The Inner Self in the Renaissance and Shakespeare's Tragic Characters

Abstract

Despite postmodern literary critics’ anti-essential conception of man in the Renaissance, Renaissance thinkers and artists believed in the nature of man and embodied such a belief in their works. Staying away from our contemporary ideological polemics on the human nature, this paper examines the inner self in the Renaissance in relation to Shakespeare’s four tragic characters: Hamlet, Cordelia, Romeo, and Juliet. The inner self was not a new concept in the Renaissance period. What was new was the attitude and direction of the concept. As a political power became concentrated on the kings of the modem nations, prudence seemed to be the courtiers’ best policy for political survival. The Reformation also put extra pressure on the contemporaries, who sometimes had to conceal their religious convictions for the sake of personal safety. On the other hand, disillusioned by dissembling in the court and the Reformed world, people desired the virtue of sincerity, which was also strongly supported by the Reformers who believed in the human emotion overt reason. Keenly aware of the differences between inner and outer, Shakespeare’s tragic characters criticize dissembling, a strategy of prudence as a representation of the self. And they also give priority to ‘that within.’ Their sincerity as an inner power looks insignificant, but it eventually causes the corrupt society to fall down and helps the society to recover a healthy state thanks to their tragic sacrifice. Postmodernists’ idea of the self in the Renaissance is a projection of their own self-image. The completely autonomous self demystified by the postmodern literary critics was the idea of man espoused by liberal humanism, which was actually unknown to the Renaissance men. A study of the inner self in the Renaissance as related to Shakespeare allows us to discover truth in its own historical contexts and to reflect on our modem or postmodern life.