Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos

Matter, Stage, Form

Jonathan P. A. Sell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre shakespearien

Winner of the AEDEAN "Enrique García Díez" Literature Research Award 2023

Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos: Matter, Stage, Form breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates a sublime mood or ethos which predisposes audiences intellectually and emotionally for the full experience of sublime pathos, explored in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's invention of sublime matter, his exploitation of the special characteristics of the Elizabethan stage, and his dramaturgical and formal simulacra of absolute space and time. In the process, it considers Shakespeare's conception of the universe and man's place in it and uncovers the epistemological and existential implications of key aspects of his art. As the argument unfolds, a case is made for a transhistorically baroque Shakespeare whose "bastard art" enables the dramatic restoration of an original innocence where ignorance really is bliss. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

1 On the Sublime

So besides this (as men reputing it a shame to be ignorant in any thing that by travail they might attain unto) they have found out to their great praise and our singular profit and pleasure, the secret and hidden reason of many things, which nature hath kept unknown from us (as it should seem of set purpose) to the end we might the rather find our selves occupied in the search and knowledge of the same. And like as some of them by reason they are ordinary and common, the cause thereof being also natural, together with the familiarity and acquaintance we have with them, and that they happen as it were of custom, do move us the less or nothing at all to have them in admiration when they chance or happen: Even so on the contrary part there are other effects of nature, which when we behold, they do the more amaze us, because we be not able to comprehend the causes and reasons thereof, but imagine straight way that nature is abused, or at least hath lost her rule who in deed is always[s] one and uniform, and cannot be but one cause working diversely, according to the diversity of her subjects. Touching things supernatural or above nature, we are to think they are not so called in respect of nature, as though she had made ought by chance, whereof she was not able to yield a reason, but rather having regard to us, whose weak understanding cannot conceive her secret means in working. And therefore we must think they have their proceeding from God or some divine inspiration, either directly or indirectly, immediately or by a mean, seeing that God oftentimes both to warn us of his justice and to punish our offences, layeth his hand and rod upon us in diverse sorts, as when we feel the raging whirlwinds and tempests by sea, the terrible earthquakes by land, the fearful flames of lightning, and cracks of thunder in the air, and all these things without us.

Edward Fenton (1569, n.p.)

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

As commander of the Mary Rose (not Henry VIII’s more famous flagship), Edward Fenton helped to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588 (Coote, 1889). Otherwise, his career as navigator, pirate and would-be king of St Helena, though active, was undistinguished: the 1,000 tons of shining ore he brought back from the Arctic with Martin Frobisher turned out to be fool’s gold, of use only for road repairs in the county of Kent. Before all this frantic and generally futile activity, Fenton had composed Certaine Secret Workes of Nature (1569), which was barely more than an unacknowledged translation of French humanist Pierre Boaisteu’s Histoires prodigieuses (1567). The epigraph to this chapter is a passage from the dedication to his patron Lord Lumley. There may seem to be nothing remarkable about Fenton’s words. For Fenton the sublime is a category of uncommon, out-of-the-ordinary “supernatural” events for which we can find no explanation. The sublime marks a cognitive impasse, where our knowledge of the rules of nature breaks down. That impasse can lead to the mind’s surrender to the inscrutable will of God or to a search for natural explanations. The sublime phenomena Fenton cites of “raging whirlwinds”, “terrible earthquakes” and “fearful flames of lightning” share the power to “amaze us”, and that amazement is one of the subjective psychopathological experiences typically associated with sublimity. Fenton is obviously writing about the sublime, although for historical reasons he does not use the term. As an account of the sublime, it is quite consistent with the rather more famous, and considerably later, Kantian one, according to which the “mathematical” sublime defies our imaginative powers of comprehension now but can act as a stimulus for the reason later to find causes or explanations, asserting thereby its superiority over the imagination.

The sublime has always been there. Fenton may use different terms from ours, but the intellectual and emotional phenomenon he invokes is the same as we experience: “the nomenclature for labelling this kind of event may shift from setting to setting […] but the experience of the sublime, the category under which it falls, and the difficulties that it poses are never utterly new” (Porter, 2016a, p. 619). Yet to have made such a claim as “he is obviously writing about the sublime” about a sixteenth-century author like Fenton would, until very recently, have been an act of intellectual heterodoxy. According to the standard view, the sublime as a concept did not become available until Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s Peri hupsous in 1674. That being the case, discourse of the sublime like Fenton’s was allegedly an historical impossibility and therefore ignored as a historical fact. The “British Aesthetic Tradition” (Costelloe, 2013) did not commence until the turn of the eighteenth century and the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Dennis, Joseph Addison and a rich cast of others. Yet Addison’s essay in Spectator no. 413 (Tuesday, 24 June 1712) clearly owes a debt, if not directly to Edward Fenton, at least to ideas that were circulating before William Shakespeare was born. God, explains Addison, “has annexed a secret Pleasure to the idea of any thing that is new or uncommon, that he might encourage us in the Pursuit after knowledge, and engage us to search into the Wonders of his creation” (1804, p. 363).

The next two sections of this chapter will show how the history of the sublime has now been replotted so that Fenton and near contemporaries like Shakespeare can be inserted neatly into it. They will be followed by a section sketching the transmission and principle notions of the two principal classical authorities on the sublime, Plato and Longinus, and introducing the notions of immanence and transcendence and their place in the Christian tradition of the sublime. The final section will explain some of the terms I shall be using in my discussion of the sublime.

Replotting the Sublime

Students of literary studies will often first enter the labyrinths of philosophical aesthetics following the trail of the sublime, particularly, perhaps, the Romantic sublime. No surprise there given Romanticism’s persistent influence on the way we tend to regard and talk about not only literature and, more broadly, art in general, but also such vital aspects of personal and public life as love or political ideals. In many ways we are still Romantics—or post-Romantics—and accordingly, many of us still seek to spice up the mundanity of our existence with rapid fixes of the phenomenal sublime, still live on the lookout for a quick thrill, an adrenalin rush, a sudden shot of the awesome. Meanwhile, others—cautious, cowardly or wise—prefer as a surrogate for the real thing the aesthetic sublime, whose innocuous contrivances guarantee survival to tell the tale. Both sublimes stimulate feelings of sublimity in those who experience them: whether those feelings are different and, if so, whether that difference is of kind or only of degree is just one of the moot points that characterise discussion of the sublime. For “sublime” is a slippery term for complex concepts and phenomena. On the one hand it may denote both philosophical idea and psychopathological experience, with aesthetic realisations of it somehow constituting halfway houses between the intellectual and the sensorial. On the other, it may be an artistic quality attributed to a work of art or the object a work of art takes as its subject.

Most readers of this book will have experienced for themselves the effects of sublimity of one kind or another. The ripple of excitement running down the spine, the sudden flush of panic, the fear registered in the pit of the stomach—all are common, possibly universal, symptoms of the sublime taking a hold of a human subject’s consciousness. Most readers, too, will have a personal stock of sublime referents which, so to speak, “do it for them”, bestow upon them moments when the mind or the senses are pushed into exhilarating overdrive as experience outstrips their capacity to wholly apprehend or comprehend it. Whether in the form of a vertiginous mountain ascent, a violent electrical storm, a last-minute match-winning goal or a musical modulation from major to minor, the sublime cuts across phenomenal categories and social classes alike, and in one way or another constitutes one of the mental coordinates around which we organise our experiences and define our identities.

It is surprising, then, that as recently as 2011, the sublime was declared moribund, if not quite dead, in an essay (Elkins, 2011) pursuing theoretical postulates to a pitch of abstraction so elevated—and not all that is elevated is sublime—that all contact was lost with common sense—and the sublime is both common sense and a common sense. Much as the posthumous fortunes of creative artists, writers among them, can be greatly advanced by premature death, so some scholars and theorists seem to believe that their professional fortunes can be advanced by certifying the decease of otherwise perfectly able-bodied and generally accepted concepts: so Roland Barthes declared the death of the author and Francis Fukuyama the end of history, thereby continuing a long tradition of apocalyptic works written in steadfast defiance of the world’s amiable tendency to keep turning on its axis. More seriously, the sublime’s alleged conceptual exhaustion was noted at a time when, far from being interred as a by-then defunct historical curiosity, it was being revivified in a cluster of important works which not only testified to its rude good health but also began to redraw its history as a philosophical-aesthetic category.

Ever since Samuel Holt Monk’s seminal The Sublime (1935) and Thomas Weiskel’s Freudian and semiotic sequel, The Romantic Sublime (1976), the history of the discourse of sublimity had been viewed as leading inexorably to its Kantian fulfilment and to Romantic thought on the sublime, whose philosophical bases were generally traced to Kantian transcendental idealism. Writing of the “growth” of eighteenth-century English aesthetics, Monk declared that its direction was “toward the subjectivism of Kant” (1935, p. 4), however “fumbling” (p. 9) the steps taken might have been; and while he was too intelligent to assert categorically that “Kant created the Romantic age” (p. 5), once the hare was raised, the suspicion inevitably lingered. As we shall see, there is a lot of Kant and of the Romantics already in Longinus, not to mention Plato and Plotinus or Hutcheson and David Hume. Nonetheless, the vaunted Kantian focus on the subjective experience of the sublime is still preeminent in more recent studies such as those of Ferguson (1992), Guyer (1996) and Shaw (2017), who argues that “the sublime affirms the ascendancy of the rational over the real” and is “a mode of consciousness” (p. 8). Even if “there was little that was original in Kant’s work”, the German philosopher is still taken as setting the future agenda of aesthetics and, “inadvertently”, laying the ground for an adequate account of the psychological experience of the sublime (Kirwan, 2005, p. 52). As a result, pre-Kantian texts, literary and philosophical, have been read through Kantian filters, while others which did not fit neatly into the Kantian teleology plotted by Monk have been sidelined as quirkish or wrong-headed. However, through the efforts of de Bolla (1989) and others (Ashfield and de Bolla, 1996; Duffy, 2005; Duffy and Howell, 2011; Furniss, 1993) to historicise the eighteenth-century and Romantic discourses on the sublime, Kant’s supremacy has been gradually undermined and the British tradition liberated to greater or lesser degree from the Kantian teleology. Furthermore, no longer coerced into performing as willing harbinger of Kantianism, the eighteenth-century British tradition has been recast by some as an alternative to Kant, one important difference being the political component of its aesthetics, which stands in frank opposition to the Kantian premise of the subject’s disinterestedness. Some of these issues will be discussed later; suffice it to say for now that the essay of which this book forms part proposes a Shakespearean sublime which in important ways is non-Kantian and permeates the pre-Kantian British discourse of the sublime. It is a sublime, too, whose experience early modern writers were able to describe and explain long before Kant’s psychological ground-laying, however inadvertent.

In the fifteen years leading up to its avowed demise, the sublime had actually been enjoying something of a facelift and had rarely looked better; and the same remains true today, a decade later. Two important collections of articles (Hoffman and Boyd White, 2011; Costelloe, 2012) have asserted the sublime’s perennial value as an analytical category and, more fundamentally, its inextricable penetration of all fields of academic study and human experience; and in their wake, numerous works have picked up the gauntlet both collections threw down by extending the study of the sublime into hitherto remote or largely unexplored territories such as green economics (Mendoza, 2018), alpine architecture (Stacher, 2018), legal and political philosophy (Monateri, 2018; Shapiro, 2018) or popular science (Gross, 2018)—to cite only a handful from a recent year’s offering. If the sublime is dead, long may it live! Indeed, so robust and energetic has the sublime been over the last two or three decades that it has rather pushed beauty out of the picture, thus forcing the latter to set aside its congenital indolence and stage something of a comeback (Gasché, 2012; Scarry, 1999).

The Early Modern Sublime

While this book breaks no new ground in taking as its subject the sublime in one of its favourite stamping grounds, literature, it does subscribe to the newly reinstated Longinian sublime. Of Longinus, the Longinian sublime and the Longinian tradition, we shall have occasion to speak a little later. But let it be stated now that this book takes as read James I. Porter’s masterly demonstration (2016a) that the Peri hupsous, conventionally ascribed to someone possibly called Longinus and written either in the first or third century CE, was neither a ground-breaking work in its time nor heterodox or aberrant as a tract on rhetoric. Porter has shown (a) that there was a healthy tradition of literary and scientific sublimes stretching as far back as Homer; (b) that a retrievable discourse around those sublimes existed before Longinus; (c) that Longinus is useful for providing a summa of that discourse and (d) that the sublime as ...