Renaissance psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare

Introduction

All things from thence doe their first being fetch,

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 ….

For euery substaunce is conditioned

To change her hew, and sondry forms to don

Meet for her temper and complexion ….

Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 3.6.37

For of the soul the body form doth take;

For soul is form, and doth the body make.

Spenser, An Hymn in Honour of Beauty, 132

unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.4.109

Many scholars have analysed the complex physiology and psychology used by Renaissance sages to gain self-knowledge, nosce teipsum. Among general studies one admires the accounts of Anderson,¹ Baker,² Bamborough,³ Barkan,⁴ Bullough,⁵ Cornelius,⁶ Harvey,⁷ Heninger,⁸ Hoeniger,⁹ Kocher,¹⁰ Lewis,¹¹ Schoenfeldt,¹² and Soellner.¹³

The rich field of humour-based passions is explored by Babb,¹⁴ Baskerville,¹⁵ Campbell,¹⁶ Carscallen,¹⁷ Draper,¹⁸ Filipczak,¹⁹ Lyons,²⁰ Redwine,²¹ Reid,²² Riddell,²³ Schafer,²⁴ Schiesari,²⁵ Shenk,²⁶ Soellner,²⁷ States,²⁸ Temkin,²⁹ Trevor,³⁰ and Paster’s classics,³¹ and the intricacies of bodily spirits by Hankins,³² Harvey,³³ and Verbeke.³⁴

The paradoxes of passion are explored by Broaddus,³⁵ Goldberg,³⁶ Hieatt,³⁷ Kirsch,³⁸ Lewis,³⁹ MacCary,⁴⁰ Miller,⁴¹ Nohrnberg,⁴² Roche,⁴³ Silberman,⁴⁴ and Traub,⁴⁵ and the enormous impact of self-love by Battenhouse,⁴⁶ Bellamy,⁴⁷ Fineman,⁴⁸ Gregerson,⁴⁹ O’Donovan,⁵⁰ Reid,⁵¹ Robertson,⁵² Wiltenberg,⁵³ and especially Zweig.⁵⁴

Rivalling the insights on passion are those on thinking: Brentano,⁵⁵ Berger,⁵⁶ Carruthers,⁵⁷ Cavell,⁵⁸ Crane,⁵⁹ Jorgensen,⁶⁰ Klubertanz,⁶¹ Reid,⁶² Soellner,⁶³ Yates,⁶⁴ and notably Nuttall.⁶⁵ The inner wits are ably explained by Harvey⁶⁶ and Wolfson.⁶⁷

A culminating aspect of Renaissance psychology is soul and spirit. Often ignored by modern critics, the transcendent essence of human nature is a central concern for Burton,⁶⁸ Frye,⁶⁹ Kraye,⁷⁰ Lottin,⁷¹ Reid,⁷² and West.⁷³ Access to mystic thinking, epiphany, and cognitive-affective union is evaluated by Anderson,⁷⁴ Collins,⁷⁵ Felperin,⁷⁶ Frye,⁷⁷ Hunter,⁷⁸ Kermode,⁷⁹ Kirk,⁸⁰ Knight,⁸¹ Martz,⁸² Reid,⁸³ and McGinn’s encyclopaedic survey.⁸⁴

But despite this wealth of commentary (in a list far from complete), we do not find a holistic and consistent form of ‘Renaissance psychology’, for, especially as it influences poetic fictions, it appears in partly incompatible schemes, with each writer producing a distinct, often garbled version of its quirky features. Only writers capable of epic scope offer fictions that suggest a holistic psychology. Spenser and Shakespeare, the best poets of Elizabeth’s celebratory post-Armada decade, do give such a comprehensive view of human nature, yet their characters and plots spring from radically distinct psychologies.

Spenser’s Christianized Platonism prioritizes the soul, his art striving to mirror divine Creation, dogmatically conceived. Spenser looks to the past, collating classical and medieval authorities within memory-devices such as the figurative house in order to reform the ruins of time. Shakespeare’s sophisticated Aristotelianism prioritizes the body, highlighting physical processes and dynamic feelings of immediate experience, and subjecting them to intense, skeptical consciousness. Shakespeare points to the future, using the witty ironies of popular stage productions to test and deconstruct prior authority, opening the unconscious to psychoanalysis. Spenser and Shakespeare do not simply emulate Plato and Aristotle, who served as catalysts for an immense intellectual evolution of contrary approaches to the embodied soul. The polarity of psychologies in Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s fictions is radical and profound, resembling the complementary theories of physics, which describes the structure of things either (like Spenser) in the neatly-contained form of particle theory, or (like Shakespeare) in the ever-changing rhythmic cycles of wave theory. These concepts are equally useful, but how do we explain their difference, and how are they related?

Part I: Anatomy of human nature

Chapter 1: We wonder at Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s quite different depictions of Elizabeth I as a ‘fairy queen’. Spenser’s epic shows her as Gloriana, a mystic figure arousing her heroic elite to realize the twelve virtues, perfecting the soul in Godlikeness. Shakespeare’s comic stage-play also evokes a magnificent mythic queen but in an utterly different realm of ‘faerie’. His charismatic ‘Titania’ is directly experienced, her bodily splendour and witty combative speeches arousing sensual desire not just in elite heroes but in rude commoners who commandeer the play’s most engaging scenes. This amazing riposte to Spenser’s epic wondrously expanded Shakespeare’s own artistry.

We equally wonder at their contrary views of self-love as a touchstone of human psychology. Spenser follows Calvin and Luther in discrediting self-love as shameful, whether in a vain monarch like Lucifera or a common ‘losel’ like Braggadocchio, causing Redcrosse Knight’s wretched fall and Guyon’s helpless faint. In contrast, Shakespeare’s characters, great and small, show a positive form of self-love, if carefully managed. His evolving treatment of an admirable self-love follows an alternative tradition, springing from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Primaudaye. Neither poet fully solves the problem of self-love.

Chapter 2: The poets also diverge in portraying the four elemental humours with their passional offshoots. The diverse humoralism of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson is missed by those scholars who assume consistency in Renaissance humoralism, who exaggerate its material causation, ignoring the role of human intellect and divine providence in managing the humours. Spenser controls the humours with the ancient mnemonic device of a figurative house, spiritualising passion in the House of Holiness, and moderating it in Alma’s Castle. Spenser’s view of humour-based passions (as of the body generally) is quite negative, needing stern moral guidance and Christlike rescue. Shakespeare’s quite different depiction of humoral passions appears in the Henriad’s main figures – melancholic Henry IV, choleric Hotspur, phlegmatic Falstaff, sanguine Hal. Unlike Spenser’s restrictive allegorical view of humour figures (fiery Pyrochles, watery Cymochles, airy Phaedria, earthy Mammon and Maleger), Shakespeare’s humour-types are spacious and flexible, all of them gifted with self-conscious speech, some capable of witty mimicry of the others. Moreover, Shakespeare’s view of humours and passions evolves greatly, becoming nuanced, changeable, and paradoxical in the tragedies and romances.

Chapter 3: The polarity of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s renderings of the psyche is equally apparent in depicting intellect. Alma’s stately tour of her bodily castle makes a striking contrast with Lear’s impassioned self-stripping – divesting himself of housing, clothing, and sanity as he feelingly identifies with a shivering fool and demon-haunted beggar on a stormy heath. Alma’s tour shows the hierarchic harmony of moving from the belly’s humoral energies to the heart’s passions, to the brain’s three ‘sages’ (inner wits) with their ‘allegory of prudence’. Shakespeare’s impassioned experiential thinking springs from jolting exposure to natural sensations, the drives of self-love, and the dynamics of enjoying or severing bonds – as shown in Lear’s saga and the energies of Juliet’s Nurse.

The two poets’ contrary view of intellect is fully evident in depicting temptation. Spenser uses the intellectual hierarchy of the ‘triple temptation’ in hexameral accounts of the Edenic fall (a device so awkwardly used by Shakespeare in Macbeth, 4.3 that the scene is often cut). Spenser’s triple temptings are complicated by allusion to all the great temptations of epic poetry and by subtle ironic paradox in the temptations by Mammon (2.7) and by Acrasia (2.12). In striking contrast to Spenser’s objective and immensely intellectualized allegory of temptation is the riveting passional power and psychoanalytic complexity of Shakespeare’s great tempters (Richard III, Iago, Edmund) and self-tempters (Proteus, the Macbeths, Leontes).

The poets’ divergent portrayal of intellect is also evident in the inverse development of their depictions of moral counsel. Each Spenserian protagonist is objectively educated by wise sages in order to realize his or her virtuous power, but that moral training becomes increasingly narrow and ineffective in the six legends – from authoritative intellective counsellors in Books 1 and 2, to equivocal counselors in the passional realm of Books 3 and 4, to constrained and problematic counselors in the sensate realm of Books 5 and 6. (Would Spenser invert this development in the final six legends?) Shakespeare’s moral counselors also show radical development, but in reverse: from the farcical failure of parents and friars in the early plays (culminating in Polonius), to counsellors transformed by empathic suffering in the mature tragedies, to the romances’ artfully effective counsellors, notably Prospero.

Chapter 4: The most comprehensive divergence of Spenserian and Shakespearean psychology concerns ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, the human essence made in God’s image. Spenser’s initial soul-maidens (Caelia and Alma) inhabit a house made with Christianity’s and then Plato’s ideal hierarchic forms. No such structure assists Shakespeare’s protagonists (Hamlet, Timon, Antony, Prospero) as they view their identity amid changeable clouds or (Juliet and Cleopatra) amid fancies of a noble but discredited beloved. In Shakespeare’s darkest play ‘soul’ nearly vanishes. Though Hamlet and Othello refer endlessly to their soul (the word appears forty times in each play), in King Lear the word appears only three times. Equally definitive is the poets’ contrary use of ‘spirit’. For Spenser it betokens transcendence (soul, supernatural spirits), only rarely referring to bodily spirits; but Shakespeare stresses its embodiment, staging the multilevel meanings of spirit as a continual warfare between bodily and heavenly referents: ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame …’.

Part II: Holistic design

Building on this radical divergence in the two poets’ depictions of psychology, the final three chapters explain how Spenserian psychology shapes the holistic design of his epic, and how Shakespearean psychology shapes the mature dramaturgical form of Macbeth and King Lear.

Chapter 5: A cornerstone in Spenser’s architectural epic is the hierarchic family (man, woman, child or servant), freighted with the patriarchal allegory of Adam and Eve’s fall, but transfigured by Christ and the Church. An exciting aspect of Spenser’s epic is its radical revision of this allegory. Even in the natural and fallen family (Mortdant, Amavia, Ruddymane) the man is most blamed while the woman lovingly seeks to cure him; and in the sanctified family of Book 1 (Redcrosse, Una, Dwarf) woman as the Church is fully exalted in struggling to reform her wretched male partner into a Christlike warrior. In Books 3–5 Spenser recasts Ariosto’s armed virago, endowing Britomart with a chaste prowess that defeats all males, liberating woman from male mastery and from self-induced suffering. The patriarchal building-block is thus drawn into currents of immense social change.

Books 1 and 2 present an intellective allegory in complementary modes, one reforming higher reason (mens), the other reforming lower reason (ratio), both informed by Christian-Platonic tripartism. Besides the triadic family grouping at the outset of each legend, there are three progressive stages of sin or of temptation (the Sans-brothers in 1.1–6, Orgoglio-Despair-Dragon in 1.7–12; and in Book 2 the three stages of temptation in Mammon’s Cave and in Acrasia’s Bower). Most comprehensive is the three-level growth of holiness in the spiritual body (House of Holiness), and the three analogous levels of the natural body (Alma’s Castle). The goal of each legend is shown in a hierarchic three-part image of Eden.

Books 3 and 4 present a passional allegory, again in the complementary modes of transcendence and immanence. Britomart enforces female ascendancy in both legends, not only by her skill with arms, enhanced by chaste integrity and a providential dynastic goal, but also by her indifference to the men’s competitive quest for supremacy through ‘merit’. Her identity is elaborated in three heroic women (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret) who as her subtypes exemplify the gifts of the Graces. In these legends the males who are the four women’s counterparts (Artegall, Marinell, Timias, Scudamour) are shown as defectively flawed, so that liberation and reunion are achieved by the women’s own prowess and endurance, aided by mothers and female deities. These legends include analogues for a female theology: quests to sustain virgin integrity and to marry, Incarnation by virgin birth, Trinitarian identity, epiphanic unveilings and transfigurations (with demonic parodies), and female endurance of a Passion.

Books 5 and 6 present a sensate allegory, showing the need for virtuous power in the most material conditions of life. Both Gloriana and Arthur are exposed to literal material circumstances that render all decisions suspect and subject them to sad confusion. Spenser’s figuring allegory in Books 1–6 as an ontological descent is evident in the narrowing (ever-more-specific) identity of Duessa, of Timias, and of the satyrs (or salvages). Does this narrowing symbolism show Spenser’s growing despondency about Irish terrors, or is the allegorical descent (‘dilation’) in Books 1–6 a part of his holistic design, laying a basis for reversal in Books 7–12?

Chapter 6: To assess the quite different holistic design of Shakespearean dramaturgy, we first observe his exploitation of ‘epiphany’ – the apprehension of a wondrous other. Unlike Spenser’s objective education of protagonists in an intellectualized house, Shakespeare subjects his protagonist to revolutionary inner change by an epiphanic encounter at the centre of each passional cycle. Each play forms a chiastic symmetry, beginning with a two-act cycle (in which Act 2 reacts to and completes Act 1) and ending with a two-act cycle (in which Act 5 completes the arc of Act 4); between these two large cycles is an intense one-act cycle, often with no known source. These transformative encounters recall five Biblical epiphanies of the wonder of Jesus: nativity, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection/ascension, crucifixion. Shakespeare achieves meaningful epiphany only gradually, for in early plays it is sensational, farcical, laughable or horrifying, but in the mature plays the epiphanies systematically illuminate the soul’s powers.

In Macbeth the chiastic sequence neatly divides into three murders in which genuine epiphany is progressively occluded: killing the king centres the opening two-act cycle, killing his best friend centres Act 3, killing a mother and children centres the final two-act cycle. The three murders suggest a Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, but unlike many critics who see the regicide as Oedipal and as the only important slaying, I read the three murders as progressive and psychically conjoined, diminishing the Macbeths as they travesty the three great psychic cathexes of human development – from sublimation, to projection, to introjection – methodically annihilating all capacity for bonding. King Lear provides a complementary sequence of three shamings, again forming a chiastic 2–1–2 cycle of acts, but now paradoxically enforcing psychic recovery through stripping and through Lear’s epiphanal encounters with Goneril at the centre of Acts 1-2, Poor Tom at the centre of Act 3, and Cordelia at the centre of Acts 4–5.

Chapter 7: Regarding Spenser’s holistic design, do the Mutabilitie Cantos conclude his epic or point to its final half, since they discredit the pagan gods’ authority, reform the titaness Mutabilitie (unlike the demonized titanomachias of Books 1–6), and show an inconclusive pastoral pageant on Arlo Hill? Spenser’s ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4), when compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, offers a vital clue to the format of The Faerie Queene – based on the principles of Christian-Platonic psychology we have surveyed. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would have admired a mystic structuring of this epic that so honours her.

As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned – as in The Summoning of Everyman – with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

Notes

1  R. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (1927; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1964).

2  H. Baker, The Image of Man (1947; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952).

3  J.B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1952).

4  L. Barkan, Nature’s World of Art (Yale University Press, 1975).

5  G. Bullough, Mirror of Minds (University of Toronto Press, 1962).

6  R. D. Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’ (diss., Bryn Mawr, 1930).

7  E.R. Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE.

8  S.K. Heninger, Jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974).

9  F. D. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (University of Delaware Press, 1992).

10  P. H. Kocher Science and Religion in Renaissance England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1953).

11  C.S. Lewis The Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1964).

12  M. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

13  R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972).

14  L. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (Michigan State College Press, 1951).

15  C.R. Baskerville, English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy (1911; rpt New York: Gordian Press, 1967).

16  L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge University Press, 1930).

17  J. Carscallen, ‘The Goodly Frame of Temperance: The Metaphor of Cosmos in The Faerie Queene, Book II’, UTQ 37 (1967–68) 136–55.

18  J.W. Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters (Duke University Press, 1945).

19  Z.Z. Filipczak, Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575–1700 (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1997).

20  B.G. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971).

21  J.D. Redwine, ‘Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Jonson’s Theory of Humoral Characterization’, ELH 28 (1961) 316–34.

22  R.L. Reid, ‘Humoral Psychology in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, CompD 30 (1996–97) 471–502.

23  J.A. Riddell, ‘The Evolution of the Humours Character in 17th-Century English Comedy’ (diss., University of Southern California, 1966).

24  J. Schafer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’ in der Elisabethanischen Komödie (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1966).

25  J. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Cornell University Press, 1992).

26  R. Shenk, ‘The Habits of Ben Jonson’s Humours’, JMRS 8 (1978), 115–36.

27  R. Soellner, ‘The Four Primary Passions: A Renaissance Theory Reflected in the Works of Shakespeare’, SP 55 (1958), 549–67.

28  B.O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

29  O. Temkin, Galenism (Cornell University Press, 1973).

30  D. Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

31  G.K. Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Cornell University Press, 1993), Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and many other essays.

32  J.E. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1978), and Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

33  E.R. Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE.

34  G. Verbeke, L’évolution de la doctrine de pneuma du Stoicisme à S. Augustin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer; Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Superieur de Philosophie, 1945).

35  J.W. Broaddus, Spenser’s Allegory of Love (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).

36  J. Goldberg, Endlesse Worke (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

37  A.K. Hieatt, Chaucer Spenser Milton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975).

38  A.Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

39  C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford University Press, 1936).

40  W.T. MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1985).

41  D.L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988).

42  J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1976).

43  T.P. Roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame (Princeton University Press, 1964).

44  L. Silberman, Transforming Desire (University of California Press, 1995).

45  V. Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992).

46  R.A. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Indiana University Press, 1969).

47  E.J. Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Cornell University Press, 1992).

48  J. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (University of California Press, 1982).

49  L. Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

50  O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (Yale University Press, 1980).

51  R.L. Reid, ‘The Problem of Self-Love in Renaissance and Reformation Theology’, Shakespeare’s Christianity, ed. B. Batson (Baylor University Press, 2006), 35–56.

52  D. Robertson ‘My Self / Before Me’: Self-Love in the Works of John Milton (University of Tampere Press, 1992).

53  R. Wiltenberg, Ben Jonson and Self-Love (University of Missouri Press, 1990).

54  P, Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968).

55  F. Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle, in Particular His Doctrine of the Agent Intellect (1867; trans. R. George (University of California Press, 1977).

56  H. Berger, Jr, The Allegorical Temper (Yale University Press, 1958); ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, ShakSt 5 (1967), 153–83; ‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene’, ELR 21 (1991), 3–48; and many others.

57  M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Book of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

58  S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

59  M.T. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2001).

60  P.A. Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties (University of California Press, 1971}; Lear’s Self-Discovery (University of California Press, 1967); and‘Perplex’d in the Extreme: The Role of Thought in Othello’, SQ 15 (1964), 265–75.

61  G. Klubertanz, The Discursive Power (Modern Schoolman, 1952).

62  R.L. Reid, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (University of Delaware Press, 2000); ‘Alma’s Castle and the Symbolization of Reason in The Faerie Queene‘, JEGP 80 (1981), 512–27.

63  R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972).

64  F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

65  A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), A New Mimesis (London: Methuen, 1983), Thinking with Shakespeare (Yale University Press, 2007).

66  E.R. Harvey, The Inward Wits (London: University of London, Warburg Institute, 1975).

67  H.A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts’, HTR 28 (1935), 107–13.

68  E.D. Burton, Spirit, Soul, and Flesh (University of Chicago Press, 1918).

69  N. Frye, Words with Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

70  J. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy, eds C.B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303–86.

71  O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux xii et xiii siècles, 2 vols (Gembloux: J. Duclot, 1957).

72  R.L. Reid, ‘Soul’, SE.

73  R.H. West, The Invisible World: A Study of Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (1939; rpt New York: Octagon, 1969).

74  J. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene (Yale University Press, 1976).

75  J. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (1940; rpt New York: Octagon, 1971).

76  H. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton University Press, 1972).

77  N. Frye, Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, ed. R. Denham (University of Toronto Press, 2002).

78  R.G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Columbia University Press, 1965).

79  F. Kermode, William Shakespeare, The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green, 1963).

80  K.E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (1931; rpt New York: Harper, 1967).

81  G.W. Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966).

82  L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (Yale University Press, 1954).

83  R.L. Reid,‘Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’, SSt 29 (2014), 63–74.

84  B. McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 7 vols, 5 completed (New York: Crossroad, 1991–2012).

PART I

Anatomy of human nature

1

The charismatic queen and the centrality of self-love

England’s soul as a ‘fairy queen’: Gloriana or Titania?

‘I would preferre divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit, to bandie line for line for my life, in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italie, and all the worlde.’ So boasts Nashe of his fellow-alumnus of Cambridge as The Faerie Queene appears in manuscript. Chaucer and Spenser are ‘the Homer and Virgil of England’; Spenser is ‘heavenly’, ‘immortal’.¹ During 1590–96 Nashe’s estimate is often repeated: Raleigh, Churchyard, Harvey, Peacham, Daniel, Covell, Fitzgeffrey, Harrington, Lodge canonize him among epic poets, stressing his learned ‘imitation of ancient speech’; Watson deifies him as ‘Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine / Amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place’; Edwards lauds his pre-eminence as England’s literary flag-bearer:

In his power all do flourish,

We are shepheards but in vaine,

There is but one tooke the charge,

By his toile we do nourish,

And by him are inlargd.

He unlockt Albions glorie.²

In 1597–98, however, a mood of malcontented mockery is abroad, making Spenser seem prophetic in his preoccupation with fables of defamation in Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene: Ate and Sclaunder in Book 4; Clarin, Malengin, Malfont, Envy, and Detraction in Book 5; Turpine, Despetto-Decetto-Defetto, Disdain, and the Blatant Beast in Book 6. Spenser ends by anticipating the beast’s assault on his own art: ‘Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, / Hope to escape his venemous despite’ (FQ 6.12.41).

Within a year Bishop Hall in ‘Tooth-lesse Satyrs’ (1597) records disdain for old-fashioned features of Spenserian epic:

scoure the rusted swords of Elvish knights,

Bathed in Pagan blood: or sheath them new

In misty morral Types: or tell their fights,

Who mighty Giants, or who Monsters slew.

And by some strange inchanted speare and shield,

Vanquisht their foe, and wan the doubtfull field.

In ‘Satire 4’ Hall disavows any ridicule of the great poet – ‘But let no rebell Satyre dare traduce / Th’ eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse, / Renowmed Spencer: whom no earthly wight / Dares once to emulate, much lesse dares despight’³ – but Hall’s clever jab and feint suggest that irreverent satyrs are indeed abroad. In Skialethia (1598) Edward Guilpin gingerly recalls debate over Spenser’s archaic language, ‘his grandam words’.⁴ Brushing tact and caution aside, John Marston in The Scourge of Villanie (1598) applies the satiric thongs unreservedly to those who ‘invoke good Colin Clout’, who feign depth through pretentious diction and seek authority by displacing ancient poets:

Here’s one, to get an undeserv’d repute

Of deepe deepe learning, all in fustian sute

Of ill-placd farre-fetch’d words attiereth

His period, that sence forsweareth.

Another makes old Homer, Spencer cite.

When Marston belittles those claiming fairy-inspired visions, he cheapens the central trope of Spenser’s Tudor mythography:

Another walks, is lazy, lies him down,

Thinks, reads, at length some wonted sleep doth crown

His new-falln lids, dreams; straight, ten pound to one

Out steps some fairy with quick motion,

And tells him wonders of some flow’ry vale;

Awakes, straight rubs his eyes, and prints his tale.⁵

Then an Irish uprising in the winter of 1598–99 ends Spenser’s epic and his life, dispelling all satyrs. An outpouring of funereal praise from England’s literati is summed up in Holland’s epigram: ‘Once God of Poets, now Poet of the Gods’.⁶

The cautious lampooning of Spenserian romance-epic in 1597–98, part of a fin-de-siѐcle vogue for satire, suggests fading confidence in those exalted myths which Queen Elizabeth had gathered about herself, as Montrose argues in his New Historicist critique, ‘Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’.⁷ Yet a more specific cause of temporary impiety toward Spenser’s art can be found in the concurrence in 1595–96 of two major but antithetical literary events: one, the long-awaited publication of Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene (registered 20 January 1596); the other, surely not anticipated, the opening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁸

Shakespeare’s transfigured comic art

Whether or not one agrees with Frank Kermode that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘Shakespeare’s best comedy’,⁹ it definitively moves beyond the ‘apprentice comedies’ (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost). What caused this creative burst in 1595–96, engendering not only a more expansive comic mode but also the deepening tragic vision of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II? In the circumstances of literary history and in the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no influence is more evident than the looming shadow of Spenser – supreme consolidator of the mythos of ‘Gloriana’ and her ‘fairyland’ – currently at fame’s summit for his epic celebration of English culture and Elizabethan rule. The other notable precursor of Shakespeare’s mingling of fairies, courtiers, and rustics is of course Lyly with his ethereal conceit of a semi-divine queen fostering earthly love while remaining steadfastly out of reach.¹⁰ But Spenser’s grandiose allegorical treatment of the ‘fairy queen’ actualized the metaphor’s fullest potential, elevating it to the status of an imago Dei. This fictive majesty could awaken Lyly’s Endymion from narcissistic detachment to engage in heroic quests, and could provoke Shakespeare to parody Spenser’s grand vision.

To some extent A Midsummer Night’s Dream builds on central themes of the previous comedies. Again romantic desire contends with a rival’s love and with self-love; again lovers become playthings of fantasy, unless they can control it through conscious play-acting; again confusions of identity raise doubts about the cohesiveness of the self which loves and is beloved. What makes the comic exploration of love, fantasy, and selfhood far more suggestive in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, first, an expansion of ontological scope, the parallel development of four levels of aberrant human desire, from the boisterous vulgarity of rustics to the enchanting sublimity of aristocratic fairies, envisioning love’s entanglements within a universal scale of being; and, second, a corresponding expansion of metaphor and fiction into mythic proportions. This comically destabilized Neoplatonic mode (to which Shakespeare finally returns, on a grand scale and in a serious vein, in The Tempest) is, in part, a reaction to Spenser’s Christian-Platonic purview of human love and identity, a consummate response to Spenser’s expansive allegory that champions a spiritual transcendence.¹¹ Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a manifesto of Shakespeare’s poetic art as antithetical to Spenser’s.¹²

What Shakespeare gleans from Spenser is not (as in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) merely a sequence of plagiarized passages,¹³ though Shakespeare includes that flattery as well, for as van Kranendonk and Hammerle observed long ago, and as a recent Arden editor confirms, Spenserian influence (especially from The Shepheardes Calender) is pervasive in the diction and imagery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, far more than in any other Shakespearian play.¹⁴ Camille Paglia argues that as early as 1592–94 Shakespeare responds aggressively to Spenser’s hieratic, learned, ‘Apollonian’ art – that in ‘Venus and Adonis’ he revises a central Spenserian myth into a less iconographic, more earthy and playful mode of erotic psychological probing, and that in Titus Andronicus he farcically literalizes Spenserian allegory.¹⁵

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, the rejoinder to Spenser is far more direct and thoroughgoing. Shakespeare appropriates, and adapts to his own purposes, the supernatural and mythic expanse of Spenser’s vision: the conception of England as an Edenic utopia, vitalized and blessed with semi-divine fairy spirits.¹⁶ He adopts, at least in part, Spenser’s cosmic perspective on the human soul as a hierarchic ladder of life-forms that leads up to true Being. Above all, he usurps the lodestone metaphor, the ‘fairy queen’, which Spenser treats as a Christian-Platonic Form of forms: this ‘true glorious type’, ‘Mirrour of grace and majestie divine’ (FQ 1.4), serves as touchstone of spiritual reality, endlessly revealed in epiphanic visions to each questing knight. Shakespeare appropriates this exalted conceit, then transforms it: not Gloriana but Titania.

Here we must pause to note, in Oberon’s mystic reminiscence of love’s origin (MND 2.1.148–68), Shakespeare’s cautionary flattery of Queen Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal, throned by the west’, her beauty the cause of Cupid’s shot, herself immune to such pricking desires: she is the Unmoved Mover of Love. The topical suggestiveness of this enchanting passage¹⁷ is highly unusual (one wishes to say, highly unShakespearean): it is Shakespeare’s only direct and unsolicited flattery of Elizabeth during her lifetime:¹⁸ it augments the flattery by recalling the gala processions idolizing Elizabeth since the time of Leicester; and, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole, it adopts the Elizabethan idiom of grandiose myth-making and sublimating metaphor. All three characteristics show Shakespeare appropriating the Spenserian mode of poetry and royal flattery – not, however, as a means of affirming Spenser’s vision but as a means of transforming it to his own mode and idiom. Having with his lavish compliment diverted Elizabeth from identifying with the fairy queen (crucial to his strategy), Shakespeare can then proceed to the darkly joyous climax of his sublime burlesque, Titania’s love-affair with the bestial English Everyman:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms ….

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

O how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

(4.1.39, 41–44)

Shakespeare’s fairy queen, quaintly parodying Elizabeth’s declarations of marriage to her subjects,¹⁹ consummates the unlikely match in crude but charming actuality. With what hilarity must the English audience of 1595–96 have reacted to Bottom’s encounter with this alternate fairy queen, neatly upstaging Spenser’s ‘dearest dread’.²⁰

The playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania can hardly be claimed to have shifted the laurels from Spenser’s learned allegory to Shakespeare’s more broadly populist art. Nor is displacing Spenser the sole purpose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which playfully celebrates the fantasies of English culture generally. But the occasional mockery of Spenserian epic during 1597–98²¹ must partly reflect the success of Shakespeare’s satiric strategy in this play – re-visioning the Fairy Queen, and redefining Poetry’s substance, audience, and purpose.

Shakespeare’s grounding of the fairy allure

Shakespeare’s burlesque unfolds subtly – at first sustaining, even heightening, the fairy queen’s grandeur. Titania’s attendant boasts of coursing through the entirety of elemental nature, and the opening lines of her chant actually replicate lines from the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (‘Through hils and dales, through bushes and through breres’, 6.8.32):²²

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough briar,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon’s sphere;

And I serve the Fairy Queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be,

In their gold coats spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy favours,

In those freckles live their savours.

I must go seek some dew-drops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.

(2.1.2–15)

This introduction to fairy spirits, long acknowledged as an allusion to The Faerie Queene,²³ at first seems to magnify Spenser’s purpose, the idealization of Elizabeth and, through her dynamic spirit, of England. The fairy queen’s quasi-divine potency is heralded by her attendant’s swiftness and freedom of movement (selfmovement being the essential characteristic of spirit, both human and divine), and also by her benevolent influence on the natural order – gracing, beautifying, energizing it. That the fairies ‘hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear’ could allude to Elizabeth’s courtly favourites affecting earrings of pearl, her favorite gem, symbolic of virgin purity. If so, it caps the sequence of sublimating imagery by which the natural world is spiritualized through her influence: ‘dew’ signifying the infusion of grace; ‘orbs’, the perfecting of nature; ‘gold coats’, the refining of human nature; ‘rubies’, the passionate ‘spots’ or ‘freckles’ that give ‘savors’ to life; ‘pearl’, the purified soul that the queen presumably evokes in all her subjects, even those of ‘cowslip’ nature.²⁴

Such, at least, are the more benevolent possibilities for associating Titania’s prowess with Gloriana’s. But one quickly anticipates the polar contrast between Shakespeare’s fairy queen and that of his predecessor. Spenser’s recondite Gloriana is associated with the transcendent reality of God, her beatific presence revealed in prophetic dream-visions to the heroically worthy, or mirrored in righteous earthly analogues (Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla) whose veils and armour guard their moral purity and power. In The Faerie Queene’s chastened world, Gloriana’s bodily presence is only demurely intimated in the vestigial figure of ‘pressed gras, where she had lyen’ (FQ 1.11.15).²⁵

If Spenser moralizes Ovid (and baptizes Plato), Shakespeare reverses the perspective, returning fairy spirits to Ovid’s carnal realm. Shakespeare’s Titania exults in the sensuous, mutable realities of an earthly moonlit forest. Her name derives from the Metamorphoses, where it designates a number of female deities descended from the Titans: Diana, Latona, Hecate, Circe, Pyrrha. Since the first three are goddesses of night, the epithet titania embraces ‘in one comprehensive symbol the whole female empire of mystery and night belonging to mythology’, rich and complex associations connected with the silver bow of Diana, the magic cup of Circe, the triple crown of Hecate. Oberon’s corresponding epithet, ‘King of Shadows’ (3.2.347), is Shakespeare’s translation of umbrarum dominus and umbrarum rex, Ovid’s names for Pluto, lord of the lower world.²⁶ Instead of Gloriana’s transcendent nuances, the name ‘Titania’ epitomizes the earthy values and moral dubiety of Shakespeare’s fairy monarchs: spirit power motivated by titanic pride.

As an immanent and elemental spirit,²⁷ Titania engages joyfully in the dance of the elements, the sweet blendings of earth and air, tree and flower, finding in them (not in heavenly abstractions) her source of delight: ‘on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, / By paved fountain or by rushy brook / We … dance our ringlets to the whistling wind’ (MND 2.1.82–6; cf. 2.1.140–1, 4.1.86ff). Gorgeous and loquacious, she is fully and shamelessly exposed on stage in her bodily splendour, so much a part of the sensory world that her tempestuous spirit (together with that of Oberon) is the very breath that turns Fortune’s wheel, the passion that impels worldly dissension and change:

the spring, the summer,

The chiding autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

(2.1.111–17)

The central mystery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream resides in the moral and mythic ambivalence of these elemental spirits: is Titania the soul of great creating Nature, as implied by her attendant’s boast and the fecundity of her bower (2.1.1ff, 249–56; 2.2.1ff; 3.1.153–60, 164–74; 4.1.1–46, 52–5); or is she the spirit of annihilative Mutabilitie, la donna è mobile, amorous of Theseus, feuding with Oberon, doting on Bottom?²⁸ Oberon is equally complex: does he practise benevolent magic as a simulacrum of Divine Providence, or does this ‘King of Shadows’, with his proud desire for mastery, share equally in inciting the amorous confusions of the dark forest world?

Though admired as godlike ‘immortals’, Shakespeare’s fairies, like Spenser’s, also figure the most privileged level of human existence. For both poets (as for creators of Tudor processions and Stuart masques), the fairies exemplify aristocrats, whose power and privilege can exploit all gifts of nature, all earthly delights.²⁹ The crucial difference in the two poetic visions is that Spenser’s fairy nobility, though shimmering with heroic fantasy, are always constrained by natural and moral law: torn by briars, wounded in combat, captivated by forces of evil, burned by their own passions.³⁰ For their errant moral choices Spenser’s fairies pay a staggering price: until a supernatural redeeming power intervenes, Florimel’s beauty will remain imprisoned in Proteus’ realm of changeless change (FQ 4.12), Amoret’s heart chained and transfixed by desire and fear of mastery (FQ 3.11–12), Serena raped and wounded by the bleating beast of scandal (FQ 6.3.20–7), and their male counterparts – Marinell, Scudamour, Calepine – unable to liberate their lovers from the bondage which their own narcissism, jealousy, and truancy have helped to sponsor.

Shakespeare’s fairy aristocrats, on the other hand, enjoy the comic fantasy of a prowess beyond natural and moral limits, remarkably free of painful consequences. Instead of providing veils and armour to protect Titania’s chaste loyalty (which she has already compromised), Oberon forces her further descent into vulgar, bestial carnality! As he goes to put the deluding drops of concupiscence into her eyes, he imagines, in a densely sensuous passage, Titania immersed in her flowery world of earth-oriented senses – smell, taste, and touch:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

(2.1.249–52)

Awed by the luxuriant beauty of this transient bower, Oberon judges it as causing her drowsy conscience and wilful self-delusion. Since he cannot prevent her carnal obsession (which he shares, as his overdetermined description suggests), he will fulfil it in extremis.

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;

And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in;

And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,

And make her full of hateful fantasies.

(2.1.253–8)

With Titania’s fancy steeped in lulling flowers and gaudy snakeskin (nature and art together enforcing the vain self-delusions of fleshliness), Oberon subjects his mate to the consummate delusion of the wounded flower’s juice. His reason for provoking her ‘hateful’ adultery with ‘some vile thing’ remains exceedingly vague, and the limp paratactic style of his speech (‘And … And … And’) ensures that we will not ascertain Oberon’s motives or degree of insight.

The indulgences of Shakespeare’s fairies (corrosive jollity, vengeful jealousy, mutual adultery – all with violent undertones) recall fears of their trickery, as well as the Celtic view of fairies as fallen angels.³¹ Titania does not simply yield to a beastly lover; her aroused passion ravishes him, while her moonlike conscience acknowledges her loss of self-control:

The moon, me thinks, looks with a watery eye,

And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,

Lamenting some enforced chastity.

Tie up my love’s tongue, bring him silently.

(3.1.191–4)

The lesson, presumably, is that fairy aristocrats, even the great queen of fairies, have the same capacity for robing themselves in carnal passion and self-deceit as ordinary folk; and the deeper lesson is that fairy spirits, like humankind in general, can best learn their true nature by enduring fully the descent into sensuous experience.³² As Robert Burton wryly observes, ‘The last and surest remedy [for love-melancholy], to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is to let them go together, and enjoy one another: Potissima cura est ut heros amasia potiatur.’³³ In contrast to Spenser’s peremptory erasure of the deluding ‘bower of blisse’ (FQ 2.12) and his persistent restraint of eroticism through iconographic framing and ‘arming’ the body, Shakespeare liberally indulges bodily passion and enhances it through art.

Gloriana’s influence can ‘fashion a gentleman’ out of any caste: a bear-child, a savage man, even base Braggadocchio may glimpse Belphoebe’s beauty (FQ 6.4; 2.3): yet full communion with Gloriana–Belphoebe is restricted to those who can emulate Prince Arthur’s arête. In astonishing contrast, Shakespeare focuses on the spirit-power of the rustic: Bottom’s vigorous imaginative sympathy (‘let me play the lion too’), as well as the innate moral sense which makes him ‘gentle’ and ‘courteous’, gives the lie to Oberon’s ‘some vile thing’ (2.2.33). Though Bottom (like Spenser’s Braggadocchio) is base-born, a consummate braggart, and an unlearned and unrefined ‘ass’, he is ultimately shown as worthy of Titania’s affection, and of Duke Theseus’ bounty and preference. This is Shakespeare’s cleverest comic inversion of Spenser’s art: instead of having a regal fairy refine humanity’s baseness, he humanizes the proud combative fairies and courtly lovers by means of Bottom’s crude but gentle art.

Bottom’s mixed nature and fundamental benevolence typifies the play as a whole. Despite the fairies’ self-indulgences, and despite Puck’s persistent aligning of himself with cruel pranks, night-terrors, and ‘Damned spirits’ (2.1.32–57; 3.2.378–87; 5.1.357–72), the embattled tone of A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes amiably, overcoming traditional fears about fairies and their moonlit fantasy.³⁴ Despite her proud wilfulness, Titania bejewels nature with dew, dispels its evils with song, strives to refine Bottom’s nature, and, instead of stealing a human child, charitably adopts the orphan of a ‘votary’. Though Bottom eats fairy food and apparently enjoys sexual intimacy with a fairy, he suffers no ill effects from Titania’s dotage and easily returns to his beloved lesser life. Finally Oberon, distinguishing his sun-loving fairies from demonic spirits of darkness,³⁵ uses song and dance to master the natural order, and providentially blesses the newlyweds and their issue. Thus Shakespeare’s immersion of rustics, courtiers, and fairy-spirits in elemental carnal nature does not obviate their intrinsic morality, but makes moral vision evolve from within conditions of embodiment.

The people’s choice

Having ‘incorporated’ the fairy queen into his own sensuous, processive, morally ambivalent idiom, Shakespeare makes this artistic metastasis the basis for Theseus’ last-act choice between Spenserian and Shakespearean types of art: he will reject those entertainment proposals which devalue common earthly passion, each associated with an artist who is increasingly refined and alienated from his audience.

Theseus first disposes of ‘The battle of the centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp’ (5.1.44–5). This effete image of the artist suggests a dig at university and courtly fashions, ‘Athenian’ being Lyly’s favourite epithet for Oxbridge scholars.³⁶ Indeed, the satiric punch derives not so much from the indecorousness of centaurs disrupting the Lapiths’ wedding as from having the tale dispassionately chanted by the refined, urbane eunuch.

Next Theseus discards ‘The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage’ (48–9), again showing an alienated artist who exacerbates rather than resolves human passion, either showing Orpheus’ other-worldly mood after the loss of Eurydice, or that (according to Alexandrian tradition) he preferred ‘the love of tender boys’ rather than of women. Thus, even less successful than the poet as detached Athenian eunuch is the one alienated and consumed by the violent passion he sings into being.³⁷

Though we, and Shakespeare’s own audience, may discern the inappropriate brutality of the first two entries, Theseus evades that recognition. He rejects these tales, not because the centaurs’ male furore and Bacchantes’ female frenzy are unfit for connubial feeling but because he has already experienced them with Hippolyta (‘That have I told my love, in glory of my kinsman Hercules’; ‘That is an old device; and it was played / When I came last from Thebes a conqueror’). Implicitly both tales re-enact courtship’s discord (‘I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’, 1.1.16–17). Moreover, the tales’ complementary frenzies have been used to celebrate the patriarchal conquests of Theseus and Hercules. For his wedding Theseus seeks a different mood (‘I will wed thee in another key’, 1.1.18) and quickly concurs in sensuous, heartfelt experience – the ‘passion of loud laughter’ which these earnest, ignorant men have provoked in Philostrate. Even more, he values the performers’ intent, the sincere desire to please which carries the rustics’ art beyond their humble selves and beyond violent, dominating impulse: ‘Love … and tongue-tied simplicity / In least speak most, to my capacity’ (5.1.81–105).

Philostrate’s least attractive entertainment is distinctly (though reductively) Spenserian: ‘The thrice-three Muses mourning for the death / Of learning, late deceased in beggary’ (52–3), which records the total and voluntary alienation of the artist. Theseus expresses his most resounding disapproval: ‘That is some satire, keen and critical, / Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony’. Bednarz speculates on patronage rivalry which might have caused this parody of Spenser’s The Teares of the Muses.³⁸ Why has Shakespeare chosen ‘Teares’ as the final and consummately ill-conceived art offering? We note its serious intent as an artistic manifesto, its symbolically weighty subject (the nine Muses having been extensively annotated by Natalis Comes), and its ingenious Neoplatonic arrangement of the muses, which Shakespeare parodies with the archaic epithet, ‘thrice-three’.³⁹ The poem claims a lofty theme, an audience of noble and literate patrons, and the exalted aim of refashioning human nature through the finest art: what better wedding gift? Yet it is clearly one of Spenser’s least appealing works. With little evocation of sensuous human experience, it pounds out a repetitious jeremiad against commoners’ insensitivity to art and against aristocrats’ neglect of the artist – a litany of wounded elitism which is the main target of Shakespeare’s satire.

From the detached and impotent eunuch, harping about what he himself cannot experience, to the dismemberment of melancholic Orpheus, who having lost his own love will not cater to the rampant passions of others, we move at last to this absolute severance of the artist from his audience – not simply because they fail to appreciate his art but because he has abstracted himself out of existence.⁴⁰ Displaced by the metonymy ‘learning’, mourned by the raffiné Neoplatonized chorus of ‘thrice-three Muses’, the artist has so lost himself in an archaic and elitist conception of Art, and has so preoccupied himself with self-pity because of others’ failure to appreciate that abstraction, that there is no longer any earthy, passional, substantial reality to sing about, either in his subject or in himself.

Shakespeare is quickly forgiven for parodying the presumptions of courtly and of learned art when we realize that the fourth option, the marvellous misadventure of Bottom and the rustics, is a riotous burlesque of his own art: ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth’. Peter Quince’s production farcically exhibits numerous earmarks of Shakespeare’s enterprise: his troupe’s catering to the Age’s thirst for youthful romantic comedy; their paradoxical conjoining of tragic and comic impulses (‘very tragical mirth’); and their earthy sensational embodiment of the irrepressible instincts of humankind, both high and low. Of course, most disarming is the way this ‘palpablegross play’ (5.1.353) parodies his own company’s noble rendering of Romeo and Juliet.⁴¹

The title of this fourth offering includes no aloof and scorned image of the artist, and rightly so, since Shakespeare, as the adaptable, resourceful hack, Peter Quince, has included himself in the work of art, integrating it in the common moonshine and beastliness of everyday life. As artist-director, Quince does not abstract himself out of the picture but, like Shakespeare, intimately engages as performer with his fellow-actors and audience. In the bumbling prologue, as Quince lays his own quavering voice and repressed syntax on the line, he is far more self-conscious than the Athenian eunuch, the disintegrating Orpheus, or the self-immolating Neoplatonic artist; yet in his very self-exposure Quince contributes to this art of vulgar immanence which delightfully jumbles its ‘rare vision’ with ‘a peck of provender’.

Rather than the spirited prowess of a fairy queen (beauteous, wilful, enchanting Titania, whose presence seemed destined to dominate and define the play), it is Bottom and friends who reveal themselves as the metaphoric touchstone of Shakespeare’s artistic vision, the fulfilment of his comic epiphany. In the contest between the two fairy queens, and between two contrary modes of art, Shakespeare impishly stacks the deck and alters the rules so that Bottom may proclaim, ‘the short and the long is, our play is preferred’.

Self-love in Reformation theology and in Shakespeare’s plays

Studies of the discourse of desire in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have, since the 1970s, focused on two main bonds: the romance of sexual opposites and its complement, the companionate bond of sexual equals. Shakespeare’s fascination with both, and the tension between them, persists from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Two Noble Kinsmen. These bonds may form an envious rivalry or be mutually supportive; and Shakespeare’s deepening use of cross-dressed disguise opens a transference and interchange between the two. In evaluating this diverse engagement of Self with Others, scholars have not fully explored how the interplay of courtship and friendship offers each character a means of self-fulfilment. Our fascination with the complexity of gender-based relationship has caused neglect of a third mode of desire which is central to Shakespeare’s plays – namely, self-love.⁴² How did Shakespeare view self-love, and in what forms does it appear in his poems and plays? What were the predominant ideas about self-love among Renaissance and Reformation thinkers, whether of Catholic or Protestant sympathy, and toward which pole did Shakespeare lean in portraying the varied forms of self-love?

Oscar Wilde notes this passion’s centrality – ‘Self-love is the beginning of a life-long romance’ – a maxim Shakespeare fully exploits. Increasingly he grapples with the frustration of this compelling love affair, which implies a division in the self. In Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur observes how one’s own body and mind are perceived as a mysterious ‘other’, arousing a desire to possess and magnify this otherness which is so near and dear.⁴³ This infatuation, however, gives way to a fearful wound on realizing the body-based self’s imperfections, its degrading subjection to ugliness, weakness, mutability, mortality. As a result, one defensively seeks power, bonding, and possessions to palliate the wound of unfulfilled self-love and resultant self-estrangement. Managing this proliferation of defensive, recuperative strategies is central to the quest for self-fulfilment and identity. Thus, while romantic love fades in Shakespeare’s histories and becomes abusive in the tragedies, self-love remains central in every play and poem.

In Sonnet 62 Shakespeare’s main concern is not the adoration of a handsome youth, or frustration with a dark lady, but an unfulfilled self-adulation:

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye

And all my soul and all my every part;

And for this sin there is no remedy,

It is so grounded inward in my heart.

In the first line ‘eye’ puns on the ‘I’ as the essential self and the ‘eye’ which sees the self reflected in worldly mirrors. Self-love thus knits the outer and inner worlds. The second quatrain shifts to the self’s aggressive fantasy of greatness as a trope of superiority:

Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,

No shape so true, no truth of such account,

And for myself mine own worth do define,

As I all others in all worths surmount.

This assertion of absolute supremacy problematizes the poet’s identity, implying an insecure envy which seeks to surmount (indeed negate) the significance of ‘all others’. This denial that anyone can mirror him adequately, that he must be sui generis, a godlike self-definer, anticipates the contemptuous exclusivity of Macbeth and Coriolanus.

The sestet brings the usual reality check, when a mirror shows the poet wrinkled with age. This humbling discovery utterly inverts the experience of Narcissus, yet, in privileging material appearances (ensouled body rather than idealized soul), Shakespeare remains true to his customary worldview:

But when my glass shows me myself indeed,

Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,

Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;

Self so self-loving were iniquity.

Here is perhaps the key to what Keats called the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare. Acknowledging his failure to look like Narcissus and, moreover, to realize grandiose eternal selfhood, the playwright will resort to endless imagining of high-born and low-born characters as defensive displacements. Thus in the closing couplet Shakespeare defers to the handsome boy, lauding him as a valid basis for his own self-love since he identifies so completely with the boy’s youthful outward beauty:

’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,

Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

This conclusive flattery of the beloved, a common pattern in the sonnets, here is used to reformulate the problem of self-love. Instead of deflecting our awareness of the ‘sin of self-love’, the deferential couplet actually enhances the poet’s admission of utmost egoism. As Anne Ferry notes in The Inward Language, Shakespeare, unlike Sidney, fully acknowledges and explores the implications of his own self-love.⁴⁴

In The Heresy of Self-Love (1968), which argues the centrality of self-love in Western culture, Paul Zweig considers it the salient motive in all Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially the 126 apparently addressed to a young man. In the adored youth, Zweig says, the poet seeks to immortalize an idealized image of himself as a defence against time’s, and life’s, ravages.⁴⁵ But by asserting the power of his art to confer immortality, the poet flatters himself more than the youth. Moreover, the sonnets praise the young man’s outward beauty far more than his moral character, which increasingly appears as fickle and self-indulgent. Thus the critique of self-love in Sonnet 62 seems intended partly as a lesson for the beautiful youth: the opening line indicates the poet’s fascination with the youth’s, as well as the poet’s, ‘sin of self-love’. The young man’s consummate attractiveness (‘beauty of thy days’ suggests the allure of both youth and privilege) mirrors the poet’s self-love in identifying with him: ‘’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise’.

Philosophical fictions which portray the mythos of love’s origin