Abstract
In the treatises of moral philosophy of the Renaissance humanist period, there is a paradigm that recurs describing what it is like to be human. The paradigm, it can be argued, is revealing of some aspects of the characters and the fairytale quality of The Tempest. Moral philosophers write about this paradigm in different ways but they refer to it invariably as being made up of three elements, the nature of which supports their common vision of humanity. In a quotation supposedly from Plato, for example, Baldwin describes the human being as constituted of two elements, the soul and the body, and there is nothing remarkable in this statement. But as he develops his argument, he points out that the soul too is constituted of two elements, first a pure spirit that gives it its otherworldly character and next a reason that has characteristics of both the spirit and the body. “Man,” Baldwin writes, “is a creature made by God of two parts, of a soule everlasting, immortall, of substance materiall, wherein is reason, wisedom, and knowledge: and of a body, fraile and corruptible, made of foure elements, whereof cometh life, lust and senses.”1 We are no longer in a notion of man as spirit and matter but in one that conceives of him as a spirit and a body and a third thing in between them somehow made up of both, known generally as reason. Reason is at once spirit and matter and that part of it conceived of as “matter” is the soul functioning in time. in this paradigm, Baldwin encapsulates the meaning that contemporary moral philosophers attributed to human life as a working vision of their ideals of wisdom, will, and emotion.
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Notes
William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie [.] Wherein Is Contained the Worthy Sayings of Philosophers, Emperors, Kings, and Orators … enlarged by Thomas Palfreyman, 20th ed. (London: Thomas Snodham, ?1620), Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, with an introduction by Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, FL, 1967), p. 44[a].
Pierre De La Primaudaye, The French Academie, translated with dedication by Thomas Bowes (London: Edmond Bollifant, 1586), Anglistica and Americana facsimile reprints No. 112 (Hildesham: George Verlag, 1972), p. 74.
Thomas Crewe, The Nosegay of Morall Philosophie, lately dispersed amongst many Italian authours and now newely and succinctly drawne together into Questions and Answers, and translated into Englishe (London: Thomas Dawson, 1580), Sig. E4v.
Philippe De Mornay, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion…. Begunne to be translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney Knight, and at his request finished by Arthur Golding (London: Thomas Cadman, 1587), Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, with introduction by F. J. Sypher (New York: Delmar, 1976), pp. 227–229.
Charron, Of Wisdome (London: Edward Blount and Will Ashley, n.d. [before 1612]), The English Experience facsimile series No. 315 (Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., De Capo Press, 1971, pp. 54–55, 58, 425.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), pp. 117–118, 135–137.
Of the other “romances,” The Winter’s Tale appeared under the comedies in the folio of 1623 and Cymbeline under the tragedies, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and The Two Noble Kinsmen that were added to the canon later are also grouped under the romances. The five romances have received considerable attention, including from Stanley Wells, “Shakespeare and Romance,” Later Shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 49–80; E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London and New York: Staples Press, 1949), pp. 161–199; and from a linguistic point of view, Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), pp. 109–140.
Robert W. Upshaw has called Prospero’s use of his art “the performance of romance.” Beyond Tragedy, Structure and Experience in Shakespeare’s Romances (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), p. 94. He describes the play as “the imaginative descent of the experience of romance into areas more accessible to reason” (p. 93).
Hallett Smith, “Introduction,” to The Tempest, The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., general and textual editor G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 1656.
For Baldwin’s prefaces to the 1559 edition of The Myrroure For Magistrates, the edition by Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1960), pp. 63–71. Also, de La Primaudaye, Chapter 56 “Of the People, and of their obedience due to the Magistrate, and to the Lawe,” French Academie, p. 610, and Chapter 65 “Of the preservation of Estates and Monarchies,” p. 73; and Charron, Book I, Chapter 49 “of the State, Soveraignes” on the “inconveniences and miseries” of princes, Of Wisdome, p. 192, and Book III, Chapter 16 on “The dutie of Soveraignes and Subiects” and on the obligation of the ruler “to keepe his covenants and promises” with his people, p. 489.
Fulbecke, A Booke of Christian Ethicks, or Moral Philosophie (London: Richard Jones, 1587), The English Experience facsimile series No. 737 (Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1975), Sig. B4v.
Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall [1601], facsimile text of the fifth edition (London: Miles Flesher, 1630) based on the second edition of 1604 (London: A. Islip and T. Thorpe, 1604), with introduction by Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 7.
Haly Heron, Kayes of Consaile, A Newe Discourse of Morall Philosophie (London: Ralph Newberie, 1579), edited with introduction by Virgil B. Heltzel. University of Liverpool Press, 1954, p. 70: “Let us take for example the curious arte of Cosmographie, not straying farre from the purpose. Wherein I shoulde take occasion to talke of the parte of the worlde which is called Terra Habitabilis, the mayne lande inhabited whereof accordyng to the auncient wryters there are three partes, Europa, Africa, & Asia; the last of them in quantitie is Europa, wherein we are conteyned, the head Citie whereof is Rome, nexte unto that is Africke, wherein Carthage is chiefe, an earliest follower and imitator of the Empyre of Rome: but the greatest parte is Asia, whereof in tymes paste the principall Citie was Troye. And so to describe the seas that devide them all other from other, and yet environed rounde aboute the same, myght I not well be likened to a blynde man iudgyng colours, that talke of suche things by hearsay, which I cannot as Occulatus testis partely witnesse and reporte.”
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© 2016 Anthony Raspa
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Raspa, A. (2016). Of Animals and Men: The Tempest. In: Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580160_6
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