"A Weight of Carrion Flesh": Measuring Disgust, Shakespearean Mimesis

ABSTRACT

The present article argues that a Shakespearean poetics of disgust unveils a deeper concern in his work with the moral and social limits of the emotions. The essay first looks into a well-known treatise on physiology and psychology, Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601, 1604), in relation to Renaissance theories of poetry and Shakespeare’s figurations of disgust in Hamlet (1601), King Lear (1604), The Winter’s Tale(1611) and Timon of Athens (1607). Its aim is to explore the capacity of metaphors and tropes, in both medical and poetic discourse, to test affective intensity, as measuring the passions was considered a necessary condition for moral and social well-being. In Shakespeare’s plays the moral dimension of disgust is often put to question by the aesthetic element inherent in poetic mimesis, which tends to depict the disgusting as a source of pleasure. The essay’s second part turns to The Merchant of Venice (1596) to assess, through the trajectories of disgust that sustain the rivalry be-ween the merchant Antonio and the moneylender Shylock, a second notion of mimesis the envious emulation of others’ ways of feeling that cultural theorists like René Girard (1991) have signposted as the core of Shakespeare's modernity. In broad-er terms, this study points to the centrality of the these two notions of mimesis for an understanding of the early modern phenomenology of the emotions

RESUMEN

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