The pith and marrow of our attribute: dialogue of skin and skull in Hamlet and Holbein's The Ambassadors
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360902760257
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Byzantine Studies and History
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For a brief discussion of historical phenomenology, see Bruce R. Smith, 'Introduction' to 'Forum: Body Work', in Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001), pp. 22–23. On emotion scripts more generally, see 'Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions', in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 9–13. See Anna Wierzbicka, 'Human Emotions: Universal or Culture-Specific?' American Anthropologist 88 (1986), p. 588, for a discussion of the Polish emotion tesknota, somewhat like what English speakers mean by nostalgia, but which she sees as developing specifically from events in the nineteenth-century Polish revolution. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13. John Sutton has even argued that we should pay respectful attention to early modern models of the brain because the dominant materialist psychology of early modern natural and moral philosophy bears distinct similarities to the dominant connectionism of contemporary cognitive science: 'studies in the history of theories of memory are grounded in new interpretations of strange, neglected old French and English neurophilosophy. But only late twentieth-century worries about memory, science, and truth make sense of indulgent attention to 'seventeenth-century French connectionism' (Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1). I am quoting Stephen Kosslyn and Oliver Koenig, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 4; I owe this reference to Mary Thomas Crane and am much indebted to her ideas. For a very helpful introduction to the usefulness of cognitive science for literary-critical practice, see Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 14–24. Tim van Gelder, 'What Could Cognition Be, If Not Computation?' Journal of Philosophy 91 (1995), p. 373. I owe this reference to John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, p. 5. See John Sutton, 'Porous Memory and The Cognitive Life of Things' in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, ed. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Allessio Cavallaro (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 131–32. Crane, Shakespeare's Brain, p. 35. John Sutton, 'Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: history, the extended mind, and the civilizing process', The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary (London: Ashgate, 2007), p. 1. Evelyn Tribble, 'Distributing Cognition in the Globe', Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005), pp. 139–44. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 20. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 29. Unlike with Holbein's portraits of famous subjects such as Henry VIII, Thomas More, or Erasmus, the two sitters here languished unknown until Mary Hervey's magnificent research on the portrait and her identification of the circumstances of its commission; see Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein's 'The Ambassadors': The Picture and the Men (London: Bell, 1900). A more recent discussion of the historical circumstances surrounding the painting is in John North, The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002). Mary Hervey says the immediate contrast is between 'the swordsman on one side and the gownsman on the other', and attributes Dinteville's rosy color to a 'hectic flush' that is a sign of his delicate health; see Hervey, Holbein's 'The Ambassadors', pp. 199, 202. Clearly she assumes Holbein is merely reproducing what he sees. Elizabeth D. Harvey, 'Flesh Colors and Shakespeare's Sonnets', in A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Michael C. Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), p. 315. Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits (Examen de Ingenios), trans. Richard Carew (London, 1594), p. 30. On Holbein's painstaking techniques in rendering faces, see Maryan Ainsworth, '"Paterns for phiosioneamyes": Holbein's portraiture reconsidered', The Burlington Magazine 132 (1990), pp. 173–78. On Holbein's pride in his ability to render countenances, see Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Making and Meaning: Holbein's Ambassadors (London: National Gallery, 1997), p. 12. Foister and her colleagues reproduce another commissioned portrait, this one of the four Dinteville brothers as Biblical heroes (p. 24). Jean de Dinteville as Moses does resemble Holbein's depiction of him, as does Francesco Primaticcio's portrait of him as Saint George (p. 23). I am quoting John Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 16114), sig. b4, but the thought is a commonplace. In paintings, skin coloration also often indicated gender. As Zirka Filipczak has shown, the difference between the ruddy skin tones of active male protagonists in Renaissance allegorical paintings is a conventional means of signifying their greater heat in relation to the pale-skinned passive heroines they are poised to rescue. See Zirka Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575–1700 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997), pp. 14–27. On the differences attributable to geographic or ethnic difference see the work of Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 35–47; on differences attributable to social rank, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 190–200. On the tradition of the scholar's melancholy, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 6–8; and Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 92–95. On the Renaissance elbow, see Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 266; but also Joaneath Spicer, 'The Renaissance Elbow', in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 84–128. Spicer does not discuss Holbein's painting. On the transition from an earlier openness to the modern closure of the body, see David Hillman, Shakespeare's Entrails: Belief, Skepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 5–8. For a classic treatment of this historical movement, see Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, Vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 257–58. For Dinteville, there would be irony in this contrast since he was stuck in England as Francis I's ambassador throughout much of 1533 waiting for the birth of Anne Boleyn's baby in order to stand as godfather by proxy for his king. His letters home complain of the weather, his ill health, and melancholy: 'I am the most melancholy, weary and wearisome ambassador that ever was seen'. But his melancholy does not appear in Holbein's painting, at least not in contrast to the brown hues of his fellow diplomat – a difference which extends even to their hands. See Foister et al., Making and Meaning, p. 16, where Dinteville's letter is quoted. On Pyrochles and Cymochles, see Gail Kern Paster 'Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance' in Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, ed. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 146–50. Sutton, 'Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things', pp. 130–31. On our status as cyborgs by nature, the locus classicus is Donna J. Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81; but see also Sutton, 'Exograms and Interdisciplinarity'. Consider, by contrast, Holbein's 1528 portrait of his friend the astronomer Nicholas Kratzer, who is depicted holding a polyhedral sundial in one hand – perhaps the same sundial represented in The Ambassadors – and a protractor in the other; see Foister et al, Making and Meaning, p. 37 and Plate 31. For a detailed reading of the objects, see Foister et al, Making and Meaning, pp. 30–43. I am quoting Trevor, Poetics of Melancholy, p. 111. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 88. On these wriggling spirits, see Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, pp. 27–38. Arthur F. Kinney makes this point about choosing perspectives in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5. Slavoj Zizek traces the history of the two deaths from Sade to Freud to Lacan in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 134–36. Zizek, Sublime Object, p. 135. For a succinct articulation of this point, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 21. Sutton, 'Exograms and Interdisciplinarity', p. 1. Huarte, Examination of Mens Wits, pp. 24–25. Huarte, Examination of Mens Wits, p. 26. Huarte, Examination of Mens Wits, p. 30. Huarte, Examination of Mens Wits, p. 28. Michel de Montaigne, 'Of the inconsistency of our actions' (2.1) in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 239. All subsequent references to this edition. Montaigne, 'Of the inconsistency of our actions', p. 240. Montaigne, 'Of the inconsistency of our actions', p. 242. On the importance of this essay, see Timothy Hampton, 'Private Passions and Public Service in Montaigne's Essais', in Politics and the Passions 1500–1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 38. Montaigne, 'Of husbanding your will' (3. 10), p. 780. The French reads: 'Ce que ceux-la faisoient par vertu, je me duits à le faire par complexion'. I owe this reference to Timothy Hampton. Montaigne, 'Of husbanding your will', p. 767. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule, ed. Margaret Lee Wiley (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), p. 49. For a more extended treatment of this passage, see Paster, Humoring the Body, pp. 1–4. I follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1997). For an extended paraphrase of this entire Q2-only passage, see Appendix A (ii) in Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 356–58. For more on such analogies, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, translated by Rosemary Morris (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 137. Ruth Stevenson also paraphrases this passage in 'Hamlet's Mice, Motes, Moles, and Minching Malecho', New Literary History, 33 (2002), p. 441, but notably defines 'some complexion' as 'aspect of human psychology' – that is in non-material terms. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 234. But the point was made earlier by Michael D. Bristol who argues that there is 'no reason to doubt the gravedigger's assertion' either; see Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York and London: Routledge, 1985), p. 192. Neill, Issues of Death, p. 235. Neill, Issues of Death, pp. 235–36. I take this phrase from Bristol, Carnival and Theater, pp. 192–93.
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