Identity, Character

Question 1

Christopher Tillmouth

Answer 1

Although use of disguise demonstrates that some notion of inner identity existed (not fully externalised)
‘the dialogic domain of intersubjectivity’ creates identity – thus it is ‘performative’, actor/audience dynamic required
‘an intersubjective structure…manifests itself in the imagination as an externalized third party…or as an idealised version of oneself…….this watcher, an intrusive presence within the mind, acts synecdochically for a wider and shameful public exposure of one’s deeds’; same process occurs in ‘public reputation’
Expansion of Tudor public life increased the area that intersubjective influence could work upon

Question 2

Christopher Tillmouth - passion

Answer 2

Passion as an ‘object of anxiety’; emotional ‘typology’ sought to reduce all passions to types which could be understood within a ‘moral framework’
Notes that ‘passion’ comes from the Latin Suffering

Question 3

Jonathon Hart

Answer 3

‘depicting human experience as Shakespeare does, means an interpenetration of such opposites as good and evil so that pure states break into many shades’

Question 4

Hugh Grady

Answer 4

‘Shakespeare…..complicated his Machiavellian thematics with Montaignean ones…he depicts subjectivity as something of a dialectical negation of power, not a mere effect of its operations; as an orientation to multiple potential selves or identities, not merely the production of a unitary one; as a mental space critically distanced from, and not entirely defined by, the circulating ideologies and discourses of institutions of power’

Question 5

Graham Hough

Answer 5

‘incarnational literature’ - ‘abstract’ concepts are absorbed into, and expressed by, character

Question 6

Patrick Gray

Answer 6

Shakespeare’s characters are ‘concrete’ rather than ‘allegorical ‘’ - meaning they are ‘ifneuced by external cirucmstacnes as well as their own personality’

Question 7

David Bromwich

Answer 7

Self-knowledge or recognition occurs in the mind of readers or audience - NOT the characters themselves

Question 8

Plutarch

Answer 8

‘not to write histories, but only lives’ - hence inclusion o f’lightest occassions’ as well as ‘noblest deeds’ to reveal character

Question 9

JW Lever

Answer 9

‘the individual problem of being in the world’ - NOT generalised abstraction