions paine, Or great Prometheus tasting of our ire, Would have suffiz’d the rest for restraine, And warn’d all men, by their example, to refraine. (7.6.29) 59 While Milton’s allusions convey size as well as ambition, Spenser focuses on the latter, highlighting Mutabilitie’s aspiration through the names of classical overreachers. In identifying Prometheus as a member of this rebellious camp, Spenser provides Milton with precedence for linking Titans with monsters. But where Spenser names “great” Prometheus, Milton omits him. Milton’s choice of “Titanian,” in other words, signals the self-reflexivity involved in Milton’s poetry, the charged thinking that allusion entails. It is not just a name, but also a host of 58 Merritt Y. Hughes does not link the two passages in “Milton’s Celestial Battle and the Theogonies. See Hughes, Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 213. 59 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (London: Routledge, 2007). 176 associations that must be sifted, adjusted, probed, and ultimately elided for use in Milton’s poem. As the brief discussions of Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Spenser suggest, to arrive at the relatively simple name “Titanian” for a poet like Milton means not only entanglement with tradition, but also a modification of that tradition. The naming of “Titanian” rather than Prometheus illustrates an example of Deleuzean “creative repetition.” What Deleuze defines as the author’s creative differentiation from earlier works by means of improvisation or variation is precisely the activity occurring in Milton’s thinking with Prometheus. The rhetorical figure for this variation is metalepsis or transumptio, which is what allows Milton to name Prometheus without actually naming him. George Puttenham calls metalepsis “the far-fetched,” suggesting that Milton “had rather fetch a word a great way off than use the one nearer at hand to express the matter as well and plainer.” 60 But metalepsis includes slightly different uses as well. For example, “to exchange,” “take in a new way,” “to take in another sense” as well as “participate,” “receive instead,” and “translate” all come from the term metalambanô, the origin of metalepsis. 61 In other words, rather than naming Spenser’s Prometheus, Milton leaps over the logical comparison to find one that disguises, however slightly, the close resemblances of the Promethean connection. The creative alteration leaves just enough ambiguity for there to be uncertainty as to Milton’s intention, but that is part of the process of thinking through Satan. Satan is an evolving process of Milton’s poetry, and to lock him into a finite comparison would be to limit his ability to change. 60 George Puttenham, The Art of Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 267. 61 See John Hollander’s history of metalepsis and transumption in The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 133–49. Hollander calls Milton’s type of metalepsis, specifically in the similes, “echo metaleptic.” 177 In connecting Satan with Prometheus, Milton pushes against Renaissance theories of inventio, which argue that invention lies in “the searching out of things true or things likely, the which may reasonably set forth a matter and make it appear probable.” 62 While this argument for “apt matter” sounds a lot like Milton’s argument in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), where he states that a “true poem” consists of the “choys of such persons as [the poet] ought to introduce, and what is morall and decent to each one” (YP 1:818), Milton’s poetry does not adhere to this Ciceronian ideal, but resists it. In principle, Milton might adopt a decorous stance but his poetry frequently exhibits considerable “indecorous” thinking. As N. K. Sugimura has suggested, Milton’s thinking is “enhanced and rendered more complex by the creative content of his poetry. . . . The result is that Milton’s thought processes unfold in his poetry in ways that complicate, and also differ from, their exposition in his prose writings.” 63 The Promethean allusion, as suggested above, sees Milton departing from his thinking in his prose to an expansive and exploratory thinking not based on proportion, but on what Ricks calls a “lineal” relationship. 64 Milton’s thinking with Prometheus establishes a paternal relationship between Satan and Prometheus. By identifying Satan with the Titans, Milton turns Satan into Prometheus’s heir, something that could only happen if Milton was not concerned with “apt matter.” While Satan can argue to his council that he is “self-begot, self-raised” (5.860), Milton’s slippery allusion identifies his indecorous origins in a Greek hero. The Promethean die was cast, so to speak, in the first epic simile of the poem. 62 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), 49. 63 N. K. Sugimura, “Matter of Glorious Trial”: Spiritual and Material Substance in “Paradise Lost” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), xiv. 64 Ricks, Allusion to the Poets, 16. 178 As suggested earlier, allusion and simile are connected both rhetorically and cognitively in Paradise Lost. 65 In many of Milton’s epic similes, but especially “the Prometheus simile,” there is a pause that “builds hesitation, negotiation, and even accommodation into its very syntax.” 66 This pause, which Teskey calls “moment,” braids “together opposite things in a dynamic situation: instability and stasis, movement and arrest.” 67 The simile, in other words, arrests the narrative’s forward action and generates “ample room” for thinking. Rather than substitution, which is what a metaphor does, a Miltonic simile “weakens the logical end of its own comparative work by extending the time it takes for the [author] to get from ‘this’ to ‘that.’” 68 While some critics, such as James Whaler in “The Miltonic Simile,” call attention to the “predominant method of exact homologation” in the “getting from ‘this’ to ‘that,’” many readers find Milton’s similic method incongruous. 69 Peter C. Herman, for example, has pointed to the “metaphoric ambivalence” in many of Milton’s epic simile, which he sees as Milton’s tendency to make equivalences that lead to textual contradictions. 70 Herman specifically highlights the final lines of the above simile that introduce the final comparison for Satan as evidence of Milton’s “ambivalence”: 71 [The Leviathan] haply slumbering on the Norway foam 65 The scholarship on Milton’s similes is extremely rich and extensive so I will limit myself to influential examples: James Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile” PMLA 46, no. 4 (1931); Geoffrey Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970); Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton; and Leonard, Faithful Labourers. Leonard (Faithful Labourers, 327–90) charts and examines the history of criticism on Milton’s similes, noting that the poem’s earliest commentators (e.g., Addison and Bentley) were the first to discuss the similes as “digressive” while its nineteenth-century readers (e.g., Wordsworth, De Quincy, Landor) were the first to discuss their heterogeneity. In the twentieth century, A. J. A. Waldcock (“Paradise Lost” and Its Critics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947]) and Anne Ferry (Milton’s Epic Voice: The Narrator in “Paradise Lost” [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963]) also spoke to the similes’ contrasting comparisons. Leonard’s account of this heterogeneous tradition as well as the opposing homologous tradition unfortunately ends at 1970, so there is no discussion of recent criticism (i.e., “New Milton Criticism”) that revisits this early heterogeneous terrain. 66 Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking, 97. 67 Teskey, “Thinking Moments,” 114. 68 Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking, 97. 69 James Whaler, “The Miltonic Simile,” 1065. 70 Herman, Destabilizing Milton, 25. 71 See Herman and Sauer, The New Milton Criticism, 2. 179 The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea, and wished mourn delays. (1.203–8) Rather than completing the suggestion of the simile, which would likely involve the whale pulling down (or carrying away) the unsuspecting pilot, Milton leaves the pilot with “the anchor in his scaly rind,” a result Herman finds “inconclusive” and evidence of Milton’s ambivalence toward Satan. While Milton is not exactly clear in his comparison of Satan to a “scaly” whale, he does keep the comparison rather close. Milton’s first order of business in the simile is the conveyance of size, not the moral implications that lie behind them, which is where Milton’s thinking often exceeds the comparisons. But in these suggestive final lines of the simile, Milton does not avoid closure because he is uncertain about Satan’s status. Instead, he avoids closure so that he can maintain Satan’s “liminal status and ongoing transformation.” 72 Milton, in other words, is not finished thinking about Satan. To relate clearly the whale pulling down the pilot would be a move too proleptic even for Milton. At only 200 lines into the epic, Milton’s complete degradation of Satan lies several books away. What is important for Milton is the development of Satan’s change, and the closing off of the simile would eliminate that change. So to ensure Satan’s development, Milton follows the above simile with a cluster of descriptive similes (1.284ff., 292ff., and 295ff.). But in these additional comparisons, Milton continues with his peripatetic thinking, suggesting that “cognition is a form of motion rather than a form of possessing.” 73 Milton does not subordinate his portrait of Satan to didactic or one-sided thinking, 72 Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 129. 73 Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 248. 180 which is what tradition has done, but opens up allusive possibilities, what Heidegger calls approaching the strangeness. 74 Satan, in other words, becomes more convincing and compelling the less certain we are of his nature. It is not so much the content of the allusions and what they point to that give allusion its power and purpose so much as Milton grappling with their suggestiveness. III: “Repairing Eden”: Thinking Place While the above simile illustrates Milton using various biblical and classical sources to think through Satan’s character, many of Milton’s richest thinking moments occur in the Garden of Eden, which is where the epic spends most of its narrative time. Such an important locus, however, needed context and background beyond the scant verses available in Genesis, so to flesh out a prelapsarian landscape Milton drew heavily on literary and postbiblical religious traditions, each of which treated various loci amoeni (pleasant places) with considerable imagination. 75 But Milton’s Eden, while certainly deriving in large part from these traditions, also stands in opposition to them: rather than static and unchanging it is mutable; rather than a place of ease it requires work. Eden is where Milton creates forward-looking rather than retrospective poetry, or poetry that draws from the past to prepare for the future—what Teskey aptly calls “theoretical poetry.” 76 In drawing from the past, Milton develops additional uses of 74 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 55. 75 For discussion of loci amoeni and gardens see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1953); A. Bartlett Giamatti, Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (New York: Norton, 1966); Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Indianapolis: university of Indiana Press 1969); Joseph E. Duncan, Milton’s Earthly Paradise: A Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972); and Ken Hiltner, Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008). 76 According to Teskey, “to be a theoretical poet [. . .] is to look in both directions at once, like Janus, the double- faced Roman God of thresholds. For a Christian poet such as Milton, it is to look back into the past, into the totality of what has already been made by man within the frame of the larger totality of divine Creation [. . .]. But it is also to look forward in time, into the temporal sense of the emergence of everything human that has yet to be made, 181 allusion, specifically as a device of proleptic thinking or foreshadowing. In this sense, allusion structurally helps him to control his narrative. To adapt a phrase from C. S. Lewis, the “cognitive core” of Eden is the famous “Enna” simile. 77 Coming as it does after the long (approximately 150 lines) topographical description of Eden, the analogical richness of the simile provides a microcosm of the entire poem, which illustrates Milton working through images of rural innocence and beauty while introducing portentous pagan material: Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired Castalian spring, might with this Paradise Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian isle Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham, Whom the Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove, His Amalthea and her florid son Young Bacchus from his stepdame Rhea’s eye; Nor where Abassin kings their issue guard, Mount Amara, though this by some supposed True Paradise under the Ethiop line By Nilus’ head, enclosed with shining rock, A whole day’s journey high, but wide remote From this Assyrian garden. . . . (4.4.268–85) Milton does not look directly at Eden in this passage. Instead, he approaches it from both Satan’s perspective and from various loci amoeni. This indirect approach, signaled by the important “not,” allows Milton to open up analogical possibilities. He accommodates Eden through the Christian concept of via negativa—description through counterexamples. The including the poem that the poet is working on now” (Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity [Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 2006), 2; italics in original). 77 In The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), Lewis refers to the “allegorical cores” of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of which is the Garden of Adonis (334). See above, Chapter I, for a discussion. 182 “might” suggests alternative gardens that “strive” with Eden, but they are only possibilities and not Eden. By holding the “not-Edens” in his mind, Milton is able to entertain competing ideas of what Eden must have been like. The apophatic “nots” then develop the implications of the comparisons, enhancing rather than diminishing them. For example, the allusion to Enna provides one of the poem’s most moving accounts of Eve. Without being direct about Eve, whom the reader has yet to encounter, Milton provides a condensed description of Proserpine’s fall. This passage conjoins topographical detail with moral thinking. Two arguments about Eden are being made simultaneously: one regarding its beauty, in which it excels all other gardens, and the second, a moral scene of instruction. Enna is not just a “fair field” where Proserpine “gathered flowers” but that “fair field” where she was “gathered” up “by gloomy Dis” and that “cost Ceres all that pain.” In expanding the allusion beyond the point of reference to its significance for the story, Milton charges the allusion with a new context. The context begins with descriptive attributes like the context of the Prometheus simile but ends in a moral context that alters the simile’s raison d’être. Another important consequence of Milton’s holding various allusions in such a dilated manner as the epic simile is narrative prolepsis, what Gérard Genette calls annonce (“advance notice”). “Prolepses” or “announces,” Genette observes, almost always function as “brief allusions,” referring “in advance to an event that will be told in full in its place.” 78 As foreshadowing or anticipation, prolepsis therefore joins thinking with planning. It provides both a cognitive and structural moment of creation, illustrating that composition is, among other things, a twofold process. When Milton swerves in the above simile from Eden, which he has been describing for 60 lines, to Enna, the “plucking of flowers has an obvious sexual 78 Cited in Teresa Bridgeman’s “Thinking Ahead: A Cognitive Approach to Prolepsis,” Narrative 13, no. 2 (2005): 125. 183 implication,” turning the pleasant place into a locus malus. 79 The comparison prepares the reader for the coming fall by noting the analogue of Proserpine and Dis whose backstory suggests rape (from raptus, “abduction”), a forbidden fruit, as well as a fall. Milton is not just fleshing out narrative description with mythological references, but placing two gardens in ontological tension with one another, and in doing so playing with two lines of moral thought. In this sense, Enna becomes the means for Milton to interrogate Eden’s equivocal status. Rather than continuing with the natural description of Eden that constitutes much of book 4, Milton thinks through Eden with a moral foil, an uncloistered Enna. And Enna’s topological as well as moral undoing provides a proto-fall, a moment of allusive as well as proleptic thinking. While Milton provides guidelines for thinking well in his Art of Logic, the thinking or reasoning in his treatise remains understandably abstract. A more poetically friendly work of Milton’s prose, Of Education (1644), offers a more practical and capacious sense of thinking, arguing that the “end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” (YP 2:366). The operative word of the passage is not “learning,” “knowledge,” or “God.” It is “repair,” not only the main verb of the sentence, but the guiding principle behind much of Milton’s work, both in poetry and prose. To repair is to return something to its original state. But the action of “repair” does not come from its prefix, re-, but from its stem, pare, meaning, “to cut,” “to trim,” or “to shave off,” much like the “lop[ping]” and “prun[ing]” that Adam and Eve must undertake to maintain the garden (9.210). This sense of repair aligns with such verbs as “work,” “make,” and “think,” which actively mold and shape material, both physical and intellectual. To repair in the sense quoted above means to “make” or “think” Eden, that is, to 79 Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of the Ancient Epic (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002), 172. 184 sort, trim, and cut through postlapsarian history to approach what Eden must have been like. It is a verb, in other words, of selection, bringing the full freight of the mind to the act of choosing. By particularizing thought rather than abstracting from it, allusion draws pre- and postlapsarian worlds into contact with one another and allows their interaction to influence each other. Eden becomes Enna, and Enna becomes a proto-Eden. In thinking with allusion, Milton does not simply reproduce or organize images of preexisting loci amoeni, but generates a new conception of Eden. Thinking through description returns to the argument of inclusion and exclusion explored earlier. Just as with Satan’s size and character, Milton has various options for comparisons to Eden, but he cannot name them all. For example, he includes none of the loci amoeni listed in Spenser’s garden-cluster (i.e., “pleasant hill / Of Rhapsode,” “Thessalian Tempe,” “Ida,” “Sweet Parnasse”) nor does he mention the one locus amoenus many readers would have in mind, and one explored in an early work, Arcadia. 80 He also omits the two classical loci amoeni mentioned at the end of A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, Hesperus and Elysium. While Hesperus appears just before the simile (4.250) as anticipation of Enna, it does not join the list of counter- analogues. And lastly, there are the three gardens that Milton chooses to include in book 9: the Garden of Adonis, the Garden of Alcious, and the Garden of Solomon. The fact that Milton names at least six other loci amoeni or gardens in his poetry (three of which are named later in Paradise Lost) suggests that very particular choices are being made in the above simile that foreshadow the fate of Eve. But these choices also illustrate Milton’s thinking with and through their significance, a thinking clearly developed through such pronouns and conjunctions as “which,” “though,” and “but.” These functional words demonstrate Milton returning mid- 80 Spenser, The Faerie Queene (2.12.52). Milton explores Arcadia in his masque, Arcades (1634). 185 allusion to the reason for his choices and their significance to his argument. The functional words also facilitate the simile’s hesitation as Milton moves from this “Enna” to that “Mount Amara.” He progresses through six comparisons in the simile, all of which he qualifies. The final “but wide remote” returns Milton to the beginning of his thinking, the beauty of Eden. The simile thus creates and constitutes its own thinking environment, which in the case of Eden is an environment that illustrates the “process of arriving and approaching and approximating—not as guesswork, but as footwork.” 81 The allusions constitute mental footsteps that Milton takes as he moves from “Enna” to “sweet grove” and from “Nyseian isle” back to “Eden.” They also allow Milton to pursue and entertain ideas without actually entering the place or literary work from which they originate. As extrapolated loci, the allusions flesh out the description of Eden, providing the footwork necessary for its realization. Such a process does not suggest an artful design on Milton’s part, but an imperative to fully “think” Eden. IV: “So by allusion called” Allusion, like allegory, is a protean device. 82 It appears in some poems as ornament, in others as parody, in many as imitation, and arguably in all as inheritance. Milton of course uses allusion in all of these senses, but he also frequently employs it as a means “to wander beyond the confines of the world” (YP 1:247). Thinking in and through tradition is not just imitating or inheriting, but breaking tradition down into manageable parts for use in one’s own poetry. For this reason, Miltonic allusion often creates interpretive confusion in readers because it does not resemble or even refer to what its meaning as a word or phrase might suggest. The tradition has been lost or 81 Angus Fletcher, A New Theory For American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 2004), 272. 82 Harding, The Club of Hercules, 1. See also Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y., 1964), 1. 186 modified in Milton’s reworking of it. What was a clear or identifiable work as it entered Milton’s mind through study becomes recontextualized. But as has been argued throughout this chapter, Miltonic allusion does not proceed from author to reader or from meaning to interpretation, but from allusion to allusion. Allusion, in this transumptive sense, is facilitative, procreant, and practical rather than interpretive. Milton highlights this imperative for poetic freedom of thought in one of his earliest works, his third Prolusion: “Let not your mind rest content to be rounded and cabined by the limits which encompass the earth, but let it wander beyond the confines of the world, and at last attain the summit of all human wisdom and learn to know itself” (YP 1:247). 83 Ornamental allusion “round[s]” and “cabin[s]” thinking, but cognitive allusion frees a text from its interpretive yoke. As a device that becomes a mode when it “learn[s] to know itself,” allusion constitutes a means of thinking around and through the inchoate. In addition to providing Milton with the liberty to think in his poetry, allusion demonstrates his anticipating and therefore defending himself against what the New Milton Critics have called his indeterminacy or the “conflict, ambivalence, and open-endedness” of his poetry. 84 Milton is anything but an ambivalent writer and his allusions show how cognition necessarily functions amid conflict and opposition, but in doing so does not seek ambivalence as an end in itself. Milton’s indeterminacy, in other words, is not a product but a process of thinking. One must be indeterminate or “open to the mystery” for thinking to occur. A theory of cognitive allusion restores meaning as well as intentionality to Milton’s epic, suggesting that working through problems and not answering them is not the same thing as creating unresolved choices. 83 “Sed nec iisdem, quibus orbis, limitibus contineri & cicumscribi se patiatur vestra mens, sed etiam extra mundi pomoeria divagetur” (CW 12:170). 84 Herman and Sauer, New Milton Criticism, 1. 187 Epilogue: Sidney’s Energia and Thinking Beyond the Renaissance “In this passage is exerted all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter” -Samuel Johnson 1 “The mind, having the free faculty of conceiving, finds within itself the art of unfolding its conceptions” -Nicholas de Cusa 2 In this study, I have defined and analyzed discriminable moments of literary thinking. As suggested in the Prologue and Introduction, these loci of thinking, which are both spatial and temporal (i.e., extending over time but isolated to textual phenomena such as devices and conventions that are observable), are partly the result of a stylistic shift away from rhetoric and imitation to a more personal and expressive style that affected all the arts across Europe. Movement as opposed to decorum became an emergent style in the poetry and prose of the period. What I did not discuss in the two aforementioned paratexts was the critical shift that identifies and theorizes the nature of the creative shift, which might be termed a “poetics of vulgar eloquence.” In this Epilogue, I look at Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poetry (ca. 1580) as a work that not only consolidates nearly all the continental poetic theories of its day, but also suggests a new—however tentatively, given its early date—emergent style. In this sense, Sidney is a transitional figure, bridging a classical theory of poetic creativity and a “protoromantic.” Just like the Renaissance itself, Sidney “looks back to literary theories centered on imitation and 1 Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 5: The Rambler (No. 168, 26 October 1751), ed. Water Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). 2 Nicholas de Cusa, De Mente, quoted and translated in Pauline Moffitt Watts’ Nicolaus Cusanus: A Fifteenth- Century Vision of Man (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 135. 188 looks ahead to those revolving around creativity.” 3 Sidney, in other words, is to the conceptualization of a thinking style what Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are to its embodiment and development: a progenitor. In looking at Sidney, who precedes all of the authors discussed, I bring the discussion back to why thinking matters to early modern literature and what such a question might mean for the study of subsequent literary thinking. I. From Old to New: Critical Practice and the Emergence of Creative Difference In many instances, creative or artistic breaks with tradition are accompanied by a corresponding critical work (or works) that recognizes and conceptualizes the break. The critical work not only identifies the tradition from which the new, creative work emerges, but also illustrates what makes the new work radical, or to use a more contested term, “original.” In this sense, the two discourses reinforce one another. The creative work can look to the critical for its theoretical underpinning while the critical can look to the creative for its example. The critical work functions, in other words, as a fulcrum between two shifting paradigms. It identifies the before and the after. In a critical “thinking moment,” it conjoins two historically distinct periods by isolating their differences. Without the critical work, the new and emergent creative work might go unnoticed or fail for lack of support. The creative break from the past needs an advocate as well as a theoretician. In Paradise Lost, Satan provides a literary example of a figure that fulfills both roles. He is not only the new, creative work that emerges from the old (i.e., Lucifer), but also the critical work that identifies and justifies the former’s moral and thus aesthetic shift. In Satan’s case, however, he denies there was ever an earlier style: 3 Michael Mack, Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 2005), 5. 189 Who saw When this creation was? Rememberst thou Thy making, while the maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quickening power. […] Our puissance is our own. (5.856-864) Satan feigns forgetfulness in this argument to justify his radical designs. But as the reader knows from the opening of book 4 (33ff.), Satan remembers all too well what his old paradigm looked like. Satan is tormented by his thoughts. Not only does the “waste and wild” (1.60) of Hell remind him at every turn of his fallen condition, so does Eden and its “divine” inhabitants (4.364). But in this speech to the rebel angels, Satan embarks on a new poetics, a manifesto of originality that allows him to justify his deception of man. He must sever with his obedient past so that his disobedient present may begin. The entire speech, which contains such temporally charged words as “creation,” “rememberst,” “now,” and “before,” identifies a new ethos for Satan; an ethos defined, that is, by a “quickening power” of self-creation and a “puissance” or strength derived from within (both “self” and “our” are repeated twice), not from without. This is a moment of conscious transition for Satan. Like the serpent he is about to inhabit, Satan sheds his former skin so that he can emerge “self-begot.” II. The Defense of Poetry Satan’s metamorphosis from the brightest angel in heaven to the “infernal serpent” (1.34), “arch- enemy” (1.81), and “author of all ill” (2.381) should not be taken as a moral indictment of the stylistic shift in the early modern period, but instead as an analogical description of one style begetting another. But just as important as this shift is to understanding Satan’s role in the fall of 190 man is his defense of his own role in its authorship. Satan serves, as the above passage illustrates, as his own critic. By adopting the form of the “Defense” or “Apologia,” in other words, Satan lays claim to his own history and how that history begins with his own “quickening power.” The “Defense,” in this sense, marks an origin point for something new. In Deleuzean language, the Defense identifies “difference,” which is the only way that Satan can lay claim to any kind of originality that does not rely on another “maker.” The Renaissance was not a period short of critical works that conceptualized a new beginning through a clear departure from past aesthetic principles. Joachim Du Bellay’s La Defense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise (1549), for example, was a spirited attempt to establish French as a literary language equal to Greek and Latin. Defending the poetic principles embodied in the work of Pierre de Ronsard and the Pléiade group against such contemporaries as Clement Morot (Blason [1536]) and Thomas Sébillet (Art Poétique francois [1548]), Du Bellay provided the theoretical foundations for French “Classism,” most notably articulated in Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art Poetique (1674). 4 Du Bellay’s decision to publish, moreover, a separate volume of his own poetry (L’Olive et queques autres oeuvres poéticques) along with the Defense suggests a mutually reinforcing project. One text argues, the other incarnates. While titled a “Defense,” what Françoise Cornilliat calls “a theoretical exposé” wrapped “within a passionate lecture on the French language,” Du Bellay’s argument for the “embellishment and glorification” 4 For Du Bellay’s influence on Elizabethan poetry, see Elizabeth Macintire, “French Influence on the Beginnings of English Classicism,” PMLA 26, no. 3 (1911). 191 of French constitutes a poetic manifesto. 5 Despite its scathing tone and contradictory nature, the Defense’s argument ultimately provides sustenance to over two hundred years of French poetry. 6 The “Defense” was arguably the most influential genre or form to come out of the early modern period’s attempt to theorize itself to itself. 7 Unlike some of the more personal and vitriolic genres such as the “Preface” and “Epistle,” both of which could be attacks or anticipatory declarations against others, the defense consolidated past principles and applied those principled to forging a new tradition, specifically a vernacular tradition. 8 In this sense, the defense was a necessary critical step to the emergence of a shift in style. Once the ground had been laid, so to speak, of what a language or tradition consists of, a manifesto could be written. As a major genre of early modern literary criticism, the Defense conjoined two traditions, one dominant and the other emergent. Like Satan, they could embody both the old and the new. The closest the English language comes to a Renaissance manifesto happened to be one of its earliest works of critical theory, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (composed ca.1580; printed in 1595). 9 Unlike Du Bellay’s “Defense,” Sidney’s Defence focuses on the vocation of 5 Françoise Cornilliat, “From ‘Defense And Illustration’ to ‘Dishonor And Bastardization’: Joachim Du Bellay On Language and Poetry,” MLN 130, no. 4 (2015), 731-732. Although Du Bellamy’s text is the most famous French “Defense” of the period, Cornilliat points out that its owes it argument, specifically its defense of the “Gallic vernacular” and thus the relationship between poetry and language, to debates that had been occurring for several decades. Du Bellay’s brash and youthful ambition, however, gave a “new slant” and “much polemical luster” to the debate (733). 6 Cornilliat, “Joachim Du Bellay On language and Poetry,” 751. 7 The term “defense” derives from “Apology,” which in its Greek form, apologia, means “a speech in defense.” Plato’s Apology (Socrates’ defense of himself) is an example of an early apologia. One of the most influential early modern examples of an Apology was Michel de Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1580). It is important to note that Sidney does not use the term “apology” in the text, but instead uses “defence” (73:34). For a discussion of the genre of “Defense,” see Anthony Howe’s “Poetic Defences and Manifestos” in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, edited by David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 8 For a discussion of the various types of critical genres and their representative texts and authors, see J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London: Routledge, 1947); see also J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1899). 9 Two different printers published Sidney’s Defence in 1595, which accounts for the two titles: William Ponsonby published The Defence of Poesie and Henry Olney published An Apologie for Poetrie. See “Introduction” to Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), for a discussion of the history of the text’s printing. 192 the poet, specifically what separates the poet from the philosopher and historian and makes them a second God. 10 Sidney’s idea of the poet as God does not supplant the idea of God or suggest, as some modern critics have argued, a secularizing argument, but instead elevates the powers of the poet to the “likeness” of God, just as Genesis states that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). 11 In this sense, the poet does not imitate Nature, but imitates a creating God. While Sidney’s text is often viewed historically as a compilation of Classical and Renaissance theories of poetry, ranging from Aristotle and Horace to Marsilio Ficino and Joseph Scaliger, it nevertheless promotes a creative aspect of poetry that is imitative but also personal, artificial but also organic. It is this hybrid tension between art (téchnê) and mind (wit) that gives Sidney’s poetics its emergent tinge. The core of this tension, though it has not received as much attention in recent discussions of Sidney’s theory as it should, is the notion of energia, which Sidney takes from Greek rhetoric and philosophy, specifically Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Metaphysics, to mean “activity,” “actualization” as well as “functioning” or what Sidney calls “forcibleness” (79:8). 12 Energia is not simply the efficacy of poetry and its impact on the 10 On Du Bellay’s avoidance of the origin of poetry and its creative center in inspiration, see Cornilliat, “Joachim Du Bellay On Language and Poetry,” 742-743. 11 All references to Sidney’s Defence are from Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). I parenthetically cite the page number followed by the line number. According to Sidney, “Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the Heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth surpassing her doings” (79: 17-23). 12 Energia should be distinguished from enargeia, the latter of which means clarity, brightness, or vividness (it also goes by the name of evidentia, hypotyposis, and illusratio). The best way to distinguish between the two is to think of the former as mechanical (a faculty or power) and the latter as rhetorical. George Puttenham briefly discusses the two terms in the Book Three (Chapter 3) of The Art of English Poesy (1589). Regarding the omission of energia in recent studies of Sidney’s Defence, neither Michael Mack’s Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 2005) nor Robert E. Stillman’s Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) mention the term. Catherine Bates only mentions it in passing in On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), but her study does not focus on poetic creativity; instead, she approaches Sidney’s work from an economic standpoint. Bates seeks to “de-idealize” the text, which she suggests is inherent in its argument. 193 reader’s mind but the activity of realizing a potential (dynamis) within an object, which in Sidney’s case is the poet. It is energia that allows the poet to “rang[e]” or “think” their poetry, and constitutes the “functioning” capacity of the poet that produces “speaking picture[s]” (mimesis) and the representation of just and virtuous behavior. This notion of an internal activity of the poet is the seed of a poetics of thinking that inaugurates the shift in style represented and embodied in the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. III. Second Gods As a theoretical work accounting for the origin of poetry and well as its social function in forming and modeling virtue, Sidney’s Defence turns on its identification of the poet as an elevated vocation. The poet is distinct from the philosopher, the historian, and other vocations because they are not limited to the rules of Nature. As Sidney argues in an early and critical passage, Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the rigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. (78:22-30) Drawing out the implications of the Greek verb poiein, “to make,” Sidney not only defines the poet etymologically as “a maker,” he also separates the poet from all other rational or craft- oriented professions. Just as Milton was later to do in his note on “The Verse” of Paradise Lost (1668, 4 th printing) and in Areopagitica (1644), Sidney argues against the language of constraint and “subjection” to argue for the poet’s unique and unqualified creative freedom. Verbs such as “lifted,” “grow,” “bringeth,” and “ranging,” not to mention the adverb “freely,” stand in opposition to the “enclosed” rules of the grammarian, rhetorician, and logician, all of whom rely 194 on “Nature for [their] principle object.” Sidney, in other words, turns the poet into a second God, a creator of natures. The principle of the artist as a creating God finds analogues in the work not only of earlier Italian humanists like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Julius Scaliger (1484-1558), but also in the theoretical work of contemporary Italian painters such as Federico Zuccaro (1539- 1609) and Gian Paolo Lommazo (1538-1592). 13 Because of the overlapping concern with the epistemology of the artist, several critics of Sidney’s Defence have identified it as a work of “mannerist” theory. 14 While “mannerism” as discussed in the Prologue has never been successfully applied to literary works of the period (especially one as early as Sidney’s Defence), its descriptive concern with the relationship between sense-impressions and how those impressions relate to mental processes in the artist does have significant relevance for a thinking style. Zuccaro, Lommazo, and Sidney all express an interest in how ideas form in the artist’s mind and in what way those ideas relate to the actual production of the work of art. But both Zuccaro and Lommazo’s treatises post-date the composition of Sidney’s Defence, which means that any Italian “mannerist” influence on Sidney is not likely. Additionally, and more important than Sidney’s earlier date, is the fact that Sidney’s understanding of the “idea or fore-conceit” (79:7-8) of a work of art does not derive from nature or outward sense as it does in the two 13 See in particular Scaliger’s Poetices libris septum (1561). In his edition of Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002; revised and expanded 3 rd ed.), R. W. Maslen provides a summary of the relevant passage in Scaliger’s Poetices as well as interlinear notations corresponding to Sidney’s passages (137-138). The two relevant works by Federico Zuccaro and Gian Paolo Lommazo are L’Idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (1607) and Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scultura et architectura (1584-1585) respectively. For a discussion of their relationship to Sidney, see Shepherd (1965) and Craig (1986) in the below notes. 14 In the “Introduction” to Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (London: Nelson, 1965), Geoffrey Shepherd notes, “if we require a label for Sidney’s theory of poetry, the epithet ‘mannerist’ may perhaps be borrowed” (66). See also A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 121. 195 Italian thinkers, but instead from within the poet. 15 As the last clause of the passage above illustrates, the poet does not copy the “brazen” world of Nature, but “freely rang[es] within the zodiac of his own wit,” thus creating a new, “golden” world (78:34). In this central argument of his poetic theory, Sidney pivots to an internal an inspired process of God-like creation. This process manifests as “ranging,” which is a striking verb that anticipates Sidney’s use of energia later in the Defence, and one that applied to its object, “zodiac,” aptly captures the activity of the mind in the process of creation. Poetry, in this sense, does not relate to the mastery of a craft, but instead to the inspired motions of the poet. (Much like Ramus, whose work Sidney knew well, Sidney demotes the rhetorical element of poetic creation in favor of the dialectical, which constitutes the logical finding of images or ‘ideas.”) Poetry is self-generated creation, and because of this, it has the power (energia, efficacy) to raise man from his fallen state. Not only does Sidney’s theory possess a vitalist epistemology, it also possesses an ethical theology that acts to improve and elevate through example. The poet’s “fore-conceit” conceives and promotes “virtuous action” (83:7). While Sidney stops short of an “expressive” theory of poetry (no theorist before the eighteenth century provides one), he does indicate a different process and source for poetry that has significant repercussions on the style of what subsequent poets, including his younger contemporary and protégé Edmund Spenser, creates. If the poet is able to generate ideas, images, and range from within, then he or she is able, like Shakespeare, to create personalities, emotions, and arguments that are not simply derived from reading or external impressions, but generated from within the poet and embodied in the form of the art itself. Like God, the poet creates ex 15 For a refutation of Sidney as mannerist see D. H. Craig, “A Hybrid Growth: Sidney’s Theory of Poetry in An Apology for Poetry” in Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden: Archon Books, 1986), 116. 196 nihilo. And as mentioned above, this creation derives from a principle that Sidney names energia in his “Digression” on English poetry, the penultimate and most personal section of his Defence. IV. Energia and the Activity of Literary Thinking Apart from its argument, which is both poetic and philosophical (i.e., moral or didactic), the most significant aspect of Sidney’s Defence is its account of the history of English poetry. Given Stephen Gosson’s attack on poetry in The Schoole of Abuse (1579) and Sidney’s targeted response, this “digression” or oratory-within-and-oratory, which occurs near the end of the Defence, is the most topical issue in the Defence. Much of Sidney’s digression hinges on rescuing English poetry from Gosson’s censure even as its agree with Gosson’s assessment of its current, low state. But what makes the digression even more important to the overall argument of the Defence and vie with the “poet-as-second-God” argument is its embodiment of a personal and expressive form that highlights the poet’s energia. As many have noted, the Defence is structured like an oration, but unlike Ciceronian oratory, Sidney digresses in the manner of his own Arcadia and other medieval and Renaissance romances, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene. 16 As Quintilian notes in the Fourth Book of his Institutes, oratorical digression can function as a means to “find immediate vent.” 17 It is as if the heat of Sidney’s argument signaled a necessary boiling point for him, wherein he begins a second defense in the name of English poetry. As some scholars have argued, Sidney seems to begin a new work in the Digression. 18 What was already complete, the proper defense of poetry 16 Kenneth O. Myrick’s early study, Sir Philip Sidney as Craftsman (1935; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), was the first to analyze the oratorical structure of Sidney’s Defence. Most studies of its structure begin with Myrick’s study. See Maslen’s discussion of the seven-part structure, which follows Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1553), in his “Introduction” to Apology, 31-37. 17 Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 4.3 (125). 18 See O.B. Hardison, Jr., “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” in Essential Articles: Sir Philip Sidney. 197 itself, which includes an exordium, proposition, confirmation, refutation, and partition, is succeeded by another voice, which begins another argument that in its abruptness feels incongruent with the early sections of the Defence. The digression, in other words, embodies the internal swerve and motion of Sidney’s own thinking. It provides textual evidence, inaugurated by a “But,” that Sidney himself is inspired, overtaken by the cause of his defense. Phrases such as “Sweet posy,” which announces the Digression, for example, offer a lyric pause, a moment of lamentable praise that does not seem stylized but instead breathes into a rhetorical form the feelings and thoughts of its author, while the subsequent discussion on England’s “vile wits” challenges Sidney’s earlier claim that poets are inspired. The split argument of the Defence surfaces as Sidney tries to reconcile the current status of English verse with the high calling of the poet. In this “thinking moment,” where Sidney seems caught in the aporia of his argument, the poet is not said to be endowed with the “divine gift” of God, but rather with an inclination towards poetry that is exercised through art (i.e., imitation). In observing the state of English poetry, in other words, Sidney is caught between his ideal of inspired poetry and the practical realization that English poetry needs help. This tension, however, leads to the realization that poetry is a confluence of inspiration and work, genius and thinking, which finds it synthesis in the notion of energia. One of the keys to Sidney’s poetic theory and its reconciliation of competing theories lies in the activity or power of the poet to realize their ideas, which Sidney identifies as energia (L. efficacia). The term, which as mentioned above is Greek in origin, has not garnered much discussion in relation to Sidney’s theory, though it seems to underlie the entire expressive and stylistic shift this study analyzes. 19 Sidney, in fact, is the first English writer to use the term, and 19 Two importance exceptions to the critical study of energia are Neil L. Rudenstine’s chapter in Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) and Daniel T. Lochman, “‘The Countess of Pembroke’s 198 his use is rather limited and not expanded upon, buts it appearance signals a kinetic poetics that reverberates throughout Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetry. 20 In his discussion of the false passions of English lyric, Sidney employs the term to identify an efficacy or quality of true passion: But truly many such [lyrics] as come under the name of irresistible love. If I were a mistress, would never persuade me [that the poets] were in love; so coldly do they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings (and so caught up in certain swelling phrases which hang together like a man which once told me the wind was at north-west and by south, because he would b sure to name winds enough), than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer. (116:35-117:1-9) This passage not only illustrates a condemnation of feigned or “swollen” passion, what might be termed a lack of animus or spirit in English poetry, it also identifies energia as a means to achieve a true or right balance between passion and execution. Energia, which comes down to Sidney through both its metaphysical use as “activity” and “functioning” and its rhetorical use as “efficacy” and “power,” cannot be underestimated in its rather brief appearance at the end of the Defence. In fact, both senses and are coterminous in Sidney’s use of the term, especially as he is reconciling the visionary (Platonic) with the practical (rhetorical, i.e., persuasive) purpose of poetry. In this sense, energia is critical to joining the emotional inception of poetry with its expression or achievement as art. It fuses thought with feeling. As “the vivid mental apprehension of things themselves,” energia provides the vividness of the poetry; that is, its efficacy as both inception in the mind (as “fore-conceit”) of the poet as well as its form. Arcadia is for the body…’ and soul: Energia and Enaction in Sidney’s Apology and Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 38, no.2 (2020). See also Maslen’s excellent note on energia in his edition of Sidney’s Apology, 240-241; 20 As with much in the Defence, Sidney draws on Scaliger’s description of energia in his Poetices. For the most part, Scaliger defines energia as “vigor of speech,” which is primarily a rhetorical use of the term. I suggest below that Sidney actually suggests more in using the term, especially if the term is applied to other aspects of his definition of the poet and poetry. 199 In the critical discussions of Sidney’s use of energia, the term primarily plays a rhetorical role in understanding Sidney’s poetic theory. Energia functions as the principle feature of persuading others. In its “forcibleness” lies its power to effect change and give form to feeling and thought, specifically through “speaking picture[s].” Without energia, poetry would be no better than philosophy or history. Its examples would fall flat, and its passion would be lifeless. 21 But Energia also possesses a more metaphysical function as the underlying animus or power of poetry, which relates back to Sidney’s concept of the poet as God. By equating the poet with God, energia functions as the poet’s actualizing power. The demiurge analogy, in other words, aligns the poet’s energia with noesis, or thinking, as the ultimate power to realize potential (i.e., to think thoughts, images, etc.). As Aristotle argues, “life is the activity [energia] of thinking [noesis]; God is that activity.” 22 Aristotle thus conceives of energia along the lines of verbs such as “think” (phronein), “understand” (noein), and “see” (horân). 23 The poet, in other words, does not just provide the effect of potency, which is the rhetorical use of energia, but uses that potency in the act of creation. As an “enduring state of actuality,” energia sees the poem through to the end, from its finding and conception in the “idea or fore-conceit” to the poem’s shape and form. 24 If poetic creation is God-like creation, then its constitutes its own internal and thus causa sui force. Although only mentioned once in the Defence, energia informs, as Daniel T. Lochman 21 For example, this is Rudenstine’s understanding and definition of Sidney’s use of the term. See Sidney’s Poetic Development, 152-157. For the philosophical foundations of the term as well as the complex (“knotty”) reception of the term in Renaissance commentators, see Forrest G. Robinson brief discussion of the term in The Shape of Things Known: Sidney’s ‘Apology’ in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), specifically Chapter 3, 127-135. 22 See F. E. Peters’ entry on “Energia” in Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 56-57. This quotation from Aristotle appears in Metaphysics, 1047b. 23 Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “Aristotle’s Kinêsis/Energeia Distinction: A Marginal Not on Kathleen Gill’s Paper,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23, no.3 (1993), 387. 24 Daniel W. Graham, “States and Performances: Aristotle’s Test,” The Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980), 117. 200 argues, a “cluster of related words, including seven references to ‘force,’ twenty-six to ‘move’ and ‘motion’ and derivative forms, eighteen to ‘act’ and ‘action,’ three to ‘active,’ four to ‘experience,’ and one to ‘efficacy.” 25 Energia functions for Sidney not only as an animating power akin to the recta ratio of Christian epistemology, but also to the actual movement that finds, conceives, shapes, and ultimately executes the poetry. Its goal, which makes energia teleological, “is immanent, it constitutes at once both an ongoing engagement and the fulfillment provided directly by that engagement.” 26 In many ways, it functions as the “soul” of the poetry, but rather than simply acting as an awareness or consciousness behind the poetry, it extends itself through the poetry. Energia works internally as combustion, and externally as form and body. It is the internal fire of the mind become style. In identifying the poet as artist whose energia conceives an image that he or she is able to hold before the reader as a “concrete universal” rather than an “affective” image, Sidney names the shift to come in English poetry. 27 While such a description of energia suggests an image of the poet as thinking the poem in “that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself” (79:7-8), energia nevertheless betrays a personal style for Sidney, a way of conceiving and thus executing poetry. In giving primacy to matter as the “idea” and its development in the “wit” as “ranging,” Sidney’s theory anticipates the ultimate shift from manner to matter or thinking as the subject of poetry. Energia, in other words, animates Spenser’s “allegorical cores”; it gives Shakespeare’s soliloquies their vividness and force; and it actualizes the choice- making movement of Milton’s transumptive allusions. 25 See Lochman, “Energia and Enaction in Sidney’s Apology and Arcadia,” 6. Lochman’s argument is one of the few that focuses on the metaphysical (i.e., technical) dimension of energia as actuality and activity, but he sees it directed externally as a shaping force in moving the reader rather than as a shaping force in the conception (i.e., thinking) of the idea and thus poetry. 26 Mourelatos, “Aristotle’s Kinêsis/Energeia Distinction,” 386. 27 Forrest G. Robinson, Shape of Things Known, 133. 201 V: Thinking After The Renaissance As mentioned above, Sidney is the first English theorist to conceptualize, however embryonically, a thinking style that identifies the poet’s energia at the center of poetic creativity. In using both senses of energia—its rhetorical and its metaphysical but emphasizing the latter’s role in the poet’s God-like powers—Sidney names an expressive force for poetry. Sidney, of course, places the “idea or for-conceit” at the center of this poetic force and the purpose of it remains to promote “virtuous action” and therefore “repair the ruins,” as Milton said, “of our first parents.” 28 But whether or not the poetry results from an “idea” conceived beforehand and subsequently executed through art matters little to the impulse or cause that derives from an internal energia, or “ranging” power. In the invention of the idea through cognitive “ranging,” matter and not manner are the poet’s primary concern. Manner leads to “vile wits” while poetry infused with the energy of the poet’s “Genius” leads to creation. Cause, not effect, are the concern of the poet’s energia. Not all of Sidney’s neo-Platonic moralizing is relevant for early modern English poets let alone their style, but Sidney’s insistence on the power of the poet to persuade nevertheless provides a transitional example of the importance of energia to an expressive and therefore personal theory of art. In this sense, Sidney’s Defence acts as a critical pivot, shifting poetic invention from rhetoric to God-like creation. Sidney was no doubt deeply traditional, and much in his ideas would have been understood and even praised by authors of the previous century, but his understanding of the poetic vocation as essentially affective meant that he understood its social need to adapt in order to stay relevant. Sidney, in other words, maintained the centrality of 28 John Milton, “Of Education,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume II, ed. John Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 366-367. 202 the poetic vocation to shaping action, which means that Sidney was not only a contemplative poet, but also an active poet. Both “vitae” meet in Sidney’s conception of poetry. Poetry is force, and force is about moving from one state to another, whether from ennui to delight, ignorance to knowledge, vice to virtue, or from image to image. “Right” poetry, like right reason (recta ratio), persuades and renders the reader altered. As the Prologue argues and the individual chapters of this study illustrate, literary thinking is about movement, which is what Sidney’s notion of energia bequeaths to his successors. It occurs as the sequential and kinetic thrust of the Spenserian stanza as it develops a theory of mutability. Mutability, which is itself a form of change from one state to another, embodies both a philosophical position and an instantiation of that position in the form of Spenser’s style. Spenser’s poetry unfolds as the “mental space” of consciousness. Consciousness is not stagnant, nor is Spenser’s poetry. Nothing remains the same in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but continually morphs into another episode, another book, another character, and another virtue. Although Spenser did not necessarily intend for his “Cantos of Mutabilitie” to end his great romance, it does serve as a fitting conclusion to its theme of “Constancie.” Mutabilitie, while defeated, nevertheless asserts her primacy as a force of energia in the “nature of things.” Movement also occurs representationally in Shakespeare’s soliloquies not only as thought captured onstage, but also as the development of a character in the process of change. Shakespeare’s villains and other great soliloquists form their character in the manner of an “idea of fore-conceit.” They see their “selves” in another state: as kings, lovers, or simply something that they are not, and thus will themselves in the manner of a “ranging” wit. In the exceptional space of the soliloquy, we see energia in motion, the heat and glow of their thinking. While not paragons of what Sidney would call virtue, Shakespeare’s villains nevertheless possess the 203 efficacy of authentic—that is, felt and personal—desire. They might lie to themselves, but in lying tell the truth about themselves. In their potency lies their destruction, as the soliloquy undoes its speakers, which makes the soliloquy thought’s sepulcher. 29 While Shakespeare represents and dramatizes the poet as thinker, Milton embodies it, making his position in English literature one of transition, as many have seen, between the old world of God-ordained meaning and the new world of individual or personal determination. 30 Milton does not so much secularize thinking, as naturalize its power, using it to further his personal and political, which are always ethical, interests. But as argued above, thinking and freedom are necessary for such an enterprise, and like Sidney, Milton believes in the need to remove all constraints from poetry. More than any poet after Sidney, Milton actualizes Sidney’s concept of energia. As the English poet of the Grand Style, Milton generates that style not through his theme—that is, the justification of God to man—but through his cognitive music, which in its swerves, counterpoints, qualifications, and admonitions to itself and others, enacts a poetics of sublime thinking. For subsequent periods, specifically the Romantic and Modernist periods, the early modern serves as “thinking poetry” avant la lettre. But as this study illustrates, it is not just the early stages of poetic thinking that the early modern period exemplifies, but its locus classicus; that is, the period where texts such as The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and Paradise Lost among other works develop the current modes of literary thinking. The Romantics, in particular, viewed Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton as their precursors in thought and feeling. They saw in them the inception of their concern for “what passes within.” Spenser, 29 For a discussion of the soliloquy as a “fallen” monologue, see J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’ (New York: Schocken, 1967). 30 See Gordon Teskey’s account of Milton as a transitional “modern” figure in Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 204 Shakespeare, and Milton, in other words, function as Christ-like figures that live beyond their death in the poetry of Romanticism. Wordsworth, for example, hailed Milton as the great bard of liberty as well as sublime poetry. There would not have been a Wordsworthian sublime without Milton’s “ranging” mind, in particular its ability to convey the mysterious powers of such sublime places as Hell, Chaos, and the mind of Satan. In such spatial and cognitive loci, Milton’s “thinking moments” can be seen as direct precursors to Wordsworth’s “spots of time.” Milton’s ability to move through historical events, persons, ideas, and loci as a choice-making exercise in synthetic thinking becomes a model for Wordsworth’s via naturaliter negativa, which allows Wordsworth to pass beyond nature into idealizing moments of the imagination. 31 For Coleridge, Shakespeare was the supreme thinking poet, the poet whose poetry manifested itself in the act of composition rather than in “fore-conceit.” Shakespeare’s “intellectual action,” Coleridge argues, “is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and out of C., and son on, just as a serpent movies, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.” 32 Shakespeare, in this sense, embodied Coleridge’s theory of the “esemplastic” imagination, which “dissolves, diffuse, dissipates, in order to re-create.” To attend or read Hamlet means to be in the presence of an “enormous, intellectual activity,” both Hamlet’s and the author’s who represents that activity in dramatic language. In Keats, to mention one more Romantic poet conceived in their reading of the earlier triumvirate, we have a poet finely attuned not only to the “negative capability” of Shakespeare 31 See Geoffrey H. Hartman, “A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa,” Modern Philology 59, no. 3 (1962). 32 From Coleridge’s Table Talk (1830), collected in Coleridge’s Literary Criticism, ed. J. W. Mackail (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 7. 205 and the “gormandizing might” of Milton, but also the lush, bucolic feel of Spenser. 33 For Keats, Spenser’s career in the genres of pastoral, epic, and love lyric provided a model, which led to the emulation of the Spenserian stanza in “Imitation of Spenser” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Although he would ultimately adopt the Ode as his most personal and thus accomplished genre, Keats found in Spenser a liberatory figure whose experiments in form led to experiments in feeling. Like his close acquaintance, Percy Shelley, Keats saw in Spenser a national and political ally, a poet whose verse could teach readers how to feel, and in feeling achieve liberty. While Keats was not as overtly cognitive (he deplored “poetry that has a palpable design upon us”) in his argument as his contemporaries, his verse nevertheless possesses a movement that channels emotion in a way that makes it equivalent to thought. 34 For Keats, feeling is thought but at a more refined level. In their engagement with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, the Romantic poets drew “sustenance from the dead.” 35 Just as the Modernists returned to Shakespeare and other early modern sources such as John Donne for inspiration, the Romantics defined their moral and aesthetic agendas in relation to earlier literature. But it was not simply a relationship of influence as Harold Bloom would have it, but one of calling; that is, vocation, which is what Sidney identified and promulgated when he argued, “a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it” (111:32-33). Poets must be free to realize their art, which means relying less on rhetoric and imitation than on what lies within. For Wordsworth and company, poetry became 33 Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton are the most cited authors in Keats’s letters and the authors most alluded to in his poetical work. See Keats to George and Tom Keats (December 21, 27 (?), 1817), and Keats to James Rice (March 24, 1818), in John Keats: Selected Letter, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 34 Keats to J. H. Reynolds (February 3, 1818), Selected Letters. 35 T. S. Eliot, “A Review of The Poets’ Translation Series I-VI,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Vol. 1: The Apprentice Years, 1905-1918, ed. Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2021) 494. 206 a confluence of memory, inspiration, thought, and feeling, which did not eliminate schemes, decorum, or proportion from poetry, but placed those strictures in the service of the active mind. But more than anything, the thinking style embodied in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton matters to subsequent poetry because it pushes against accepted norms, preconceived ideas, and challenges us to think otherwise. It is forward looking poetry that can be nostalgic in its prophetic stance. (Just look at “sage and serious” Spenser for someone who used the past to teach and ultimately shape the future.) The elliptical and obscure poetry of the twentieth century “language poets,” for example, was born in Shakespeare’s late play. 36 The allusiveness of Geoffrey Hill’s verse is an echo of Milton’s labyrinthine similes. Alice Oswald’s ethnography of the voices of the river Dart might draw directly from Wordsworth’s Derwent, but their flowing waters of inspiration and change are informed by Spenser’s dilations in Faery Land. A thinking style breaks with tradition by insisting on alternative perspectives. Poetic thinking does not commence without resistance or at least disagreement even if the eventual “thought” (the completed thinking) results in agreement or acquiescence. In this sense, thinking constitutes a constancy of motion, whether as argument, representation, or choice, which is process (energia) understood as actualization, and not simply the static or completed idea. Spenser, for example, might have planned The Faerie Queene out beforehand as a Sidnean “fore- conceit,” but the act of composing the poem generated a different poem and a different idea. “Fashioning a gentleman,” in other words, meant diffusing virtue across several characters and books rather than instilling them in a single, heroic ideal as in classical epic, medieval romance, and their Italian progeny. As the existing poem illustrates, Spenser’s poetical temperament would 36 See Charles Olson’s essay on Shakespeare’s late style, “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Collected Prose: Charles Olson, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 207 not allow for a conventional heroic ideal. Arthur, the supposed poetic ideal, appears in the poem, but he never achieves what Henry Peacham would have called a “complete gentleman.” Rather, Arthur identifies an unfulfilled as well as an abandoned poetic ideal. The actualization of the virtuous ideal in the argumentative act, in other words, turns The Faerie Queene into a new poem, one in which the earlier idea(l) of virtue becomes something else. Spenser’s fashioning, which comes from the Latin “factio,” “a making or doing,” introduces a kinetic force that unfolds as thinking. In resisting the virtues bequeathed to him by tradition, Spenser defines another form of heroic ideal, “Mutabilitie.” Such departures from tradition, style, and argument constitute the early modern intervention in the history of literature and the arts more generally. The period defines itself as “early modern” not only through its scientific discoveries, religious revolutions, and increasing sense of individualism, all of which anticipate modern paradigms of thought and behavior, but also through the expressive acts of mind and movement underlying those shifts, which appear most conspicuously through the artistic styles of the period. In a twentieth-century poem such as A. R. Ammons, “Corsons Inlet” (1965), the mind freeing itself from strictures of form and constraint are the direct inheritance of the personal and thinking style developed and illustrated by the early moderns: I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight: [ . . . ] there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance in the overall wandering of the mirroring mind. (13-18, 27-29) 37 37 Ammons, “Corsons Inlet,” Collected Poems, 1951-1971 (New York: Norton, 2001). 208 In this passage, “thought” is not thinking, but the paradigmatic “boxes” of conformity, habit, and in particular the life of the city and its monopolization on the mental life. In the “dunes” of the inlet, however, a motion abounds that corresponds to the free mind, the thinking mind that “flow[s],” “bend[s]” and “wander[s].” Not only does the verbal language of kinesis illustrate the shifting movement of the poet’s thinking and its opposition to a previous or controlling “form,” what could be called the rhetorical tradition in the context of this study, but also the staggered lines, the punctuation, and the serial listing. Modern theorists, specifically physicists, call this type of movement and deformation “entropy,” but in its poetico-metaphysical context, it constitutes Sidney’s energia. Energia underlies the “sandy paths of remembrance,” which can be traced back to Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” Milton’s transumptive allusion, Shakespeare’s eddying soliloquies, and ultimately Spenser’s “dilations of being.” 38 These are the conspicuous examples of thinking moments moving through time. Not only are they in conversation with one another, just as Shelley said all literature is one grand poem, but they identify the constant flux and flow of the imaginative mind as it grapples to articulate itself to itself. As representative of a good deal of modern and contemporary poetry from T. S. Eliot to Jorie Graham, Ammons’ poetry looks and feels radically different from a Pindaric Ode, even a Petrarchian love lyric. To these earlier poets, Ammons’s poetry would look unfinished, lacking art and rhetoric. The sense would no doubt be conveyed, but much of the poetry, which the above passage is representative of Ammons’s longer work, would read, or even feel like an “essay” (i.e., attempt) rather than a finished product. It is not just the lack of rhyme or the poem’s “free-form,” but the subject and the way in which the image forms and deforms in the temporal 38 Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in a Poetic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 54. 209 unfolding of the poem. The poem thinks rather than captures a completed thought. It flows, and in flowing, creates its form. Ammons, in other words, demonstrates one of the fundamental differences between what is traditionally understood as thinking or reasoning and intellect or knowing. This distinction identifies what is at stake when we talk about literary thinking. Literary thinking does not seek answers or certainty but meaning. Meaning does not only connote individual and personal experience of a moment imbued with significance and worth, but also change. What was once meaningful can change the next day, which is how poetry works. If Ammons, hypothetically, for example, were to attempt the exact poem a month or even a day later, it would be different. Its thinking and thus execution would be different because Ammons is not composing to a form, art, or even idea necessarily, but a process. The same applies to much of the poetry discussed in this study. Its creation is of the moment, a thinking moment as opposed to a “horizon of expectation,” or what this study refers to as rhetoric. 39 Poetry’s claim to move and inform thus lies in it “energiac” capacity to elicit a meaningful as opposed to a knowing response from the reader, and this can only be accomplished if the poem itself embodies this meaningful articulation in its own creation and form. 39 See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 210 Bibliography Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and The Lamb: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. 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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The Anatomy of Cognition: Thinking Moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton refines the notion of thinking in relationship to literature and human knowledge more generally. By identifying three modes of what I call “literary thinking” in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, I argue that literature provides an alternative to psychological and philosophical definitions of thinking, which are traditionally based on notions of logic, reason, judgment, and understanding. While not antithetical these modes of thinking, literary thinking, however, tends to be elliptical, counterfactual, emotional, playful, and ultimately subjunctive. Its various modes offer connotative possibilities rather than denotative answers to what it means to be human. But just as important as providing a taxonomy and genealogy for understanding literary thinking, I make the claim that literature affords in these modal instances a means of expanding what Bernard Williams calls “ethical consciousness.” Moving the question of thinking from its traditional place in epistemology and psychology to literary poiesis (making), I return thinking to its ethical context; that is, a means of changing the world.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Minas, Steven Aaron
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The anatomy of cognition: thinking moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
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College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Doctor of Philosophy
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English
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2022-08
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07/22/2022
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allusion,aside,cognition,kinesis,Milton,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Renaissance poetry,rhetoric,Shakespeare,soliloquy,Spenser,style,thinking
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), Anderson, Emily Hodgson (
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Tags
allusion
aside
cognition
kinesis
poetics
Renaissance poetry
rhetoric
soliloquy
Spenser
style
thinking