This interdisciplinary study argues that the intersection of
pedagogical and affective language in Renaissance literature shows
that emotion was conceived as a conventional practice.
Renaissance writers habitually drew upon the idioms and images of the schoolroom in their depictions of emotional experience. Memorable instances of this tendency include the representation of love ...as a schoolroom exercise conducted under the disciplinary gaze of the mistress, melancholy as a process of gradual decline like the declension of the noun, and courtship as a practice in which the participants are arranged like the parts of speech in a sentence. The Grammar Rules of Affection explores this synthesis of the affective and the pedagogical in Renaissance literature, analysing examples from major texts by Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson.
Drawing on philosophical approaches to emotion, theories of social practice, and the history of education, this book argues that emotions appear in Renaissance literature as conventional, rule-guided practices rather than internal states. This claim represents a novel intervention in the historical study of emotion, departing from the standard approaches to emotions as either corporeal phenomena or mental states. Combining linguistic philosophy and theory of emotion, The Grammar Rules of Affection works to overcome this dualistic crux by locating emotion in the expressions and practices of everyday life.
Shakespeare's procreation sonnets enjoin a young man to sire an heir so as not to deny his beauty to posterity, employing the persuasive techniques of poetry to facilitate the act of childbearing. ...While existing studies of reproduction and early modern literature have focused on literature's discursive and ideological effects, the procreation sonnets invite us to consider the direct, material involvement of poetry in the reproductive process. This essay argues that the procreation sonnets represent their efforts as a form of reproductive labour, drawing links between the craft of poetry, the artificial propagation of plants, and various forms of early modern matchmaking. The sonnets show that poetic production and biological reproduction are interwoven and mutually dependent. While the commemorative work of poetry appears to be an alternative to physical procreation, it is nevertheless contingent on biological reproduction: the sonnets may only preserve the image of the young man "So long as men can breathe". But the sonnets also draw attention to ways in which they work to condition biology, acting upon the body in a manner analogous to nursing or grafting.
The play itself, however, draws attention to its own artifice, its own verbal constitution, through its insistent metatheatricality, undermining its protagonist's campaign against the limits of ...language. ...while Hamlet the character is intent on transcending linguistic representation, Hamlet the play revels in it, ostentatiously parading its status as an edifice of "mere words. Sarah Beckwith's recent study, "Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness," offers an artful and perceptive reading of Shakespeare's late drama, arguing that while tragedies such as Hamlet bear witness to the destructive consequences of "a split between a self that 'passeth show' and a face and body that can only betray a mind too lonely and inaccessible to be expressed," the later plays heal this rift by cultivating a language of forgiveness, pioneering what Beckwith calls a "theater of embodiment" in the union between inward being and outward expression.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is famous for its attempt to adumbrate an inward passion that transcends outward expression, best seen in Hamlet’s insistence that he has “that within which passes show” and ...lacks the necessary “art to reckon his groans.” This essay argues that the text’s subtle and widely overlooked echoes of grammar school pedagogy demonstrate the harmony of inward states and outward expressions in the play, contrary to Hamlet’s own protestations. By tracing the passions of its characters in the terms of the grammar school (as in Polonius’s discussion of the “declension” of Hamlet’s melancholy), the play reveals that passions are not ineffable inward states, but instead expressive practices that abide by social rules and conventions. In advancing this argument, the essay draws on recent Wittgensteinian approaches to Hamlet and the new historiography of the grammar school.
Shapes of Grief ROSS KNECHT
The Grammar Rules of Affection,
04/2021
Book Chapter
Readers of Hamlet have for some time observed “the intensely critical, almost disillusionist, attitude of the play towards language itself.”¹ This is especially true of the play’s protagonist, who in ...his professed clumsiness with poetic “numbers” and his impatience with the tedium of “words, words, words” adopts a traditional anti-rhetorical position, a dismissal of the outward qualities of language in favour of the things they strive to represent but often only obscure (Hamlet 2.2.119, 192). The position draws on the long-standing opposition between words and things, a dichotomy frequently raised in early modern discourse on grammar and pedagogy. As we
Drunken Custom ROSS KNECHT
The Grammar Rules of Affection,
04/2021
Book Chapter
The 1604 edition of Thomas Wright’s influential psychological treatise The Passions of the Minde in General includes a prefatory poem by Ben Jonson. The two men may have been close: there is evidence ...suggesting that it was Wright, a Jesuit priest, who converted Jonson to Catholicism when he was imprisoned in Newgate Gaol.¹ But whatever their personal relationship, Jonson likely had an intellectual interest in the book, as his writing for the public stage drew heavily upon Galenic medicine and the psychology of the passions. The poem, one of Jonson’s few sonnets, praises Wright for his judicious account of the
Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), a sonnet cycle of unparalleled influence in Elizabethan England, unites the traditions of Petrarchan poetry with the idioms of Tudor pedagogy. The ...Renaissance schoolroom was the site of a powerful combination of disciplinary and amatory experience, making it an appropriate metaphorical setting for the Petrarchan love affair. Thus in Sidney’s cycle the kiss is “schoolmaster of delight,” Love a wanton boy “School’d onely by his mother’s tender eye,” and Stella a “schoole-mistresse” who punishes those who fail to learn her lessons.¹ The love affair is figured as a relation between an adoring but tormented
The Ablative Heart ROSS KNECHT
The Grammar Rules of Affection,
04/2021
Book Chapter
For much of its history, Love’s Labour’s Lost was among the most poorly regarded of Shakespeare’s plays.¹ It was considered at best a kind of preparatory sketch for the later comedies, a work of ...juvenilia in which Shakespeare experimented with characters and motifs that would find full expression in mature plays like Much Ado about Nothing.² Critics chiefly complained of the play’s extravagant language, which they considered baroque and overly self-conscious. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, it was precisely this linguistic self-awareness that attracted critical attention.
William C. Carroll’s The Great Feast of Language was the
Precept and Practice ROSS KNECHT
The Grammar Rules of Affection,
04/2021
Book Chapter
In On Interpretation, Aristotle writes that “words spoken” are the “signs of the affections or impressions of the soul,” which are in turn “representations or likenesses” of things.¹ The claim ...subordinates language to psychology: words are understood to signify or reflect the content of the soul or mind, which is itself a reflection of the things of the world. The mind is the mirror of nature, and language the mirror of the mind. This classic formulation provided the blueprint for Western thinking on language for centuries. Indeed, its influence persists into our own time, from the common understanding of language
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