Passion’s Fictions

The final chapter consolidates the implications of the foregoing argument for the interpretation of early modern literature, in part by returning to the start of the story, in Shakespeare; but it approaches Shakespeare by way of an eighteenth-century phenomenon: the rise of works of “character criticism” represented for example by William Richardson’s essays. Eighteenth-century character criticism has long been seen as a new way of reading Shakespeare, even the intrusion of something foreign to Shakespeare’s plays. The word for that foreign element is often “psychology,” especially as allied to reading practices associated with the novel. This chapter argues that the real roots of character criticism lie in much older theories of the passions. The psychology at work is not nearly as new as has been claimed, as can be seen by contrasting Richardson’s essays with one of the books he cites: Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The chapter then circles back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays already contain the elements of a psychology: an externalist psychology grounded in rhetoric and its account of the circumstantial mimesis of actions as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Shakespeare’s plays could become the material for a science of the passions because in some sense they already were: instances of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions produced according to principles first theorized by rhetoric, which themselves shaped the new sciences of the mind that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Desdemona: Body, Emotions, Ethics

This paper aims to delve into Desdemona’s mind in Shakespeare’s Othello. In this paper, Desdemona’s utterances are perused through conceptual metaphor analysis. The objective of this study is to disclose Desdemona’s cognitive complexity, and conceptual metaphor analysis offers an opportunity to enter Desdemona’s cognitive world notwithstanding the degradation of her speech. These conceptual metaphors will follow three major axes of scrutiny: body, emotions, and ethics. The findings of this paper demonstrate that a cognitive exploration of the character reveals a structured system of thoughts where corporeal passions, emotional acuity, and ethical choices are culminated in a coherent and dynamic female protagonist. Desdemona’s conceptual metaphors confirm a sensual and wilful persona who broke an ascetic image of femininity associated with conditioning and interdictions. The study aspires to demonstrate how Desdemona would become a haunting presence on stage, triumphant even as all other characters fell, and how she would reach from beyond the grave to hold the audience in the throes of empathy. The intent of the paper is also to point out that conceptual metaphor analysis, with its ties to cognitive poetics, can furnish character criticism with dissimilar readings.