il80) and its "instantially viewed universals" (Nuttall 1967,49) to Shakespeare. |warbling .... al philosophical problems or themes of Shakespeare's Christian culture. Measure for ... Shakespeare's genius and lonely individualism that perhaps ultimately reflects ... inal passage from one small piece of action to another" (73).
Shakespeare: Philosopher, Scientist, Ecologist Antbony DiMatteo
Anthony DiMatteo, professor of English at NewYork Institute of Technology, writes on the relations between myth and politics in early modern literature.
The emotions are greatly alterative with respect to the body. Therefore, through them the imagination is able to transform the body. (Dr.Thomas Fienus, early modern physician, qtd. in Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan 2007, 177) What to ourselves in passion we propose. The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy. (The Player-King, Hamlet 3.22. 194-97)
Fletcher, Angus. 2007. Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $29.95bc. 179pp. Floyd-Wilson, Mary, and Garrett Sullivan, Jr., eds. 2007. Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern Etigland. NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan. $69.95bc. 213pp.
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;Nuttall,A. D. 2007. Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven:Yale University IPress. $30.00hc; $19.00sc. 428pp.
A
typical historical narrative, even a grand récit in literary criticism, tells us that allegory, the dominant poetics of the Middle Ages, gave way to its at least implicit critique in the Renaissance. Analogical correspondences so multiplied to the point where the old four-fold scheme described by Dante in his Letter to Can Grande della Scala appeared less and less able to hold together. A number of events had brought about this paradigm shift from allegory to mintesis.The combined impact of the printing press, the discovery of another world in the earthly form of a new one, the Reformation, the rise of political absolutism, and the beginnings of a more empirical approach to science and representation split apart the semantic and political world of Europe anchored for centuries in Rome. Split is indeed the word. The great accomplishments in art and science we associate with the Renaissance coincided, especially as the period reached its late stage, with wars of conquest and religion that induced a widespread trauma. As 'Shakespeare has Ulysses put it in what A. D. Nuttall calls his most philosophical play, "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what dis'cord follows" {Troilus and Cressida 1.3.109-10).These three books chart some iOf the ways that Shakespeare and early modern culture coped with and fur'thered vast changes as old-world thinking and life gave way to new. , Given this large-scale alteration, it is more than coincidental that Angus Fletcher and A. D. Nuttall (who died while his book was in press), arguably two of our greatest scholars of allegory writing in English in the last halfcentury, have near or at the end of their life's work written books on Shakespeare. Furthering the critical path opened by C. S. Lewis and Roseniond Tuve, both began their prestigious careers with books on allegory in the 1960s, a time of polysemy if there ever was one. To follow the long arc of these two scholars' many books in their over forty years of writing is to experience something like what early modern people must have felt and thought. To go from "the magical relationships" of allegory (Fletcher 1964, il80) and its "instantially viewed universals" (Nuttall 1967,49) to Shakespeare |warbling "his native Wood-notes wild," as Milton described him in i"L'Allegro," involves undergoing a simultaneous banishment and empower,ment, both a comic longing for a unity that never was and a fretful realization of what is or may be. The rapidly changing circumstances of European life in the sixteenth century required a new kind of two-minded literature, 'and it was Shakespeare (along with Cervantes and Ariosto) who more than any other writer rose to meet the great challenge.
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Shakespeare did so, Nuttall observes, through his invention of a new kind of drama resolutely focused on history, breaking the binary hold that comedy and tragedy had had over drama. In Shakespeare's history plays especially, but throughout all his plays, Nuttall convincingly shows how "we become aware that history has a multiple momentum and is imperfectly controlled by the most powerful persons concerned" (2007, 29).To achieve this double effect that reveals how characters contribute to and are caught up by historical forces or "momentum," Shakespeare had to be both dramatist and thinker, dramatizing thought as well as thinking through drama, Nuttall often fumes against contemporary schools of criticism throughout this book because, arguing that even having to describe Shakespeare's accomplishment this way—as thinker and dramatist, philosopher and writer—indicates how narrow and divisive the terms and genres of present day literary criticism and philosophy have become, each in its eminent domain as a separate category in our academic disciplines and libraries. No, for Shakespeare, to write is to act and to know, a double procedure that folds over itself to cut a wide path, leaving us in its even wider wake, Nuttall fmds virtually every idea and theory considered—and then mostly tossed aside—by Shakespeare in Shakespeare, perhaps, like Picasso, a great cannibalizer of other artists' minds, even those not yet born. Like a trap waiting for our step, Nuttall's Shakespeare is always ahead of the reader, his Protean oeuvre echoing and outdistancing our every speculation. Like a time traveler, even as we catch on to our own ideas, Shakespeare has already thought them and has already passed us by, destined to be differently understood by some distant people in the future who will laugh at the present day industry that has grown up around him even as they perhaps double its size. Arguing for Shakespeare's "systematic elusiveness" (2007, 1), Nuttall follows the generally agreed-upon chronology of the plays to offer a host of insights about individual works and their concerns as these evolved, with Shakespeare often imitating himself in order to rethink and reconsider particular ideas and predicamemts. What he was after, according to Nuttall, was a magic trick of stunning ambition and complexity: to "make reality succeed and transcend the formal description ofthat reality" (112), The mark of this double goal and awareness is found by Nuttall in nearly everything Shakespeare wrote. There is a "tension" or dynamic resulting from a "fluid antinomy [that] keeps forming and re-forming" between "glittering vacuous formalism" and the "variable paradigms" of reality (109). Recoiling from "metaphysical theses beginning with the thrasonical word 'All'" (328), Shakespeare routinely invokes a constructivist way of seeing while indicating at the same time "the co-presence of a possibly unmanipulated self" (298), A key early discovery made by Shakespeare that Nuttall often discusses occurs
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in the rose-picking scene in Henry VI, Part One. Symbolically gathered in a ' garden, members ofthe houses ofYbrk and Lancaster arbitrarily select white and red roses to represent their rival causes for the English throne. These "dumb signficants," as Richard Plantagenet calls the plucked blooms (Henry VI, Part One 2.4.27), take on a strange life in a long and bloody struggle for \ power. In this scene, Shakespeare shows he understands "the vertiginous transformation of reason into honour" in the male-dominated culture of his time (32), as well as a still more fundamental dynamic explored at length in many subsequent plays, in which humanity and history are locked in a crucible or anamorphic mirror of time. "Outside-in motivation" (199, 281) and "lateral causation" (277) on group and individual levels become recurring concerns of Shakespeare. People grow afraid because they run, believe ! because they say prayers, fall in love because they express it. Across all the ¡ genres he wrote in, Shakespeare worries like a philosopher about rhetoric's ! power (186). Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet "wrestle with the prob-
lem of brilliant articulateness, with its implicit substitution of form for matter" (104). The effect of performance upon identity becomes a crucial focus for modern-like Shakespeare in a way no philosopher contemplating the I drama of human life from the outside-in could sustain: "the role-playing that I was a means of evading action for Richard II is in Hamlet a desperate attempt to galvanize muscles that are inert" (198).Taking up more tradition, al philosophical problems or themes of Shakespeare's Christian culture. Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear and Timon of Athens
investigate how justice painfully differs from grace or mercy. Love, though "an elastic universal" for Shakespeare and his audience (10), is often overwhelmed by what Nuttall sees as an emerging issue for Shakespeare: not the difference between good and evil, but that "between goodness and nothingness" (309). The four final so-called romance plays address this fearful contrariety by inventing a new kind of drama that has Shakespeare "clearly straining toward the Greek end of the spectrum," and away from the deeply rooted Christian doctrines of his age (341). ' As good as it is as a general introduction to Shakespeare's "philosophy" I or philosophies, there are obvious shortcomings to Nuttall's book. According ' to Nuttall, history, cause, identity, motive, language and genre are what 1 Shakespeare is thinking about through drama and as kinds of drama. Given ¡ the many crisp insights of his book, one can see how these topics that name ' problems in philosophy were indeed Shakespeare's. Yet were they not also , Montaigne's, to whom only two brief references are made by Nuttall? This ' omission, I believe, is connected to Nuttall's Burckhardtian stress on : Shakespeare's genius and lonely individualism that perhaps ultimately reflects I Nuttall's own sense of identity as one of the few who can follow and com-
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prehend Shakespeare's omnivorous intelligence. This stress perhaps also explains why one subject Shakespeare apparently did not think about in play after play is power, specifically political power: how it is made, what different forms it can take, what their consequences are, and why and how the struggle over it is so often pernicious and contrary to love and to human and nonhuman life. But this is decidedly not the case, and it is profoundly misleading to ignore Shakespeare's consideration of this leviathan of a topic. Fletcher's book concentrates upon a more scientific aspect of Shakespeare, if we can hold science and philosophy apart for a moment. Fletcher sees the plays and many of the scientific and literary achievements of early modern culture as registering profound discoveries about and concerns with the problem of motion, with how things move and change, suffer alteration or cause it. The plays are both reflections on and experiments in motion. Fletcher convincingly demonstrates what he calls "the predominant conceptual, scientific, metaphysical and hence philosophic power of the idea of motion for the poets of the early modern age" (2007,41-42). His first three chapters interrogate Galileo's metaphorical description of mathematics as a kind of language and its implication for Renaissance poetry and drama, while the next five chapters narrow the focus to individual authors: Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Milton. I must confess that as a former student of Professor Fletcher at the Graduate Center, City University of NewYork, I have the advantage of imagining his voice and gestures, of remembering the kind of dumbfounding observations he would toss off seemingly out of nowhere as we students struggled to keep up with his incredible ability to think polysemantically Even in the classroom, such astonishing multidisciplinary observations as the following sentence delivers were routine: "It is one thing to imagine that somehow philosophy can translate motion in physics to action in literature, and quite another to see how this translation actually works, when actual human bodies—speaking bodies, gesturing bodies, standing and falling human bodies, weeping and sleeping bodies—are the carriers of the most abstract levels of meaning" (49). An entire course of study would suddenly open before us as we witnessed his pithy interrogations that came upon him as if visited by Apollo. "What kind of word is a number?" was one such query of his that encouraged a complicated project resulting in an excellent book, as Barbara Fisher's Noble Numbers, Subtle Words tells us (1997, 8).We were trained to distrust deeply what Fisher's study terms, "single-level semiotics" (2007, 46). Faithful to his own creed, Fletcher focuses on someone else who posed difficult questions cutting across disciplines, namely Galileo, whose search for a correct theory of motion was accurately seen by the Church as threatening to translate—and empty out—doctrines of divine providence and ere-
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ation into independent natural causes (2007, 18). Galileo's lifelong study of the mechanics of motion is comparable to Shakespeare's obsession with what moves characters into action. Shakespeare wants to prolong and investigate how people and things undergo dispersion in the in-between state of an "interim," with "each moment" in the dramas an instance of "a dilated lim( inal passage from one small piece of action to another" (73). Giving voice and ! figure to imaginary characters opens up opportunities for investigating time I and space: how long things last and interact, and how they are distributed in I space. The soliloquy, for example, is an experiment testing how subjective , emotions form or register as bodily and verbal motions. "The process of solil' oquy permits in the most radical form the exposition of change, and it could not occur without the distanced closeness provided by the New Science" ] (91). Shakespeare's Globe thus becomes a type of lens. It takes some courage to look through it: "Ideas about the disappearing present moment give thematic structure to the entire Shakespearean canon" (71). Shakespeare was not alone in such experiments. Marlowe's Faustian contract had created "an entrance into modernity" (63), and Jonson's The Alchemist and other plays present us with "a new secular society" as if it were "a system of interacting particles, kept separate by what one might call interests" (102-03). j Shakespeare's Hamlet "is the most extended treatment of the dilation of the • present," while Timon of Athens ofFers "the most extended treatment of any attempt, however late in the day, to arrest this passage, to correct an error" (94). Whole new vistas for the study of drama open up here, it seems to me. For one, it becomes possible to understand how Shakespeare and other of his contemporaries can be profitably described as environmentalists or even ecologists.This is exactly what a host of recent studies have done (Paster , 2004; Floyd-Wilson 2003; Schoenfeldt 1999; Rowe, Paster and Floyd-Wilson ' 2004). Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, Jr.'s collection (2007) profitably builds 1 upon these studies, linking humoral psychology to current ecological thinking that studies the interface of minds, machines and environments and thus I works against the body/mind or subject/object divide (Sutton 1998; Clark ; 2003). The essays help us to "see and hear green," in Bruce Smith's terms, I for this is what the Galenic medicine of the early modern period required, making "thinking absolutely dependent on seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling" (Smith in Rowe et al. 2004, 150). To identify early modern ecological thought, one must abandon "the lonely ego which . . . doubts the existence of everything except its own thinkingness" (Barker 1995, 50). Thus, not "cogito ergo sum, but sentio ergo sum" (Smith 2004,150).Theater I in this sense-driven epistemology and cognition can be understood as "a kind I of inhabited affective technology," as Steven Mullaney explains (Floyd¡ Wilson and Sullivan 2007, 74). The interpénétration of inside and outside
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reflects "self-world interchanges" that are "endemic to the ecology of passions" (Paster qtd. in Floyd-Wilson, et. al. 2007,146). The Old World fluidity and porosity of subject and object, once held in check by the Medieval theocentric analysis and its controlled levels of allegory, became a great source of vulnerability to people of all degree in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Europe as they faced the traumatic changes brought about by war, sectarianism, and absolutism. The twelve chapters of the collection convincingly demonstrate and explore how this social and psychic network of selves and surrounds registers in the work of a host of early modern writers with various critical implications. Katherine Rowe shows how the drama of George Wilkins, George Chapman, John Webster and Shakespeare presents "crises of sexual inconstancy" that undermine "the demands of contractual subjectivity for stable and continuous experience" as expressed chiefly in the marriage vow (2007, 92-93). David Baker argues that the travelogue self-published in 1611 by one of the inventors of tourism as we have come to know it, Thomas Goryate, "replaces the concept of a sealed British body politic [dominant during Elizabeth Is reign] with the far more likely, in early modern terms, concept of the body as a leaky vessel constantly in reciprocal flux with its environment" (137). John Sutton investigates early-modern anticipations of current extended-mind theory in the writings, among others, of Princess Elizabeth Tudor's mentor Roger Ascham who speaks of "the spungy brain" in a way that is "barely metaphorical for the best theories of brain structure and function described networks of pores traversed by fluids" (18). Gail Kern Paster's chapter on Edmund Spenser's Book of Temperance in Tire Faerie Queene demonstrates that "the environment, the humors, and the ensouled flesh were always engaged in what philosopher Andy Glark has described as 'continuous reciprocal causations'" (150). Mary Thomas Grane's chapter oflîers a close-reading of Andrew Marvell's pastoral poem "The Garden," whose speaker,Janus-minded between old and new worlds, alternates from wonderinducing analogy to wonder-inducing mechanism, with "neither worldview providing a way for the speaker to escape a cognitive bond with the environment" (48). In Elizabeth Harvey's explication, John Donne's bizarre lengthy poem, "Metempsychosis," placed at the head of the 1633 edition of the poet's works, conspicuously does not "cordon off the vegetative and bestial from existence" in its narrative of the various reincarnations of the soul of the apple from the tree of knowledge, with Donne thereby questioning the supposed "sovereignty of man over nature" (67, 55). Likewise, Katharine Graik's essay reveals the surprisingly materialistic and pleasure-based poetics of George Puttenham's 1589 treatise The Arte of English Poesie, perhaps the first full English articulation of the relationship between poetry and feeling
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(154). Tanya Pollard's fascinating chapter delves into the "curiously liniinal nature of words" as revealed in early modern spells and word-cures, allowing us access to nuances of literal meaning in many Shakespearean passages that we might otherwise take metaphorically, such as Gertrude's vow to Hamlet, "if words be made of breath, / And breath of life, I have no life to breathe / What thou hast said to me" (Hamlet 3.4.181-3; Pollard 181). In Jim Egan's analysis, we find the English soldier-traveler-chronicler John Smith of Jamestown fame offering his own somatic experiences as a way of connecting the "very diverse spaces on the globe" of East and West (104).Julian Yates delivers a network-based reading ofThomas More's Utopia. He persuasively argues that "the text as much recruits good humanists as offers a model of a 'perfect Commonwealth'" (190), inviting readers to enter an imagined humanist habitat so utterly contingent upon servants and good food. This excellent collection will stimulate future scholarship in many directions. Works Cited Barker, Francis. 1995. The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fisher, Barbara. 1997. Noble Numbers, Subtle Words :Tlxe Art of Mathematics in the Science of StorYtelling.Teaneck, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: Tlie Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. 2003. English Ethnicity and, Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuttall, A. D. 1967. Two Concepts ofAllegory: A Study of Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Ijogic ofAllegorical Expression. New Haven:Yale University Press. Paster, Gail Kern. 2004. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rowe Katherine, Gail Kern Paster, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. 2004. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schoenfeldt, Michael. 1999. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology, and tnwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, John. 1998. t^hihsophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
