Abstract
What is this creature that we call “consent”? Is it a specific decision at a moment of time, or is it some sort of mental process that leads to some overt act? What role does consent play when a couple decide to get married or to have sexual relations or indeed to fall in love? These questions matter to us today when we try to work out the ethical principles that should govern us as we live our romantic lives. Shakespeare lived in a very different time, but his insights in Romeo and Juliet can help as we try to decide what “consent” means and how it matters for our choices about how to act.
This paper was first written for the seminar, ”Invisible Presences: Detecting the Unseen in Renaissance Drama,” at the 2019 Shakespeare Association of America, led by Andrew Sofer and Jonathan Walker. Thanks to them and my fellow participants for their help.
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Notes
- 1.
For Austin’s ideas see Doing Things with Words, William James Lectures at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
- 2.
See, for example, Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- 3.
Of course there are also issues of who can give consent and under what circumstances. Can a minor give consent, and at what age? Are there incapacitating conditions? Should the default be consenting or not giving consent?
- 4.
The word “imitate” evokes our complex understanding of how stage representations can suggest realities, and I do not intend to distinguish modes of doing so, far less privilege one kind of imitation, such as realism.
- 5.
1.3.98–100. All quotations from the play are from Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Methuen, 2012).
- 6.
I discuss the nature of intention in relation to its role in literature and literary criticism in Robert B. Pierce, “Intention and Ogden Nash,” Comparative Literature Studies 38 (2001): 232–248. There I contend that intention, like consent in the argument of this essay, is not a clear, separate human phenomenon in the mind or brain, but a cognitive tool of our language that we use to make sense of how human beings behave.
- 7.
The coming together or holding each other in the formal structure of the dance can be seen as a sort of “as if” enactment of love, with the couple forming a symbolic representation of the relationship of love. Thus during the dance the couples enact being in love, and, as the dance proceeds, the relationship can become more and more real as the couple actually fall in love.
- 8.
See later in this play at 3.3.35 ff., and also Much Ado 5.4.53, Lear 1.1.254, Pericles 4.3.45–47, Troilus and Cressida 1.1.55. See OED, senses 6a, 6b, 7a.
- 9.
See my analysis of the union of Ferdinand and Miranda, Robert B. Pierce, “Performing Marriage in Shakespeare: The Tempest,” Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference 6 (2013): 43–55, esp. pp. 43–47.
- 10.
R. H. Helmholtz gives a picture of the complications of consent to marry in Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 69–73. See also Charles Donahue, Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 1–37.
- 11.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schultz, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schultz, rev. 4th ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Sec. 580, p. 162.
- 12.
I would prefer a term like “people-reading” to “mindreading.” That is, in the form of cognition described we actually learn to read people, not to see through their bodies to some mysterious dark thing the “mind” in their bodies, where we might find another clear entity “consent.”
- 13.
For an intelligent and careful analysis of possibilities in this enterprise, see Martha C. Nussbaum’s recent book, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).
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Pierce, R.B. (2022). Consenting as an Ethical Act: On the Meaning of a Word. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Literature and its Language. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12330-6_9
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