Emotion

Early modern emotion was big business. Just as modern bookshops groan with self-help guides, so there was a proliferation of similar texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet this is not where the connection ends. When I delved into these texts, I found myself undergoing a disorientating emotional experience, a sensation of simultaneous strangeness and recognition. In one moment, I was pondering the weird advice contained within William Vaughan’s Approved Directions for Health (1612) that cucumbers are ‘fit to be eaten onely of cholericke persons’ (sig. E4r). In another, I was recognising the continuing resonance of James Maxwell’s advice to his readers in The Treasure of Tranquility (1611) to be true to themselves as ‘it is a great paine and a restlesse molestation of mind … to appeare different in shewe from that which they are in substance’ (sig. D1v). As a parent of young children, I am well aware that school, Disney movies and children’s books hammer home the ‘be true to yourself’ message with equal vigour.

This disconcerting sense of both familiarity with and alienation from the early modern emotional world is even contained in the word emotion itself. Its first recorded use was only in the 1590s, raising the question as to whether even describing it as an early modern keyword is a little anachronistic. Yet, you can see hints of it emerging earlier in the period in the word ‘motions’, a term used to describe the physical movement of passions around the body. The other early modern terms which were in use — such as ‘passions’, ‘affections’, and ‘sensations’ — seem, in their variety, to also be attempts to categorise elusively fluid experiences. As early modern authors struggled to settle on a definitive emotional vocabulary, my use of a word that allows twenty-first century readers at least some degree of empathetic connection is perhaps, therefore, forgivable.

‘Phlegme Warming Himself by the Fire’ from Henry Peacham, Minerva Brittania (London, 1612). British Library C.38.f.28. (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0).

Indeed, if exploring early modern emotion was popular at the time, viewing it is just as popular now. People love watching Shakespeare because, among other reasons, they feel they can identify with the emotions being portrayed on the stage. But when we see Juliet in love, Othello being jealous or Hamlet melancholic, perhaps we should be asking ourselves if we really understand the emotions we are watching. Despite our desire to connect with these early modern texts, the field of early modern emotional studies has largely been concerned with the most alienating aspect of it, Galenic humoral theory. For Galen, an Ancient Greek whose medical theories were still dominant in early modern England, people were stuffed full of phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and blood, which formed the basis of their natural emotional makeup. Hot and dry choleric people, full of yellow bile, were naturally angry; phlegmatics, cold and wet, dull and lazy. Cold and dry black bile caused melancholy, while hot, wet blood resulted in a sanguine temper. These humours were also influenced by the external environment, hence Vaughan’s advice that cucumbers would be good for hot, dry choleric individuals but dangerous for phlegmatics or other damp constitutions. It is when pondering this very physical basis for emotion in the early modern period that it can feel most removed from our own beliefs.

Even in this Galenic physicality, however, there is familiarity. The idea of being born with a basic constitution (I could call this nature) which can then be influenced by your lived choices (nurture perhaps) is a concept that still resonates. Moreover, in addition to their humours, people also experienced ‘passions’: overpowering emotions such as love, hate and anger. Galen saw these passions as physically transforming the body so that, for example, fear would cause the heart to contract, drawing in blood which cooled the body and sent heat down to the stomach, making people feel queasy. While we may have lost the physical reality of the Galenic emotions, modern emotional metaphors — such as boiling with anger or being cold with fear — draw on Galenic vocabulary and connect us to an early modern understanding of the physical sensations experienced by emotional individuals.

Ludovico Marchetti, Othello, Act 4, Scene 2, “Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?”. Late 19th / Early 20th Century. Folger Shakespeare Library (LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection). Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

It is also important to note that there are very few moments in early modern drama when characters feeling angry, sad or melancholic turn to the food cupboard to sort themselves out. Instead, throughout these plays there are wonderful moments of individual emotional complexity that reveal the extensive influences that, alongside humoralism, contributed to early modern emotional understanding. In Coriolanus, for example, the eponymous hero can be seen as pursuing a stoic approach to emotional constancy, highlighting the pervasiveness of philosophical considerations of emotion. Duke Frederick in As You Like It has a religious experience that changes him from hate-filled to humble. Katharine’s emotional conversion in The Taming of the Shrew reflects years of emotionally gendered shrew literature, while Romeo loves Rosaline in the way taught to him by Petrarch’s sonnets. Prince Edward, in a play by Robert Greene called Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, explicitly invokes societal emotional expectations when he declares that it isn’t princely to be jealous of his best friend and so casts his anger and hatred aside. Edward’s recognition of emotion as a socially determined experience has a particular modern resonance of its own too. When people battle against current emotional tropes, such as Kamala Harris being faced with antagonistic characterisations of her as an angry black woman, they are highlighting how effective this social control of emotional expression still is and how damaging it can be.

Understanding this mesh of personal, medical, social, philosophical and cultural influences on the early modern emotional self can therefore help us to recognise the complexity of our own emotional experiences. Early modern emotion is both familiar and unfamiliar because, while the nature of many of these influences has changed over five hundred years, this mesh still shapes our emotional selves. Unlike early modern authors, we may have settled on one word to describe it all but when we use the word emotion — when we describe ourselves as emotional — we would do well not to forget the divergent influences acting upon our experience and expression of it.

Suzy Lawrence is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at King’s College London.

Selected Bibliography.

Maxwell, James. The Treasure of Tranquility (London, 1611).

Vaughan, William. Approved Directions for Health (London, 1612).

12 March 2021.