Fear,Anger,Love And Hate

In the light of the modern study of “History of Emotions”,the antagonism between emotion and reason is gradually deconstructed.The cognitive trend in the field contends that emotion is not an irrational activity that happens in people's mind as was traditionally assumed;it is instead embedded in thought material,and has certain aims and goals.Historically,it has had important impact on the human society.For these reasons,emotion has recently become a popular topic of study in the humanities.How to understand the emotional expressions recorded in historiography that were previously neglected? And how to grasp the change of emotions through history? These are the two major research questions in this field.Emotion is closely related to witchcraft which has tremendously afflicted the English people in the early modern period.Numerous emotional descriptions can be found in demonologist treatises,trial records and pamphlets relating real-life witchcraft cases.The period has seen no unanimously-agreed definition of a witch;but commonly speaking,witches were those who had signed a contract with the devil to trade themselves for the latter's supernatural power,in order to cause the mischiefs they desired.The witch was the agent of humanity's archenemy,the devil.The appearance of a witch was the harbinger of some evil power with imminent danger,and therefore the sight of the witch might easily evince fear.Those who became witches were usually poor,old widows who were bullied and marginalized by their neighbors.Thus,they were prone to anger and revengefulness.Besides,popular beliefs in witchcraft in the period had it that the witch can procure love and hate.This explained why suitors in distress often asked the witch for counsel in their pursuit of love.Conversely,the witch could drive a wedge between people and provoke the feeling of hate for mischievous purposes.Fear,anger,love and hate—these are four emotions most intimately associated with witches and witchcraft.To the rational scholars in a Post-Enlightenment era,witchcraft was a groundless belief that only existed in its believers' imaginations.Their interpretations of the phenomena,therefore,are often made from political,economic or medical aspects.Witchcraft may have been a subcategory of superstition,yet the emotions that they had conjured were authentic.The power of emotion charged from witchcraft into the society was noticed by playwrights in this period.After all,theatre is in essence a site for emotional conflicts and exchanges facilitated by performances of tragic and comic stories;thus the emotional power of witchcraft was apt for appropriation by the playwrights.Based on the theoretical assumptions made in the scholarly field of“History of Emotions”,and applying the New Historicist methodology of text-reading,this dissertation reads and analyzes nine early modern English witchcraft plays,focusing on how the emotional dimension has benefited the playwrights' dramaturgy,and how early modern people's perceptions of fear,anger,love and hate may have been reflected in the plays.The first chapter analyzes how the witches arouse of fear in those around them in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and Macbeth.The three plays demonstrate that fear of witches is rooted in the failure to know.According to performance records,in several enactments of Doctor Faustus in the sixteenth century,the audience as well as actors on stage were properly frightened when the doctor recited the conjuration of Mephistopheles onstage.The devil that signs the pact with Doctor Faustus the witch stands for the ultimate other in the human world,and is an embodiment of the unfathomable abyss of darkness.The overarching devil therefore frightens the characters and the audience in the theatre.Fear in The Comedy of Errors,then,originates in the impossibility of knowing the self caused by the enchantment of the witch.The characters,unaware of the existence of the twins,are much afeared because they could find no explanation for the Antipholus and Dromios twins' loss of self-recognition.The omniscient audience,on the other hand,know from the beginning that what is performed in front of them is simply “a comedy of errors”;hence,the witch-craze turns to a laughing matter.The witches in Macbeth have prophetic abilities,and tell Macbeth his fortune twice in the play.Yet the ambiguous prophecies trap Macbeth in the limbo of knowing and unknowing,and lead him astray to the final fate of demise.The second chapter studies how Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 1,The Tempest and the collaborative play The Witch of Edmonton put on the stage the nation,the monarchy and the village community's containment of the witches' anger.In Henry VI Part 1,on the one hand,Shakespeare emphasizes anger and civil dissentions as the main reason behind the country's military defeat by France;on the other hand,Joan le Pucelle,transgressor of the social conduct of the patriarchy,is depicted as an angry and hateful witch who longs for England's fall.As a result,Joan becomes the angry English lords' scapegoat that must be punished,sacrificed and burnt to ash.The Tempest features the emotional regime built by the emotionless magician Prospero against Caliban,who finds in an accident the emotional refuge in the devil's spiritual embodiment—alcohol.He then launches a rebellion,only to be suppressed later by Prospero.The Witch of Edmonton takes its audience to the village community,where the angry Elizabeth Sawyer asks for the devil's help in her revenge on the bullying neighbors.Her angry emotion proves evil and malicious in the end,and is also contained by her emotional community.The third chapter examines the representation of the witch's ability to control love and hate in Shakespeare's Othello,Thomas Middleton's The Witch and the collaborative work of Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome,The Late Lancashire Witches.The three plays together complete the argumentation that the “charm of love” is nothing but superstition,and that the witch procures not love,but hate.In Othello,the handkerchief made by the Egyptian witch resembles the popular charm of witchcraft—the “love-cup”which is thought to be a charm of love,yet in essence is a sort of poison.Used in the hand of the potential witch Iago,the handkerchief becomes the catalyst of Othello's hatred and consequent murder of Desdemona.Hecate in The Witch offers two suitors ineffective charms of love,hence the play proves that love is not in the purview of control of the witches,who are only capable of manipulating erotic desires.Witchcraft in The Late Lancashire Witches works on provoking hate between people.The four witches turn the domestics order upside down,disturb the ceremony of wedding,and one of them has adulterous relationship with the devil.Consequentially,the son develops a hateful emotion against his father,the married couple are alienated,and the emotional bonds of the community are gravely sabotaged.The nine plays take advantage of the emotional power contained in witchcraft events for the purpose of creating certain theatrical effects.At the same time,as dramatic texts,they are part of the field of discourse around witchcraft and emotion in the early modern period,and also part of the interwoven web of culture.They prove apt for the study of the “History of Emotions”,in the sense that together they reveal how witchcraft has given rise to the emotions of fear,anger,love and hate,and how these particular emotions were perceived in this period.Apart from dramatizing the abovementioned emotions,the witchcraft plays represent also the crisis of community in the early modern era.Due to the unrest caused by the Religious Reformation,the rise of individualism and the menacing challenges of rebellions and assassinations planned against the monarchs in the sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century England,the idea of community was in the danger of dissolution.In this social milieu,the witches stand for the intruding others that avail themselves of the opportunity to break into the community.As a result,emotions expressed in the witchcraft plays of this period are in close association with the community: fear is the emotional response of the community facing its unknown other;the witch's anger is a negative emotion that must be contained and oppressed by the community;and the witch's control of love and hate undermines the emotional bonds that join the community members together.The nine plays discussed in this dissertation are embedded in the context of the crisis of community,and they in turn reflect the anxiety of their age.