The Elizabethan Mind : Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty

The first comprehensive guide to Elizabethan ideas about the mind What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humours and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil’s interference. In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind. This was a period of turbulence and transition, as persistent medieval theories competed with revived classical ideas and emerging scientific developments. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Hackett sheds new light on works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Spenser, demonstrating how ideas about the mind shaped new literary and theatrical forms. Looking at their conflicted attitudes to imagination, dreams, and melancholy, Hackett examines how Elizabethans perceived the mind, soul, and self, and how their ideas compare with our own. Cover 1 Halftitle page 2 Title page 4 Copyright page 5 CONTENTS 6 ILLUSTRATIONS 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11 A NOTE ON THE TEXT 14 ABBREVIATIONS 16 Introduction 18 ‘Know thyself’: a preoccupation with the mind 20 The Elizabethan mind in the world of its time 26 ‘Man is but his mind’: the meanings of the mind 30 PART I Mind and Body 34 1 The Mind in the Body Medical Frameworks 36 ‘Airy substance’: the embodied soul and the spirits 36 ‘The mixture and temperature of the elements’: humoral theory 38 ‘Variable humours in disguised shapes’: the humours on stage 42 ‘So often happening in these miserable times’: melancholy 46 ‘Winds, whirlwinds, or tempests’: passions and affections 56 ‘Nought else but a fault of humour’: an Elizabethan body-mind? 58 2 Mind against Body Philosophical and Religious Frameworks 64 ‘Myself am centre of my circling thought’: mind, soul, and self 65 ‘The inner man’: ancient traditions of mind–body division 69 ‘Battle and combat’: psychomachia 73 ‘Tranquillity of mind’: the iconography of martyrdom 75 ‘In a secret closet’: religious introspection 82 ‘The beauty that is seen with the eyes of the mind’: Neoplatonism 86 ‘The mind alone is man’: Neostoicism 87 3 Knowing by Feeling Writing the Passions 94 ‘Have them we must, and use them we may’: turning the passions to good 96 ‘Shaking and comforting’: through inner conflict to contentment 99 ‘The storms that the faithful feel’: the Psalms and Protestant passions 100 ‘Many tears and relenting’: the inner struggles of Richard Rogers 104 ‘What afflictions of mind, what abundance of tears’: Catholic passions 106 ‘He that his mirth hath lost’: passions, poetry, and politics 110 ‘All weeping eyes resign your tears to me’: Southwell’s Mary Magdalen and St Peter 113 ‘I sit / With Mary at the grave’: new passions in Protestant poetry 117 ‘Never-drying tears’: a fluid genre 122 PART II Marginalised Minds 126 4 In Other Voices Female Minds 128 ‘The imbecility of their understandings’: men disparaging the female mind 133 ‘Exercises of good learning’: men praising the female mind (within limits) 137 ‘Waxen minds’: men inside the female mind 142 ‘Matter more manlike’: speaking through translation 149 ‘My mind is here expressed’: original poetry by women 156 5 The Minds of Africans Imaginings and Encounters 161 ‘The ablest philosophers, mathematicians, prophets’: Elizabethan ideas about African minds 163 ‘He had so slightly considered of it before’: global encounters 171 ‘Among us’: Africans in England 175 ‘Acts of black night’: African minds on stage 180 ‘Arise, black vengeance’: onwards to Othello 188 PART III Disturbances and Discipline 192 6 Stars and Demons The Permeable Mind 194 ‘A perpetual unlucky irradiation’: astrology and the mind 198 ‘The Devil’s mocking illusions’: demonic possession 205 ‘Satan’s illusions’: Elizabethan explanations for demonic possession 212 ‘In a dark room and bound’: Shakespeare on possession 218 ‘They assail them with invasions’: devils in every mind 221 ‘Who pulls me down?’: external and internal demons in Doctor Faustus 231 7 ‘Things Feigned in the Mind’ The Unruly Imagination 235 ‘Three hollow places’: the anatomy of the brain 237 ‘Wicked imaginations’: suspicion and fear of the imagination 242 ‘Fragments of idle imaginations’: the interpretation of dreams 249 ‘Feigning notable images’: the imagination and literary creation 259 ‘Images of absent things’: the mind’s eye and the ‘imagine’ chorus 264 ‘Shaping fantasies’: Shakespeare on the imagination 269 8 Governing Self and State The Politics of the Mind 275 ‘Reason beareth the room of a king’: sources for politicising the mind 277 ‘A most excellent and perfect order’: hierarchy in the Elizabethan mind 279 ‘She rules alone the whole mind’s commonweal’: Elizabeth I as Queen of the mind 283 ‘Will would be ruled, but Wit had no reason’: will and wit 291 ‘Will is the prince, and wit the counsellor’: will as Queen of the mind 296 PART IV Writing the Mind 300 9 Writing Thought and Self Autobiography, Sonnets, Prose Fiction 302 ‘What I am of mind myself’: Thomas Whythorne and autobiography 304 ‘My life melts with too much thinking’: Astrophil and Stella and the sonnet sequence 312 ‘Exact pictures of every posture in the mind’: representing thought in prose fiction 320 10‘ That Within’ Hamlet and the Mind on Stage 331 ‘Still tormented is my tortured soul’: Kyd, Marlowe, and early developments in playhouse soliloquy 335 ‘A generation of still-breeding thoughts’: Shakespeare’s early experiments with soliloquy 338 ‘A noble mind’: Hamlet 345 ‘The inward qualities of the mind’: Hamlet and non-dramatic genres 352 1600: a moment of the mind 357 Epilogue The Elizabethan Mind and Us 359 ENDNOTES 368 BIBLIOGRAPHY 396 Index 423