Introduction: Metaphor and Social Subjectivity

Abstract

Much has been written about the Renaissance project to fashion the self, even, according to Harold Bloom’s famous formulation, about the Renaissance and more specifically Shakespeare’s ‘invention’ of human subjectivity. This attention to the rhetoric of ‘selfhood’ reflects an interest in individual agency that is a marker of modern literary (and political) taste. A parallel strand of historicist criticism, which looks at the emergence and mediation of literary nationalism, is usually not so much celebratory as implicitly cautionary. However, selfhood does not exist in isolation, and if it does, it should be seen as abnormally sociopathic; if we interest ourselves in the way in which Renaissance literature invoked and explored the complexities of human psychology, we should also give close analytic consideration to the literary processes involved in fashioning a self-reflexive awareness of collective identity. Shakespeare certainly did; as purveyor of dramatic commodities to a theatre-going public, he could not afford not to.

Can this Cock-Pit hold

The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme

Within this Woodden O, the very Casques

That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?

O pardon: since a crooked Figure may

Attest in little place a Million;

And let us, Cyphers to this great Accompt,

On your imaginarie Forces work.

(Shakespeare, Prologue to Henry V, 11–18)