Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England

David Houston Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317010111
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.

Chapter 1 “Divers paces with divers persons”¹ : Timing the Self in Early Modern England

¹ See As You Like It (3.2.282–83). Except where explicitly noted, all quotations of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, (ed.) 2nd edition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

DOI: 10.4324/9781315550930-1

Time, Self, and the New Historicism

Benvolio	Good morrow, cousin.
Romeo	Is the day so young?
Benvolio	But new strook nine.
Romeo	Ay me, sad hours seem long….
Benvolio	… What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Romeo	Not having that which, having, makes them short.
—Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.160–64

Nothing is more chaungeable than time: and therefore no thing is more perillous to the body. For as Hippocrates sayeth: The chaunging of time gendereth most euills. For sodayne chaunging of colde into heate, chaungeth and appayreth [wastes] bodyes: and that is, for that kinde suffereth not sodayne chaungings, as he sayth. Therefore ofte sodaine chaunging of time, is cause of sicknesse.

—Batman uppon Bartholome, 9.2

The elastic sense of time Romeo expresses to Benvolio in my first epigraph is one we might recognize as both transcultural and transhistoric, a subjective emotional truism. Romeo, here a stereotype of the pining Petrarchan lover, presents an impression of the languorous way in which time itself can seem to unfold based on the passion he projects toward the absence that signifies his heart's desire. And so it does; as individuals boasting our own respective agencies, wishes, and desires, we postmoderns, too, as the social sciences confirm, are inherently familiar with our own subjective impressions of time and temporal experience across a range of our daily activities and affective states.² The works of William Shakespeare, of course, are crammed full with just such similarly emotionally inflected, subjective representations of time: whether in Juliet's insistence, for example, that, given the right emotional footing, “in a minute there are many days”; to Dromio of Syracuse's suggestion that Father Time can certainly muster “reason to turn back an hour in a day”; or, further still, in Rosalind's assertion that “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.”³ Ironically enough, much of the timeless attraction of Shakespeare's works surely lies in these psychologically satisfying, cogent comments relating both to character and to time. Yet, on closer inspection, the particular emotion Romeo reveals in this passage for the beautified Rosaline, and the sentiment he relates regarding his subjective temporal experience, undermines implicitly the very transcultural, transhistoric quality we may seek to perceive in such passion.

² See, for example, from a sociological perspective, Michael G. Flaherty, The Watched Pot: How we experience time (New York: New York UP, 1999), esp. 9, 23–24; from an anthropological, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 1983); and from a psychoanalytic, Jacob A. Arlow, in what he terms the “psychopathology of everyday time experience,” in “Psychoanalysis and Time,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 34 (1986): 508. ³ See Romeo and Juliet (3.5.45); The Comedy of Errors (4.2.62); and As You Like It (3.2.282–83). Also note, for example, the Friar in Much Ado About Nothing: “this wedding-day / Perhaps is but prolong’d, have patience and endure” (4.1.253–54); and 1.2 of 1 Henry IV, in which Hal links specific forms of character with specific forms of time, demanding of Falstaff: “What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day? unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-color’d taffeta; I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of day” (6–12).

After all, the peculiar quality of Romeo's behaviors in Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet has led his father, Montague, to suspect Romeo's status as the sufferer of a disease uniquely attuned to the early modern English cultural moment: melancholy.⁴ In making this judgment, Montague notably cites what he identifies as his son's “humor” to be “Black and portendous” (1.1.141), alluding to Romeo's inward, bodily dominance by the black bile of the melancholy humor. Moreover, given Montague's relation of the “tears” (132) his son has been rumored to have shed, in addition to his “deep sighs” (133), solitary lurking in the woods, and self-created world of “artificial night” (141)—all central features of this disease as evidenced in early modern medical texts⁵ —Montague's diagnosis appears singularly accurate in this context. Relating both to inward cause and outward symptomatology, the observations that both Montague and Benvolio establish for Romeo—in addition to the “Griefs” Romeo identifies within himself (1.1.186–189)—reflect in fact a specific form of this particular infirmity; identified as love-melancholy in contemporary medical treatises, this malady thrived as a cultural construction of both medical disease and social affectation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England for a host of psycho-socio-theological reasons.

⁴ There are a number of excellent secondary studies that engage the topic of early modern melancholy. For exhaustive overviews of the subject across Europe, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964; reprint, Liechtenstein: Klaus, 1979), and Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz, 1991). Classic studies with a focus on English representations of melancholy include Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1951); Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England, (New York: Norton, 1971); and Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). For a specific focus upon concepts of lovesickness, see Trevor, “Love, Humoralism, and ‘Soft’ Psychoanalysis,” Shaksepeare Studies 33(2005) 87–94, and Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: the Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990). For a specific view of the disease in the context of gender studies, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); for a psychoanalytic analysis of such gendered forms of the disease, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1992). Finally, for a truly remarkable study of the relationship between melancholy and madness during the period, I strongly recommend Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004). ⁵ See, for example, Burton 1.3.1.4, 1.3.3. All quotations of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Henry Cripps, 1628) will be numbered as he himself divided his work: first, by Partition; second, by Section; third, by Member; and, fourth, by Subsection. The first edition of the Anatomy was published in 1621.

Romeo's reflection on the emotionally inflected subjective experience of time in this passage tellingly correlates with other characters similarly affected by forms of love-melancholy in Western European Renaissance literature: from the Italians, in works by Petrarch and Alberti; from the French, in works by Ronsard and Du Bellay; and drawn as well from the numerous characters troubled with the disease across English literary writing from the period such as Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona, F.J. in George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., and Musidorus in Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia.⁶ Like Romeo, these characters insistently complain of a dilatory loss of time that accompanies the emotion. Early modern medical theorists confirm such experiences and caution against such prodigality with one's time. But the black bile whose excess was understood to produce the humoral melancholic disposition was itself portrayed by such theorists as the material cause for a wide range of depressive ailments during the early modern period—not simply as faddish love-melancholy or social malcontentedness, but across a pervasive and ubiquitous taxonomy of grieving. As Timothy Bright (1586), Thomas Wright (1604), and Robert Burton (1621) illustrate in conspicuous detail, among other early modern humoral theorists, this taxonomy encompasses states ranging from love-melancholy to religious melancholy; from head-melancholy to windy, or hypochondriachal, melancholy; and and from genial to dangerous forms of the disease that lead from sexual jealousy to states that contemporary theorists identify as “melancholy madness.”⁷

⁶ Note Proteus’ comment that “Thou Julia, thou hast metamorphis’d me / Made me neglect my studies, lose my time, / War with good counsel, set the world at nought”, (Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1.1.66–68; see also 1.3.19); F.J.'s, that “it seemed that whereas you went about in time to try him you did altogether lose time which can never be recovered, and not only lost your own time … but also compelled him to leese his time which he might … have bestowed in some other worthy place”, (George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J. in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, Paul Salzman, (ed.) [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998: 57]); and Musidorus's caution that in pursuing Philoclea, Pyrocles has “divert[ed his] thoughts from the way of goodness to lose, nay abuse, [his] time”, (Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The Old Arcadia], Katharine Duncan-Jones, (ed.) [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999: 17]). In addition, see Love's Labor's Lost, 5.2.755. ⁷ See Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie: Contayning the Causes thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies …. (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1586) 2.

According to a range of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance traditions, the naturally cool, dense quality of black bile was understood to be terrifically susceptible to “adustion,” sudden caloric increases that scorched the humors, producing, along with resultant crudities and vapors, the catastrophic emotional volatility associated with intense fury and rage. As Thomas Elyot explains, for example, in The Castel of Helth (1541): “Melancholy is of two sorts. The one is called natural, which is only cold and dry; the other is called adust or burned …. [A]ll adust melacholy annoyeth the wit and judgment of man, for whan that humor is hot it maketh men mad.”⁸

⁸ Sir Thomas Elyot, from “The Division of Melancholy and the Diet of Persons Melancholic” The Castel of Helth. The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatc Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century (1541). Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, (eds) (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1954): 118–20.

Significantly, contemporary humoral theorists link this fury and rage with correlatively feverish forms of subjective temporal experience. Burton's caution, for example, that melancholy adust foments inward “violence and speedy alterations in this our microcosm” (1.2.3.1) which lead to a “sudden madness” (1.2.3.5), or Bright's observation that melancholy adust “urgeth [rage] with most vehemencie” (109), or Wright's loaded humoral reference to a “gunpowdred minde” that “of a sudden bee inflamed” (6), among myriad such cautions expressed in contemporary medical texts, indicate that the relationship between historicized forms of time as they pertain to melancholy are apparently neither as simple nor as limited to time's elasticity as the smitten Romeo's words might make the case first appear.⁹ The protracted depression and sudden violence that infuses so much early modern literary artwork—precipitated in The Winter's Tale, for example, by Leontes’ explanatory exclamation relating to the firing of his melancholy humor: “Too hot! Too hot!” [1.2.108]—frequently reflect the dangerous humoral imbalances that threaten health and emotion within this dynamic theory of medical interpretation. Such instability centers on the bifurcation of temporalities that serve as both dilatory and explosive facilitators for the palpably volatile emotional paradigm that constitutes humoralism itself.

⁹ See Bright, and Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: 1604).

*******

The central premise of this book is that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced characteristics of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Since the human comprehension of time is not a transcultural phenomenon, one which we twenty-first-century postmoderns can necessarily be understood to share with those who live in the early modern English, or any other, cultural moment, this failure has significantly impeded our understanding both of time's representation in early modern concepts of selfhood, as well as in time's deployment in early modern literary narratives.¹⁰ In order to address this omission, this study looks to a specific form of temporal experience unique to early modern concepts of time, one that finds explicit embodiment in the humoral self of early modern English medical interpretation. My focus upon the way in which time shapes the concept of the self within early modern discourses related to health and emotion serves as the groundwork for analysis of how early modern writers employ such depictions in the narrative structuring of their literary works. In doing so, I engage both early modern and current theories related to the timing of the self, all of which center on the subjective temporality these theories associate with the literary representations that I explore within the context of the critical modes of narratology and psychoanalysis.

¹⁰ For a postmodern literary perspective on this issue, see Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003); Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997; and for an anthropological perspective, see Fabian.

Drawing especially on the dangerous role early modern medical theorists ascribe to suddenness—that is, volatility—within humoral representations of varying affective states, this study explores the ways in which early modern artists utilize such volatility in what Peter Brooks identifies as the “textual erotics” of their narratives. Though examples abound in the literature of the period, I demon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “Divers paces with divers persons”: Timing the Self in Early Modern England
• 2 “The accident of an instant”:Passions, Potions, and Poisons in Sidney's Old Arcadia
• 3 “Very Now”: Time and the Intersubjective in Othello
• 4 “Not a jar o' th' clock”: Time and Narrative in The Winter's Tale
• 5 “Spirit of phrenzie”: Narrative Temporality in Samson Agonistes
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index