Category Archives: History of Ideas and Emotions

Early modern studies: Ebooks

It’s been a while since I posted here. I did a lot of travelling in 2023, there are other projects I’m working on, and suddenly I find it’s been months since I last posted.

It’s not that I haven’t been working on the early modern period. Last summer, I was back in the University Library at Cambridge, working on a translation of Nicolas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica, an early pornographic work.

No, it’s not ready yet, but I have another offering – well, two, in fact. They’re a far cry from Chorier’s work, but they may be of interest to the right people.

1. Peter Milward: The Elizabethan Controversialists

Before his death in August 2017, Peter Milward, Shakespeare scholar and erstwhile colleague at Sophia University in Tokyo, handed me a typed manuscript entitled The Elizabethan Controversialists: An Anthology and Commentary. It came with something of a sad story.

One of Peter’s most successful and practically useful works is his Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources, which, together with its companion volume, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age, is still the most comprehensive catalogue of the religious polemics of the early modern period.

In his mind, though, these catalogues were only the beginning. His ambition had been to present extracts from their work, edited with a commentary. Unfortunately, however, when he approached the publisher with the first volume, he was met with a polite but firm refusal.

This was the manuscript which he handed to me and which I have – finally – made into an ebook and published:

Peter Milward, The Elizabethan Controversialists: An Anthology and Commentary

To read this as an ebook, or to download it as a PDF, click on the above link. The PDF is text-searchable.

2. John R. Yamamoto-Wilson: Catholic Literature and the Rise of Anglicanism

On the whole, Peter and I got on surprisingly well. I joined the Department of English Literature at Sophia just as he was retiring but, as a Jesuit, his home was in S.J. House, right in the middle of the campus, so our paths often crossed. In those days, he also ran the Renaissance Centre, which had a room of its own in the university library, and the Renaissance Institute, which held a yearly conference, along with other, smaller events. Sadly, these were both closed down prior to his death.

The Renaissance Institute also published a journal and an annual monograph, and Peter kindly invited me as the author for the monograph for 2002. Things did not go altogether smoothly. I showed him a draft of the work in progress and he handed it back to me with several pages of criticisms, culminating in the words, “I disagree with everything you have written”.

Well, a Jesuit and me? A school headmaster once described me as “quite the most non-committal boy” he had ever met, and the last thing you’ll ever find me doing is taking a party line on anything, especially when it comes to religion. Some friction was only to be expected. I nearly gave up at that point, but reasoned that things could only get better from there.

We talked things through, I stuck to my guns as far as my perceptions were concerned, and his objections did me a world of good, as he left me in no doubt about what I was up against. I could no longer, for example, describe Catholics and Puritans as the “extreme” ends of the religious spectrum in the England of that period. In what sense, he asked, with some asperity – and, it must be conceded, with an equal dollop of justification – could those who chose to remain faithful to the religious traditions that had underpinned society for a whole millennia be described as “extreme”?

And so the work came to light – and Peter and I remained friends.

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Catholic Literature and the Rise of Anglicanism

This little book stood me in good stead, and I went on to write a number of peer-reviewed articles based on matters relating to its contents. I reproduce it here for any who may be interested in the topic – one which was more or less unheard-of at the time that I embarked on my (at that time) ill-fated PhD at Cambridge, but which has now been brought into the mainstream through the scholarship of Judith Maltby, Anthony Milton, Alison Shell, Alexander Walsham and others.

I am keen to create similar public domain publications of scholarship in the field (contact me or leave a comment below if you are interested) and very much hope that these two offerings will turn out to be the first of many.

Hamlet’s tragic flaw is not hesitation, “To be or not to be” is not about suicide – and it matters!!

This is a video I’ve been planning to make for some time now. I finally got round to it, and it makes the case fairly clearly for understanding Hamlet’s soliloquy as being about revenge, not suicide.

There is quite a lively discussion about this topic currently taking place on LinkedIn. Please join in or comment below if you wish to add your voice to the debate!

Different critics have talked about Hamlet’s tragic flaw in different ways, but what most of them boil down to is dithering.

Coleridge talkesabout “the lingering and vacillating delays of procrastination”, A.C. Bradley bewails “the endeavour at a resolution, and the sickening return of melancholic paralysis”, Goethe’s take, summarized by Ernest Jones, is that “Hamlet, for temperamental reasons, was fundamentally incapable of decisive action of any kind”, and Dover Wilson opines that “the procrastination is due to the distemper, is in fact part of it”.

Hamlet doesn’t seem to be able to get on with it and just do the job. Instead, he pretends to be mad, worries about whether what the ghost has told him is true – did Claudius really kill Hamlet’s father? – and misses an opportunity to kill Claudius while he’s praying, because he thinks that a person who is praying at the moment of death will go to heaven, and he, of course, wants Claudius to go to hell.

But there is something else, something even more fundamental, that makes Hamlet hesitate, and that is that, by taking revenge, he will himself be punished by God and end up in hell.

This aspect of Hamlet’s hesitation is often missed, and the reason it gets missed is that his famous “To be or not to be” speech is widely misunderstood as being about suicide, when clearly it is not.

Hamlet has already talked about suicide. Suicide is the topic of his first soliloquy, in Act 1 Scene 2:

“O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”

Why would he return to this topic in Act 3 Scene 1? This is a revenge tragedy, written in an age when society was making the transition from individuals seeking revenge by themselves to those who have been wronged having recourse to the law and taking their grievances through authorized channels. Why would Shakespeare not talk about that?

We all know what Elizabethan men looked like, right? They looked like this…

They are almost always depicted as wearing a sword, or some kind of weapon. That’s just the way things were in those days. Men carried swords, and if they were crossed, they took their swords out and they used them. The dramatist Christopher Marlowe, with whom Shakespeare collaborated in some of his early plays, was stabbed to death in what either was, or was made to look like, a drunken brawl. This kind of thing was a common occurrence.

But this was also a period in which wide-ranging religious reform was going on, supposedly based on a close reading of a Bible that tells us to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), a Bible that very clearly and repeatedly states (in the words of the Geneva Bible, which Shakespeare quotes from so often in his works), “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord” (Geneva Bible, 1560, Romans 12:19).

What we’re seeing in Shakespeare’s time is a shift from taking revenge into one’s own hands to submitting to a higher authority – theoretically God, but in practice essentially the state – and trusting to that authority to administer justice. The ethics of taking revenge were a central issue in Shakespeare’s day, and it is hardly likely that he would have Hamlet contemplate all the ifs and buts of taking revenge and leave that out.

So now let’s take a look at Hamlet’s speech in Act 3 Scene 1:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:”

Here Shakespeare sets up an opposition. He queries whether something is “to be” or “not to be”. But what is it that is to be or not be? He continues:

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?”

So the opposition is between suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – that is, just putting up with things – and taking arms “against a sea of troubles” and so putting an end to them. Just putting up with things means doing nothing, not making anything happen, so I would equate that with “not to be”, while taking arms against a sea of troubles suggests doing something about it, making something happen, making something “be”.

There’s nothing in those opening lines that makes me think they are about suicide. The choice is stated very clearly, and it’s a choice between putting up with injustice and fighting back and doing something about it.

Hamlet then goes off on what seems to be a tangent:

To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.

If death is just like sleep, he says, if death simply means the end of all the heartache of this life – well, in that case, who cares about dying? But he continues:

To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

Suppose death isn’t just a kind of sleep? Suppose the Bible is right, and the sleep of death is filled with dreams – dreams of heaven and dreams of hell. What then? Well, then we’re in trouble….

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Who would take the passive route – who would put up with all the injustices of this world – when he might “his quietus make with a bare bodkin”? A bodkin is a type of dagger, typically worn in a sheath strapped to the wrist, so it could be hidden by the sleeve and used as a weapon if necessary.

But the real issue here is the word “quietus”. There’s a general assumption that Shakespeare is talking here about a man putting an end to all the injustices of this life by turning a dagger on himself, by killing himself. But that’s not what “he himself might his quietus make” means. Take a look at some of the examples in the Early English Books Online database. To make one’s quietus means to settle one’s debts, in other words to pay people back, to pay back the oppressor and the proud man and the insolent official. Why, Shakespeare asks, would we not just kill all those who do us wrong, “but that the dread of something after death…makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of”?

In other words, the only thing that stops us from taking our revenge on those that wrong us is the fear that we will be punished after death. I really don’t think this can be understood in any other way. Hamlet is not talking about running away from the dangers and difficulties of life by killing oneself; he is talking about the ethics and morality of taking revenge into one’s own hands.

And, finally, he concludes:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Whatever suicide is, it can hardly be described as an enterprise of “great pith and moment”. That is not what Hamlet is talking about here. He is talking about conscience making us think twice about lashing out in fury against those that wrong us. He is talking about how we restrain our impulse to take revenge because we fear that to do so is sinful and we will be punished after death.

Now, finally, we know what is “to be” and what is “not to be”; acts of revenge – enterprises, as he calls them, “of great pith and moment” – “lose the name of action”, cease to be, fail to materialize, remain merely what we would like to do, not what we will actually do – unless, of course, we ignore our conscience, we ignore everything the Bible says about turning the other cheek and trusting to God to administer justice, and take the law into our own hands.

This is Hamlet’s tragic flaw. He is right to hesitate, he is right to consider the implications of taking revenge, but he is wrong to dissemble and plot as he does. When his mother asks him, in Act 1 Scene 2, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” he says, “I know not seems”, but his whole strategy is based on a pretence, the pretence that he is mad. It is all about “seeming”!

In Shakespeare’s works a just and noble revenge is one that is pursued openly and backed up by the authority of a legitimate state, like the young Fortinbras’s revenge in “Hamlet”, or Macduff’s revenge in “Macbeth”. Shakespearean tragedy is essentially about good men getting tricked. Macbeth is tricked by the witches, Othello is tricked by Iago, Lear is tricked by Goneril and Regan and, in the end, Hamlet is tricked by the ghost. Regardless of the fact that what it says is true, and Hamlet’s father really was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet is tricked into taking revenge in a way that takes innocent lives and spells his own doom. That is his fatal flaw, not the fact that he hesitates about taking action, but that he takes action in defiance of the moral code, the law of God, if you want to see it in religious terms.

Finally, then, what does it matter? Why should we care about what Shakespeare says in a play written over 400 years ago?

Why? Because the swords of Shakespeare’s day are the open carry of America today. The vigilante justice that Hamlet metes out is the “stand your ground” of Alabama, Florida and other states. The revenge he exacts has its modern counterpart in the invasion of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the attempted attack on the Capitol.

Steven Pinker (The better angels of our nature) points to Shakespeare’s period as a turning point in the history of violence. This, he says, is the time when society began to turn away from individuals taking revenge and towards states seeking to administer justice. This, according to Pinker, is a vital component in the civilizing process.

In that context, Hamlet’s speech on the ethics and morality of revenge is as relevant today as it was when Shakespeare wrote it 400+ years ago, and it’s vital that we understand clearly what he was saying in order not to end up as Hamlet does, doomed and with the blood of innocents on our hands.

This interpretation of Hamlet’s soliloquy is not my own. Davis D. McElroy wrote about it in 1964 (College English, 25:7, pp. 453-5), and it was not new even then. McElroy, however, feels that Hamlet’s thoughts turn from revenge to suicide during the course of the soliloquy, whereas I see the whole speech as being about revenge.

Vincent F. Petronella (Studies in Philology, 71:1, pp. 72-88) credits A.C. Bradley with coming up with the suicide analysis in 1904, and I am still working on what the prevailing understanding was before that. One thing I can say with some degree of certainty is that that key word “quietus” was not used to mean suicide in any text from the time of Caxton right up to the end of the 17th century. If that is what Shakespeare meant by it, then it is a lone anomaly.

Early Modern Medicine: A new online resource

The Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) is starting a new series of digital material. The first video in the series, Vegetable Harmonies, a short video with the Illuminations by Gherardo Cybo (1512-1600) on Mattioli’s Discorsi sopra la Materia Medica di Dioscoride Pedacio (BL Ms Additional 22333) accompanied by Monteverdi’s madrigal La Giovinetta Pianta (1592), was published just a few days ago:

CSMBR has an upcoming conference on Medicine in the Phiiosophy of Descartes (November 19-20, 2020).

Follow CSMBR on Facebook.

Titus Oates and the Popish Plot

[Reposted from Quora Spaces.]

One of the ironies of English history is that the landmark 1689 Bill of Rights, with its prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishment, was prompted, in part, by the ill-treatment of one of the great villains of the seventeenth century.

In 1678, for want of anything better to do, Titus Oates, a failed student of Cambridge University who conned his way into the priesthood, conspired together with a fanatical – and quite possibly clinically insane – clergyman called Israel Tonge to accuse English Jesuits of a plot to kill the king, Charles II.

They did this totally off the top of their heads, with no basis in fact whatsoever but, given the climate of the times, they were widely believed. The instruction to kill Charles, it was asserted, had come from the pope himself, and so the so-called plot came to be known as the Popish Plot.

As it happened, a strongly Protestant Member of Parliament, by the name of Edmund Berry Godfrey, was murdered shortly afterwards, and Oates seized on this as evidence that his pipe-dream of a plot was true. The press jumped on board and pretty soon a witch hunt of Catholics was under way.

This May 1679 issue of The London Gazette denounces the “Bloody and Jesuitical Principles” underlying another murder, that of James Sharp, the Archbishop of St. Andrews in Scotland. The true culprits turned out to be Presbyterians.

The country was in the grip of anti-Catholic hysteria. Following Godfrey’s murder, Catholics were banished from London and were not permitted within a 20-mile radius (later reduced to 10 miles) of the city. Several others (prominent among whom were Stephen Dugdale, Robert Jenison and Edward Turberville) jumped onto the bandwagon, and started accusing Catholics willy-nilly.

At least twenty-two Catholics were put to death, others died in grossly inhumane conditions in prison, and still others were killed by mobs.

Finally, Oates was exposed and it was acknowledged that there was not, and had never been, any such plot. A fat lot of good that did to the Catholics who had died, though, and the ban on Catholics (other than tradesmen and householders) entering London was maintained. Although Charles II himself was bitter about the number of people whose execution he had authorized as a result of the deception, anti-Catholic prejudice continued unabated, and scant remorse for the injustices done was expressed by the press or the populace at large.

Which is why I call it an irony that the Bill of Rights of 1689 was partly inspired by the punishment that Oates received. Make no mistake, he paid a high price. When James II, who had converted to Catholicism, came to the throne in 1785 he had Oates thrown in prison and sentenced to be whipped through the streets five days a year for the rest of his life. The presiding judge was Judge Jeffreys, “the Hanging Judge”, and it’s speculated that the aim was for the whippings to kill Oates, since Jeffreys could not impose the death penalty for perjury.

The irony is that, while remaining apparently unmoved by the executions, banishment from the capital and general mistreatment of Catholics, the public reacted strongly to the punishment meted out to Oates, the cause of all this suffering. John Phillips, for example, was outraged at “Protestant Judges condemning a Protestant, and the Detector of a most Horrid Popish Plot” (The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II [London, 1690], p. 187), impervious to the fact that the “horrid” plot he refers to was a complete fake.

The Bill of rights of 1689 was designed to prevent judges from overstepping the limits of their powers and inflicting punishments that went beyond their mandate.

A Remonstrance of Innocence, published in 1683, is a Catholic account of the deaths of those executed for their supposed involvement in the fake plot.

When James II was ousted, in 1689, Oates was pardoned, released from prison and given a pension. He died in relative obscurity in 1705.

  • The two illustrations to this post are from my collection of early modern publications. I’ve written a bit more about them and the context in which they were written here: Religious Controversy: POPISH PLOT.
  • For further details on Oates and the Poposh Plot, see Susan Abernethy’s informative blog post: Titus Oates.

Sadomasochism and Christianity

This is a post on a website entitled “Bad News about Christianity“. The name gives a fairly good indication of what it’s all about, and there’s certainly a lot of detailed information on the website, but unfortunately there is no indication of the identity of the author[s]. This seems to be intentional.

Anyway, the post I wanted to draw people’s attention to is on Sadomasochism and Christianity. It’s a bit predictable in a way, I suppose, but it does draw together a lot of examples, saying:

…in any other context these images would be considered disturbing, sadomasochistic, deviant and unsuitable for children. They concentrate heavily on brutality, beating, flogging, piercing, torture, bleeding, nailing and death. Collecting and drinking blood is an especially popular theme in Christian art. Some Christians submit themselves to some of these sufferings – wearing crowns of thorns, flogging themselves, and even having themselves nailed to crosses.

Examples of suffering are drawn from the Bible, from accounts of saints, and so on, and the page is lavishly illustrated with bleeding hearts, flagellating penitents and so on.

What’s lacking is any real attempt to get to grips with the Christian perspective on suffering. The author mainly wants to show the spectrum of suffering embraced by Christianity, without going very much into why anyone might want to focus on suffering in this kind of way.

Still, despite the “look at these kooky Christians” approach, if you want a range of sources for Christian suffering this is probably as good a starting place as any.

International Society for Intellectual History

International Society for Intellectual History

“The ISIH was created in 1994 to promote the study and teaching of intellectual history in all its forms and to foster communication and interaction among the global community of scholars in the field.”

Among other projects, it is developing a database of twentieth-century authors whose work has shaped the development of intellectual history.

It also has a page on Facebook.

James A.T. Lancaster published a plug for my book back in 2014, and I had thought I’d posted an acknowledgement and thanks here, but either I’m wrong about that or it’s disappeared (I had some technical trouble a while back and a few posts may have been deleted).

So here it is again – a thank you from me, and a reciprocal plug for IHIS!