Tea at Trianon: Shakespeare and the Sciences of Emotion

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Shakespeare and the Sciences of Emotion

From OUPblog:

Rhetoric knows the passions by tracing them to their circumstances. That is, it knows them narratively, and it construes narrative as a means of producing knowledge about passions in their particularity. This way of knowing is evoked in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: “poets and writers of Histories” have been passion’s “best Doctors”—that is, best scholars—because in them we find depicted “how affections are kindled and incited: and how pacified and refrained: and how again contained from act and further degree: how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they are enwrapped one within another, and how they do fight and encounter.”

Bacon wants a natural history of the passions to displace this unsystematic poetic and historical knowledge. It is tempting to say that this is exactly what happened in the next two centuries, as forms of empirical psychology took over a space that once belonged to rhetoric. But it matters that these psychologies reoccupied rhetoric’s terrain. The knowledge they offer is closer to the one Bacon ascribes to poets and historians than to scientia: in the sphere of the passions, rhetoric is the forerunner of an empirical knowledge of particulars. One can trace its continuing if hidden influence on new psychologies from Locke—who recommended Aristotle’s Rhetoric as part of the study of the passions—to Hume and Smith, whose models of the mind echo the psychology of the vivid image articulated by Hamlet and the circumstantial analysis of passions practiced by Wright. Scholars sometimes claim that a “psychological” approach to Shakespeare is anachronistic, because his period had no psychology. That is not entirely accurate, but the main point is that, in a sense, the period’s literature was its psychology: a circumstantial, open-ended, narrative knowledge of the passions grounded in rhetoric. That knowledge, which thrives beyond the limits of any system, still has something to tell us about how we know the emotions now—not as experts, but as people engaged in everyday life. (Read more.)