Afterword: Intention Redux: early modern life-writing and its discontents

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Methuen, 1984). Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 86. Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 14; italics in original. Katherine Eismann Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 39. Given my longstanding interest in protecting psychoanalytic approaches to early modern subjectivity from the dreaded specter of anachronism, I offer the following parenthetical question here: if modern neurosience can productively be brought to bear on how the early modern mind, echoing Paster, ‘produced memory’, could not modern psychoanalysis (Freudian psychoanalysis itself having its origins in late-nineteenth-century neurophysiology) also productively be brought to bear on the formation of early modern memory traces – i.e., repressions caused by the momentary faulty hydraulics of neural tissue? Though privileging text over life, Grossman, in acknowledging his profound indebtedness to the late Joel Fineman's Lacanian reading of the sonnets (Shakespeare's Perjured Eye), ironically gestures in the direction of scholarly ‘life’ as a model for later generations of critics. Among the many ironies of Greenblatt's critique of psychoanalysis as belated when brought to bear on Renaissance texts is the fact that he has long been fascinated by intense father/son relationships. Greenblatt's scholarship has, from time to time, referred lovingly to his own father, and his tender relationship with his father is clearly reflected in the experiences of the young Shakespeare at Kenilworth. Meanwhile, Greenblatt ironically disavows Freud, whose writing is peppered with the young Freud's Oedipal affinities for his father. Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanist Culture’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9–27, at p.10. Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanits Culture’, p. 17.