Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice ed. by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice ed. by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett James Waddell Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Ed. by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii+301 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–49539–4. 'There is nothing simple about compassion', the late Lauren Berlant wrote, 'apart from the desire to be taken as simple' (Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 7). That is an 'axiom' which still 'reverberates strongly' (p. 295), according to Kristine Steenbergh's concluding chapter to this volume. As this diverse and engaging collection shows, Berlant's sceptical interrogations of compassion are applicable to—and, indeed, were operative in—the early modern period, when 'the feeling and practice of compassion were recalibrated in a pressure cooker of social, religious and political changes' (p. 6). These shifts brought new tensions to classical disputes about compassion, including over its constitutive balance of emotion or action, intuition or intention, and proximity or distance between subject and object. Essays are paired thematically, setting up congruences and contradictions which emulate the 'confusion and diversity' of compassion itself (p. 10). The opening essays by Bruce Smith and Katherine Ibbett are illustrative. Smith expounds an undogmatic 'middle way between Stoic control of the passions and Christian encouragement of compassion', notably in the 'embrace of compassion's "outgoing-ness"' (p. 30) in Thomas Wright's 1604 psychological treatise The Passions of the Mind in General. Calling this embrace 'an exception' in a work otherwise 'hostile to the passions' may, however, overstate the case (p. 29); if anything, Wright's approach to the passions is markedly tolerant. In contrast to Smith, Ibbett delineates the bounds of compassion as construed by four genteel writers of [End Page 473] the European Counter-Reformation, by whom compassion was couched in the language of decorous sociability among an 'enclosed world of peers' (p. 49), an altogether more conservative form of fellow-feeling. Even inclusive forms of compassion inevitably bespoke and policed boundaries and hierarchies, whether racial (as in Matthew Goldmark's chapter on Bartolemé de las Casas (pp. 257–72) and John D. Staines's on Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (pp. 273–90)) or religious (as in Richard Meek's and Steenbergh's chapters on sermons (pp. 103–38)). Two essays examine 'Consoling' in the contexts of bereavement (Paula Barros, pp. 63–81) and sickness (Stephen Pender, pp. 82–100). Drawing on rich source materials—Spenser, Donne, Burton, Browne, Bacon, Vives—both consider shifts between intimately affective expressions of solace and more rigorous consolatory practices rooted in humanist discourses of proper friendship. Other pairings are more surprising: Alison Searle's bustling analysis of compassion, religious conversion, and state authority in James Shirley's The Sisters (pp. 159–79) is united with Clarinda E. Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka's more expository (but still illuminating) account of the Jesuit drama of Poland–Lithuania (pp. 141–58). There is much here for historians as well as literary critics, notably Rebecca Tomlin's research into alms-giving, delving into the churchwardens' Memoranda of St Botolph's, Aldgate (pp. 237–54). The most compelling chapters revolve around Shakespeare. Elisabetta Tarantino uses the vexed question of compassion for Malvolio as a starting point for a meticulous tracing of onomastic and chronological mirrorings, within and between Twelfth Night and its sources (pp. 173–96). Eric Langley contributes a bracing, sensitive exploration of the Lucretian trope of shipwrecks viewed from shore by (un)compassionate spectators, focusing on The Tempest (pp. 197–216) but leading deftly into Toria Johnson's chapter on King Lear, which, it is argued, expresses a sense of unmooredness arising from the 'Reformation shift away from medieval structures surrounding charity—grounded as they were in clear church doctrine— and the subsequent rise of concepts more commonly associated with interpersonal connection, like pity, fellowship and compassion' (p. 221). Overall, this heterogeneous, pan-European collection of essays presents a convincing alternative to rigorous compassion scepticism: Steenbergh's Conclusion suggestively takes cues from post-humanist critics to insist that 'we stay with the trouble and explore the...