Friday, November 30, 2012

The Imagination in Measure for Measure

For this final post, I would like to return to some of the same ground I covered in my first, in which I looked at the "temptation scenes" (2.2 and 2.4) of Measure for Measure in terms of Patterson's discussion of the autonomous self in Chaucer. Since we have now read another essay dealing with medieval self-consciousness, Nicholas Watson's "The Phantasmal Past: Time, History, and the Recombinative Imagination," let's see if we can find evidence for or against the hypothesis that something like the medieval "imagination" is depicted in these scenes.
     To be a bit more precise, I am interested in Watson's description of the cellula imaginativa as a troubled mediator between external reality and the faculties of "judgment and memory" (9); "troubled" because the rational part of the mind seems to require images produced by the imagination in order to function at all, yet there is no way to be sure these images will adequately represent reality and the imagination may further muddy the waters by combining images haphazardly (as in dreams). Watson uses the example of John of Morigny's Liber florum to demonstrate the severity of this anxiety, as well as one ingenious scheme for managing it in the context of divination: "the Virgin's appearance in dreams must be carefully vetted for diabolical deception. [... E]ven true visions may contain a whiff of the diabolic, a mingling of truth and error" (28). That this kind of thinking was still possible in Measure for Measure's day may perhaps be established by the prominent place in Descartes' philosophy, a generation later, of the famous "evil genius" hypothesis (e.g., Meditations 22).
     And the scenes of the play leading up to Angelo's temptation do indeeed introduce the notion of the shaky relationship between image and truth. Vincentio's appointment of Angelo as his deputy begins with the ironic (in retrospect) claim that "There is a character in thy life / That to th'observer doth thy history / Fully unfold" (1.1.28-30). The metaphor is of an open book, the sight of which produces reliably intelligible images in the mind of the "observer"; but Angelo answers with a less confident figuration: "Let there be some more test made of my mettle / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamped upon it" (1.1.49-51), introducing a coining motif that will recur several times in 2.4.
     Angelo first retools it as a metaphor for Claudio's crime in begetting a bastard:
                                                            It were as good
          To pardon him                 [. . .]
                            [. . .]                               as to remit
          Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
          In stamps that are forbid. (2.4.42-6)
But the appearance of the coining image that most clearly associates it with the imaginative faculty occurs in Isabella's response to Angelo's claim that "women are frail too" (2.4.125): "Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms. / [...] / [...W]e are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints" (2.4.126-7, 130-1). The imagination here is figured both as a fragile mirror of the soul and as a faculty for imprinting images on the woman's "soft" judgment. It was this latter formulation that would prove so enduring among British empiricist philosophers, beginning with Hobbes: "There be also other imaginations that arise in men [...] from the great impression made in sense" (Leviathan 1.2.4).
     The argument thus far I hope has established that the crucial "temptation scenes" of Measure for Measure are, in fact, concerned with a mental faculty akin to the medieval "imagination," which stamps images or forms onto the mind in a way that can be misleading and problematic. But the question remains, given the ease with which Measure for Measure's characters--and indeed those of early modern drama in general--are taken in by the imagination's false coinings: how is one to go about "vetting" its distressing productions?


Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First PhilosophyDiscourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. 46-105. Print.


Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.


Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Eds. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. Print.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Kenny!
    Great post. I especially appreciated your final question about how to vet the imagination's "distressing productions," because I think this is where Watson stops short--he's more interested in producing a method of study for the imagination. I'm interested in how the concept of the operator would play in your analysis. Watson suggests that "interpretations of dreams always stand to be corrected by new evidence" provided by the operator, so I wonder to what extent false images in Measure for Measure are indelibly "stamped"? (28) Do you perceive an operator anywhere in your analysis (perhaps Angelo, since he both introduces the coining motif and revises Vincentio's claim)?

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  2. Hi Kenny. To me, you make a convincing argument that the medieval "imagination," as Watson describes it, plays into the temptation scenes in Measure for Measure. Of course, the way in which characters in the play sift through false and true images makes for both interesting and important lines of inquiry. As you probably know, my focus is not the early modern period, but I would love to read an article on Shakespeare's plays that investigates how multiple characters "vet" the imagination's "distressing productions."

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