In Shakespeare’s imagined worlds, love of the same for itself, the principle Levinas identifies with the opposite of ethics, seems to characterize not just the psychology of sociopathic loners such as Edmund, Iago, and Richard III, but also to breed tainted, diseased forms of sociality. As illustrated profoundly by Dionyza in Pericles, Prince of Tyre and the Queen in Cymbeline, murderous maternal solicitude for the worldly flourishing of one’s offspring may function as a dark counterpart of incestuous or quasi-incestuous paternal colonizations of one’s own children. Shakespeare highlights how both paternal and maternal identifications of the good with the flourishing of selected others may foster an amorality that equates nature with self-aggrandizing energies and views those energies as alone giving law or reason a basis that is neither conventional nor imaginary.
So prominent is the theme of ethics’ difference from kinship-ethnic loyalties in Shakespeare’s thought that, as Patrick Colm Hogan notes, his heroic plots strikingly deviate from tragicomedic motifs that commonly privilege in-groups over outsiders: “for Shakespeare, the exiled ruler rarely redeems himself by defending the home society against an invasion by another nation. Rather, the exiled ruler is joined with the other nation and invasion. Examples include King Lear; Arthur in King John, Malcolm in Macbeth, Coriolanus.…”1 Shakespeare calls attention to the presence within nature of qualities that Levinas identifies with conatus, a term he borrows from Spinoza to describe the endeavor (conatus) of organisms to preserve and enhance their own loves and wellbeing.2 For Levinas, “the conatus of beings … takes dramatic form … in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are all at war with one another” (OB 4), whereas ethics, an “otherwise than being” discovered in responsibility for others, in experiencing oneself as “one-for-another,” goes “counter-current to a conatus,” as in disinterested helping of another, and in doing so constitutes “goodness” (OB 18).
Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cymbeline both dramatize the strong presence of conatus in family bonds and anticipate Levinas in treating naturalizations of self-love or its extension in love for kin as potential sources of unethical thought and conduct. Like Levinas, Shakespeare suggests that undoing the effects of invidious naturalizations of self-love involves, paradoxically, processes of recurring to a deeper or more original nature, one whose anteriority, in Levinas’s words, “is ‘older’ than” (OB 101) all conflations of being and will. Shakespeare no less than Levinas insists that will and its projects are secondary to the psychic, emotional effects “of an attachment that has already been made,” a being affected for which the “evocation of maternity … as metaphor suggests to us the proper sense of oneself” (104). We discover an enjoining connectedness to others prior to the ego’s schemes, outside any calculus of utility, the cognitive and affective registering of which exposes the delusiveness, the belatedness, of what we previously had taken to be original nature.3
Shakespeare and Levinas both argue that even though organic materiality urges cupiditas or conatus upon us, for either to become totalizing forces within individuals and societies, we must assent to metaphysical arguments—in Edmund’s case, that nature’s law is self-promotion, or, in Dionyza’s and the Queen’s, that likeness of kind rightly regulates affections and loyalties. Such arguments’ proximity to Neoplatonic metaphysical principles highlights surprising affinities between Christian traditions and modes of thought privileging oneself and those like oneself. These affinities, intensified within what Thomas Betteridge calls the “homogenising logic” of Post-Reformation “confessional Christianity,”4 are surprising because of Christianity’s desire to understand itself as liberating humankind from both the pagan predatory naturalism imprisoning the classical world and an ethnically grounded, “carnally” understood “old law” keeping us in subjugation to the “old Adam.” For Shakespeare as well as for Levinas, seriousness about dissociating the good from lineage or in-group triumph, and so from sublimated egoism, mandates searching interrogation of Neoplatonism’s influence upon Western thought and culture.
Within the religious-political discursive contexts of Shakespeare’s England, the propensity of social affection to emerge from and resolve itself back into what Levinas calls conatus was identified with cupiditas—understood by Christian patristic-scholastic thought to denote egoistic perversion of will, a consequence of original sin’s tainting of nature.5 For the strong Augustinianism championed by Puritanism, so intractable was the will’s perversion that nature could only be grace’s adversary.6 Such views were inimical to Erasmian-humanist defenses of theatre, and of literary art generally, which, while acknowledging endemic evil in human nature through original sin, valorized imaginative writing, and especially plays, as a means by which natural but undeveloped or unawakened inclinations for the good could be aroused and directed toward fertile intercourse between kindliness and rationality.7 From perspectives theologically committed to totalized natural human unregeneracy, however, those defenses appeared naïve as best, and complicit with Pelagianism at worst.8
Condemning self-love as emblematic of unregenerate human nature was complicated, however, by the prominence within such traditions of Neoplatonic arguments that love of one’s own good leads, through a succession of secondary, deficient goods, to finding in true goodness and true beauty, or God, the proper object of desire—proper because it alone obviates the lack or need motivating desire. Notably, Diotima in the Symposium subsumed parental love into self-love: since people “long for the good to be their own” (206a) and to be their “own forever,” all “Love is a longing for immortality” (207a), and so “every creature prizes its own issue” (208b), but as offspring offer only proxy and contingent immortality, it is much more enviable “to gaze on beauty’s very self—unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint that haunts the frailer loveliness of flesh and blood” (211e). Through “true contemplation” the immortal ideal may “become [one’s] own forever.”9 Similarly, in Plotinus, erotological progress and ontological ascent converge in pursuit of a “well-being” (eudaimonia) in which “liv[ing] superabundantly,” without lack or need, follows from philosophical transcendence of worldly, bodily vulnerabilities.10 Imagining the human-divine relationship in terms of an erotic quest for fulfilled desire and satisfied need,11 Augustine argues that our enjoyments of human relationships are only proper and significant insofar as they point to what we hope to enjoy from God hereafter,12 and Pseudo-Dionysius, stressing that what proceeds from God yearns to return to Him, argues that the soul’s erotic return to God transcends individuation and mortal cognition.13 To reconcile Neoplatonism with Christian condemnation of self-love, Aquinas argues that “in the order of generation, faith must precede hope and charity,” for hope of “obtaining some good from someone” leads to loving him, but “in the order of perfection, charity precedes faith and hope,” as “charity is the mother and root of all the virtues,” for it is their “form.”14 In Shakespeare’s time, Neoplatonism informed the naturalizing of totalized self-preoccupation within Puritanism (taken to be evil in relation to this life, but good when focused on personal salvation) as well as the positing, in the hermetic, Pythagorean humanism of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and Giordano Bruno, of one’s own perfection or transcendence as the object of erotic desire.15 Moreover, the naturalizing of conatus within Neoplatonism reinforced conflations of being and will—whether those Edmund and Marlowe’s Machiavels assume, or those posited by nominalist and Calvinist theology.16
If, however, egocentric, ethnocentric privileging loses its hold upon our understanding and imagination, we need not remain captive to the sorts of asocial radical individualism that for Shakespeare are figured in Machiavels, Puritans, and hermetic-heroic Platonism, and that for Levinas are lionized as “authenticity” by Heidegger and Sartre (TI 40-48, 302-304). For both Shakespeare and Levinas, to address the deep conceptual roots of familiar thinking that marginalizes the ethical and deprecates or obscures affective sociality’s non-coincidence with egoism, one must contest the egocentric orientation at the core of Western thought. Shakespeare does this through the recovery-of-lost-kin motif of romance, Levinas through making embodied subjectivity the site for rethinking love and transcendence in radically non-Platonic terms.
Depicting collusion of self-love and love of kin in Dionyza and the Queen, Shakespeare returns to themes central to his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. There, Tamora, the queen of the Goths captured in battle by Titus, determines to destroy him and his family because he refuses her request to spare one of her sons from dying as a funeral sacrifice for the sons Titus has lost in the war. Set in a late antiquity yet untouched by Christianity, the play couches Tamora’s plea for caritas in terms evocative of its later religious connotations. Moreover, she attempts to inspire in Titus the sort of caritas-priming ethical imagination that theatrical performances associated with Erasmian pedagogy were intended to achieve.17 “Gracious conqueror, / Victorious Titus,” she exclaims, “rue the tears I shed. / A mother’s tears in passion for her son; / And if thy sons were ever dear to thee, / O, think my son to be as dear to me!” (1.1.104-108). Titus remains unmoved by her appeal that he “draw near the nature of the gods” (117) by “being merciful” (118), for he is influenced by tradition’s authority, which enshrines a pagan “old law” sanctioning ethnic privileging as ethical obligation. Thus he finds his being affectively touched by her request of “pardon” (121) to be insignificant. Gesturing to his sons, he declares, “These are their brethen, whom your Goths beheld / Alive and dead, and for their brethen slain / Religiously they ask a sacrifice” (122-124).
The pointed stress upon “Religiously” highlights how positive law, predicated both upon a notion of retributive justice and the imperative to get for one’s own “brethen” what is their due, makes affectively mediated moral intuitions ineffective or “unfulfilled.” For Erasmus, all positive law rendering the ethical inconsequent or secondary constitutes legalism or formalism, which he frequently calls, rather unfortunately, “Judaic,” a fall of religion into ritualism and ethnic-privileging that he sees Christianity, if true to the teaching of Jesus, as rectifying.18 In Titus Andronicus the conflating of religion with in-group solidarity yields a bitter harvest, for Titus’s presiding over ritual sacrifice sows such hatred in Tamora that she readily embraces Aaron’s plot to exact revenge by violating Titus’s daughter and murdering her suitor, the Emperor’s brother. Notably, the attack takes place during a hunt—appropriate for the dehumanizing enmity involved. Indeed, Tamora’s Moorish paramour Aaron, an analogue to Ithamore, the unscrupulous Moorish servant of the Machiavel Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,19 presents nature as intrinsically hospitable to predatory violence: “The forest walks are wide and spacious, / And many unfrequented plots there are, / Fitted by kind for rape and villainy” (2.1.114-116).
Imagery of nature’s wild amorality and imagery of indifference to others’ speech and gestures run throughout the play, nowhere more horrifically than in the attack upon Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. Nature, hardly primitively good, is made worse through misuse of culture. Aaron’s plans have a literary inspiration. He declares, Titus’s “Philomel must lose her tongue to-day” (2.3.43). Moreover, within socio-political worlds where successful violence confers legitimacy, as in ancient, raiding-warrior cultures and the empires they spawn, barbarism so easily infuses thought that Aaron speaks of Tamora’s sons “mak[ing] pillage of [Lavinia’s] chastity” (44). Though Tamora wants to stab her so that a “mother’s hand” may “right” a “mother’s wrong” (121), she tells her son to enjoy Lavinia’s “honey,” but not to let “this wasp outlive, us both to sting” (131-132). Dismissing Lavinia’s appeals to her as a fellow woman by declaring, “I will not hear her speak” (137), Tamora prompts Lavinia to declare her hardness unnatural, noting that the lion is reputed to be “mov’d with pity” (151) and “Some say that ravens foster forlorn children / The whilst their own birds famish in their nests” (153-54). Lions, thought to be naturally compassionate, were associated proverbially and in bestiaries with Christ, which suggests in context that Lavinia appeals to a moral understanding, glimpsed vaguely in intuitions of goodness within nature, as yet without authority in her cultural world. Moreover, her citing ravens, typically associated with predation, as extending kindliness beyond kin in ways that humans should emulate, reinforces the monstrousness of the human actions.20
The scene implies that to subsume nature under notions of conatus or cupiditas alone, as both barbaric pagans and Puritans do, is to make oneself deaf not only to others’ speech, but also to all that “speaks” in nature and in our natures against treating others as prey to be hunted. Likened to a doe (2.1.93, 2.2.26, 3.1.89-92) by her victimizers, and (to different effect) by Titus and his brother, Lavinia, in the last words she can utter, exclaims, “No grace? No womanhood? ah, beastly creature” (2.3.182). What is “beastly” attains chilling articulation within a “womanhood” bereft of any “grace” of maternal compassion toward non-kin. But the shudder that dramatizing monstrousness induces, the impossibility of processing the action cognitively without experiencing it as evil, upon which the pathos of Shakespeare’s scene depends, attests to how deeply woven into our natures is intuition that, as Levinas puts it, we “cannot decline responsibility,” for the “position of the subject is a deposition” (OB 127) in the sense that we are “de-positioned” from an assumed egocentric standpoint, from a viewpoint where our will, our intentions, our projects regulate the significance of what is seen and felt. From an Erasmian perspective, the inescapability of such non-egocentric intuitions and their presence within cultural worlds that are unable to acknowledge fully their significance attest to how much both pagan wisdom and Hebraic piety are marked by hope for a dimly sensed better dispensation that, for Erasmus, the incarnation makes possible. However, as much as Lavinia’s words may point, unknowingly, in such directions, the play to which she belongs delineates a world cut off from all moral-spiritual transformation.
The vengeance Titus exacts for Tamora’s revenge, on the contrary, completes the Ovidian script that Aaron sets in motion. Titus murders Tamora’s sons and serves them to her as food. This constitutes in his eyes an elegant poetic justice, but it requires him to see nature, the earth, and temporal-material existence as no more than Tamora’s image and likeness, and so, dead to redemption. His scheme is to make her “Like to the earth” in “swallow[ing] her own increase” (5.2.191), so that the mother “daintily” (5.3.61) feeds on “the flesh that she herself hath bred” (62). Lavinia’s voice, expressing faith in grace’s inflection of nature, is silenced, her tongue cut away amid the unfolding of a horrific predatory naturalism for which Ovid’s tale of Philomel and Procne serves as description and model. Still, the arts in both Ovid and Shakespeare give voice to the voiceless (Philomel weaves an account of her violation, Lavinia points to Ovid’s text and then writes, using her teeth [4.1.30-80]). Both stories suggest that language and culture, at last, partake of nature’s non-coincidence (paradoxical or miraculous) with beastliness, even though nature and culture nonetheless provide “plots” for audacious crimes, in the sense of both spaces and stories. Speech, moreover, is associated with civilizing art, as in humanist allegorizing of the Orpheus myth,21 because what it has most urgently to say, as the indirect speech of Philomel’s weaving and Lavinia’s gesturing indicates, concurs with demands for justice and mercy, demands presented in Biblical prophetic writing as transcendent and absolute.
Still, the play’s final speech, delivered by Titus’s surviving son Lucius, reveals language’s moral duality. His speech pins all blame upon Tamora, thus conveniently forgetting the initial funeral sacrifice of her son. This forgetting and editing discloses how easily cultural discourse may become, in Levinas’s terms, a said (a claim, an account, a picturing of things) that betrays the saying (the lingusitic bearing witness to ethical responsibility) it ought to serve (OB 5-7, 31-59; BPW 66-77; LR 151-159): as Tamora’s “life was beastly and devoid of pity” (5.3.199), Lucius claims, so her corpse should be “prey” (198): “let birds on her take pity” (200). Shakespeare’s play, of course, remembers what Lucius would forget. It thus pries from Lucius’s said what it would conceal.
In addition to noting how rhetoric facilitates totalizing conceptual violence, Shakespeare also intimates that unethical privileging of one’s own tends particularly or archetypically to be affiliated, dubiously, with women. For Shakespeare, the locus classicus of such topoi would be Virgil’s Aeneid, where extreme anger (“tantae … irae,” 1.11) fueling the “Furor impius” (1.292) that triggers human reversion to bestiality is traced back to maternal-feminine impulses identified with Juno’s protection of hearth and home, which are associated with archaic savageness through Allecto and inhospitable in-group solidarity through Amata’s appeal to Latinus: “o genitor? Nec te miseret gnataeque tuique? / nec matris miseret …? / … / … quid cura antiqua tuorum …?” (7.360-61, 366) [“O father, and hast thou no pity on thy daughter and thyself? no pity on her mother …? What of thine old love for thine own …?].22
To the extent that Shakespeare makes such motifs his, and that Levinas couches positive kinship relations in terms of fathers and sons (as in TI 267-280), both may be viewed as not exempt from Lucius-like Virgilian tendencies.23 But in Shakespeare, maternal imperialism is linked with naturalized patriarchal Neoplatonic metaphysics (so that homicidal mothers like Tamora identify with deeply flawed notions of authoritative maleness), and in Levinas resistance to conatus involves a distinctly maternal otherwise than being: “The one-for-another has the form of sensibility or vulnerability, pure passivity or susceptibility …, psyche in the form of a hand that gives even the bread taken from its own mouth. Here the psyche is the maternal body” (OB 67); “Rather than a nature, earlier than nature, immediacy is this vulnerability, this maternity, this pre-birth or pre-nature in which the sensibility belongs” (75-76); “The sensible—maternity, vulnerability, apprehension—binds the node of incarnation into a plot larger than the apperception of self” (76).24 For both Shakespeare and Levinas, what is paradoxically entwined in a heightened, clarifying way in the maternal is characteristic of human subjectivity in general, caught as it is between ethical imperatives that are undeclinable and a preference for what belongs to us that is experienced as natural and unnatural simultaneously.
In Shakespearean romance the opening of the body to affect exposes patriarchal cultural orders to the corrective authority of feminine voices (both actual women and maternal nature) and the soul to the regenerative effects of forgiveness. Suspending all calculus of quid pro quo, this forgiveness finds human expression in “wondrous,” “foolish” offerings of love that seem to echo nature’s production of second chances. Human and natural worlds amend the logic of consequences, even as the inevitability of yielding one’s hold on the good things of mortal life to others (as in surrendering youth to the next generation) is, like bodily susceptibility to affect and sexual desire, redeemed by entwinement within ethical sociability. Ian McAdam notes that by “anchor[ing] the process of regeneration” in the romances “thoroughly within the sphere of human agency,” Shakespeare continues his tragedies’ balancing of “anti-Calvinist … downplay[ing of] human depravity and absolute dependence on divine grace” with insistence “that excessive self-assertion … can vitiate human integrity as effectively as a belief in futile human agency.…”25 Because redemption entails both displacement of egocentric patterns of valorization and desire, and appreciative affirmation of the goodness of what is other, with its own integrity, the romances embrace modes of being for another and pluralism that cannot easily be resolved into Neoplatonic allegory. This is a departure from the genre’s prototypes, Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Il pastor fido.26
Shakespeare’s turn to romance seems to have been prompted by encountering, in an old play, in a prose narrative and/or fragmentary play script by George Wilkins (an otherwise undistinguished minor writer), or in all of the above, a reworking of Greek romance and medieval poetry.27 This tale of the miraculous recovery of a lost daughter and wife stimulated the writing of what are now Acts Three through Five of Pericles, Prince of Tyre,28 which in turn seems to have prompted Shakespeare’s elaborate interrogations of romance motifs in the plays that followed—a generic turn perhaps related to the unfolding of a close relationship with his elder daughter.29 Each act of Pericles begins with a monologue by the fourteenth-century poet John Gower, underscoring the archaic, mythic nature of its material, and perhaps playing off against the old-fashioned stiffness of its earlier treatment.30
Even so, already in the non-Shakespearean first and second acts the material speaks to long-standing Shakespearean preoccupations, depicting the incest of the King of Antioch, Antiochus, with his daughter as epitomizing Macbeth-like desires to control time and nature (evident in his use of riddles to put her potential suitors to death). Young Pericles intuits that the riddle describes father-daughter incest, for its scrambling of familial relations (“He’s father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife—and yet his child” [1.1.68-69]) issues from patterns of natural predation (“I feed / On mother’s flesh which did me breed” [64-65]) whose political articulation is tyranny, taking successful force as its own justification. Once Pericles sees incest as Antiochus’s perverse, monstrous extension of sovereignty’s prerogatives, he flees the consequences of that perception—first by escaping Antiochus’s court and then by exiling himself from his own kingdom, Tyre, lest he be killed for having grasped the secret.31
Pericles’s account of his reluctance to confess what he knows, not present in the sources, “All love the womb that their first being bred, / Then give my tongue like leave to love my head” (107-108), links love of kind for kind, the source of natural affections but also a core Neoplatonic metaphysical principle,32 not only to incest, but also to natural instincts of self-preservation. Loving one’s own head, wanting to continue in enjoyment of all that is sweet in life, connects Pericles to Antiochus by connecting the naturalness of self-preservation to the naturalness of aspiring to retain possession for oneself of all that is enjoyable. Antiochus’s retrieving in his nubile daughter what time, through his wife’s death (1.pro.21-30), has taken away connects incest to predation, but also to natural desires to undo nature’s bond with time, desires which, as Diotima argues, subsume love of others into longing for one’s own immortality. If romance plotting here evokes Neoplatonic themes, it does so in destabilizing, subversive ways.
Associations between beauty’s promise of untrammeled enjoyment with incest, tyranny, and asocial self-enclosure are reinforced by the contrast, presented in Act II, between Antiochus and King Simonides, who encourages his daughter’s Thaisa’s marriage, and affirms her choice of Pericles. He notes with pleasure, “how she’s in it, / Not minding whether I dislike or no!” (2.5.19-20). While teasing her with a brief show of patriarchal authority, he remarks in an aside that her “peremptory” manner makes him “glad” (73, 74). Affirming the legitimacy of female agency makes acknowledging legitimate natural limits to fatherly-kingly sovereignty psychologically possible. It embraces pluralism, goodness within the difference of the other, which are themes that, as Levinas notes, are antithetical to the monistic thrust of Neoplatonism.33 In Simonides the “self-identification” integral to “paternity” (TI 267) and to Neoplatonic eros is modified by the child being at once “my own and non-mine,” the result of an “encounter with the Other,” here figured “as feminine” (267), whose abiding difference gives the father a relation to the future reducible neither to possession nor power: fecundity “does not bring an eternal life to an aging subject; it is better across the discontinuity of generations, punctuated by the inexhaustible youths of the child” (268), for “Transcendence … goes unto the Other” (269). What is desired is not, as in Neoplatonism, abrogation of lack or need, but rather, as in Simonides’s affirmation of his daughter’s will and sexuality, “again Desire,” so that the “true adventure of paternity” goes “beyond the simple renewal of the possible in the inevitable senescence of the subject” (269).
Yet the model of Simonides does not undo the impression made by Antiochus, for Pericles’s gaining a daughter seemingly to balance losing a wife is analogous to Antiochus’s incestuous replacement of wife with daughter. Thaisa gives birth aboard ship during a storm, is taken for dead, and, in conformity with the sailors’ “superstition” (3.1.50), is thrown overboard, in a casket, to appease the waves. The romance plot’s mythic logic implies that just as new life, Marina, is born upon elemental flux, so our vulnerability to mutable materiality shatters pretensions of sovereignty. Pericles declares, “We cannot but obey / The powers above us. Could I rage and roar / As doth the sea [Thaisa] lies in, yet the end / Must be as ‘tis” (3.3.29-32). Human subjection to nature, however, may be modified by confluences of charity and learning. After Thaisa’s casket floats ashore, she is revived by Cerimon, who has “studied physic” (3.2.32) and whose character, in another departure from the source texts,34 is marked by confidence in acculturation’s capacity to extend maternal, life-giving ethical agency: “I hold it ever / Virtue and cunning were endowments greater / Than nobleness and riches,” for understanding how “nature works” and thus how to effect “cures” “doth give me / A more content in course of true delight / Than to be thirsty after tottering honor, / Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags …” (26-28, 38-41). “Tottering honor” and “silken bags,” aristocratic and bourgeois values, are both tainted by the predatory egoism informing incest and tyranny. Miraculous romance plot twists (such as Thaisa’s rescue from death) become, paradoxically, natural possibilities once the egoism assumed by Neoplatonic psychology (and allegorized in tragicomedic romance) is, as in Cerimon’s case, denaturalized. Though his love of secret knowledge is potentially Faustian (and so Marlowean), and he is associated with magical music and so with Plotinian-Pythagorean Neoplatonic mysteries, his interest is not in power or wisdom for his own (self-centered) enjoyment, but in serving others.35
The figure of Cerimon allows Shakespeare to put in question Neoplatonism’s egoistic bent, as does Levinas, while nonetheless suggesting, again like Levinas, that Neoplatonism’s erotological monism has behind or within it intuitions or potential inconsistent with its self-enclosing anti-pluralism: “How, in Plotinus, would the One overflow with plenitude and be the source of emanation, if the One persevered in being, if it did not signify from before and behind being, out of proximity, that is, out of disinterestedness, … out of the-one-for-the-other?” (OB 95). So Cerimon’s fusion of skill and caritas gives back to another a life that is hers. From an Erasmian-humanist perspective, such signifying within the notion of emanation from plenitude discloses inchoate intuitions inhering in pagan wisdom, intuitions that caritas governs the “pre-nature” underlying nature, that ethical responsiveness structures human embodiment and sensibility.36
Moreover, charity breeds charity, as when the governor of Tharsus, Cleon, promises to care for the infant Marina while Pericles returns to Tyre, for, Cleon notes, Pericles had previously relieved his kingdom’s famine (acting, like Cerimon, gratuitously, without an interested motive): “Fear not, my lord, but think / Your Grace, that fed my country with your corn, / Must in your child be thought on” (3.3.17-20). The title “Your Grace” associates Pericles’s identity with actions recalling theological grace, and so presents sociability, friendship, and concord among states as what should naturally follow from conduct that is imitative of a “pre-nature” that is co-extensive with “maternal” divine love. It is conduct that, like Cerimon’s, moderates human vulnerability to nature by locating value elsewhere than in predation.
The aptness of humans to revert to predatory values, however, is dramatized in Act 4, when, after having raised Marina alongside her own daughter, Cleon’s wife, Dionyza, plots her murder because Marina’s natural and cultural accomplishments make her daughter’s appear slight by comparison. Like Lady Macbeth, Dionyza identifies manliness with maintaining asocial consistency against ethical and affective assault: “Let not conscience, / Which is but cold in flaming, thy [lone] bosom / Inflame too nicely, nor let pity, which / Even women have cast off, melt thee, but be / A soldier to thy purpose” (4.1.4-8). Dionyza gives Marina over to an assassin whose name, Leonine, denotes beastliness. She is rescued by pirates who sell her to a brothel, where the dark humor of the banter among Pander, Bawd, and their servant Boult reveals the perversion of social order through naturalizing and capitalizing upon sovereign claims to the use and enjoyment of others. The Bawd’s mock-maternal accents partake of Antiochus’s merging of tyranny and incest: “Come, you’re a young foolish sapling, and must be bow’d as I would have you” (4.2.87-88). When a horrified Cleon reproaches Dionyza, she offers, unlike her counterparts in the sources, a philosophical defense: like’s affinity for like makes natural her actions, for Marina “stood between” their daughter “and her fortunes. None would look on her, / But cast their gazes on Marina’s face” (4.2.31-33). Playing on semantic bonds between “kind” and “kin,” Dionyza insists her actions conform to the essence of maternity because they seek for offspring the triumphant enjoyment of being that Antiochus sought for himself through incest: “It pierc’d me thorough [to see Marina preferred to her daughter], / And though you call my course unnatural, / You not your child well loving, yet I find / It greets me as an enterprise of kindness / Perform’d to your sole daughter” (4.3.35-39).
Whereas Janet Adelman’s influential readings of malevolent maternity in Shakespeare take the core problem to be male horror before the thought and actuality of female sexuality, especially as localized in sexualized maternal bodies,37 the argument here is that the maternal body and female sexuality evoke horror when they are subsumed into the unchecked predation that follows from making responsiveness to conatus its own justification.38 Thus Shakespeare may be seen as confronting, and as asking his audience to confront, tensions internal to embodied human subjectivity that confound the easy demonizing of Dionyza characteristic of his sources.39
Were such “enterprises of kindness” as Dionyza’s to define human relations, the results would be unbearable, as Pericles’s being “in sorrow all devoured” (4.4.25) once he is falsely informed of Marina’s natural death attests. Audaciously, the play employs romance’s signature implausibility, the trope of beautiful maidens captured by pirates and/or sold into slavery miraculously maintaining their virginity, to dramatize the wonder that human subjectivity cannot but sense an absence of fit between itself and the logic of predation. Marina has, from the brothel-owners’ viewpoint, the unfortunate effect of “freez[ing] the god Priapus” through “quirks” and “reasons” and “prayers” that “would make a puritan of the devil” (4.6.3, 7-10). So Lysimachus, the local governor, loses all lecherousness in wonderstruck observation: “I did not think / Thou couldst have spoke so well, ne’er dreamt thou couldst. / Had I brought hither a corrupted mind, / Thy speech had altered it” (102-105). The ethical erupts as “an inversion of the conatus of esse” (OB 75),40 which explains why evil so often requires fortifying oneself against sense or talking oneself into the view that one “has no choice” but to obey nature’s predatory dictates, as when Boult, ordered to sexually brutalize Marina so she will be cooperative, responds to her appeals by exclaiming, “What would have me do? Go to the wars, would you? where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?” (170-173).
Marina escapes violation only by assuring Boult that her captors can “gain” from her by other means: she “can sing, weave, sew, and dance,” and teach others the same (182, 183). While of course this is a plot contrivance, it points to connections between sociability and the civilizing effect of the arts, a common humanist theme.41 Boult posits a world in which material acquisition is bound inexorably to predation. In offering gain-producing arts, Marina separates accumulation from predation sufficiently to liberate self-preservation instincts from necessary acquiescence in the self’s estrangement from ethical sense. As the harassed tone of Boult’s questions indicate, encountering another through speech cannot but activate that sense.42 While the classical text and Gower’s poem also contrast wages and direct exploitation, by Shakespeare’s time a fundamental displacement of slavery by upward socio-economic mobility becomes imaginable: indeed, Shakespeare’s own experience of escape from morally and socially compromising dependency through wealth-acquisition via skill in the arts makes Marina’s story an archaic, fabulous analogue to his own.43 Anthony Giddens notes that pre-modern polities’ dependence upon successful direct violence for wealth-creation puts people under continual threat of raiding, conquest, subjugation, and internal lawlessness, whereas the wage economies of modern nation-states may expose citizens to increased indirect violence (from administrative power and capitalistic coercion), but with the gain of significantly less exposure to pirates, slavery, and forcible prostitution.44
Even material, social revolutions (in Renaissance humanist terms, lessening of savagery through the arts, enhancing civility and prosperity), however desirable, cannot undo normative subjectivity’s proximity to Antiochus’s monstrousness, for they cannot block predatory “interestedness” from influencing intentional consciousness. They may, however, help reform socio-political contexts, and so decrease the hold of conatus over minds and hearts. Pericles regains his daughter because his ship is received hospitably in a foreign harbor and because hospitality to the ship extends to the governor’s, Lysimachus’, concern for the mental suffering of a stranger, Pericles. Unmotivated kindliness, charity, prompts a discussion of how Pericles’s speechless grief might be relieved, which leads to the thought that Marina’s artful singing might “make a batt’ry through his [deafen’d] parts, / Which now are midway stopp’d” (5.1.47-48). Instead, his evident suffering moves Marina to offer her story as a possible balm, which flushes Pericles out of himself, awakening concern for another: “My fortunes—parentage—good parentage—/ To equal mine—was it not thus? What say you?” (5.1.97-98).
Notably, what opens the miraculous possibility of regaining one’s lost daughter is “finding” one’s daughter in another, transcending the narrowing of affections to kin—“such a one / My daughter might have been” (107-108)—so that concern for others broadens into moral admiration. Pericles’s ability to address his daughter as “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget” (195), articulates a moral economy woven marvelously into nature—the daughter “begets” the father in the sense of prompting displacements of imperialistic egoism, thus paradoxically granting him something of the revitalized material flourishing that Antiochus’s incest would attain, but only through renouncing the consumption of the other upon which such well-being seemed, happily delusively, to depend. A similar mythic logic attends Pericles’s recovery of Thaisa through a vision of the goddess Diana: the moral suspension of masculine sovereign claims to sexual predation, suspension encoded culturally in veneration of virginity, renews and sustains the well-being implicit in recovering a beloved wife.45
Yet the plot Shakespeare inherits leaves unresolved, or undeveloped, two matters central to the romances that follow. First, the role of forgiveness in redemptive regeneration is slightly treated in Pericles’s story; second, the coming to an end in time of all our second chances is only glimpsed by Pericles’s declaration that Marina and her fiancé, Lysimachus, will rule Tyre (5.2.80-82), for, in accord with the wish-fulfillment logic of romance, the reality of ceding “sovereignty” to the next generation is veiled by retrievals (returning to and living on in Tyre) whose appearance of permanence is illusory.
In Cymbeline, Dionyza’s maternal monstrousness is recuperated in the Queen, whose determination to secure the flourishing of her son, Cloten, induces the Briton king, Cymbeline, to identify his sovereign will with the act of forcing his daughter, Imogen, to marry Cloten. As they are step-siblings, there are evident incestuous overtones in this dynastic-political effort at self-enclosing self-completion, as there also are in Cymbeline’s determination to appropriate his daughter’s sexuality to his desires. By making Cymbeline morally responsible for the “loss” of his daughter, Shakespeare combines the figures of Antiochus and Pericles. He thus returns to tragic variants of Lucianic-Erasmian folly, such as those explored from Julius Caesar through King Lear (where dogmatic self-consistency shuts out both others’ voices and one’s own dissonant intuitions46). But he also links that folly to the “bewitching” of ethical rationality by a predatory naturalism that translates into intolerance of another’s separateness from oneself, and thus hostility to all agencies not one’s own—especially women’s. So Cymbeline dehumanizes Imogen, calling her “Thou basest thing” (1.1.125) and “O disloyal thing” (131), because he construes her value in terms of himself: she is what “shouldst repair my youth …” (132).
Barricading himself against modification, Cymbeline obdurately refuses any “intercourse” with his daughter that might “beget” moral regeneration. Doing so, he makes her a metaphorical equivalent of the speechless Lavinia. In banishing her sensibly chosen, newly-wed husband, Posthumus Leonatus, a well-regarded courtier who, as orphan of a loyal warrior, was raised at court, Cymbeline induces Imogen to think of her father in terms of being “like the tyrannous breathing of the north / Shak[ing] all our buds from growing” (1.2.36-37). Such tyranny, as the imagery evoking Pluto and Persephone implies, rebels against nature’s bestowal of what we possess, our “inexhaustible youth,” upon others whose desire is distinct from our wills, whose flourishing necessarily displaces our sovereignty. Noting affinities between Cymbeline and Heliodorus’s 3rd or 4th century C.E. Greek romance, Aithiopika (re-discovered in 1523 and imitated by Sidney, Tasso, and Cervantes), Simon Reynolds notes that Imogen, like Heliodorus’s heroine Charikleia, “seems, through no fault of her own, to embody … rebellion” against a father whose “loss of understanding” threatens “loss of the child he has formed,” for he has “become victim of fraudulent and insubstantial images either created by his own mind or introduced into his thoughts by malign individuals.”47 Conflating the Other with an “image,” and so occluding the face and tuning out speech, is an ethical violence whose necessary counterpart, giving oneself over to rule by images, is idolatry—an appropriate failing, for Cymbeline’s one distinction within the chronicles and popular lore was that he was king at the time of Christ’s birth. He epitomizes all that Christianity ideally should transform.
Happily, in accord with Erasmus’s account of nature inflected by grace,48 female agency generates second chances by naturally and rationally resisting culture’s colonization by predation, and it does so in a manner that reveals, as in the comedies, providential alliances between female sexuality and ethical sociability.49 In Cloten we see that the kind of masculinity produced by maternal monstrousness is, by nature, affectively and ethically repugnant, and so sexually noxious, to any female subjectivity whose resistance to appropriation reflects not a competing egoism, but a wedding of sexual desire to prudential concern for conserving her own ethical agency. Shakespeare’s celebration of sensible women in the comedies, and the redemptive role he accords daughters and other female figures in the romances, articulate the ways nature prompts us to appreciate, as graces, what Bate identifies as the “two laws” of the Shakespearean world: first, that “truth is not singular” but aspectual, so that totalizing perceptions need dialogical contestation, ethical interruption; and second, that “Instead of being pre-determined, identity is performed through action.”50
Because Imogen is what she does, not the “thing” Cymbeline assigns her to be, he cannot allow her speech to touch him, but to the extent that she is taken by audiences and readers as the play’s heroine, aesthetic sense and ethical sense combine to make “the Desire that is the independence of the separated being and its transcendence” (TI 268) the source of enjoyments separating paternity from patriarchy and literary appreciation from co-option and colonization. Instincts of self-preservation collude with aspirations to participate in a moral community; as both Erasmus’s and Kristeva’s accounts of maternity emphasize, and as the passage from fecundity to transcendence and pluralistic politics in Levinas implies, this collusion brings into being a posterity of speaking subjects who, unlike the Queen’s son, are estranged from predation by kindliness and civility.51
Absent such estrangement, there is only rapacious egoism, epitomized by Cloten’s glee at the prospect of raping Imogen after murdering her husband, Posthumus: “She said upon a time (the bitterness of it I now belch from my heart) that she held the very garment of Posthumus in more respect than my noble and natural person, together with the adornments of my qualities” (3.5.133-138). Cloten’s complacency, his easy equation of “noble” with “natural,” not only blocks ethical sensibility but also fuels his resentment: “With [Posthumus’s] suit upon my back will I ravish her; first kill him, and in her eyes; there shall she see my valor, which will then be a torment to her contempt” (139-140). Cloten’s notion of “valor” epitomizes a barbarous inability to imagine successful force as anything other than its own justification.
Cloten’s speech will create tension in the audience, however, only if the barbarism / civility distinction that “valor” activates within their working memory is not deconstructed.52 To be “talked into” regarding the distinction as an arbitrary binary opposition or colonialist fiction is to be “talked out of” culturally mediated, not culturally created, ethical sense.53 Indeed, awareness of the distinction’s sophistic political history, critiqued at least since Euripides,54 does not undermine, or even really speak to, its self-authorizing revelatory force here—which is ethical, and so a “signifyingness” that “is not a knowing of being, nor some other access to essence” (OB 69).
Consistent with both Levinasian and Erasmian notions of a “pre-nature” measuring cultural meaning against ethical sense, Cloten’s use of “valor” prompts what Jenefer Robinson calls “non-cognitive affective appraisal,” setting in motion a process of “cognitive monitoring” in which “non-cognitive appraisals as ‘primitive’ emotions … are succeeded by complex cognitive activity”: “Like the startle response of the crayfish, human indignation is a three-stage process of affective appraisal, physiological responses, and cognitive monitoring, but unlike the startled crayfish, an indignant person is likely to be indignant about something requiring complex thought, and is also likely to catalogue her emotional state in words.…”55 Dramatized speech such as Cloten’s musing upon when his “lust hath din’d” on Imogen (3.5.141), and his construal of sexual appropriation as prologue to domestic and political subjugation—“to the court I’ll knock her back, foot her home again” (143-144)—imparts to cognitive monitoring an excitation of indignation that bears witness to the non-arbitrariness of ethical significance. By triggering such witnessing in its audience, Shakespearean theatre exposes cultural moral relativism to be only “theory,” a form of Lucianic folly screening us off from felt experiences of ethical subjectivity which are, as Levinas notes, the precondition for all interpretation, all possibility of cultural, political critique.56
Indeed, Cloten merely takes to their logical extremes attitudes and conduct that mark not just Imogen’s father, but also her husband and the depicted historical socio-cultural world in general—which, as Glenn C. Arbery notes, Shakespeare’s audience would have taken to be on the cusp of the Christian revelation.57 Posthumus’s love for Imogen is tainted by pride in possessing an exemplary woman, and so, seduced by an egoistic idolatry akin to Cymbeline’s, he is willing to bet Jachimo that she cannot be seduced (1.4). Jachimo, determined to win at all costs, hides in her bedchamber to discern details he can use to persuade Posthumus that he has possessed Imogen (2.2), details which, as Simonds notes, involve pictorial, decorative art associating Imogen with iconic female figures from classical mythology and history.58 Engaging in an ocular or cognitive variant of rape, as Shakespeare’s allusions to his own The Rape of Lucrece (2.2.12-14) and reprise of Philomel in Titus Andronicus (44-46) attest,59 Jachimo assimilates the Other into his intentional horizon, incorporating Imogen into an economy of the Same, which is how Levinas describes the violence of egoistic imperialism (TI 42-52).
By subsuming Imogen into a field of mastered knowledge, Jachimo succeeds in destroying Posthumus’s faith in her, prompting his easy lapse into misogynistic musings, “Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; / Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, / Nice longing, slanders, mutability …” (2.5.24-26). The drift of this free association is not just to project upon women every imaginable ethical failing,60 but also to identify women with totalized cupiditas, and so to unite the lack of “hope” ascribed by Christianity to the pagan, classical world with denials of goodness to others and those unlike oneself characteristic of Puritanism. All the unease and resentment engendered by intuitions of the body’s transience and the mind’s cognitive limits are discharged upon women who, paradoxically, are demonized by being imagined as pursuing forms of self-aggrandizement and self-sufficiency whose prospective loss or likely impossibility fuel male anxieties.61 To the extent that the audience and its socio-political world are implicated in Posthumus’s and Cymbeline’s patterns of thought and conduct, they, no less than the characters, stand in need of undeserved second chances—which of course is how Erasmian humanistic Christianity understands the incarnation’s significance.
In Cymbeline, unlike in Pericles, the recovery of what is lost entails recognizing, like Othello, that one has thrown “a pearl away / Richer than all [one’s] tribe” (5.2.247-48). Thus, miraculous restoration enjoins gratitude for unmerited forgiveness. Thinking Imogen dead, Posthumus exclaims, “Ay me, most credulous fool, / Egregious murtherer, thief, any thing / That’s due to all the villains past, in being, / To come! O, give me cord, or knife, or poison, / Some upright justicer!” (5.5.210-214). Learning that she who was discarded is nonetheless alive, Cymbeline declares, “How now, my flesh? My child? / What, mak’st thou me a dullard in this act?” (264-265). In accord with what Erasmus’s Dame Folly argues, human nature here discloses the impress of the divine in the foolish forgiveness that maternal, wifely, daughterly love of fools inscribes into daily experience, from which the material continuance of human life, and the kindliness that renders it bearable, flows.
Such wondrous folly’s anticipation of Christian revelation, and its correction of perversions of that revelation, structures the play’s central plot. Imogen, led away from the corrupt court to the wilds of Wales where she expects to meet her husband returned from banishment, learns, through the gratuitous goodness of her husband’s servant, Pisanio, that Posthumus intends to kill her. She initially falls into the counterpart of Posthumus’s misogyny, declaring, “Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming, / By the revolt, O husband, shall be thought / Put on for villainy” (3.4.54-56). Imogen associates losing an idealizing, idolatrous image of Posthumus, the object of naïve erotic desire, with loss of faith, so that, referring to the letter ordering her murder that Pisanio shows her, she asks, “The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, / All turn’d to heresy?” (81-82), and even suggests that all men have fallen through Posthumus: “Goodly and gallant shall be false and perjur’d / From thy great fail” (63-62). But Puritan-like deprecation of nature and others is lost, first, in experiencing within the wild, dressed as a youth, full human bodily vulnerability to the elements and hunger, which teaches her that “hardness ever / Of hardiness is mother” (3.6.21-22), but also that we only live, bodily, from finding civility in those one expects to be merely savage.62 She is caught in a cave eating the food of three apparently wild men, but rather than being killed, as she expects, she is welcomed hospitably to share the food, whereupon one declares, “I’ll make’t my comfort / He is a man, I’ll love him as my brother” (70-71), and she is told she is “‘mongst friends” (74).
The play being a romance, Imogen has marvelously come upon her actual brothers, kidnapped as small children by a loyal courtier of Cymbeline. Having been betrayed by court intrigue, he, in primitivist fashion, takes culture to be the site of corruption, and so has raised the boys according to the ways of nature, which he takes to be morally sufficient.63 Simonds points out that Shakespeare draws upon iconographic traditions of representing “wild men” as endowed with unsophisticated fortitude and honesty, though still brutish in an asociality linked with original sin, and Raphael Lyne notes that current scientific research discloses “unconscious processes of kin recognition” that make Shakespeare’s depiction of intuitions of affiliation between Imogen and her brothers less unrealistic than it appears.64 Still, the central point is that Imogen survives because, though a stranger, she is treated as kin (romance contrivance illuminating a fantastic truth—all humankind is “brethren”). Moreover, her discovery within nature (literally) of affections shaped by intuitions that the ethical calls us to override kin/outsider distinctions teaches her an ethics that transcends Puritan-like misanthropy.
Primed to redemptive transformation through being “saved” by reception into a community in which natural goodness and incipient civility are interwoven, Imogen enters into a new life, signified by her seeming death (from a poison treacherously given her by the Queen, though happily adulterated by a physician, Cornelius, who acts, like Pisanio, out of gratuitous goodness). After her funeral, she awakens to discover Cloten’s headless corpse, killed because of his imperious incivility to one of Imogen’s brothers. As he was wearing Posthumus’s clothes, she takes his body for her husband’s, and is filled with grief and renewed faith in Posthumus’s core goodness, upon the evidence of things unseen, that seems the height of folly (as her unjust accusations against Pisanio indicate) (4.2.316-332). But folly articulates a higher wisdom. Posthumus, convinced Imogen is dead, is seized, despite conviction of her guilt, with such remorse he wants to die (5.1.1-29), but he, like his wife, is reborn, sparing Jachimo when he defeats him in battle, though he believes Jachimo has cuckolded him. This act of grace smites Jachimo’s conscience (5.2.1-10).
These turnings of the heart prepare the way for the general forgiveness that accompanies the revelations of true identities in the final scene. Lyne notes that in “the stretches and strains” of the characters’ language we see the groping of “processes of cognition” struggling with what surpasses conventional conceptualization and its rhetoric,65 which is consistent with Arbery’s argument that the play elicits an exegesis consonant with the characters’ deepest intuitions but outside their interpretative frameworks, a lack of fit that “seems emblematic of one world in the process of becoming another.…”66 The agency of the Other becomes “maternal” in pushing us away from imprisonment within cupiditas/conatus by breeding in us appreciation of goodness in others sufficient to alienate us from self-love. Thus we become receptive to, and imitative of, forgiving grace.
Cymbeline acquires “proper appreciation” of Imogen in recognizing that her “gaze and her understanding transform the things they light upon,”67 and Posthumus enters into a new life through losing his sense of male sovereign entitlement: “You married ones, / If each of you should take this [his own] course, how many / Must murder wives much better than themselves / For wrying but a little!” (5.1.2-5). His glimpsing the core of Jesus’s ethics, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matt. 7:1; also see 7:2-5), makes possible his entering upon a course of action that (wondrously) brings him back into his wife’s presence. Similarly, his receiving her forgiveness (5.5.261-263) is prologue to his forgiving Jachimo with words whose cadences, “Live / And deal with others better” (419-420), echo those of Jesus, “go, and sin no more” (John 8:11), to the woman taken in adultery. Indeed, the “You married ones …” speech initiating his new life (5.1.2-5) is a proleptic exegesis of John 8:7: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” If the final scene makes clear that Imogen acts in some respects as a spiritual mother to both her husband and father, it also stresses that she is able, Christ-like, to offer others new life only because she has been thrice saved from death by the disinterested goodness of others—Pisanio, Cornelius, and the “wild men” (229-268). Wondrous “fulfillment” in the plot’s resolution of what “the ripeness of time” prepared attests, against claims to the contrary, to the goodness within nature and the heart’s understanding that makes redemptive rebirth into a “sociality” whose “irreducible excellence” is its “very plurality” (BPW 159) at once miraculously and naturally possible.
While intimating that only Christian exegesis beyond the scope of the characters may fully interpret the sense organizing the drama, Cymbeline is consistent with the ecumenicalism Betteridge and Maurice Hunt discern in Shakespeare’s treatment of religion68 and with the faith in drama’s affective-moral agency that Richard McCoy ascribes to him.69 It concludes with the suggestion that in opening us to recognize ourselves as fools in need of forgiveness, and in nurturing the forms of agency that bestow it, nature, via the gracious maternity embedded within it, produces the second chances from which culture renews its capacity to battle the barbarisms that arise from what Levinas would call conatus and that Christian piety identifies with cupiditas.70
Notes
1 Patrick Colm Hogan, How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51 cited; also see 46-74 and “Narrative Universals, Heroic Tragi-Comedy, and Shakespare’s Political Ambivalence,” College Literature 33 (2006): 34-66.
2 In locating unkindness within kin loyalties in ways consistent with Levinas’s analysis of conatus, Shakespeare critiques what Robin Headlam Wells calls “Renaissance primitivism,” the idea, derived largely from idealizing accounts of New World natives, that human nature was innately good or at least so malleable that removing corruption from society would eliminate from people all that was antisocial and evil. See Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 14-19, 101-105.
3 For a thorough dismantling of notions, made prominent by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, that Shakespeare and his contemporaries anticipate postmodern anti-essentialism in having no idea of an underlying, transhistorically constant, determinate but flexible human nature, see Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 6-30, and 177-203; also see Tom Alindon, Shakespeare Minus “Theory” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
4 See Thomas Betteridge, “Writing Faithfully in a Post-confessional World,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, ed. Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 226; also see Ian McAdam’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “anti-Calvinist agenda” in his “Magic and Gender in Late Shakespeare,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, 247-251, 247 cited.
5 To rebuff claims of self-sufficiency associated with Pelagianism, Augustine, in his later works, makes a categorical distinction between human merits, which are always evil in being ever reflective of a cupiditas making man “incapable of any good by himself” and merits which are gifts of grace—effects of heeding the call of “a voice from heaven” (Grace and Free Will, trans. Robert P. Russell, O.S.A., in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 59 [Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968], 265, 264). Aquinas, contrastively, reflecting the influence of Aristotelian ethics and metaphysics, argues that intellectual and moral virtues “are in us by nature aptitudinally and inchoately, but not according to perfection, except for the theological virtues, which are entirely from the outside” (Summa Theologica Q. 63, Art. 2, in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Anton C. Pegis [New York: Modern Library, 1948], 599).
6 In Calvin, the depravity of man and the autarkic sovereignty of God’s will reinforce one another (see Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne, bk. 3, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit [Paris: Libraire philosophique J. Vrin, 1960], 404-416). For Puritan reiterations of strong Augustinianism, see William Bucer, In regno Christi (1550), in Melanchton and Bucer, ed. William Pauck, in Library of Christian Classics, vol. 19 (London: SCM, 1969), 174-394; Thomas Lupton, The Second Part and Knitting up of the Book Entitled “Too Good to Be True,” (1581) in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 514-524; and Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of the Abuses of England (1583), ed. Frederick Furnival, New Shakespeare Society Reprints ser. 6, no. 12 (Valduz, Liechtenstein, Kraus, 1965). For variations of Augustinianism in Shakespeare’s England, see The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshal and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Wells points out that radical Protestantism, viewing human nature as “irreparably damaged by the Fall,” was “deeply suspicious of poetry, music, and drama,” and was extremely influential, indeed inscribed into Church of England dogma in the Thirty-nine Articles “approved by Convocation in 1562 and ratified by parliament in 1571” (Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 18).
7 On Erasmian-humanist defenses of theatre, see Robert B. Bennett, Romance and Reformation: The Erasmian Spirit of Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 17-21, 28-29, 52-54, 101; Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). For Shakespeare’s faith in dramatic art, see Richard C. McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For Erasmian contexts of Shakespeare’s thought and dramatic practice, see Betteridge, “Writing Faithfully,” 225-242; McAdams, Magic and Gender, 243-261; Jonathan Bate, Soul of The Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2010), esp. 116-130; John D. Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007); Christopher Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2006); Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 6-30; Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theatre in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Chris R. Hassel, Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Donald R. Wehrs, “Placing Human Constants within History: Generic Revision and Affective Sociality in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest,” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 551-558; Donald R. Wehrs, “Moral Physiology, Ethical Prototypes, and the Denaturing of Sense of Shakespearean Tragedy,” College Literature 33 (2006): 75-84; and Donald R. Wehrs, “Touching Words: Embodying Ethics in Erasmus, Shakespearean Comedy, and Contemporary Theory,” Modern Philology 104 (2006): 22-33. For Erasmus’s defense of secular literature, see esp. Erasmus, Antibarbari, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, in Collected Works of Erasmus [henceforth CWE], vol. 23, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); and Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Christening Pagan Mysteries: Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). For the centrality of Erasmus’s interconnected valorization of rhetoric and natural sociable affections to his theology, see Manfred Hoffmann, Rhetoric and Theology: The Hermeneutics of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). In A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, in CWE, vol. 26, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), Erasmus argues that an “innate capacity and inclination for the good” marks the nature of children, though both must be nurtured by sociable, kindly human relations and good liberal education lest they lie “fallow” or become perverted (311).
8 Indeed, both Luther-Calvinist Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholicism rejected Erasmian humanist Christianity, as Bruce Mansfield documents in his Phoenix of His Age: Interpretations of Erasmus, c. 1550-1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Betteridge notes that what the “confessionalism” of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism shared was at least as significant as their doctrinal differences: “all post-Reformation magisterial confessions were godly in their clericalism, the punishing demands they placed on their adherents, their insistence on seeing the world in black and white, and their desire to define, discipline and prescribe Christian praxis” (“Writing Faithfully” 226). Also see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25-89.
9 Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 558, 559, 560, 563.
10 Plotinus, Eenead 1.4, “On Well-Being,” 3, 25-30, in Plotinus, vol. 1, with trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 180-181.
11 See esp. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmond-sworth: Penguin, 1961), I, i-iii, 22-23; II, ii, 43-44; III, iv. 58-59, V, ii, 91-92; VII, ix-xxi, 144-56; XIII, xxxv-xxxviii, 346-347.
12 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, rpt. 1995), 46-47.
13 See Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystic Theology, in The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Part I, trans. Rev. John Parker (Merrick: Richwood Publishing Co., 1976), 130-208, On the Celestial Hierarchy, in The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Part II, trans. Rev. John Parker (Merrick: Richwood Publishing Co., 1976), 1-66; and Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
14 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q. 62, Art. 4, in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, 596.
15 On the currency of the hermetic tradition in Shakespeare’s England, and his critical assessment of it, see Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 122-131.
16 For affinities between Machiavellian aspirations to self-sufficiency and the model of divine sovereign will as the optimal form of subjectivity (derived from nominalist revolt against Thomistic rationalism), see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 37-226, 343-375; Heiko A. Oberman, “Via antiqua and via moderna: Late Medieval Prolegomena to Early Reformation Thought,” in From Ockham to Wyclif,, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 445-463; Ullrich Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3-24, 84-148; and Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 42-144.
17 See Bennett, Romance and Reformation, 17-54. Rebecca W. Bushnell contrasts the “static” formal speeches of Renaissance Senecan tragedy with French and Italian advocacy of vraisemblance (A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996], 150-167, 151 cited), but both speeches and dramatized actions were expected to move the emotions in morally improving ways.
18 For Erasmus’s insistence that Christian piety must enact an ethics of love that follows Christ’s teachings and example, see his Enchiridion militis christiana (Handbook of the Christian Soldier), trans. Charles Fartazzi, in CWE, vol. 66, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). On Erasmus’s ethical-religious critique of superstitious separation of soliciting divine favor from practicing the selfless love Christ enjoins, see his Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, in CWE, vol. 27, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); for his association of superstition with a formalism and ritualism that are “pagan,” see his Colloquies, trans. and ed. Craig R. Thompson, in CWE 39-40, esp. 39: 37-43, 55-63, 329-343, 352-367; 40: 621-674, 677-762. For Erasmus’s framing critique of ethically empty legalism and ritualism in terms of anti-”Judaic” argument, see Shimon Markish, Erasmus and the Jews, trans. Anthony Olcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For Erasmus’s argument that “pagan wisdom” intuits, albeit in darkened and fragmentary ways, the ethical imperative to follow Christ’s philosophy of love, see Boyle. For the ethical herme-nenutics underlying Erasmus’s reading of scripture, see Erika Rummel, Eramus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). While Erasmus attributes “Judaic” formalism and ritualism to scholastic dogmatic theology, the same critique may be leveled at Shakespeare’s Puritan contemporaries. Indeed, Wells argues that Shylock’s egocentric legalism gives him unmistakable Puritan attributes (Shakespeare’s Humanism 51-54).
19 In making Aaron a version of Ithamore, the young Shakespeare engages in out-group stereotyping at odds with his own, albeit limited, humanizing of Tamora and her sons, but his return to an upwardly mobile Moorish character in Othello suggests a degree of self-correction.
20 On lions, see Peggy Muñoz Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: An Iconographic Reconstruction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 288-291; on ravens, 204-205.
21 Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 12-13. He cites George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doige Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 6; and Henry Peacham the Elder, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), intro. William G. Crane (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954), sig. ABiiiv.
22 Virgil, with trans. H. Rushton Faircloth, vol. 2, rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 26-29.
23 For surveys of the debate on Levinas and feminism and gender, see esp. Diane Perpich, “Levinas, Feminism, and Identity Politics,” in Radicalizing Levinas, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 21-39, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 177-198; Tina Chanter, “Hands That Give and Hands That Take: The Politics of the Feminine in Levinas,” in Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics, ed. Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 48-62; Time, Death, and the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); and Stella Sandford, “Levinas, Feminism, and the Feminine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 139-160.
24 For the entwinement of ethics and maternity in Levinas, see Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). For the anti-virile thrust of Levinas’s reading of scripture, see Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: In the Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
25 McAdam, “Magic and Gender,” 249, 247. Also see Glenn C. Arbery, “The Displaced Nativity in Cymbeline,” in Shakespeare’s Last Plays: Essays in Literature and Politics, ed. Stephen W. Smith and Travis Curtright (Lanham: Lexington, 2002), 157-178.
26 See Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 29-65. She notes that both plays were available to Shakespeare in London editions, and that the genre combined miracle play and morality play features with those of classical tragicomedy and esoteric Greek romances and their Latin analogue, Apuleius’s Golden Ass (32).
27 The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre, trans. Gerald N. Sandy, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon (Berkeley: California, 1989), 738-772; John Gower, Confessio Amantis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), VIII: 270-2010, pp. 416-464.
28 On Wilkins’ authorship of Acts I and II, see MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Bate, Soul of the Age, 46-47; and Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 369. Also see Hallet Smith’s account in the introduction to Pericles, Prince of Tyre in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1479-1482; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 194-198; and M. W. A. Smith, “The Authorship of Acts I and II of Pericles: A New Approach Using First Words of Speeches,” Computers and the Humanities 22 (1988): 35-37.
29 Greenblatt, Will in the World, 361, 378, 389-390; and Bate, Soul of the Age, 406.
30 On the play’s use of Gower’s narration to create the effect of its being episodic dramatizations of an old tale, one feigned with both ancient and medieval genre conventions, see Andrew Hiscock, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre and the Appetite for Narrative,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, 16-35. On how juxtaposition of Gower’s narration with dumbshow reenactment highlights questions of what constitutes proper interpretation of old texts, see Charlotte Scott, “Reading Strange Matter: Words and Text in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, 158-171, esp. 166-67.
31 Jeannie Grant Moore argues in “Riddled Romance: Kingship and Kinship in Pericles,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 57 (2003): 33-48 that “the incest scene at Antioch … underlies all that follows” (34). Also see Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 66.
32 Plotinus argues that love originates in “the longing for itself which was there before in men’s souls,” for “the individual soul longs for what corresponds to its own nature …” (Enneads 3.5, “On Love,” 1, 15-20, 4, 5-10, in Plotinus, vol. 3: 166-69, 180-181).
33 Moore notes in “Riddled Romance” that Simonides’ teasing implies a degree of sexual tension, and observes that the fishermen’s discourse (2.1) reveals his kingdom to be not devoid of hierarchy and coercion (38). Both these “imperfections,” however, underscore the moral achievement underlying his relationship with his daughter. For Levinas’s critique of the inhospitability to pluralism within Neoplatonism, and Western philosophical thought generally, see his “Peace and Proximity” (BPW 162-169, esp. 162; TI 304-307). For the relation of Neoplatonist monism to marginalization of sociality and the feminine, see Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 103-121.
34 Compare with Apollonius of Tyre 26-27, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 753-754; and Gower, Confessio Amantis VIII: 1151-1271, pp. 440-444.
35 McAdam (“Magic and Gender” 250-251) argues similarly. Also see Robert M. Adams, Shakespeare: The Four Romances (New York: Norton, 1989), 39-40. For the Pythagorean currents in Plotinus, see Aphrodite Alexandakis, “The Notion of Beauty in the Structure of the Universe: Pythagorean Influence on Plotinus,” in Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ Enneads, ed. Michael F. Wagner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 149-155.
36 See Erasmus’s account of nature’s dialogical, companionable pluralism in Queralis Pacis (A Complaint of Peace), trans. Betty Radic, in CWE, vol. 24, 294, which grounds his insistence that virtue follows nature, and vice opposes it (Ecclesiastes, in Desiderii Erasmi Rotterodami, Opera Omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991), vol. 5-4, 368; for a previous discussion, see Wehrs, “Touching Words,” 9-10.
37 See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 193-238.
38 For a reading of Hamlet’s horror in relation to Gertrude in these terms, see Wehrs, “Moral Prototypes,” 82-83.
39 See Apollonius of Tyre, 31-32, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 756-758; and Gower, Confessio Amantis VIII: 1340-1400, pp. 446-447.
40 For the crucial role of speech in this process, see TI 64-77, 204-212, 294-297; and OB 5-7, 31-59. Similarly, Erasmus thinks of access to grace not, like Luther and Calvin, in terms of being subdued by a stronger force, but in terms of receptivity to persuasive discourse. Contrast Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, in Luther’s Work, vol. 33, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972) with Erasmus, Hyperaspistes 2, in CWE, vol. 77, trans. Clarence H. Miller, ed. Charles Trinkaus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Erasmus argues, “Divine wisdom speaks to us in baby-talk and like a loving mother accommodates its words to our state of infancy” (Enchiridion, 35). See Hoffmann’s commentary (106-126).
41 See Cicero, De Officiis, I:i-x, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1913); Plutarch, “On Moral Virtue,” in Moralia VI, trans. W. C. Hembold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939); Erasmus, A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, in CWE, vol. 26; Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 32-33; and Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, 7-14, 19-25. Such a relationship between speech, pity, civility, and the arts is emphasized in the classical source, where the Marina figure’s telling of her story induces a pity which overcomes lust by bringing the would-be client king to recognize in the girl the likeness of his own daughter, which discloses a common humanity that makes sexual exploitation tantamount to incest: “Stand up. We both understand the blow of fortune; we are both subject to the human condition. I too have a virgin daughter for whom I could fear similar misfortune” (Apollonius of Tyre 35, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 759). The monetary tribute she receives for eliciting pity suggests that the production of humane feelings may rival satisfactions of lust as a marketable service. Rather than seeing this as a debasing commercializing of emotion, the text suggests that nature’s infusion of sociability into humanity, moderating predation, makes it possible for “the resources of a completely mastered liberal education” and skill with the lyre (36, p. 761) to allow the girl to have use-value for her owners that does not necessitate appropriating her body as material to be consumed. On Marina’s discursive agency, see Stephen Dickey, “Language and Role in Pericles,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 550-566.
42 See Levinas’ discussion of how engaging the Other as an “interlocutor” precludes totalizing the Other through “comprehension” in “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (BPW 2-10). Also see TI 64-70, 201-212.
43 On how access to grammar school education underwrote Shakespeare’s material independence and social mobility, no less than his creativity, see Bate, Soul of the Age, 71-99, 131-46; and Greenblatt, 87-117.
44 See Anthony Giddens, Violence and the Nation-State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Giddens carefully notes that distinctions between pre-modern conquest polities and modern nation states, and between direct violence and indirect coercion, are not absolute (as sweatshops and human trafficking in our time attest), but, as all three versions of the Apollinius/Pericles story make clear, differences between selling one’s skills in liberal arts and selling one’s body are tangible and ethically significant.
45 If there is a Neoplatonic process of moving from “love of the beautiful” to “understanding,” as Leo Paul S. de Alvarez argues, it is one that works against the effacement of the Other and the desire for self-sufficient self-completion within Neoplatonism (“The Soul of the Sojourner,” in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 197-215, 213 cited). Still, there is (modified) Neoplatonic allegorizing typical of Renaissance tragicomedies. While individual scenes are depicted with Shakespeare’s characteristic realism (so venereal disease figures prominently in Boult and the Bawd’s discourse), mythic logic consistent with Neoplatonic themes governs the plot. Arguments such as Margaret Healy’s, that Pericles’ readiness to have Marina marry Lysimachus reveals his (and possibly Shakespeare’s) indifference to her exposure to syphilis (“Pericles and the Pox,” in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles [Edinburgh: Edindurgh University Press, 1999], 92-107), seem oblivious to genre. What matters about Lysimachus is that his receptivity to another’s speech opens him to recognize that kin and strangers are one, so as to displace exploitation of the marginalized with unselfish solicitude for others’ well-being. As abstract, allegorizing emblem of such a redeemed soul, he is a fitting spouse for Marina.
46 See Wehrs, “Moral Prototypes.”
47 Simon Reynolds, “Cymbeline and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika: The Loss and Recovery of Form,” Translation and Literature 13 (2004): 24-48, 26, 28 cited. For a contemporary translation, see Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, trans. J. R. Morgan, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 353-588.
48 See esp. Erasmus, De libero arbitrio (A Discussion of Free Will), trans. Peter Macardle, in CWE, vol. 76, ed. Charles Trinkaus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 23-32, 59-62, 80-82, Hyperaspistes 2, in CWE, vol. 77, 368-374, 585-598, 706-738. The heart of Erasmus’s position is that there is goodness in nature and humankind which enables receptivity to grace’s persuasive speech, but since that goodness comes from God, through the creation, its acknowledgment in no way lessens God’s glory nor human dependence upon Him for salvation.
49 See Wehrs, “Touching Words”; and “Placing Human Constants within Literary History,” 551-559.
50 Bate, Shakespeare’s Genius, 327, 332.
51 See Erasmus, “The New Mother,” in Colloquies, in CWE, vol. 39, 592-607; Kristeva, Tales of Love, 32-34; and TI 274-280.
52 For a cognitive-neurological account of how literary discourse engages working memory so as to indirectly highlight or confer significance upon particular terms or call forth particular distinctions, see Patrick Colm Hogan’s account of connectionist circuitry or parallel distributed processing—the way the firing of one set of neurons tied to memory schemas will trigger activation of other sets of neurons governing schemas associated logically or culturally with those of the first set (Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists [New York: Routledge, 2003], 48-58). Embodiment and acculturation converge in the operation of “Hebb’s Learning Rule”: “when two connected units are simultaneously active, then the connection between them is strengthened. When one is active and the other is not, the connection between them is weakened” (55). For the relationship between working memory’s refinement through on-going experience (which would include that of attending plays) and neurodevelopmental flexibility and learning, see Don M. Tucker and Phan Luu, Cognition and Neural Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
53 In the context of advocating acknowledgment and appreciation of Shakespeare’s humanism, Wells argues in similar terms (Shakespeare’s Humanism 192-203). For Levinas’s critique of amoral and insouciant cultural relativism emerging from anti-humanism, see “Meaning and Sense” in BPW 34-64; and Humanism of the Other (HO).
54 See The Trojan Women (The Daughters of Troy), ll. 764-771, in Euripides, trans. Arthur S. Way, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1912), 416-417, and Andromache, ll. 173-177, in Euripides, ed. and trans. David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 288-289.
55 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 89. For related discussion of the interplay between neurobiological and acculturated aspects of emotions, see Patrick Colm Hogan, Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 1-28.
56 See Levinas’s discussion of how “the epiphany of the Other (Autrui) involves a signifyingness of its own, independent of this meaning received from the [cultural, intentional] world” (BPW 53), and how “behind” the significations of “cultural life” the “Saying, that is, the face,” insinuates, “at the doorway of language,” an “inalienable responsibility” that makes subjectivity “partner of the transcendence that disturbs being” (BPW 73-74).
57 Arbery, “The Displaced Nativity,” 158-159. Alison Thorne argues that any expectations of hermeneutical clarity the audience might thereby have are frustrated by the play (see her “‘To write and read / Be henceforth treacherous’: Cymbeline and the Problem of Interpretation,” in Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 176-190), while Betteridge maintains that Shakespeare “advocates a return to a pre-Reformation devotional model of Christian selfhood” (“Writing Faithfully,” 236).
58 Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 95-135.
59 Jachimo’s running narrative of his actions and perceptions recalls Shakespeare’s depiction of how Tarquin, similarly prodded by a husband’s pride, engaged in analogously erotically charged cognitive “possession” of Lucrece’s bedchamber (365-469) before turning aside all her speech and proceeding to sexual violence.
60 See Evelyn Gajowski, “Sleeping Beauty, or ‘What’s the Matter?’: Female Sexual Autonomy, Voyeurism, and Misogyny in Cymbeline,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 89-107.
61 For this reason, as Adelman notes, “the parthenogenesis fantasy is central to the Cymbeline plot …” (Suffocating Mothers, 202).
62 The similarity of this to Lear’s ordeal and purgation on the heath, and his re-entrance into elemental sociality through solicitude for “poor Tom,” should be evident.
63 In depicting the princes as hungering for an ethical sociality that requires cultural-political life, the play critiques primitivism, but in emphasizing that their natural inclination to the good has not been blunted or perverted by the norms of a corrupt court, the play suggests their well-meaning kidnapper, surrogate father, and tutor is not entirely wrong in trusting nature. On anti-courtier currents in the work, see Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 170-197.
64 See Simonds, Myth, Emblem, and Music, 136-169; and Raphael Lyne, “Recognition in Cymbeline,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, 56-70, 65 cited.
65 Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162.
66 Arbery, “The Displaced Nativity,” 167.
67 Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, 161-162.
68 Betteridge, “Writing Faithfully,” 225-242; and Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness.
69 McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare, 3-27.
70 See Reynolds’ related reading in “Cymbeline and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika,” 46-48. To the extent that both Posthumus and Cymbeline are redeemed through becoming “the willing receptor” of “a form of mental stamping” (48) from human, natural, and divine forces outside themselves, the play does not, as Adelman argues, reinstate “the parthenogenesis fantasy” (see Suffocating Mothers, 202-218).