Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare the Historian
- The Decline of the Chronicle and Shakespeare's History Plays
- Rites of Oblivion in Shakespearian History Plays
- Richard II's Yorkist Editors
- Mapping the Globe: The Cartographic Gaze and Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1
- Falstaff's Belly: Pathos, Prosthetics and Performance
- ‘And is Old Double Dead?’: Nation and Nostalgia in Henry IV Part 2
- Performing the Conflated Text of Henry IV: The Fortunes of Part Two
- Medley History: The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth to Henry V
- Georgic Sovereignty in Henry V
- The Troublesome Reign, Richard II, and the Date of King John: A Study in Intertextuality
- The Trials of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII
- ‘Watch Out for Two-handed Swords’: Double-Edged Poetics in Howard Barker's Henry V in Two Parts (1971)
- Daunted at a Woman's Sight?: The Use and Abuse of Female Presence in Performances of the Histories as Cycles
- The RSC's ‘Glorious Moment’ and the Making of Shakespearian History
- Shakespeare as War Memorial: Remembrance and commemoration in the Great War
- Shakespearian Biography, Biblical Allusion and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture
- Filling in the ‘Wife-Shaped Void’: The Contemporary Afterlife of Anne Hathaway
- Shakespeare and Machiavelli: A Caveat
- Shame and Reflection in Montaigne and Shakespeare
- Playing the Law for Lawyers: Witnessing, Evidence and the Law of Contract in The Comedy of Errors
- Shakespeare's Narcissus: Omnipresent Love in Venus and Adonis
- Surface Tensions: Ceremony and Shame in Much Ado About Nothing
- ‘Remember Me’: Shylock on the Postwar German Stage
- ‘Dangerous and Rebel Prince’: A Television Adaptation of Hamlet in Late Francoist Spain
- What Shakespeare Did with the Queen's Men's King Leir and When
- Re-cognizing Leontes
- Shakespeare Performances in England 2009
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 2008
- The Year's Contribution to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index to Volume 63
Shame and Reflection in Montaigne and Shakespeare
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare the Historian
- The Decline of the Chronicle and Shakespeare's History Plays
- Rites of Oblivion in Shakespearian History Plays
- Richard II's Yorkist Editors
- Mapping the Globe: The Cartographic Gaze and Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1
- Falstaff's Belly: Pathos, Prosthetics and Performance
- ‘And is Old Double Dead?’: Nation and Nostalgia in Henry IV Part 2
- Performing the Conflated Text of Henry IV: The Fortunes of Part Two
- Medley History: The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth to Henry V
- Georgic Sovereignty in Henry V
- The Troublesome Reign, Richard II, and the Date of King John: A Study in Intertextuality
- The Trials of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII
- ‘Watch Out for Two-handed Swords’: Double-Edged Poetics in Howard Barker's Henry V in Two Parts (1971)
- Daunted at a Woman's Sight?: The Use and Abuse of Female Presence in Performances of the Histories as Cycles
- The RSC's ‘Glorious Moment’ and the Making of Shakespearian History
- Shakespeare as War Memorial: Remembrance and commemoration in the Great War
- Shakespearian Biography, Biblical Allusion and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture
- Filling in the ‘Wife-Shaped Void’: The Contemporary Afterlife of Anne Hathaway
- Shakespeare and Machiavelli: A Caveat
- Shame and Reflection in Montaigne and Shakespeare
- Playing the Law for Lawyers: Witnessing, Evidence and the Law of Contract in The Comedy of Errors
- Shakespeare's Narcissus: Omnipresent Love in Venus and Adonis
- Surface Tensions: Ceremony and Shame in Much Ado About Nothing
- ‘Remember Me’: Shylock on the Postwar German Stage
- ‘Dangerous and Rebel Prince’: A Television Adaptation of Hamlet in Late Francoist Spain
- What Shakespeare Did with the Queen's Men's King Leir and When
- Re-cognizing Leontes
- Shakespeare Performances in England 2009
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles, January–December 2008
- The Year's Contribution to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index to Volume 63
Summary
This article discusses the presentation of reflective retreat in Shakespeare and Montaigne, noting that for both of them reflection frequently follows an experience of shame. Moreover, for both reflection offers no path out of embodiment. That is, neither embraces a hallowed Platonic (and an imminent Cartesian) idea that a focus on mental life extricates one from the difficulties of embodiment.
Being seen in a bad light, gazed at with a critical, superior eye, promotes shame. As Silvan Tomkins comments,
The shame response is an act which reduces facial communication. It stands in the same relation to looking and smiling as silence stands to speech and as disgust, nausea and vomiting stand to hunger and eating. By dropping his eyes, his eyelids, his head and sometimes the whole upper part of his body, the individual calls a halt to looking at another person, particularly the other person's face, and to the other person's looking at him, particularly at his face.
Closing eyes or bowing the head to break eye contact with the shamer, covering the face or the exposed body parts, are, in effect, an attempt to enlarge or barricade the space between the shamed body and the shaming, gazing body of the other. Flushing (more involuntary than the first two, but not much more involuntary) may in some physical or residually animal way be an attempt to accomplish the same thing by changing colour, radiating heat, producing a warning sweat, stoking the metabolism for conflict or flight.
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- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 249 - 261Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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