Shortly before his murder at Pomfret Castle, Shakespeare’s Richard II imagines his prison as a “little world” populated by his thoughts, “In humours like the people of this world,/For no thought is contented.”¹ These discontented thoughts provide Richard with three different responses to his suffering. First, the “better sort” directs Richard toward religion and “thoughts of things divine,” but these “are intermix’d/With scruples and do set the faith itself/Against the faith” (5.1.11–14). Specifically, he juxtaposes Christ’s invitation of “Come, little ones” with his caution that “It is as hard to come as for a camel/To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye” (14, 16–17). Although both passages prize forms of lowliness, one welcomes while the other warns away, so they leave Richard feeling conflicted about his own salvation. Since Richard’s theological scruples obstruct his initial efforts of contentment, he proceeds to entertain escapist fantasies. Moving on to his “[t]houghts tending to ambition,” he uses the most visceral language of the speech to describe “how these vain weak nails/May tear a passage through the flinty ribs/Of this hard world, my raggèd prison walls” (19–21). However, he knows he lacks the bodily strength to enact such “[u]nlikely wonders” – or any allies left to help him – so these thoughts “die in their own pride” (19, 22). Richard cannot invent a material solution for his present predicament, just as his religious reflections fail to orient him toward future contentment in heaven.

Finally, Richard weighs the consolations of philosophy, but these “[t]houghts tending to content” prove similarly limited in their ability to generate it. He notes that these thoughts “flatter themselves/That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves/Nor shall not be the last” (23–25). Continuing with similarly dismissive diction, he likens them to “silly beggars/Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,/That many have and others must sit there” (27). Richard hints at a degree of self-deception in these vaguely Stoic thoughts, yet he admits that “they find a kind of ease,/Bearing their own misfortunes on the back/Of such as have before endured the like” (28–30). Enduring misfortune would seem to be Richard’s goal, but perhaps the humbled king cannot lower himself to the level of slaves and beggars. In any case, he concludes this line of thinking, saying, “Thus play I in one person many people,/And none contented” (31–32). Buffeted by misfortune and miscellaneous humors, Richard’s identity has been radically destabilized and left in a state of apparently irremediable discontent.

But Richard fixates on contentment, even as he denies any possibility of attaining it himself. This soliloquy uses forms of the word “content” three times, more than any other single speech in Shakespeare’s plays. In the throes of an emotional and political crisis that strikes at his very sense of self, Richard clusters together spiritual, physical, and philosophical considerations under a conceptual umbrella of contentment. This concept had been detailed and debated by sixteenth-century writers, and its cultural currency in England, well established by the late Elizabethan period, continued to rise through the seventeenth century. Taken together, Richard’s remarks express skepticism about that idea of contentedness, but they also expose the extent to which he falls short of the standard that he himself applies. Richard’s immediate impulse is to turn to religion, but he dismisses it just as quickly and moves to other avenues, rather than reconciling his faith with other forms of knowledge. By contrast, in the intellectual and affective climate of Reformation England, contentment united strategies of the mind, body, and soul to shore up selfhood in times of peril and plenty. A thrilling piece of theatre in its own right, Richard’s final soliloquy distills key aspects of the Renaissance discourse on contentment and – as literature is especially equipped to do – represents both its value as an ideal and its difficulty as a lived practice.

This book offers the first full-length study of contentedness, the emotional and ethical principle that became the gold standard of English Protestant psychology and an abiding concern of English Renaissance literature. Literary critics and contemporary theorists have equated contentment with passivity, resignation, and stagnation. However, I excavate an early modern understanding of the category as dynamic, protective, and productive. While this concept has roots in classical and medieval philosophy, contentment became newly significant because of the tremendous social and intellectual changes that accompanied the Reformation in England. Through sermons, translations, and theological treatises, reformers explored contentment as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. More than satisfaction or mild happiness, contentedness became a form of self-fortification, of protecting the godly subject from the external threats of capricious fortune and the internal divisions caused by the passions. The efforts by authors in overtly religious genres to reform contentment existed alongside similar representations and thematizations of this state by poets, playwrights, and writers of prose romance. Authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton revised concepts of content and its role in the Protestant English nation, and they created fictive arenas that put the category into contact and conflict with the full gamut of early modern affects. With the tools of genre, mode, and literary language at their disposal, English authors contributed to an extensive conversation about contentment that linked the armature of the self to the architecture of society.

Reforming Contentment

It has become commonplace to identify an “affective turn” and “emotional turn” across disciplines,² and Renaissance scholars have participated in this movement longer than most. As Erin Sullivan notes, “Shakespeare studies actually got there first, producing a number of important emotions-oriented studies before the humanities began its wider emotional turn.”³ Indeed, ground-breaking work on humoralism and embodiment by Gail Kern Paster, Michael Schoenfeldt, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, to name just a few, paved the way for research that continues to thrive into the present day.⁴ Several recent scholars, though, have encouraged us to look beyond the Galenic model and emphasized the importance of factors such as philosophy, rhetoric, and religion for Renaissance theories of affect.⁵ As a result, research on early modern emotion is now more inclusive than ever. Yet within the “turn to emotion,” certain types of emotion still turn up far more frequently than others. Reflecting long-standing trends in emotion science, scholars of the humanities have disproportionately focused on what we might call negative emotions.⁶ In literary criticism on the early modern period, this privileging of negative emotions has produced compelling studies of melancholy, despair, and different species of sadness, while positive emotions have received relatively little attention.⁷ Admittedly, some scholars have rightly cautioned against a rigid distinction between positive and negative emotion, which might obscure continuities between these experiences and further risks projecting our own categories onto the past. Indeed, the suggestion that any emotion can have positive and negative dimensions dates back at least to Aristotle.⁸ Nevertheless, such a distinction can be conceptually useful, when applied with caution, to offset the imbalance in existing scholarship and broaden our perception of early modern literature and culture. And very few emotions may stand to benefit as much from reassessment as contentment.

While many positive emotions have simply been overlooked as objects of serious scholarly inquiry, contentment has been debunked and devalued in theoretical discourses. For example, twentieth-century psychoanalysis cast contentedness as a diluted and potentially deluding form of pleasure. In the tellingly titled Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud explains that the civilizing process requires a renunciation of instincts and the repression or sublimation of desires, frequently leading to a deferral or denial of the pleasure principle and producing “only … a feeling of mild contentment.”⁹ As Ronald Huebert notes, a much more cynical view is taken by Jacques Lacan, who derides any pleasure that is “merely passive contentment” – a “principle of homeostasis” that, unlike desire, “limits the scope of human possibility.” To escape the passivity and limitations of contentedness, Lacan instead posits a “jouissance beyond the pleasure principle.”¹⁰ Jouissance is, of course, the same term Roland Barthes applies to the text of “bliss” or “rapture,” which he distinguishes from the text of plaisir, a word that his translator renders as “content.” The text of plaisir is “the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” – a practice of reading opposed to the unsettling, liberating, and orgasmic jouissance in which Barthes, like Lacan, is ultimately more interested.¹¹ Even when contentment is not seen as a shallow substitute for pleasure or a paralyzing myth in support of the status quo, it is sidelined in works surveying the study of emotions.¹²

However, in the early modern period, the word “content” had a rich range of significations that have been lost to contemporary theory and criticism. The word derives from the Latin infinitive continēre, meaning “to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain,” and the past participle contentus, meaning “contained, limited, restrained, whence self-restrained, satisfied.”¹³ These etymologies are reflected in the two familiar nouns “content,” as in “That which is contained in anything” and “content,” as in “a contented condition.”¹⁴ Furthermore, the dual significance as “contained” and “satisfied” shapes early modern understandings of contentedness as an emotional effort which holds the individual together. It consolidates, sustains, and shields the contents of the self, but it is also bound up with the (always ongoing) construction of the self. By “[h]aving one’s desires bounded by what one has” and “not [being] disturbed by the desire of anything more, or of anything different,” the contented subject works to define and defend the boundaries of the self.¹⁵ In the psychophysiological register, contentment denotes a negative relation to particular threatening passions and a disciplined regulation and containment of other passions that are more positively construed. Contentment is “pleasure, delight, gratification,”¹⁶ but it is also a habit of self-containment that provides emotional stability in an uncertain world. Thus, even as contentedness encourages a distinction between positive and negative emotion, it defies straightforward classification as an emotion. It can be both a positive emotion and a positively inflected response to emotion.

Previous studies of self-fortification and passionate regulation in the Renaissance have largely taken a philosophical approach and emphasized Neo-Stoicism, but Emotion and the Self takes a religious approach and shows how the Reformation supplied writers from Sidney to Milton with a new conceptual toolkit for investigating contentedness. The outpouring of religious publications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided an outlet for a complex cultural conversation on the strengths, shortcomings, and utility of this ideal. The entry for “to be Content” in Thomas Wilson’s Christian Dictionarie (1612) reads, “When the mind is pleased with such thinges as God hath thought fit and meete for vs: This is Contentment; so as withall, wee be readie to vndergoe a meaner and hard estate, if God will, euer iudging our present condition best for vs.”¹⁷ Furthermore, as the Oxford English Dictionary details, the common variant “contentation” had the additional meanings of “The making of satisfaction for sin” and “The satisfying of the conscience, of the moral or rational faculty.”¹⁸ As such, contentation was readily put into conversation with fundamental Protestant principles of justification and conscience. Even if complete self-sufficiency was unthinkable in this religious worldview, in which the individual Christian depended upon God’s grace, the ideal of a steady experience of pious, positive emotion became increasingly appealing amid the “gradual yet profound cultural transformation” that was the English Reformation.¹⁹

In Renaissance studies, the turn to emotion has already been in productive dialogue with an increased focus on faith and religious experience, as scholars have explored the role of the Protestant Reformation in reshaping the emotional landscape of early modern Europe. In The Reformation of Feeling (2010), Susan Karant-Nunn details “the ways in which Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist ecclesiastical leaders in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany tried to shape the religious feelings of those in their charge.”²⁰ Karant-Nunn resists the idea that early Protestantism was somehow opposed to emotion, though she observes clerical efforts to “dampen the outer demonstration of religious fervor” – in effect, to contain emotion.²¹ In Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), Alec Ryrie seeks to “show the experience of Protestantism from within,” and he devotes the first major section to surveying “the emotional landscape of early modern Protestantism.”²² Although Ryrie’s argument aligns with Karant-Nunn to an extent, as he agrees that Calvinist teaching encourages a “discipline” of the emotions, the end goal of that discipline is “to direct and to heighten” those emotions.²³ Properly disciplined emotions “could be guides on the road to godliness, supports when that road became hard, and invaluable testimonies that the destination was within reach.”²⁴ Finally, Steven Mullaney in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (2015) argues that the “Reformations of faith coincided with a great many other changes, and these included reformations of the heart,” which dramatically changed “[s]tructures of feeling,” in addition to “structures of belief.” Whether one embraced or resisted these changes, the cultural shift unsettled “the affective core of individual and collective identities.”²⁵ But it also allowed new ones to emerge. In England, all manner of writers responded to this emotional exigency, and their revaluations of affect repeatedly positioned contentedness as the most stable foundation available for the self. Contentment capably addressed the affective crisis of Reformation and reflected the important status of emotion as reaffirmed by Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and many others.²⁶

Until recently, though, despair has dominated studies of Protestant emotion in the early modern period. In particular, scholars have traced the ways in which English Calvinism could precipitate religious despair. Blair Worden claims, “The volume of despair engendered by Puritan teaching on predestination is incalculable.”²⁷ Similarly, John Stachniewski argues “that Calvinism and puritanism were conducive to despair and that this was both a widely recognized and widespread phenomenon in England at least from the late sixteenth century.”²⁸ Even Ryrie, who warns against over-emphasizing negative emotions, admits that “Calvinism could be a theology of despair, a problem which was as apparent in the early 17th century as it is now.”²⁹ According to Andrew Escobedo, despair became “a normative aspect of spiritual life” that “functions simultaneously as a transparent manifestation of God’s dispensation and as a kind of joint or pivot between paradoxes inherent in Protestant Christianity.”³⁰ Such despair was “a sadness born out of the disproportion between self and world that Protestantism did not create but exacerbated by making Grace at once more personally immediate and implacably invisible.”³¹ Yet he adds the caveat (without further elaboration) that English Protestantism also offered important alternatives to religious despair.

Literary critics have only just begun to examine some of the elements of Protestant thought that constituted a positive affective alternative to despair.³² For example, Adam Potkay isolates joy as an important theological concept in the period: “English Protestant writing of the early modern era vividly evokes both joy and, conversely, the threat of joylessness in the Christian life.”³³ David Bagchi similarly highlights Protestant joy and notes that the Book of Common Prayer counterbalanced the scriptural treatment of “more negative emotions, such as grief and despair, [that] are part of the Christian condition.”³⁴ Heather Hirshfeld, focusing on the even more immediately relevant category of satisfaction, demonstrates that the “general, affect-tinged understanding of the term,” with all its “emotional, qualitative associations,” existed alongside and informed more technical meanings in religious, legal, and economic discourses.³⁵ Hirschfeld subsumes contentation under the topic of satisfaction as an “economic disposition or affect,” but such treatment (however appropriate to her own study) significantly narrows its range of meanings in the period.³⁶ Instead, contentedness became such a useful, flexible category because it was not a technical term or a pillar of Protestant theology. In this sense, content had more in common with cheer, an affect that Timothy Hampton has recently shown was “deeply theological and social” in the early modern period before becoming “part of the vocabulary of the self.”³⁷ By looking more closely at how contentment was invoked, I aim to challenge prevailing notions of the category; expand current understandings of the relationships between religion, emotion, and the self; and contribute to the emerging body of research on positive affect in Renaissance literature.

Contentment, however, was hardly an invention of the Renaissance, and even reformed contentment owed much to classical philosophy.³⁸ The Stoics had elaborated, if not necessarily invented, concepts that were of obvious relevance to a principle of contentment, such as self-sufficiency, patience, and constancy. In his translation of the influential De Constantia, John Stradling suggested that Justus Lipsius “directeth his studie to the forming of goodmanners, and moderating of affections, (especially feare and sorrow in aduersitie) whereby hee may at length be safely harbored in the hauen of a contented mind,” and Lipsius himself suggests that the philosopher’s garden of repose is a place to debate “contentation, constancie, life, and death.”³⁹ But Lipsius’s work was not published until 1583, with Stradling’s translation following in 1594 – well after the earliest Protestant discussions of contentment. Of course, Reformation writers drew on their humanist education and turned to Seneca and other ancients, but their primary point of reference was biblical, especially the accounts of contentedness by St. Paul. The most significant classical precursor to early modern content was ataraxia (imperturbability), “a kind of negative happiness” prized in both Stoicism and Epicureanism.⁴⁰ For the Stoics, ataraxia followed from apatheia (indifference or equanimity) and represented a freedom from mental agitation and even the experiencing of emotion altogether. This freedom made possible the eupatheiai, “good states of feeling,” though Richard Sorabji notes that these were available only to the Stoic sage and that “it is unclear whether the Stoics believe that anyone has yet attained to sagehood.”⁴¹ Moreover, the indifferent sage would not actively pursue ataraxia; it resulted from living in perfect accordance with reason and virtue, the true Stoic goal. By contrast, many Reformation writers taught that all Christians should actively foster contentment. Epicurean formulations of ataraxia as “the transcendence of worldly cares” that stems from “coming to understand the world’s true nature” were also influential in the period, as David Carroll Simon has recently suggested.⁴² But the “painless tranquility” that Reid Barbour identifies as the Epicurean ideal would be difficult to maintain amidst suffering and strife, while Christian contentation was prescribed especially in these conditions.⁴³ In more positive circumstances, contentment encouraged enjoyment of what one has, rather than requiring indifference. If contentedness reflects certain aspects of ataraxia, it also places greater emphasis on qualitative differences between emotional states and offers a more affirming orientation toward lived experience.⁴⁴ It promotes the value of godly cheer.

The religious upheavals and theological dynamism of the English Reformation defined the ways in which authors constructed contentment from existing traditions and available texts.⁴⁵ Many English reformers marshalled the resources of Stoic philosophy to support their arguments about contentment, but they also regularly distinguished themselves from their secular counterparts. Obviously, the Stoic canon offered a number of different and sometimes conflicting views on the passions, and “the transmissions of Stoicism … are messy in construction and malleable in strategy.”⁴⁶ Even so, authors often accused the Stoics (justly or unjustly) of endorsing an overly passive condition.⁴⁷ At the same time, Andrew Shifflett observes that “Stoic bogeymen were routinely attacked on the grounds that they were prideful, discontented, and divisive.”⁴⁸ Indeed, Neo-Stoicism was considered at least as likely to produce English malcontents as it was contented Christians. But perhaps the most relevant objection to Stoicism in the period was that it was too extreme in its response to emotion. Sorabji explains, “Stoicism as formulated by Chrysippus was opposed to nearly all emotion,” but he hastens to add that “[w]e do not have to agree with this unacceptable side of Stoicism in order to learn from the Stoics how to be free of those emotions that are unwanted or counter-productive.”⁴⁹ In much the same vein, reformers adapted Stoic concepts such as quietude and constancy and incorporated them into a model of content that protected against emotional turmoil without calling for an elimination of the passions – a task they deemed either undesirable or unachievable. They repurposed and rejected classical teachings to meet their needs and goals, just as they approached the history of their own faith. Stoicism, then, functioned as one intellectual tributary, however important, into a broader body of thought on Christian contentment.⁵⁰ Contentedness entailed many of the same virtues esteemed in Stoic philosophy, but it was what living such virtues felt like in early modern Christianity.

A new phase in the intellectual history of contentment began, a phase that was distinctly English and Protestant. This is not to say that Christian content was conceptually unavailable before the Reformation. Karant-Nunn insists, “neither Lutheranism, Calvinism, nor a newly fortified Catholicism invented ideals of religious feeling that had not existed earlier. Rather, each selected from among the elements already available ‘in Holy Mother’s lap’ and elevated its choices.”⁵¹ As we will see in Chapter 1, St. Paul espoused the importance of contentment, and his epistles provided a biblical basis for its Protestant incarnation. Moreover, Renaissance texts about contentedness often echo what William J. Bouwsma has identified as an “Augustinian” understanding of the human passions with an emphasis on moderation.⁵² Even Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a predominantly secular text by a Christian author that went on to massively influence medieval Catholicism, anticipated sixteenth-century Protestant ideas of contented suffering – and then played a role in articulating them. When Chaucer translated Boethius, before contentment became important to English Christianity, he did not use the word a single time. By comparison, Elizabeth I’s 1593 translation of The Consolation of Philosophy uses variants of the word “content” four times,⁵³ and the term appears more than a dozen times in another translation published in 1609. The unnamed translator explains that “nothing is miserable but when it is thought so, and contrariwise, every estate is happie if he that beares it bee content.” By contrast, whoever yields himself “to Fortune’s sway … must bee content with the conditions of thy mistresse.”⁵⁴ Renaissance writers conscripted Boethius (among others) into an early modern project of promoting and producing contentedness.

However, the Reformation remains a crucial context for English thought on contentment for three major reasons. First, the meaning of contentment was, in large part, a function of the English word itself and its etymology.⁵⁵ As Paul’s Greek and Luther’s Latin were translated into the vernacular, “content” (and its variants) became a prominent means of articulating Christian ideas, values, and affects in the Reformation moment. Thus, the second reason to understand contentment in light of the Reformation lies in its prevalence in distinctly religious genres of writing. Questions of contentation were taken up most directly and extensively in texts including sermons, martyrologies, theological treatises, and works of religious controversy. Although contentment was not a technical theological term like satisfaction, it nevertheless became a key word within the “revolution in theological vocabulary.”⁵⁶ It permeated Protestant discourse in England from the earliest rumblings of Reformation until it became almost an obsession in the mid-seventeenth century. Third, contentment combatted religious despair and directly addressed the newly Protestant “disproportion between self and world,” instead allowing for more benign articulations of this relationship.⁵⁷ Even if Calvin’s canon “has little to recommend in the way of consolation for believers adrift in doubt,”⁵⁸ English authors attended to this absence through an abundant literature of content. Contentment helped to heal the unintended wounds of Reformation, or at least alleviate the pain. Christian contentedness offered an alternative to Calvinist despair, and many authors pitted the two against each other as they actively played out theories of affective self-fortification in their works. Together, Renaissance writers endeavored to reform contentment, to refine a concept suitable to the historical circumstances of the Reformation in England.

But literary authors also re-formed contentment, as they emphasized and altered aspects of the concept across literary forms. Throughout the book, I will foreground questions of genre, mode, and form to show how authors exploited and expanded the resources of their art as they contributed to a cultural project of reforming emotion in which contentment played a key role. Even writers unaware of the specific discourse on Christian contentedness could still recognize and respond to the broader theological and psychological concerns that triggered it. Choice of genre, engagement with literary traditions, and the use of particular literary devices all impacted an author’s ability to engage with the ideas of the age and the emotions of an audience. According to Philip Fisher, literary forms are largely defined by the passions they represent, so that specific modes and genres can have distinctive affective associations.⁵⁹ Moreover, the editors of Shakespearean Sensations observe, “Early modern audiences approached literary genres with the expectation that they would move, stir, or enrapture them in particular ways.”⁶⁰ Considerations of form have also become significant to discussions of affect, which is decoupled from the individual subject and commonly associated with intensity or force. As Eugenie Brinkema argues, “only reading specific affects as having and being bound up with specific forms gives us the vocabulary for articulating those many differences” between them – “aesthetically, politically, ethically, experientially, and formally.”⁶¹ Since forms both represent and elicit emotions and since affect itself “manifests in, as, and with textual form,” any consideration of contentment in early modern culture would be incomplete without carefully attending to the particularities of the texts themselves. Forms helped shape the conversation about contentedness in Renaissance literature. This does not mean that particular expressions or experiences of contentation are only and exclusively possible in particular forms, but it does mean that the form impacts how such types of contentment are communicated and created – or deconstructed. Genre and mode matter.

My literary analysis covers prose romance, comic and tragic theatre, and lyric and epic poetry, yet the pastoral mode provides a literary through-line across chapters. By the time it reemerged as a dominant literary mode in late Elizabethan England, pastoral had been firmly established as an apt medium for commentary (either overt or oblique as the circumstances dictated) on political, economic, ethical, philosophical, religious, and artistic issues. In The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham affirmed pastoral’s ability to “glance at greater matters,”⁶² and scholars have shown that these “matters” included nearly every aspect of early modern existence. As Nancy Lindheim explains, pastoral is a “tool to think with,” defined by a “stripping down” and a stripping away of life’s complications to examine “the minimal terms of human happiness.”⁶³ This imaginative practice intersected productively with a Reformation discourse that encouraged the godly individual to be content “in whatsoever estate” (Philippians 4:11).⁶⁴ Thus, pastoral empowered authors to treat contentedness with conceptual rigor, even within works that ultimately produced quite different representations or reached divergent conclusions from one another. Contentment became the lens through which pastoral authors and speakers evaluated their experiences as artists, lovers, citizens, and Christians. For the authors discussed in this book, the marked prevalence of contentment in pastoral literature was not a purely superficial convention, but rather a horizon of possibility, a point of contact with larger cultural conversations and concerns.

Yet skepticism about contentedness in contemporary literary criticism has been most apparent in studies of Renaissance pastoral. In his series of foundational articles detailing the “pastoral of power,” Louis Montrose argues, “Pastorals that celebrate the ideal of content function to articulate – and thereby, perhaps, to assuage – discontent”: pastoral is “an authorized mode of discontent.”⁶⁵ Influenced by William Empson, Montrose reverses a long-standing tradition of pastoral criticism inaugurated by Friedrich Schiller and epitomized by Renato Poggioli. Schiller centers his category of idyllic poetry on a “poetic representation of innocent and contented mankind,” while Poggioli claims that “pastoral poets … exalt the pauper’s estate … because it teaches self contentment,” a pious conjunction of “sensual delight, as well as moral contentment” that Poggioli calls “enlightened hedonism.”⁶⁶ Montrose joins his predecessors in recognizing the prominence of contentment within pastoral, but in order to make sense of it – to explain how talented, sophisticated authors could possibly be interested in content – he suggests that these representations demonstrate the absence or opposite of any actual contentedness. In other words, when a Renaissance writer discusses contentment, readers should really be looking for discontent. Various critics have revised or rejected Montrose’s political readings, but they have not challenged his account of pastoral contentation.⁶⁷ In the name of historicizing pastoral, literary critics in the last four decades have walled off a historical conversation in which pastoral played a significant role. Rather than recoiling from “ideological” pastoral criticism and returning to an earlier “idealistic” model,⁶⁸ I explore the extent to which authors used pastoral alongside other literary modes and traditions to engage with the intellectual and emotional culture of the Reformation.

From Luther onward, Renaissance intellectuals sought to develop a theory and praxis of contentment reconcilable with new, rapidly proliferating and ever-evolving religious ideals. The texts collected in this book display a remarkable diversity of thought. Many authors actively sought to generate contentedness through language. Some found a meaningful place for contentment in a world of contingency and suffering, but only with great concession and qualification. Others concluded that true contentation is not achievable, or maybe even desirable, in this life. All of them, however, contributed to expanding the emotional knowledge of their age. By elaborating an affective vocabulary, these writers allowed their audiences to better understand, express, and endure their own experiences, as well as to imaginatively engage in other experiences through dramatic, poetic, and prose fictions. They still allow audiences to do this today.

Finding Contentment: Evidence, Terminology, and Theory

Emotion and the Self in English Renaissance Literature uncovers an extensive early modern archive of contentment. In the first chapter, I survey and analyze theological treatises, sermons, martyrologies, and other texts of the Reformation, as well as political and natural philosophical texts. This diverse body of writing begins to reveal how pervasive the implications of contentment could be. The purpose of examining these works is to demonstrate not merely that early modern writers constantly use the word “content,” but that the concept accrues an urgency – and a literary relevance – in Renaissance England due to the psychological, social, and theological changes precipitated by the Protestant Reformation.

As I have already suggested, the concept of reformed contentment cannot be fully understood apart from the word’s proliferation in English Renaissance texts. For that reason, I track a specific set of emotion words.⁶⁹ These words (content, contentment, contentation, and their variants) have routinely been written off and, thus, written out of our literary and cultural histories. Without access to contentment’s range of meanings, scholars have glossed over appearances of these words as superficial nods to literary conventions, equated them with more familiar concepts from philosophy (especially neo-Stoicism), or projected their own skepticism upon them. This in no way denies Mullaney’s claim that “[t]he relationship of language to emotion is dynamic and processural rather than static or definitional or merely nominative.” Surely, “[t]he power of words is not to reduce feeling to a specific term, to affix a label to it, but to trace and enact the syntax of a feeling.”⁷⁰ If anything, an increased attention to early modern usage of these words across time shows how dynamic the process of constructing contentment was, and how literary authors in particular experimented with the power of this language to shape and stimulate the emotions of their audience. By adding this early modern emotion word to our critical lexicon, we can continue to address what Sarah McNamer calls the “hows of affective history” to not only ask “how did they feel?” but also “to vivify that how.”⁷¹

As we trace the language of contentment across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourse, we must recognize that not all uses of the word are equally deliberate or significant. As with any word, there are strong and weak uses of “content.” There are instances when it is used with purpose and others when it is used only in passing. The context of the usage generally provides the most helpful evidence, especially when the passage in question discusses other features that were commonly aligned with contentedness. It is not always possible to discern between the two categories, yet I will focus primarily on strong uses of the term and note when I linger over a weaker use. However, even observing weak usages of the word helps to reveal its pervasiveness and, more importantly, allows us to see continuities – and potential sites of discontinuity or disagreement – across authors, texts, and discourses. Furthermore, an intuitive (if not absolute) distinction between weak and strong uses might suggest a third category of essential uses. Essential uses occur in texts that present themselves as being about contentment: dedicated to exploring the concept, its viability, and its value. As I have already suggested, such texts during the early modern period are composed almost exclusively in genres of religious writing. That is, while strong uses of the word “content” permeate Renaissance literature, the term is often essential to Reformers.

In the process of recovering this vocabulary of contentment, I do not adhere strictly to certain terminological distinctions made by affect theorists, even as I benefit from their insights. Most theorists differentiate between affect and emotion, though they at times differ over definitions or attach different ethical and political significances to the terms.⁷² Teresa Brennan defines affect as “the physiological shift accompanying a judgment,” whereas feelings are “sensations that have found the right match in words.”⁷³ Brian Massumi equates affect with “intensity” and aligns it with “motion,” rather than “position.”⁷⁴ While affect is autonomous, emotions are “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal”: “Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture.”⁷⁵ If emotion belongs to the individual, affect is, as Megan Watkins puts it, “importantly a relational phenomenon.”⁷⁶ Or, as Sara Ahmed describes, affective economies concern a cultural orientation toward objects, rather than the psychology of the single subject.⁷⁷ As both an emotion and a disposition toward emotion, contentment is a similarly relational principle. Since the contented individual’s desires are bounded by “what one has,” contentment itself is a property of an individual subject defined, in part, by that individual’s relationship to property: inwardness is established in relation to external goods, material conditions, and other selves. Reformed contentment brings together issues of individual, captured experience, on the one hand, with the dynamism and elusiveness of affective relationships, on the other.⁷⁸

As scholars have recognized, considerable similarities exist between contemporary accounts of affect and Renaissance understandings of the passions. In Galenic thought, the passions were one of the six non-naturals that could alter one’s humoral balance and, in turn, affect temperament, behavior, and health. The passions and affect alike challenge subject/object distinctions, active/passive binaries, and concepts of the emotions as purely proprietary to the individual. Recent theorists describe affects as “communicable” and “contagious,” much like the passions.⁷⁹ However, both terms have their advantages and disadvantages for helping us to explain early modern contentment. Throughout this book, I use the word “passions” in the same sense as did authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This psychophysiological model obviously bears on the contented containment aspired to by individuals, with their porous, permeable bodies. Self-containment could suggest that one had to “enclose,” “hold in,” “confine,” “restrain, put restraint on, repress (one’s feelings, passions, etc.),” or “refrain from expressing or yielding to feeling, passion, etc.”⁸⁰ However, it could also mean “sustain” or “retain in a certain state or order,”⁸¹ and contentedness rarely required the individual to be closed off; rather, it privileged certain forms of receptivity.

Brennan’s conceptual vocabulary of self-containment and self-possession is particularly relevant to a discussion of contentment vis-à-vis affect and the passions. In her account, self-containment is an injurious illusion derived from the “foundational fantasy,” through which the infant child unconsciously projects its own negative affects onto the mother.⁸² Left unchecked, this process of projection and introjection results in boundaries between self and world that serve (ineffectively) to protect the aggressive ego. This “sealing of the heart” bolsters the idea of the autonomous, contained self and its proprietary emotions.⁸³ In contrast to self-containment, self-possession supports “more permeable … ways of being.”⁸⁴ Self-possession entails “somehow maintaining equilibrium” despite still “subjecting oneself to eddies or even torrents of affects.”⁸⁵ It requires “evaluations of one’s inner states and evaluations of the origin of the affects,” which can only be achieved through the “brief suspension of the state of projection” and attentive discernment, “an act of sustained consciousness” that promotes healthy habits of affective transmission.⁸⁶

However, Brennan’s distinction between self-containment and self-possession is not absolute. To clarify what she means by self-possession, she “consider[s] what it is not”: “Projecting is the opposite of discernment because projection directs affects outward without consciously (as a rule) acknowledging that it is doing so; discernment consciously examines them.” Brennan then adds, “Boundaries may depend on projecting, but this is only one route to self-containment. There is another, based on discernment.”⁸⁷ That is, while projecting boundaries and discerning affects are opposed processes, they are each of them “route[s] to self-containment.” Here, self-possession is actually a species of self-containment, albeit one quite different in appearance and effect from that based upon projection. Rather than strictly delineating self-containment and self-possession, Brennan suggests that there are (at least) two versions of self-containment: one deluding and destructive and the other ethical and advantageous, but both falling under the conceptual umbrella of self-containment. This fleeting reference to the congruity of projection and discernment as routes to self-containment suggests how different theories of the emotions and competing models of selfhood can conceptually overlap, however momentarily. Similarly, contentment proves a remarkably flexible concept in Reformation discourse, reflecting aspects of what Brennan identifies as self-containment and self-possession. By emphasizing the boundaries of the subject, Renaissance writers could, at times, construct an ideal of contentedness as autonomous selfhood, in which the individual was effectively impervious to outside influences. In this way, contentment became almost a precursor concept to Brennan’s self-containment. At the same time, however, authors anatomized contentation’s embodied, transactional, and relational nature. As many recognized, the shored-up selfhood promised by contentedness depended on carefully moderating one’s engagements with the world, with the other, and with the divine. Contentment safeguarded the self against fickle fortune and the onslaught of affects even as it reflected an understanding of the self that cannot be articulated apart from its relationships, with all the contingencies, desires, and passions those relationships entailed.

Since contemporary theoretical distinctions between affect and emotion do not fully apply to contentment, I use both terms throughout the book. Although the word “emotion” may be anachronistic, its modern meaning accords with the sense of contentment as a subjective, contained phenomenon, which is central to Reformation discourse on the topic. Insofar as contentment suggests a degree of stability, an enduring emotional experience, it resembles emotion’s close cousin “mood,” “a more diffuse affective state that generally lasts for a much longer duration than emotions and are usually less intense.”⁸⁸ And, as we have seen, contentedness is also a response to emotion. Consequently, I use affect primarily as an umbrella term to capture the multivalency of contentment as both emotion and emotional principle; as a feeling of pleasure and a resistance to change; as a form of containment and a means of connection; as protecting, producing, and, at times, policing selfhood.⁸⁹

Quentin Skinner suggests that one “role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to reconsider what we think of it.”⁹⁰ By bringing discussions of contentment to the surface, I hope to encourage a reconsideration of this emotional concept, the English Reformation, and Renaissance literature. Moreover, studying a Reformed contentment’s place in the early modern emotional vocabulary challenges some of our own assumptions about emotion, ethics, and subjectivity. In such efforts, Jane Bennett encourages us to “suspend suspicion and adopt a more open-ended comportment”: “If we think we already know what is out there, we will almost surely miss much of it.”⁹¹ Yet suspending our suspicions doesn’t require us to look with rose-tinted glasses either. A concerted focus on contentedness need not produce overly optimistic interpretations of early modern culture or literary texts. Taking contentment seriously – recognizing the overwhelming evidence that early moderns took it seriously – does not mean reducing literature to a site of wish fulfillment or an escapist fantasy free from the awareness of pressing historical issues: ours or theirs.⁹² Instead, contentment could provide one more way to survive in a world beset by these issues, even as it empowers us to address them.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 1 of this book investigates the extensive English Reformation conversation on contentment, beginning with translations of St. Paul and Luther in the early sixteenth century and ending with publications produced during the English Revolution and Interregnum. Although various classical and medieval works informed early modern concepts of content, English Renaissance writers transformed this material, resulting in a tremendous textual archive on contentment. My examination of these texts will be guided by a series of questions asked by the authors themselves: What is contentment? What is Christian about contentment? Where does it fit into a world of suffering, desire, and discontent? How can contentedness be achieved in such a world? What are the consequences of contentment for the individual and for the nation? The first chapter considers how authors address these questions in differing ways in light of their intellectual and religious commitments, immediate political circumstances, and the influences of other texts. In this way, the chapter establishes the historical and intellectual context for the discussion in subsequent chapters of particular literary authors.

Chapter 2 explores how Sidney uses literary form for passionate experimentation and develops a sophisticated affective vocabulary that intersects with the reformation of contentment. Neither The Old Arcadia nor the revised New Arcadia reproduce widespread Protestant concepts of contentedness or proselytize an idealized Christian psychology. Instead, in The Old Arcadia Sidney pursues the strategies of romance, including the “wandering,” “error,” and “trial” described by Patricia Parker, and arrives at counter-intuitive and potentially scandalizing conclusions about this emotion.⁹³ More specifically, Sidney aligns both sexual satisfaction and virtuous endurance with contentation, and he makes the character Pyrocles’s erotic fulfillment in Books 3 and 4 instrumental to his pious suffering in Book 5. However, in The New Arcadia, Sidney displaces the most extreme manifestations of desire from the four young lovers onto their antagonists, and he disentangles contentment and constancy in the face of adversity. By pushing contentment to the pastoral peripheries to emphasize the revised work’s more chivalric tenor, Sidney recoils from his most innovative contribution to the Renaissance discourse.

Chapter 3 focuses on The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume as evidence for Spenser’s interest in a situational, rather than perpetual, contentedness. Although pastoral episodes in Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene gesture toward the kind of emotional stability suggested by Christian contentment, they also show ways in which that response can be feigned, mistaken, or exploited. Through instances of false and true contentment, as well as content’s jockeying with other affects, Spenser challenges the ideal of an absolute happiness in this life, even as he acknowledges the attraction and usefulness of satisfaction in certain circumstances. Ultimately, Spenser offers a contentment that coexists with more radical emotions, and he fashions an unexpected compatibility between content and complaint. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works, while also emphasizing how he mixes modes and genres to fashion readers and Reformation culture.

Chapter 4 examines the relationship between individual, communal, and political contentment in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Othello. As this pair of plays demonstrates, Shakespeare presents contentment as most successful when shared between selves, whereas an overly possessive attitude toward one’s own contentation jeopardizes its continued existence. As You Like It depicts a commonwealth built upon the bonds between subjects and preserved through mutual contentedness. By contrast, the malcontent Iago identifies vulnerabilities in Othello’s understanding of contentment to destroy his relationships with Desdemona and Venetian society writ large. In As You Like It, communal content counteracts the social threat of envy, but in Othello jealousy distorts contentment beyond the point of recognition or redemption. Like Spenser, Shakespeare represents the challenges to contentedness, but he attempts to provide audiences with collective experiences of positive emotion and to unite them in the face of tragedy. Though recent critics have described the Renaissance theatre as an arena for emotional extremes, this chapter broadens our perspective of Shakespearean emotion to include a contentment that shares the stage with other affects.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s response to reformed contentment, as publications on the topic became increasingly popular during and after the English Revolution. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike, which had positioned Charles I as a contented Christian martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican import of content and discontent. Milton recognizes that the language of self-containment had limited applications for his yet-unfallen subjects of Adam and Eve, who interact freely and harmoniously with their pastoral environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space removed from and defined in opposition to the material and natural world. Satan perverts reformed contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject themselves and their world to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentation reveals his efforts to apply the strategies of Reformation to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

While the five chapters examine aspects of early modern contentment that often challenge reigning critical and theoretical assumptions, the conclusion revisits the significance of those assumptions. In this way, Emotion and the Self not only provides a literary and intellectual history of contentedness in the Renaissance, but it also explores the merits such contentment might have in a contemporary context. Just as an emergent Protestant culture and an outpouring of English literature on page and stage precipitated widespread interest in contentedness, subsequent shifts in philosophy, science, global affairs, and artistic sensibilities led to yet another reappraisal. The consequences of that reappraisal, the deformation of contentment, persist to the present day.