Catherine Belsey, "The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama" (Book Note)

 

The Subject of Tragedy is a sequel to Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice, which explores the  construction of subjectivity in contemporary discourses during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Belsey argues that an individual's sense of self is socially and historically constructed, not an expression of "human nature." She discredits the current prevailing view of liberal humanism by exploring its origins and flaws through an exploration of medieval and Renaissance English drama.

The post-medieval human "subject" is blinded by an illusory sense of autonomous selfhood, partly produced and reinforced by literature. Both male and female subjects are unsuspectingly subjected to an illiberal, property-based, militaristic society, and women to patriarchy as well. Tragedy, as a public genre not bound to reconciliation, readily exposes social conflicts in the construction of subjectivity.

Belsey begins by considering morality plays like The Castle of Perseverance, The World and the Child, and Wisdom. In these plays, the protagonist is not a unified, independent source of meaning but is God's subject. Later perspective staging, a move toward classic realism, confirmed autonomy in actors and audience, offering a unified spectacle to unified spectator-subjects. Between the fifteenth century and the Restoration, collisions between residual and emergent discourses disrupted certainties and released the possibility of plural understanding of drama and the self.

Humanist criticism attempts to defeat pluralism through the construction of interiority. Belsey traces the development of the unified humanist subject from the sixteenth-century Vice, whose interiority and apparent immutable essence become the isolation and assertiveness of Kyd's Lorenzo, Shakespeare's Richard III and Coriolanus, and Webster's Flamineo.

Equally alienating for the subject is the differentiation of the self from knowledge, no longer a transforming, self-dissolving knowledge of God. The seeker after empirical knowledge displaces God and becomes the incapable arbitrator of meaning. Belsey maintains that only through conformity to social norms can the isolated, uncertain subject find corroboration.

At the heart of The Subject of Tragedy is a chapter on political and individual autonomy, deconstructing the Tudor-Stuart strategic opposition between absolutism and chaos. Playwrights can voice but cannot endorse the concept of a politically autonomous subject. Protestant thought also fostered autonomy, with Anglican theory placing the monarch within the law and Puritan theory authorizing disobedience to an unjust sovereign on grounds of conscience.

In her book, Belsey discusses the revolution in the second half of the seventeenth century that gave men the illusion of autonomous selfhood and made them politically subordinate women. Some women rejected subordination, such as Alice Arden of Faversham, who commissions her husband's murder to marry her lover Moseby. This play serves as an allegory of the transition to the liberal-humanist family, where women remained an object of suspicion, subject to their husband, and excluded from participation in public life that might have empowered them.

Women in Tudor-Stuart drama lack a single, unified position from which to speak, with examples like The White Devil, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and Elizabeth Carey's The Tragedy of Mariam. These plays demonstrate that except for speeches of acquiescence to men's will, women were enjoined to silence. Transgressors like Vittoria, Mariam, and historical "witches" were permanently silenced or penitently silenced themselves.

The renewed subjugation of women through liberal humanism was not without controversy. Radical defenses of their independence can be found in Medwall's Fulgens and Lucires, Godly Queen Hester, and Shakespeare's comedies. The Duchess of Malfi defined the proposed limits of women's freedom for the seventeenth century: romance, familial affection, and the public, political domain could not encroach on the public, political domain.

Despite the invisibility of the power structure, within the eighteenth century, thanks to the few women who had written and nurtured them, women were finally installed as liberal humanist subjects with the dubious benefits pertaining thereto. One benefit is the voice given women with which to interrogate humanism and press for universal equality.

Belsey's work is considered "mildly polemical," but it remains thoughtprovoking, challenging, and illuminating for readers who believe that the most important function of literary criticism is to help make a better world.