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Formes abrégées, mondes en petit

Shakespeare’s Human at Scale

James A. Knapp

Résumés

Cet article explore la façon dont Shakespeare imagine l'humain en termes scalaires. De la réduction par Hamlet de l’« homme » divin à une « quintessence de poussière » à la demande de Lear que la tempête « frappe à plat l’épaisse rotondité du monde » et que « tous les germes se répandent à la fois / Ce qui rend l'homme ingrat », certains des passages les plus célèbres de Shakespeare emploient la rhétorique de l'échelle pour souligner la place de l’humain dans l’ordre cosmique. Je soutiens que les récentes articulations théoriques de l’échelle aident à éclairer la façon dont l’utilisation de l’échelle par Shakespeare clarifie la façon dont l’humain était considéré par rapport à la nature créée et au cosmos divin au sens large. Je me concentre sur ce que le théoricien de l’échelle Joshua DiCaglio appelle la « dislocation située » qui résulte de la prise de conscience par un sujet de son existence à des échelles discontinues. Je soutiens que Shakespeare met régulièrement en scène des « dislocations situées » qui révèlent la ténuité de l’humain en tant que catégorie dans une cosmologie changeante et qui ouvrent des possibilités d'action humaine éthique.

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  • 1 All quotations from Shakespeare will be to The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, ed. Stephen Greenbl (...)

1Meeting some fishermen on the shore of Pentapolis, the shipwrecked Pericles introduces himself as: “A man, whom both the waters and the wind / In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball / For them to play upon” (Pericles 2.1.58-60).1 The hero’s plea just before this encounter is to the sea and its god:

Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain, and thunder, remember, earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you,
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you. (2.1.1-4)

  • 2 The fly killing scene only appears in the Folio (act 3 scene 2), omitted by the Norton. For Edgar’s (...)
  • 3 Joshua DiCaglio, Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Pres (...)

2My argument here is that in moments like this we can see how Shakespeare routinely imagines the human in scalar terms that complicate the prioritization of “man” as the most potent of God’s creations. We see this also when Hamlet reduces Godlike “man” to a “quintessence of dust” (2.2.269); when Titus compares the pain of filial loss to the sight of Marcus casually killing a fly; or when Edgar describes the vertiginous height from which Gloucester will imagine his fall.2 In such cases, scale terms mark the place of the human in Shakespeare’s world. I argue here that recent theoretical articulations of scale can help illuminate the way Shakespeare’s use of scale works to locate the human within a broader cosmological frame. In particular, I will focus on how Shakespeare stages what scale theorist Joshua DiCaglio calls the “situated dislocation” that results when subjects become aware of their simultaneous existence at different scales.3 I take as my primary examples moments in four plays in which Shakespeare depicts moments when characters reflect on their humanity as they are faced with the scale of a natural world that exceeds the limits of their own perceptual experience. In As You Like It, King Lear, Cymbeline, and Pericles, when a character’s perspective moves outside of the court they encounter the human in scalar terms that call into question the primacy of the human in the cosmic order.

I. The Scala Naturae and the place of the Human

  • 4 On a critique of humanism that associates the field of ecology with anthropomorphism, see Zach Hort (...)

3Taking aim at the destructive forces of anthropocentrism in the West, post-humanist critics routinely target humanist thought that developed in the Enlightenment, though their critique often traces the roots of humanism to the European Renaissance.4 It is true that the Renaissance humanism associated with figures like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola centered inquiry on human capacity and capability in a gesture that would anticipate later developments in Enlightenment thought. But to reduce the humanist movement to its placement of the human animal above all other natural life forms is to oversimplify its project. To better understand the conception of the human in Renaissance humanism, one must engage with the period’s engagement with scale.

  • 5 Pico Della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino are often identified with Neoplatonism, while others, like (...)
  • 6 Joseph Campana, “Scale” in Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, vol. 2 Concepts, ed. Campana (...)

4The role of scale in Renaissance humanist thought is complex, as renewed interest in classical thought merged with the medieval philosophical tradition, challenging some ideas while synthesizing others. While Neoplatonism was pervasive in the work of some humanists, the importance of Aristotelian cosmology continued into the seventeenth century, even as Neoplatonic, Stoic, and Epicurean thought gained ground in Shakespeare’s England.5 Citing the immense influence of Aristotle’s scala naturae in the Renaissance, Joseph Campana points to a popular characterization of the scala, or Great Chain of Being, in which “scale implies vertical ascent from lifelessness to life, from plant to animal, and, by implication, from animal to human, with creatures divine hovering over humanity.”6 Yet, the inheritance of the medieval scala was complicated in ways that would produce a good deal of debate in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Kellie Robertson has detailed how, in the late Middle Ages, the scala was conceived of in two quite different forms: one based on Neoplatonic transcendence and another Aristotelian version that emphasized immanence. The transcendent version stressed the distance between God and the created world:

  • 7 Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy, Philadelphia: Uni (...)

[the] Neoplatonic ladder is familiar from the later writings of negative mystics such as Walter Hilton in The Scale of Perfection for whom climbing the spiritual ladder means leaving the sensory world far behind […] the well-defined rungs of the scala naturae support a stable moral order, a static hierarchy that allows for a transparent valuation of ontological categories in terms of their relative distance from God.7

5This version stresses the importance of climbing up to reach the divine and escape the created world that is corrupted by sin. In the immanent version, associated with Aristotelian metaphysics, the ladder goes both up and down:

  • 8 Idem, p. 58.

This Neoplatonic ladder was refashioned by medieval commentators on Aristotle, whose scientific writings reimagined the varying steps (or degrees) of the ladder as the result of dynamic causal relations that structure the physical world. While both the Aristotelian and Platonic versions of the chain are held together by love, the Aristotelian version reverses the polarity: it is not the Creator’s love raining down on his creatures that reins in and stabilizes the disordered strife of the cosmic elements, but rather the creaturely love directed upward to the Creator that was ultimately responsible for linking the motion of the Unmoved Mover to the rest of the universe.8

6The conceptualization of scale as a ladder that one might employ to climb up or down on this hierarchical array of life forms was only amplified in the early modern period by technological advances that included the telescope and microscope, providing access to previously imperceptible natural phenomena, and thus confirming the idea of the cosmos as a complex and interrelated natural ecosystem.

  • 9 The Anthropocene is a debated concept, as evidenced by the recent vote to reject including it as an (...)
  • 10 See for example, Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, ed. and Introduction, Renaissance Posthumanism, (...)
  • 11 Campana, op. cit., p. 35. See also his claim (with Maisano) that “contrary to critical and historic (...)

7This conception of nature as ordered by gradations on a scale with humans at the top – a conception supported by the scriptural account in Genesis – has served as evidence of the period’s affirmation that the entire created world was viewed as a resource for humans to mine. Recent efforts by some ecologically oriented critics to include Shakespeare’s period in the story of humanity’s history of environmental destruction makes some sense in this context. Just as the Renaissance witnessed the birth of Western colonial expansion, in such accounts it also marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, due in part to the prioritizing of the human as the highest form of life.9 But as Campana, Scott Maisano, and Karen Raber among others have argued, the period’s distinction between human and animal was not as clearly fixed or hierarchical as such an account suggests.10 Exploring early modern attitudes toward insects, for example, Campana argues that “the ‘lesser’ of lesser living creatures constituted exquisite compactness rather than insubstantial smallness.”11 This interest in a natural world extending both down as well as up the scale of creation was a good fit with the immanent version of the scala articulated by Aristotle’s medieval commentators. As Robertson points out:

  • 12 Robertson, op. cit., p. 58. She cites Aristotle’s account in “the Historia animalium,” where “he ob (...)

While the hierarchical scale of sentience remains (with those things demonstrating more ‘order’ occupying higher positions on the scale), Aristotle’s revision blurs the dividing lines between each rung of the ladder […]. Categories of being are still ranked; however, it is now imagined as a dynamic network bound together with causal connections. The Aristotelian categories display a marked ontological elasticity, as the distance separating each rung on the ladder narrows.12

8The result, she points out, is that:

  • 13 Idem, p. 59.

This version also highlights the comparative charisma of categories other than the human. A Neoplatonic emphasis on the transcendence of being – where the lower life forms were described in terms of privation (i.e., animals lack reason; plants, motion and reason; stones, motion, reason, and being) – is replaced by an insistence on immanent physical qualities observable to the senses (such as a capacity for motion or a complex structure).13

  • 14 Ibid.
  • 15 Ibid.
  • 16 It is important to note that the optical lenses that made the telescope and microscope possible in (...)

9Robertson demonstrates that even at the moment when the scala naturae was conceived and revised, the human was a category among categories, rather than one simply elevated above all else: “While the immanent ladder retains hierarchies of being, it need not necessarily imply the same kind of human exceptionalism that the transcendent version implies.”14 Aristotle begins with the human “not because the human is privileged, but because the human is what we know best.”15 Once we arrive in the early modern period, looking down the scale, the microscope revealed tiny bodies every bit as complex and wondrous as the human body. Looking up, the telescope made networks of stars and planets visible through its prosthetic, giving the vast scale of the cosmos new meaning as the container of all.16 In such cases, the concept of scale functions according to measurement and comparison. Objects at one scale correspond – once a comparative measure has been applied – to objects at another. As the perceptible universe expanded both up and down the ladder, it is not surprising that the classical analogy of microcosm to macrocosm flourished anew, even as observational approaches to natural science began to take hold.

II. Shakespeare’s Human in Scalar Perspective

  • 17 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 46.
  • 18 Idem, p. 48-49.
  • 19 Idem, p. 35.

10What the comparative understanding of scale obscures, however, is the way that technologies of scale – including rhetorical modes of scalar description – complicate scalar comparisons for human subjects. While an entity viewed under the microscope (Robert Hooke’s famous flea, for example) can be understood to correspond in its complex design to the complexity of the human body, the perception of the magnified flea cannot be had simultaneously with the perception of the world at human scale. At “human scale,” the flea remains a speck, a perceptible object, but not a complex body. As the theorist DiCaglio argues, “delineations of scale domains or resolutions are significant thresholds at which the field of relations becomes aggregated and new levels or relations are discerned.”17 He goes on to explain that “a scale domain is distinguished at the point where the objects on the previous scale are no longer discernible, that is, no longer able to be held within the scope of one’s examination without creating a scalar designation.”18 The result of creating scalar designations is to view the world in a “scalar perspective”: “If scale is the relation between one ‘over there’ and another ‘over here’ – or the equivalent in the more projected forms of observation – then where is the perspective that is scale? Properly speaking, a scalar perspective is in both places at once: it is a situated dislocation.”19

11Shakespeare gives us a powerful example of this idea in Act I, scene 3 of Cymbeline. Pressuring Pisanio for information about the last view he had of the banished Posthumus, Innogen first wishes Pisanio had followed the sight of Posthumus until he “made him / as little as a crow, or less” (1.3.14-15). When he replies that he had done so, she offers a remarkable scalar hypothetical:

I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them, but
To look upon him till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay, followed him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air, and then
Have turned mine eye and wept. (1.3.17-22)

  • 20 On the idea of a new complex world of tiny creatures, see Campano, “Scale,” and Sophie Chiari, “The (...)

12Only when the figure of Posthumus dissolves perceptually into another scalar domain, would Innogen have turned her eye from the prospect of his departure. The “diminution / Of space” is initially a result of Innogen’s imagined position in relation to Posthumus, as his size decreases proportionally to his proximity to her, as the observer. The striking moment in the passage comes when the relation in question literally changes the nature of the object itself: from “gnat” to “air.” Innogen too is changed (e.g. allowed to weep) but only when the experience she has had of the perceptual field is transformed.20 My suggestion is that, in passages like this, Shakespeare stages a “situated dislocation” that reveals the tenuousness of the human as a category in a shifting early modern cosmology. Rather than prioritizing her beloved in this passage, Innogen imagines his communion with the whole of nature associated with objects of perception down a measured scale – human bodies, crows, gnats, air – having the potential to have “melted” before her eyes.

  • 21 Awareness of a scale beyond the one available through the perceptual body recalls Benedict Anderson (...)
  • 22 In the proem to Book Two of The Faerie Queene (1590), Spenser evokes the discovery of the Americas (...)

13In particular, Innogen’s characterization of Posthumus’ dissolution from a tiny, but discernable “gnat” to the imperceptible “air” is an example of crossing a scale domain. At this moment in the play Innogen does not imagine that Posthumus is dead or nonexistent, only that he is so far away that he exists at a remove that can only be understood by “creating a scalar designation.” And it is according to this mechanism that we can know that Posthumus is “in Italy,” without being able to see Italy or even fully comprehend what it would mean to go there.21 More than just a case of abstraction, the episode emphasizes what it means to be moved by a scalar dislocation – to feel it in a way that changes the one perceiving the change. After all, what is at issue in this scene is Innogen’s emotional onboarding of the idea that Posthumus is simultaneously absent on one scale (that of human perception) and present on another – he is in the same world that contains her. In such cases the primacy of the human animal as the arbiter of knowledge is dislocated by the observer’s relation to something – here geographic space – that exceeds their perceptual ability.22 Innogen’s understanding of Posthumus’s absent presence is only available as a function of scale.

  • 23 In this same scene, Celia claims that “It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the proposition (...)

14Another example can be found in As You Like It, in the pivotal moment when Rosalind learns of Orlando’s presence in the forest of Arden. Orlando’s desire to transform the “unpeopled” “desert” of the forest with his love poems prompts him to “teach” “all that read to know / The quintessence of every sprite / Heaven would in little show” (3.2.140-42). The characterization of Rosalind as microcosm acts as a counterpoint to the foreboding vastness of the forest’s “desert” waste. The analogy is carried through the rest of Orlando’s verse, as the expansive divine cosmos is reduced by “Nature” to Rosalind’s human scale: “Therefore heaven Nature charged / That one body should be filled / With all graces wide-enlarged” (3.2.126-28). Echoing the idea that Rosalind contains “the quintessence of every sprite,” Orlando identifies “distillation” as the method by which Nature has achieved its most profound accomplishment. The alchemical associations that “quintessence” and “distillation” evoke suggest a cosmos that is ordered by gradations, from the smallest particles, or “atomies,” to the whole containing heaven and earth.23 Orlando’s clumsy blazon is an attempt to represent Rosalind as a “distillation” of the best parts of every woman both in beauty and character. Nature has “distilled” Atalanta’s “better part,” Cleopatra’s “majesty,” Lucretia’s “modesty,” Helen’s “cheek, but not her heart” (3.2.32,34-36). All particulars contained in one Rosalind; but also, one world that contains all particulars.

  • 24 Jeffrey Kluger, “Senator throws snowball: Climate change disproven!” Time, Feb. 27, 2015.
  • 25 Ted Barnett, “Inhofe brings snowball on Senate floor as evidence the globe is not warming” CNN, Feb (...)

15The movement from the particular to the universal is one of the central challenges to thinking with scale. Recent interest in scale has been driven primarily by the difficulty of correlating the reality of large-scale phenomena, or large data sets, to an individual’s situated understanding. Climate change and vaccine effectiveness are just two of the most pressing and dramatic examples. It is impossible to see climate change without the aid of big data. U.S. Senator James Inhofe’s stunt on the senate floor in 2015 is a case in point. Inhofe brought a snowball to the senate that he had made in Washington D.C. in February to “prove” that climate change was a hoax.24 The senator was ridiculed, but his demonstration is actually an apt example of how hard it is to change the minds of science deniers who tend to stick to what they can see with their own eyes. There is some irony in the fact that Shakespeare’s moment, when new technologies opened inquiry into previously imperceptible scales, is also the moment when observational science begins to overtake classical authorities as the basis for understanding the natural world – a moment that prioritized “seeing” as “believing.” Making phenomena imperceptible at human scale real on the level of personal experience is the great challenge of thinking with scale. Infhofe’s empirical demonstration is ridiculous only to those with an understanding of and faith in modern institutions of science. In the decade since Inhofe’s stunt, and to the dismay of many, the power of institutions and the knowledge gleaned from the application of scientific methods to sway public opinion has continued to wane, even as the urgency for understanding phenomena beyond the individual human scale continues to increase. The development is a warning about the difficulty of accepting as true, knowledge about the world that is only available through a scalar perspective. Inhofe’s detractors immediately pointed to the fact that “studies by NASA and other credible organizations have proven through various scientific methods that the planet is warming,” a rhetorical strategy that only works if there is faith in those institutions and methods.25

  • 26 Prominent members of the Royal Society in the 17th century, including William Harvey, were not conv (...)

16In the early modern period, of course, trust in those institutions and methods was only beginning to be established. It was not at all clear that the large- and small-scale phenomena newly available to human perception would have the power to change established beliefs about the natural world.26 The gradual acceptance of the shift from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican solar system is only the most well-known example of how difficult and dangerous accepting the lessons of scale could be. With the power of classical authorities to explain the natural world on the wane, personal experience was increasingly privileged, adding an affective component to the understanding of natural order. The situated dislocation that scalar experience produces directly disrupts one’s confidence in the stability of perceptual experience, destabilizing the subject as a result. The knowledge produced in this moment of disruption is affective and personal as much as it is the product of intellectual abstraction.

17Shakespeare often highlights the affective character of such experiences. Earlier in As You Like It, for example, the banished Duke has a moment of compassion for the deer he is about to hunt, but only when he imagines their society in human terms:

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored. (2.2.21-25)

18While critics have generally dismissed the Duke’s empathy here, the moment of hesitation is directly linked to the Duke’s ability to imagine a broader society beyond the bounds of his experience at court, an ability that apparently rises from his recognition of his place in a larger and more powerful natural world:

          Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ (2.2.3-11)

  • 27 William N. West, As If: Essays in As You Like It, Santa Barbara, CA., Punctum Books, 2016, p. 54.

19Duke Senior’s recognition of his creaturely humanity – something he shares with the other inhabitants of the forest – is revealed to him “feelingly,” an affective rather than intellectual “persuasion.” Nevertheless, the Duke’s impulse is to conceive of the inhabitants of the wood in terms of human social configurations, ultimately reinforcing hierarchies that he had left behind upon being banished. In the same scene, the account of Jacques’s response to the injured stag comes closer to being a transformative scalar experience. As Will West has put it, “Jacques imagines the experiences of the deer, he does not just describe or analyze.”27 The Duke’s comment about Jacques’s experience is telling: “I think he be transformed into a beast, / For I can nowhere find him like a man” (2.7.1-2). What the comment reveals, as West suggests, is less the Duke’s likely intention – that Jacques has somehow lost his humanity in the attempt to empathize with a beast – and more the idea that the effort to see two different worlds at once is transformative. Jacques levels the human and natural worlds rather than ordering them hierarchically.

20Similarly, it is only when Lear is personally faced with the experience of “houseless poverty” that he can comprehend a world beyond his court:

  • 28 Here and following, I quote from the conflated text of King Lear in The Norton Shakespeare, op. cit(...)

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (3.4.29-37)28

21Like Duke Senior’s response to his new forest home, Lear’s immersion in nature begins with his situated experience of the storm, but then extends to the revelation that the storm encompasses far more than his own feeble body. He is able to see that the less fortunate, “whereso’er” they are, are nonetheless part of the same ecosystem as he is.

22In a play so overtly concerned with the nature of the human, that “poor forked” animal revealed to Lear on the heath, it is not a coincidence that scale looms large. The movement is from experience at human scale to an experience with cosmic scale that disrupts the comfort of Lear’s egoic stasis. From the king’s insistence that his daughters quantify their love in the initial scene to his later refusal to identify an adequate number of followers to represent his substance, Lear repeatedly grapples with the problem of scale. He “gave” his daughters “all,” and thus cannot reasonably conceive of what he should receive in return. The problem is that “all” cannot be reconciled with any individual number. The “all” contains all number; it is the cosmos – in this case Lear’s world, but also the world that contains him. The Fool is the only one who can articulate this for Lear: he has given up all and in doing so become “nothing.” This paradox arises from the perceptual problem indicated by the microcosm-macrocosm analogy that permeated the period’s comparative logic concerning the nature of the human. Before abdicating, Lear was his world, contained its entirety, but he could only see from his limited scalar perspective. Like Duke Senior, counselled by nature to “feelingly” perceive what he is, in the storm Lear can see what he couldn’t see before. Lear becomes doubly situated on the heath; it is a disruptive experience, as he simultaneously sees himself as whole and himself as part of a larger whole. The doubleness is reflected in his frantic oscillation between a myopic vision of the world entirely centered on his experience and a holistic perspective that allows him to make some of his most memorable ethical revelations. Just after claiming that he will “shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just” (3.4.36-37), he cannot see Poor Tom as anything but himself: “nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters” (3.4.66-7). Focused on his own myopic view of the world, Lear is all revenge, but in those moments when he sees the world holistically he becomes focused on a more equal distribution of resources and justice. He eventually abandons his earlier argument that one should “reason not the need” for whatever one wants in favor of an acceptance that such individual courtly excesses actually reduce justice and equity in the world.

23DiCaglio describes how thinking about perceptual experiences in scalar terms allows for personal transformation. He urges the individual to

…turn the same apparatus on oneself, not just in the measuring of perception but in the taking into account the one who can maintain and compare these perceptions across these [scalar] shifts such that one can have, at once, two very different perspectives.

  • 29 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 34-35.
  • 30 Zach Horton, “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene,” (...)

24This can lead to a reckoning with the egoic attitude toward the world by acknowledging the “situated dislocation” that results from the experience with scale. Rather than toggling between scales – casually zooming in or out – true scalar thinking acknowledges the observer’s “dual location” as “the first way that scale dislocates the subject.”29 DiCaglio’s point is that an experience of scale extends the philosophical problem of parts and wholes to the way one experiences self as itself and simultaneously as part of something larger (or smaller) in which the self is implicated. In Zach Horton’s terms, “Thinking the human itself at multiple scales disturbs the delicately balanced affective and ideological attachments that stabilize our identities.”30 DiCaglio foregrounds the “dual location” that “introduces a tension between the production of perspective and identification of the ‘subject’ who has that experience.” Once one becomes aware of this tension (e.g.: I am looking from a perspective that is both my own and part of a larger system), the previous exaltation of the human – specifically the primacy of one’s own humanness – becomes less tenable:

  • 31 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 35.

But if we switch scales, acknowledge the tentativeness of objects, and acknowledge that scale places that perspective in two places at once, then we cannot likewise ascribe experience to a particular, clearly distinguished object definable in and of itself on one of these particular scales. In other words, we need to extend the partial-whole problem to the sense of identification.31

25It is this tension that can result in a productive transformation of the self.

  • 32 This distinction is commonly associated with Spinoza, but he derived it from Medieval formulations (...)

26The agon between man and nature that Shakespeare explores in As You Like It and Pericles is given its greatest expression in Lear. In As You Like It, the Duke’s appreciation of nature in Arden is blunted by his establishment of a shadow court there and his eventual return from exile. Nature may have a restorative power, but the human retains its position of priority, thus questioning whether any transformation has occurred. In Pericles, on the other hand, it is the hero’s acknowledgement of vast nature’s power that allows the divine plan to come to fruition. In the comedy, then, nature is created nature (natura naturata), while in the romance, nature is the divine whole (natura naturans).32 The former is passive, while the latter is active. In King Lear Shakespeare puts the two forms in tension. Lear repeatedly attempts to control nature – despite the play’s notorious absence of the divine – while Edmund’s willingness to accept nature as his “goddess” provides the counter-pressure. Lear’s self-serving demands of nature initially belie his failure to see nature as exceeding his own experience:

Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility! (1.4.241-44)

                         And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world.
Crack Nature’s molds, all germens spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man. (3.2.6-9)

27Despite Lear’s cries, the play makes clear that man’s power over nature is slight. Edmund takes the other path: “Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound” (1.2.1-2). Yet Edmund’s confident rejection of human “custom” and willingness to allow nature to be his guide rather than his handmaiden prove equally disastrous. Both men’s attitudes toward nature fail to grasp its scale.

  • 33 This view is a long way from Lear’s earlier stance on poverty and luxury: “O, reason not the need: (...)

28While neither man’s attempt to use nature for their own ends succeeds, both come to a revelation in the process of their experience with its scalar excess. As Kent implores Lear to go in from the storm, he argues that “man’s nature cannot carry / The affliction nor the fear” of the storm; his characterization reveals the dual scalar perspective DiCaglio describes, when he later inverts the message: “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” (3.2.48-49; 3.4.2-3). In the storm, Lear can be both in nature and of nature – he finds his nature at the moment that he is subsumed by its immensity. The revelation is surprising to him: “Is man no more than this? Consider him well. […] Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.93-98). Ironically it is in the diminution of the human that the human emerges as a site of ethical agency. One of Lear’s most memorable revelations comes from his madness sparked by the dislocation I have described here. Railing only nominally to Gloucester when reunited after the storm, Lear pinpoints an injustice embedded in the status system of the era: “Plate sins with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. / Arm it in rags; a pigmy’s straw does pierce it” (4.6.159-61).33 The play’s juxtaposition of human experience and cosmic scale provides a source for transformation and ethical growth. In the process the human is diminished rather than exalted. Without a scalar perspective, the outlook for humanity is bleak, marked by an egoic blindness captured well in Albany’s rejection of Goneril:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come.
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep. (4.2.32.16-32.20)

29King Lear is not a hopeful play. Despite repeated calls, the heavens never send their spirits. But this is as much a commentary on the lack of power that the human agents have over their world as it is an indictment of an indifferent divinity. “It,” apparently the “promised end” Edgar sees in the play’s conclusion “will come,” indeed has come already as the ordered world of human affairs gradually falls apart over the course of the play. The possibility that the tableau of Cordelia in Lear’s arms is only “the image of that horror,” points to the possibility that humanity can change. The unnamed servant’s willingness to rise up against Cornwall’s injustice, Kent’s unwillingness to leave Lear’s side, and even Edmund’s hope of “doing some good” before he dies all represent an acceptance of a diminished place for the human in the larger cosmic order. If, as in the Folio version of the play, Edgar is given the final lines, the one who inherits the kingdom is a version of the human that is directly opposed to the exalted pinnacle of God’s creations: “is man no more than this?” Lear asks of Poor Tom. In terms of the cosmic scale that the plays I have discussed project, the answer is clearly yes. The human institutions, customs, and accomplishments portrayed by Shakespeare are dwarfed by the scale of the cosmos of which they are a part, and only in acknowledging this situation can ethical action become possible.

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Notes

1 All quotations from Shakespeare will be to The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et alii, New York, Norton, 2016.

2 The fly killing scene only appears in the Folio (act 3 scene 2), omitted by the Norton. For Edgar’s description of the heights he imagines for Gloucester see King Lear, 4.6.12-25.

3 Joshua DiCaglio, Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, p. 35.

4 On a critique of humanism that associates the field of ecology with anthropomorphism, see Zach Horton, “Toward a Speculative Nanoecology: Transscalar Knowledge, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Ecology’s Posthuman Horizon,”

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 2.3, 2015, 58-86. For another attempt to escape the privileging of the human through an attention to scale, see David I. Porter, “Hyperobjects, OOO, and the Eruptive Classics – Field Notes of an Accidental Tourist,” in Antiquities Beyond Humanism, ed. Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes, Oxford, Oxford UP, 2021, p. 189-210.

5 Pico Della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino are often identified with Neoplatonism, while others, like Pietro Pomponazzi were responsible for a reassessment of medieval scholastic Aristotelianism. The English rejection of Aristotelianism led by figures like Francis Bacon has sometimes led to overstatements about the declining influence of Aristotle in the early modern period.

6 Joseph Campana, “Scale” in Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, vol. 2 Concepts, ed. Campana and Keith Botelho, State College, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023, p. 31.

7 Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, p. 57-58.

8 Idem, p. 58.

9 The Anthropocene is a debated concept, as evidenced by the recent vote to reject including it as an official interval of geologic time (Raymond Zhong, “Are We in the ‘Anthropocene,’ the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say,” New York Times, March 5, 2024, updated March 8, 2024). Geological scientists tend to be more conservative in their judgment on the issue, seeing that the rejected proposal would have had the epoch beginning in the 20th century. Those working with the term in the Humanities and Social Sciences tend to consider much earlier start dates. If the primary question is when human behavior began to alter the natural ecosystem, much earlier dates are plausible.

10 See for example, Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano, ed. and Introduction, Renaissance Posthumanism, New York, Fordham University Press, 2016; Laurie Shannon, “Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear”, Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2, 2009, 168-196; Steve Mentz, Break Up the Anthropocene, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2019; and Karen Raber, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory, London, The Arden Shakespeare, 2018.

11 Campana, op. cit., p. 35. See also his claim (with Maisano) that “contrary to critical and historical assertions that this era was characterized by the triumphant assertion of human prerogative, depravity and incapacity were often as commonly associated with the supposed pinnacle of creation” (p. 45).

12 Robertson, op. cit., p. 58. She cites Aristotle’s account in “the Historia animalium,” where “he observes just how difficult it can be to differentiate between two contiguous rungs”: “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie. Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the plant, and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount of apparent vitality; and, in a word, the whole genus of plants, whilst it is devoid of life as compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with other corporeal entities [...] And so throughout the entire animal scale there is a graduated differentiation in amount of vitality and in capacity for motion” (p. 59-60).

13 Idem, p. 59.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 It is important to note that the optical lenses that made the telescope and microscope possible in Europe were developed in fits and starts from the late sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth century, with published accounts of the practical, scientific uses of such instruments appearing in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius appeared in 1610 and Hooke’s Micrographia in 1667. Around 1613, the Dutch inventor, Cornelis Drebbel, wrote to King James I with details of his invention of a telescopic device, claiming: “I can make an instrument by which letters can be read at a distance of an English mile.” The letter is reproduced in L. E. Harris, The Two Netherlanders: Humphrey Bradley and Cornelis Drebbel, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1961, p. 145-148, esp. p. 146.

17 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 46.

18 Idem, p. 48-49.

19 Idem, p. 35.

20 On the idea of a new complex world of tiny creatures, see Campano, “Scale,” and Sophie Chiari, “The Plague of Gnats in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries,” in The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature, New York, Routledge, 2022, p. 107-121.

21 Awareness of a scale beyond the one available through the perceptual body recalls Benedict Anderson’s argument that one effect of print was that it allowed for a sense of simultaneity in the early modern period that would have been unavailable previously. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., New York, Verso, 2016.

22 In the proem to Book Two of The Faerie Queene (1590), Spenser evokes the discovery of the Americas to make the point that there are things beyond the human perceptual scale that nonetheless exist in and are contained by the same world in which the perceiver’s observations fail to reveal them: “Why then should witlesse man so much misweene / That nothing is, but that which he hath seene? / What if within the Moones faire shining spheare? / What if in euery other starre vnseene / Of other worldes he happily should heare? / He wo[n]der would much more: yet such to some appeare” (II.proem.3.4-9).

23 In this same scene, Celia claims that “It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover” (3.2.214-15). Such references have been explored by critics interested in the influence of Lucretian thought in the period. See Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 2014, and Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, and Jessie Hock, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

24 Jeffrey Kluger, “Senator throws snowball: Climate change disproven!” Time, Feb. 27, 2015.

25 Ted Barnett, “Inhofe brings snowball on Senate floor as evidence the globe is not warming” CNN, Feb. 27.

26 Prominent members of the Royal Society in the 17th century, including William Harvey, were not convinced that microscopy yielded any new information about the natural world. See Cristoffer Basse-Eriksen, “Magnifying the First Points of Life: Harvey and Descartes on Generation and Scale,” History of Science 60.4, 2022, 524-545, esp. p. 528. Perhaps even more famously, Margaret Cavendish rejected optical instruments touted by the likes of Robert Hooke. See Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 175-78. She notes that Cavendish’s attack on Hooke constituted an explicit attempt to keep objects on their own scale: “Each species is returned to its proper scale, and she reinstalls the hierarchy of beings and sizes in order to devalorize experimental philosophy: ‘Art is so far from altering Infinite Nature, that it is no more in comparison to it, than a little Flie to an Elephant’.” (the quote within the quote is Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), ed. Eileen O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 13).

27 William N. West, As If: Essays in As You Like It, Santa Barbara, CA., Punctum Books, 2016, p. 54.

28 Here and following, I quote from the conflated text of King Lear in The Norton Shakespeare, op. cit.

29 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 34-35.

30 Zach Horton, “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene,” in Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 35-60, esp. p. 36. Also see (in the same collection) Bruno Lator’s essay “Anti-Zoom” (p. 93-101): “we poor humans […] remain perplexed as to how to find our place among phenomena, which are at once immensely vaster than we are, and yet subject to our affect” (p. 93).

31 DiCaglio, op. cit., p. 35.

32 This distinction is commonly associated with Spinoza, but he derived it from Medieval formulations of nature that distinguished the created world from the divine cosmos.

33 This view is a long way from Lear’s earlier stance on poverty and luxury: “O, reason not the need: our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous: / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady; / If only to go warm were gorgeous, / Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st, / Which scarcely keeps thee warm” (2.4.259-62).

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James A. Knapp, « Shakespeare’s Human at Scale »Revue de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 43 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 février 2026, consulté le 17 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/revueshakespeare/443 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15nna

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James A. Knapp

Loyola University Chicago

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