Passion's Triumph over Reason : A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester

Abstract

This book surveys ideas of passion, reason, appetite, and self-control in English literature and moral thought from 1580 to 1680. Drawing on tragedy, poetry, moral philosophy, and sermons, the book explores how Renaissance writers transformed their understanding of the passions, re-evaluating emotion so as to make it an important constituent of ethical life rather than the enemy within which allegory had traditionally cast it as being. Part One of the book describes various ethical positions available to early modern readers, including those of Erasmus, the Stoics, and Calvin. It then explores the role of psychomachia and a hostility to the passions in Spenser's Faerie Queene, before turning to plays by Shakespeare and Chapman (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Bussy D'Ambois) which challenge the moral assumptions, and particularly the antipathy towards the emotions, prevalent in late Elizabethan England. It also examines the impact which Augustinianism and Aristotelianism had on the poetry of Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton. These latter traditions are shown to promote a positive evaluation of emotion when that emotion is inflected either by God's grace or by a principle of rational moderation. Part Two of the book traces the rise and fall of Restoration libertinism, particularly under the influence of Hobbes's philosophy and French libertinism. This tradition, which celebrated passion and appetite as natural, and accorded them free expression, is traced in works by Etherege, Dryden, and the Earl of Rochester. It is argued that such libertinism ultimately proved dissatisfying even on its own terms.