Identity and Awareness

294 Pages·2014·2.02 MB·English

Identity and Awareness:
Manifestations of Self and Persona in Early Modern English Drama
By
Copyright 2014
Zsolt Mohi

Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of
Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

________________________________
Chairperson Geraldo U. de Sousa
________________________________
David M. Bergeron
________________________________
Richard F. Hardin
________________________________
Byron Caminero-Santangelo
________________________________
William Keel

Date Defended: September 2, 2014
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The Dissertation Committee for Zsolt Mohi
certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Identity and Awareness:
Manifestations of Self and Persona in Early Modern English Drama

________________________________
Chairperson Geraldo U. de Sousa

Date approved: September 2, 2014
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Abstract
This dissertation traces five early modern English dramatic characters through their crises
of identity. The reader will follow the very different ways these characters respond to the demand
that they represent themselves in the respective social worlds they inhabit. The protagonist in each
of the plays, in Gammer Gurton’s Needle, in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, in Christopher
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, in Arden of Faversham, and in Shakespeare’s Othello, uses rhetorical
skills, the impression he makes on the senses of other characters, and action to embody the
function the fictional world prescribes for them. It will appear that the three corresponding media,
that is, language, perception, and action, do not only give characters an opportunity to manifest
aspects of their public persona; but these media also represent that dramatic world, its social
conditions, and the identity of others to the characters I examine. Besides building a complex image
of who they are, each character negotiates his or her relationships to others through these three
media. Are characters content with the social identity they build in the process, or are they aware of
who they are in some way other than what they show? Is there a part of who they are that eludes
representation? When they fail to comply with the requirements of a social identity, or when they
decide to withdraw from it, characters testify to a degree of consciousness that they possess, or
wish they possessed, an interior space, a sense of self, as a part of their identity. The self is elusive;
it resists a simple definition, but the chapters that follow point out hints and signs that the
characters are aware of their precious inwardness, often in the moment when they are losing it.
The analyses take advantage of the critical literature on the early modern individual both
before and after Stephen Greenblatt’s groundbreaking work. Reflections on a range of
contemporary written discourse support the study of the characters’ success and failures in their
search for identity.
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Acknowledgements
Professor Gerldo U. De Sousa, my Dissertation Director, guided me through the
planning and writing process and gave me feedback on the many versions of my chapters.
Professors Richard F. Hardin and David Bergeron read my drafts, commented on them, and
discussed issues of the research and writing process with me as I needed help. Professor Byron
Caminero-Santangelo was ready to talk to me about my ideas and helped me prepare for the
Defense. Professor Frank Baron gave me valuable advice and material especially on Doctor Faustus.
Professor Donald Wesling from the University of California San Diego read my early drafts and
provided helpful comments. Professor William Keel supported me in the preparations for the
Defense. Without the consistent and reliable support of these Professors I would not have been able
to write the Dissertation.
Apart from academic advice, I received indispensible personal support from friends both
here and overseas. Professor Julia Bader from UC Berkeley gave me expert advice on how to
manage academic processes and personal issues in this country. Margretta de Vries gave me
technical assistance and helped me with proofreading. My Aunt, Frau Edith Herm, nourished me
with cakes she prepared in her kitchen in Sindelfingen, Germany. My Sister, Terézia, held the home
front for me in Budapest, Hungary, taking care of personal and administrative problems while I was
away. My childhood friend, Erika Feczus, gave me all the moral support she could. Erika Sólyom
encouraged me to overcome many difficulties. Without the support of these people, I could not have
completed this project.
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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................................................ 1

CHAPTER 1
Early Tudor Self-Fashioning: Coming of Age in Gammer Gurton’s Needle ..................................................... 29

CHAPTER 2
The Prodigal and his Brother:
The Loss of Self in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors ....................................................................................... 58

CHAPTER 3
Doctor Faustus and the Promise of Magic ................................................................................................................ 111

CHAPTER 4
From “Circulating Passions” to the Power of Discourse:
The Structure of Identity in Henry VIII and in Arden of Faversham .............................................................. 144

CHAPTER 5
Language and the Perception of Identity in Othello ............................................................................................. 202

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................................................ 272

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................................... 274
1
Introduction
In his essay “Of the inconstancie of our actions,” Michel de Montaigne questioned the
assumption of the divine serenity of the immortal soul in contrast to the ephemeral existence of the
body as only “the soul’s conveyance” in Christian theological convention.1 He did so by transposing
the static Platonic dichotomy of body and soul into the dynamic terms of the private “selfe” and its
public appearance, a “maske,” lending also a dramatic aspect to his discussion of how a human
being acts in the world. In his introspective mode of observation, Montaigne characterized what he
called “my soule” or “my selfe”2 as the seat of “our appetite” that pulls our actions in every which
way “according as the winde of occasions doth transport us” (184). Correspondingly, the label he
attaches to this inner core of the personality is “inconstancy” (183) and the name of its
characteristic act is “Distinguo” (185). A dramatic sense of the core of the human personality arises
in these words, the source of a will to action, which is clearly directed toward the outside world as
it appears to the senses, the instruments of distinction. In discussing aspects of early modern
dramatic identity in this dissertation, I am going to refer to this putative inner aspect of characters
as the self.
I have to make a distinction here between the meaning of “self” as I use it in this dissertation
and that of “inwardness.” “Inwardness” is a general term for the phenomenon Katharine Eisaman
Maus defines as “an unexpressed interior” in contradistinction to “a theatricalized exterior.”3 Her
study on inwardness focuses on the difference between “interior and exterior” (3), on the problem
of how what cannot be seen can be known, and on the social and political consequences of this
“gap” (2). My work, however, explores the structure of identity and its manifestations in discourse,

1 According to Adolar Zumkeller, St Augustine used “Platonic images of ‘the soul’s clothing’ […] and ‘the soul’s
conveyance’ […] to describe the body.” Augustine’s Ideal of the Religious Life, trans. Edmund Colledge (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1986) 218.
2 Michael De Montaigne, “Of the inconstancie of our actions,” The Essays or, Morall, Politike, and Militarie
Discovrses, II, 1, trans. Iohn Florio (London: 1632) 183–87. 185. Early English Books Online 28 July, 2014.
3 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1995) 2.
2
perception, and action. I am interested in how individual characters experience their inwardness
and how they protect it by building a front to the outside world around it. In this approach,
therefore, inwardness becomes personal,4 individual, and unique. I hope that the word “self” will
help me contain the unstructured and often chaotic sense of this interiority in the private domain.
Montaigne also defined the relationship between the self and its outward appearance that
he called a “maske.” According to him, the “selfe” emerges prior to its public image, in which it
strives to realize itself to the world. While he acknowledged the passions of the heart, Montaigne
pointed out that one cannot let such a sense of “confusion, disorder, blending, mingling” (185), etc.,
show in social situations. In an attempt to assume a semblance of the “virtue” (186) of “constancie”
(183), he argued, “wee borrow” her image as a disguise (186). This way, we follow the prescript we
receive “even [from] good Authors” who, Montaigne claimed, often frame in their written work “a
constant and solide contexture of us” (183). Such a reliable public image, Montaigne suggests, is a
mere discursive construct. To designate the front that characters often build around their putative
selves to protect it and to create a socially acceptable space to satisfy its desires, I will use the term
persona.
Montaigne believed that a polished public appearance lends itself to an “easie” formulation
in “discourse” (184). Spoken words, and their written form that represents them, are indeed the
most prominent, and to us the only directly accessible, medium of early modern drama. Here I draw
on the insight of a philosopher who criticized St Augustine’s nominal account of signification, the
view that all that language does is mere reference, and called attention to the potential in language
to perform action and to shape our perception: “the speaking of language,” Wittgenstein argues, “is
part of an activity, or of a form of life.”5 In his wake, linguists have made more specific statements

4 Eisaman Maus does use the term “personal inwardness” (13).
5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, German–
English edition (1953; Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) 23, p. 11.
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concerning the pervasive power of language to define for us, its users, what reality is. For example,
Paula A. Treichler and Francine Wattman Frank claim that
language constructs as well as reflects culture. Language thus no longer serves as
the transparent vehicle of content or as the simple reflection of reality but itself
participates in how that content and reality are formed, apprehended, expressed,
and transformed.6
Language thus appears to be a universal and pervasive system of meaning making. The narrower
term discourse, however, refers to its ongoing use in social situations. Since it is my aim in this
dissertation to find out how main characters in English drama form a notion of who they are in
their relations to other characters, I will have to observe not only the abstract properties of the
language they use but the ways it shapes situations and precipitates specific outcomes in the plot.
Therefore, Deborah Schiffrin’s definition of discourse as not merely a component in constructing
the social world but being a part of that “social world under construction”7 will be a useful
reminder that discourse plays a decisive role in shaping the action and the characters’ idea of where
they stand in the drift of that action.
Apart from living in words, characters also make their presence felt to others and to
themselves through the senses, most of all through vision. Sheer sensory data not being available,
the reader will, again, have to observe the ways characters respond to what they can see, hear,
touch, smell, or taste, and sometimes even feel in the interior of their bodies. Instead of only
mapping the senses of the body, my purpose in paying attention to the diverse stimuli that affect
characters is always to find out how sensations and their meaning, as it is reflected and
contextualized in their awareness, help them define who they are in the social world of the play. To

6 Paula A. Treichler and Francine Wattman Frank, “Introduction: Scholarship, feminism, and language
change,” Language, Gender, and Professional Writing: Theoretical Approaches and Guidelines for Nonsexist
Usage, eds. Frank and Treichler (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989) 1–34. 3.
7 Deborah Schiffrin, Discourse Markers (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 2.
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give such an integrated account of perception, it is inevitable to consider how expectations
influence it. The cognitive approach to perception called “New Look” supports this endeavor by
encouraging the reader to conceptualize perception in terms of a “top-down processing.” According
to this view, which became popular in the second half of the twentieth century, the subject arrives
at the meaning of sensory data by embedding them in “higher-level information,” such as his or her
“prior knowledge […] or the meaningful context in which a stimulus is seen.”8 Only to the extent a
character consciously reflects on his or her being in the dramatic world can we speak of a sense of
identity. Therefore, the term “identity” in this dissertation refers to the more or less conscious
reflection of a character on his or her changing position with respect to others in the fictional world.
The notion of identity includes clues not merely to the sensual, perceptible, and discursive shape of
a character’s public image, the persona, but to the invisible self as well, even though its essence can
be hardly grasped in words. In bringing the aspects of language and perception together in a focus
on the dynamic relationship between self and persona in a specific identity, I hope, consists a main
part of the original contribution of this dissertation to previous early modern identity studies.
Characters’ awareness of their identity in a social context and of the importance to shape
their image, their persona, in the eyes of others makes it inevitable that we conceptualize
perception in reflexive terms. However strong the sense of its presence was in early modern
consciousness, as it certainly was in Montaigne,9 the self is not palpable to the senses, and the
French philosopher was aware of its elusiveness in self-observation. The perceptive thinker can see
a “supple variation, and easie yielding contradiction” in him- or herself, he wrote, and added that
this “volubility and discordance” resulted, at least in part, from the inevitable subjectivity of the

8 E. Bruce Goldstein, Sensation and Perception (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole; London: International
Thomson, 1996) 24f.
9 Montaigne declares that “Every man beareth the whole stampe of humane condition,” and so he presents
himself as a valid example of this generality when he writes, “Authors communicate themselves unto the
world by some speciall and strange marke; I the first, by my generall disposition; as Michael de Montaigne; not
as a Grammarian, or a Poet, or a Lawyer.” Montaigne, “Of Repenting,” III, 2, 451–58. 451. Montaigne “claims
that his own self is the main subject matter of his philosophy.” Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and
its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) 30.
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observer’s eye: “If I speake diversly of my selfe,” he admits, “it is because I looke diversly upon my
selfe” (185). Since characters cannot observe their inner being directly, they rely on the
manifestations of their identity in the eyes of others. As a result, they either hide their inner selves
or try to make them explicit—and at that moment they are already shaping their persona, not only
their selves. As soon as the self comes to light, it is not private anymore, its previously felt
inwardness is lost, which renders the notion of self truly elusive. When they rise above the chaos of
the self by joining the ongoing social discourse, relying exclusively on what is visible, and
embracing its “assured policies,”10 characters often leave us with a sense that something has been
“destroyed”11 in the process.
However important language and perception appear to be to an understanding of dramatic
forms of identity, the picture would be incomplete without considering the third medium, namely
action, in which dramatic identity inevitably expresses itself. According to Aristotle, in the fictional
world of drama “the Plot is the imitation of the action,” and it is “the first principle” and “the soul of
a tragedy.”12 Furthermore, beside language and perception, action is the third component of what
Robin Allott sums up in the weighty phrase “total human behavior.”13 The analyses of drama that
will follow, therefore, examine identity in its manifestations in three media: in language, in
perception, and in action. I consider identity a composite of a sense of interiority and of a front
which the presumptive self builds around itself. As far as I can show how the relative weight and
delicate equilibrium of these two components, self and persona, determine identity, my approach to

10 Montaigne, “Of the inconstancie” 184.
11 Lynda E. Boose points out that the dissolution of the obscure mythical significance of the handkerchief in
“Iago’s pornographic literalism” makes us “understand what is ultimately destroyed.” “Othello’s
Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’,” English Literary Renaissance 5.3 (Autumn 1975): 360–
74. 367.
12 Aristotle, Poetics, transl. S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts by S. H. Butcher, 4th ed. (New
York: Dover Publications, 1951) VI. 6, 14, pp. 25–29.
13 In his study of language in the context of human behavior, Allott claims that “words, the fabric of language,
are not arbitrary […] but derive directly from […], and are integrated with, perception and action, the other
main components of total human behavior.” Robin Allott, The Natural Origin of Language. The Structural
Inter-relation of Language, Visual Perception and Action (Knebworth, Hertfordshire: Able Publishing, 2001) i.