Shakespeare's Schoolroom - Lynn Enterline

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a “moving out” or “perturbation” (and used in several Latin school texts in ways close to our own modern sense), emotion still did not emerge as an English word in its own right until the late seventeenth century. Eventually bifurcating from passion, whose significance slowly narrowed from its early modern provenance to signify only intense, overpowering, and amorous feelings, emotion supplanted the earlier term and served to distinguish certain feelings “from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness.”53 After the late seventeenth century, passion was no longer used, as it was from the fourteenth century until roughly 1680, to designate corporal sensations as much as states of mind: For example, the OED cites “a bely ache or passion” (1547). The early range and subsequent narrowing of passion is a telling index of how important it is to remember that school discipline was a corporal as well as verbal affair.

      When I use affect, by contrast, I aim at a range of related meanings that derive from both early modern and psychoanalytic discourse. The earliest English meanings for affect, relatively faithful to the Latin afficio from which it derives (especially with the ablative, “to cause a person to be affected by an emotion … to stir, to be strongly moved”), were “a mental state brought about by influence; the action or result of affecting the mind in some way; an emotion, feeling.”54 Perhaps transmitting the Latin sense of an individual being acted upon in some forceful way, Richard Hooker links “affection” to appetite rather than reason, describing such strong feeling as a mystery “not altogether in our power,” at times a desire for something even if it “be … never so impossible.”55 In the rest of this book, I therefore use affect in one of two ways. First, I draw on its early modern sense of an intense, sometimes mysterious state of feeling (for example, Leontes’s famously enigmatic declaration that “affection” is a force that “stabs the center” and “communicates” with dreams). Indeed, a number of the classically inflected passions analyzed here, however powerful, seem “not altogether in the power” of those who experience them and run counter to commonsense or intuitive assessments of inner life.

      Second, I am also drawing on a modern psychoanalytic understanding of affect (also with a Latinate origin) to signify moments of opacity in emotions. Psychoanalytic theory detects a distance between putative cause and (emotional) effect that stems from our blindness, as speaking subjects, to the most significant events of our own history.56 Several of Freud’s important theories turn on affect’s enigmatic quality: He generally uses “affect” to distinguish an event, idea, or sign from the quantity of psychological energy “bound” to it. Indeed, his insight into the “separation” of affect from idea, or idea from affect, was that “they were sure to follow different paths.”57 For example, Freud’s quantitative analysis of the dream work theorizes a transfer of affective energy from one (forbidden) sign to another (permissible) one; his analysis of the death drive studies repetition’s deeply compelling yet impenetrable significance for the subjects of trauma. His early encounter with hysterics led him to distinguish between traumatic event and the “proportionate discharge of affect” that is nonetheless disassociated from it. Perhaps most important for my question about what pressure a schoolboy’s past might exert on his literary production as an adult—an issue that exceeds the scope of habitus—is that Freud’s investigations into hysteria led him to posit a notion of “psychical reality” in which a memory might produce a “more powerful release” of affective energy “than that produced by the corresponding experience itself.”58 Such an insight is suggestive about the retrospective force that literary representations of the passions might have had on audiences and authors “trained up” by the humanist grammar school. In each of his analyses of “affect,” Freud found nuances to emotional life that evade conscious understanding, require significant semiotic analysis, and defy the linear narratives of developmental models. Based on such an understanding of emotion’s mobility, obliquity, and resistance to seriatim explanation, I use the word affect to indicate that the “passion” I am considering—especially when indebted to the Latin schoolroom—may well be less transparent than it seems.59

      Throughout this book, then, I use affect rather than emotion to point toward a coincidence between the school’s theatrical training and psychoanalytic theory: Repeatedly imitating others’ words and emotions in public, under the scrutiny of many monitoring eyes and the threat of possible punishment, would be an efficient way to blur the seemingly obvious line between the intensity of an actor/orator’s expressions from the actual speaker’s feelings. I will suggest that the inventive fantasies of writers who were engaging their past school training (whether consciously or not) could take surprising turns—detours that are nonetheless affectively moving and intense. To put the matter another way, acts of poetic ventriloquism, in this period, could be at once profoundly moving and deeply enigmatic; and they therefore testify to the heuristic pallor of the term persona. The cumulative effect of school training in proper language, behavior, and affect was to institutionalize numerous kinds of detours and transfers between event and feeling, speaker and audience, orator and the passions he imitated. It is these detours and transfers—the domain of the theater, the school, the poetry of former schoolboys, but also the unconscious—that prompt me to distinguish between emotion and affect when reading early modern representations of character and the “passions.” One of the stranger aspects of grammar school practice is that the humanist effort to discipline language and affect produced rhetorically skilled subjects whose technical proficiency in evoking assigned passions, from themselves and from an audience, meant that a boy’s connection to his own feelings might become tenuous at best. And prone, moreover, to preposterous reversals of cause and effect. From the perspective of the school, scholars achieved their place in their social world by being drilled in the art of feeling and conveying passions that came from somewhere else and someone else. From a psychoanalytic perspective, early modern schoolboys were trained in techniques that distanced them from their own experience in both language and time; the substitution of a new, “father” tongue for an earlier, “mother” tongue only exacerbated the retrospective work of puberty’s displacements. To preserve my double focus on school practice and psychoanalytic theory, I maintain this mutually informing pair of terms—emotion and affect—to convey both the intensity and the opacity of early modern “passions.”

      Earlier, I invoked Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, or “structuring dispositions,” to suggest that the school’s theatrical forms of corporal and verbal discipline might incline its students toward emotionally charged practices of imitation, personification, and multiple identifications in adult life. As I’ll explore in the next chapter, the school’s structuring dispositions might further incline a former schoolboy to experience poetic or rhetorical invention as an adult as if he were still performing for an audience or judge. Bourdieu’s theory gives “disproportionate weight to early experiences,” arguing for “the active presence” of a past that “tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices.”60 At least three pasts are important in this book: the classical past activated in schoolroom exercises in imitation; the student’s individual, familial past as it intersects with the disciplinary and discursive methods of the school; and the transpersonal, collective past “reactivated” in the literary inventions of an adult schoolboy. The result, as Bourdieu observes, is not a “mechanical determinism” but rather a historical, identifiable set of constraints that put limits on the field of possible inventions, emotions, and subject positions available to the boys who earned their place as “gentleman” by means of facility in Latin.

      Though I find Bourdieu’s ideas about the continuing after-effects of institutional practices extremely helpful for thinking about the texts of former schoolboys, there are times when habitus is not capacious, or perhaps nuanced, enough for my topic. The passions represented in the literary texts of former schoolboys—classically inflected representations of grief, love, rage, disgust, wonder, and fear in which normative categories of gender and desire vanish—suggest the kinds of affective excess, opacity, and displacement traced in psychoanalytic theory. As the next chapters illustrate, moreover, normative boundaries between genders and erotic practices often turn to shifting sand in these texts. And at the same time, the ostensibly clear distinction between pain and pleasure

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