Reading the Early Modern Passions

Reviewed by: Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion Winfried Schleiner Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson , eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. vi + 384 pp. Ill. $59.95, £30.00 (cloth, 0-8122-3760-9); $24.95, £16.50 (paperbound, 0-8122-1872-8). The thirteenth and final contributor to this collection of essays quotes a powerful passage by Nietzsche from his Genealogy of Morals: "I consider even 'psychological' pain to be not a fact but only an interpretation—a causal interpretation—of facts that have hitherto deified exact formulation—too vague to be scientifically serious—a fat word replacing a very thin question mark" (p. 274). It seems to me that the majority of the contributors consider passion such a "fat" word, one that needs to be questioned or, in modern lingo (fortunately used by only a few of the authors assembled here), interrogated. Richard Strier makes an argument that in the "Western tradition" there is a strong strain of valuing passion and emotion over patience, reason, meekness. (But even with the texts he uses to make his point—including King Lear and Herbert's poems—the reader will passionately say, "but, but, but!"). As if responding to this argument and pointing to its limits, Michael Schoenfeld then shows that Milton's attitude toward passion is equivocal and situational, and "represents the radical inconsistency with which early modern culture confronted the phenomenon of passion" (p. 46). Schoenfeld recognizes a central Renaissance debate about the respective claims of reason and passion, but he shows (with or without intended irony) that Milton locates it in hell as a subject of dispute of the fallen angels. Looking closely at the portrait known as Mona Lisa, Zirka Filipczak tries to separate what in the subject's gestures denotes gender and social class versus personal emotion. John Staines, in his essay on compassion in the public sphere of Milton and King Charles, returns to the topic of passion versus reason; he, however, would like to see them not as antithetical, but as part of a single communicative practice of early modern writers. According to Staines, Milton saw the limits of passion or pity in the public sphere, for here bonds of compassion easily become bonds of slavery. Starting from a playful exchange between Prince Hal and Falstaff, in which both spin out analogies between objects and animals they call "melancholy," Gail Paster draws attention to "the passions being distributed as sensible features" of a natural world traversed by a host of sympathies and antipathies (p. 121). Here, and in some other articles stressing features of the ancient belief in a body made up of the four humors, I wonder how the label "early modern" (prominent in the collection's title) applies. Also starting from Shakespeare, but trying to elucidate the notion of "English mettle," Mary Floyd-Wilson makes an attempt to read ancient views of Scythians/Northerners as versions of a Bakhtinian grotesque—I am happier with the more general (and usual) term "other." She shows interestingly how notions of climate, country, and gender enter into what she calls a "geohumoralism" (p. 142). Bruce Smith elucidates the notion (also in Shakespeare) of hearing "green songs," and the relationship of that green to the black of melancholy. In a daring stretch, he works in greensickness, the (anemic?) [End Page 811] illness of young women in the early modern period. Katherine Rowe uses Davenant's reworking of an emotional scene in Macbeth to ask what happens if readers interpret a passionate passage from beyond a gulf of time, or even from beyond a paradigm shift. Gary Tomlinson has contributed the most demanding but possibly also the most rewarding study, for he juggles Aby Warburg's idea of a gestural rendering of emotion (or his Pathosformel) with seminal ideas of Warburg's teacher Usener, with the "crucial proximate" source Giambattista Vico, with Monteverdi's musical emblems rendering passions, and ultimately with ideas of Ficino. Victoria Kahn takes the romance notion of leggiadro inganno (lovely deception) and tests it for its political charge with thinkers from

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