Conclusion

BILLET XIII. [A young lady] desires a Tender Letter from [her lover]. Nothing can equal the Cruelty of my Fate. We are going from ----- without returning for London, and we are going to see Places which upon your Account will seem Horrid Desarts to me. I am so strangely mortify’d at this misfortue, that you wou’d hardly know me again; and unless you write something to please me, I shall not be able to bear it. Altho I venture all in receiving your Letters, I do not matter it. I suffer already all the harm it can do me. I can no longer fear any Danger, but I expect a great deal of Joy. Let them be long, without any Equivocations, Passionate, and Worthy of a Person who only suffers for your sake. Farewel, I dread a surprise....

Introducing Contagious Sympathies

In this introductory chapter, the study is situated in relation to contemporary scholarship—demonstrating both points of contact with and departure from key critical interlocutors such as Nancy Selleck and Robert N. Watson, recent writing by James Kuzner and Joe Moshenska, and theoretical work by Teresa Brennan, Michel Serres, and others—while offering an overview of the study’s concerns. It considers the place of sympathy in the early-modern mindset, looking at scientific, theological, philosophical, and literary texts to give a sense of how sympathetic relations are understood as integral to social relations and the operations of the natural world. It seeks to complicate this picture by showing how sympathy is understood as a pathological force, spreading disease.

Plagued by Kindness

Closely following the discussion of the previous chapter, this chapter focuses solely on Othello, where Iago’s contagiously sympathetic attentions, his poisonous ‘medicine’, are shown to operate with the duplicitous efficacy of the pharmakon, and via the subtle insinuations of plague, just as period treatises on the medicinal capacity of the friend and the detrimental effects of the flatterer would have warned his vulnerable victim-patients. This chapter shows how Iago employs his poisonous ‘medicine’ to plague his victims with bitter poison. The chapter contains one section on the medicinal force of Timon of Athens’s curative councillor, an antithetical figure to that of Iago.

Shakespeare’s Pharmacy

Part II of my study introduces sympathy’s attendant oppositional force, antipathy, and consequently Chapters 3 and 4 are both informed by early-modern scientific conceptions of pharmaceutical medicine, wherein the same bittersweet drug can have both medicinal and poisonous (or sympathetic and antipathetic) capacity; this pharmaceutical metaphor is shown to widely inform Shakespeare’s drama, both at the level of genre, plot, and character, and, more significantly for my study, at the level of word, where language itself is repeatedly described as operating with the force of the Platonic pharmakon. Communication is shown to have the capacity both to cure and to kill, leaving the Shakespearean subject caught up among indeterminable influences, beset by malign attendants, infectious carriers, sickly sympathizers, and ill communicators. Chapter 3 explores a number of plays—including The Winter’s Tale, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Self-contentation

Chapter 6 offers a reading of a number of Shakespeare’s self-contented subjects, whose refusal to tenderly extend towards or attend to the potentially infectious other sees them reject sympathetic involution with the world, going incommunicado: Prince Hal, whose desire to be ‘content’ demands that he shake off his polluting attendants, and that he refuses to extenuate his princely sentences; the youth of ‘Sonnet 94’ who avoids infection by attending only to himself; and Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s archetype of aggressive self-contention. The study concludes by employing Derrida’s model of the postal subject to discuss Hamlet, whose tenders of affection are denied, and whose enforced isolation is symptomatic of a period whose faith in subjective sympathetic interactivity has been so infectiously tested.

The Sight of Others’ Anguish

Part III explores the vocabulary of tenderness (from Lt. tendere, to stretch) in order to examine Shakespeare’s depiction of an ‘extended-subject’, one whose willingness to extend tenderly out towards the other becomes the condition of their generous, piteous, compassionate nature. Yet, as discussed in relation to The Tempest, to be tender towards the other is not only to attend to their needs, to tender oneself to them, or to extend towards them, but also to tenderly flinch (Lt. tenerum, delicate), to retract into oneself, refusing sympathetic contacts. Chapter 5 considers the cost of compassionate attention, asking if Miranda’s unguarded sympathies are naive in an age of tenderizing sensory and emotional impressionability, before analysing the plague-period poem, Venus and Adonis.

Postscript

CRESSIDA I have a kind of self resides with you; But an unkind self, that itself will leave To be another’s fool. Tro., III.ii.148–50 Each of us is constituted … as a site of desire and physical vulnerability … at once assertive and exposed. … If I lose you … then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. … One does not always stay intact. … To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself. … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something....

Communicating Sympathies

Chapter 2 illustrates the centrality of notions of sympathy in early-modern natural-scientific, religious, philosophical, and medical thinking, showing how individuals are understood to be vitally and dynamically embedded in an environment of concatenating influences and affect. It demonstrates how sympathetic communication should not only be approached in the form of emotional fellow-feeling, but also gives a broader appreciation of how sympathy is seen as an energetic structural force in evidence from subatomic to planetary planes. It proceeds to allow infection to percolate through this sympathetic network, demonstrating how pathologically informed anxiety concerned plague transmission threatens to contaminate these fundamental conceptions of influential exchange and interactivity, once so vitalizing, now so deadly. The chapter concludes with analysis of Troilus and Cressida, exploring Shakespeare’s vocabulary of disease, and his sense of a subject involved in potentially infectious interdependency.