Moral Agency as Readerly Subjectivity: Shakespeare's Parolles and the Theophrastan Character Sketch

Abstract

TREATING SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMATIS PERSONAE as vehicles of moral instruction seems, at least to post-nineteenth-century sensibilities, to flatten them. Yet in Shakespeare moral questions continually arise. (Is revenge courageous or blasphemous? What are the just deserts of abusively jealous husband? When a father justified in disowning, or killing, his child?) Such questions surround the known for resembling people (Hamlet, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona, Lear) as if their business were to provide answers. Could it really be that complexity, or realism, or what E. M. Forster calls roundness, was beside the point for Shakespeare? (1) To the contrary, I propose that for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, moral agency the essence of personhood, a phenomenon that elicits sympathy, making fictional persons seem real. I shall argue my proposal with the help of seventeenth-century moral sketches and test it via a brief examination of Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well, who demonstrates, in this context, that Shakespeare saw moral agency as the posture of one struggling to read--a reading subject. The Renaissance--particularly in England--saw a growing interest in the association of Aristotelian othos (moral disposition) with character, as in signifying mark. Today, character the English translation for othos. Character since Aristotle has meant something engraved--any kind of writing, symbolic object or reading material. Its connection to ethics appears in the Theophrastan tradition. Diogenes Laertius called his satirical descriptions of types of persons Ethikoi Karaktores--a title still in use in a Greek edition of the Characters printed in Oxford in 1604, also rendered in Latin as Notationes Morum. (2) Late in Shakespeare's career, the sense of ethical disposition as something to be read took the form of a popular revival of the sketch. The first Theophrastan characters in English were Joseph Hall's Characters of the Virtues and Vices in 1608. That ethikoi or and vices appears next to characters establishes not only association but also division of conceptual labor. Character indicates the expression of virtues and vices, not the ethoi themselves. For Aristotle, ethos certainly differed from notation. Ethos formed in actions resulting from proper or improper choices. Ethos means habit, and is, as he points out, revealingly close to ethos. (3) But in Shakespeare's time, ado could be made about noting--charactering in the book and volume of one's brain in the act of reading. To find character in ethos to imagine formation as reading. Signifying marks reshape the reader, turning her into a kind of writing, so that she in-formed, in mind and action, by the she reads, becoming for others to read. This system mixed Christian Providentialism with Aristotle, as in Vincentio's words to Angelo, There a kind of in thy life, which doth thy history fully unfold. Heaven does with us as we with torches do, not light them for ourselves. (4) Theophrastan character refers to literal writing. The 1616 edition of Overburian defines it as an Egiptian Hierogliphicke ... impress, or short Embleme; in little comprehending much (5) Comprehending key, chiming with John Earle's title for his 1628 Microcosmographie Or, Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters. Comprehending means representing cosmography in miniature, as well as understanding. Character as microcosmography aids readerly noting of Providentially determined cosmography. Both are graphy--both character--one from human hand, the other from divine. In identifying itself as microcosmographic, the Theophrastan acknowledges cosmographic character--the kind that would find expression in real persons. So Theophrastan are human writing preoccupied with Providential writing: A childe, remarks Earle, is a man in small Letter, yet the best copie of Adam before hee called of Eve, or the Apple; and hee happy whose small practice in the world can only write this character. …