Paul Cefalu

The Doubting Disease: Religious Scrupulosity and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Historical Context

Psychologists and cultural historians typically have argued that early modern theologians such as Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Ignatius Loyola exhibited behavior that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) classifies as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder termed “religious scrupulosity.” This essay argues that, although early modern theologians do manifest scrupulosity, such religiosity was a culturally acceptable, even recommended component of spiritual progress, a necessary means of receiving an unmerited bestowal of God’s grace. The larger aim of the essay is to point out some of the limitations of current DSM criteria when attempting retrospectively to diagnose historical figures with mental pathology.

The Burdens of Mind Reading in Shakespeare's Othello: A Cognitive and Psychoanalytic Approach to Iago's Theory of Mind

Critics have generally agreed that Iago’s power over Othello stems from his exquisite attunement to Othello’s temperament. Iago’s evil seems to reside in his talent for what cognitive theorists would describe as “mind reading,” the relative ability to access imaginatively another’s mental world and, in Iago’s case, to cruelly manipulate that world. Inversely proportional to Iago’s mind reading ability would be the mind-blindness or metacognitive deficits of Othello, who seems too obtuse and closed off from others to fathom Iago’s unimaginable designs. This essay attempts to integrate a cognitive and psychoanalytic approach to understanding Iago’s character: if theory of mind helps us to understand Iago’s hyperattunement to others (as well as his problems with self-attribution), psychoanalytic theory helps us to assess the manner in which Iago works through his theory of mind impairments.

Incarnational Apophatic: Rethinking Divine Accommodation in John Milton's Paradise Lost

This essay argues that John Milton’s Paradise Lost reveals both the limits and dangers of several modes of accommodating God to both angelic and human understanding. Not only does God fail successfully to accommodate himself and his internally efficient decrees during the celestial council, but the Son, who might otherwise serve as an agent of the special accommodation of redemption, also fails to accommodate the Father: the Son’s tendency to disclose several of God’s mysteries subverts the basic concealing-revealing function of accommodation, which otherwise aims to render some of God’s ways palatable to creaturely understanding even while ensuring the ontological and epistemological distance between creatures and God. Milton thus approaches accommodation skeptically, even testing its effectiveness and capaciousness as an exegetical device that might be of use in mimetic poetry.

Tarrying with the Subjunctive, an Introduction

The idea of a return of theory might give readers pause. When, if at all, did use and development of theory in early modern English literary-cultural studies decline? With the exception of new materialist, post humanist, and some performance-oriented work, as well as the combined social theory, performance aesthetics, and critical methodology of transversal poetics, the field has suffered a waning interest in theoretically driven approaches that began during the mid-1990s. The radical drop in positions advertised in the MLA Job List for which an emphasis in theory was a primary criterion, the emergence of a large community of scholars whose focus was the history of the book, editing, or philology, and the widespread popularity of Harold Bloom’s liberal-humanist account of Shakespeare’s genius all exemplified this lag.1

Thinking with Shakespeare: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Essays (review)

tion to the postmodern era, with special attention to controversies over the Ghost and to the rise, after World War I, of interest in matters political. He also gives examples of polarizations that arose during the “culture wars” of the 1980s, as well as selective illustrations from New Historicist and feminist approaches. In general, the selections and summaries are sensible and informative, if not comprehensive. While two galleries of pictures of “The Man in Black” may not make up for the book’s lack of attention to performance history, they provide images of prominent actors in the title role. Two rarely reproduced images of the Danish Amblett introduce the first gallery, each holding a small globe. Images of actors from John Philip Kemble to Mel Gibson follow, each in character and with the skull of Yorick in hand. In chapter 3, Hunt calls attention to the shift from the globe to the skull as “a redirection of attention inward toward self-referentiality . . . and a preoccupation with mortality” (84). The second gallery provides ten more illustrations, although not all of the actors are in character. Taken together, these images complement rather than punctuate the narrative’s historical survey. The captions, however, attempt to highlight continuities and variations among the actors’ interpretations, which is in keeping with the author’s interest in reception. Bibliographic essays for each of the chapters annotate and sometimes offer counterperspectives to the ones adopted in his narrative. However, specific documentation within the chapters would have been helpful. Nonspecialist readers will find this book fascinating and perhaps compelling. Seasoned Hamlet scholars, however, may be less excited. While there is little that is new in Hunt’s summaries and representations of contested readings, the overall impression is that Hamlet (and Hamlet) remains worth rescuing from disappearance in what the author describes as our “postliterate age” (208). There is a discernible note of sadness at the end of the book. Referring to Hamlet as “the Western world’s collective dead son” (204), Hunt reminds readers that if Hamlet is forgotten, the stakes may be higher than we realize.

Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (review)

“Comedies and Histories” in the fall and “Tragedies and Romances” in the spring). The divided Norton will thus reify a cultural bias that caused its creation and it will thwart some revisionist goals of its editors. And students interpret Shakespeare differently when his works are organized by strict chronology than by genre. Analogously, Dugas could be more precise, given his focus on marketing, about who was buying late seventeenth-century editions and how these customers understood Shakespeare differently when, for example, reading his works in expensive rather than cheap editions. Dugas productively shows, however, the indifferent connections between publishers and theaters following the Restoration. He deftly demonstrates that commercial and legal forces often affected canon formation more than taste or criticism and that publishers sought to control all these elements with their marketing.

Hamlet: New Critical Essays (review)

cycles. And Naomi C. Liebler and Lisa Scancella Shea’s “Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret: Unruly or Unruled?” follows this powerful character through her appearances in each of the plays of the first tetralogy, associating her with the Jungian archetypes of Virgin, Wife, Mother, and Crone, and arguing that Margaret “demonstrates a specifically feminine capacity for effective leadership and formidable political force by performing the full range of incarnations available to a woman” (95). The volume concludes with a section devoted to the stage history of the plays. H. R. Coursen’s review of recent productions offers not only detailed accounts of these stagings but also insightful commentary on the challenges and the possibilities inherent in the scripts. The section continues with Patricia Lennox’s description of televised versions of the plays, followed by an interview in which actor Steven Skybell reflects vaguely on his experiences in the role of York, and concludes with Irene G. Dash’s discussion of eighteenthand nineteenth-century illustrations. While the quality of the essays is somewhat uneven, the collection is a valuable starting point for study of the first tetralogy and an excellent addition to undergraduate and graduate libraries. Pendleton’s introduction, despite its critical proclivities, should prove useful to teachers in locating the play within its interpretive tradition and elucidating pertinent textual issues. Although Pendleton assumes that these plays will retain their status as “minor Shakespeare . . . even in spite of the work presented in this volume” (2), the best essays amply demonstrate that these provocative plays still elicit critical responses keyed to Shakespeare studies’ most pressing theoretical and textual concerns. While history’s lessons may no longer, or only rarely, be read as moral or providential, the first tetralogy is rich in narratives, characters, and imagery in which critics, readers, and actors with a multitude of perspectives continue to find resonances both in Shakespeare’s culture and in our own.