A strange and hostile energy surrounds René Descartes in the scholarship of early modern English literature. Despite his status as one of the most important philosophers of mind of that period, he often appears in its literary and cultural scholarship as a sort of villain, a purveyor of naïve spiritualism or disembodied subjectivity. Much of the current study on the relevance of mind to this literature instead focuses on skepticism, and this with good reason. Skepticism was on the rise in all aspects of English culture. With the re-discovery of works by Sextus Empiricus in the late fifteenth century, skepticism experienced a resurgence that extended to religion, politics, and even commercial theater. William M. Hamlin, for instance, describes the “complex calculus of self-awareness and ignorance” in early modern English tragedy as “a perfect vehicle” for debates on the ancient skeptical ideas. Hamlin makes frequent reference to the work of Richard Popkin, and indeed, when reading early modern drama by way of Popkin’s sense of the “intellectual crisis” of the Reformation, skepticism jumps off the page and stage. Perhaps most striking in Hamlin’s study are what he calls “the obsessive fault-lines between being and seeming… [or] the almost ubiquitous anxiety regarding gaps between external representation and internal truth.” Whether it be kings scanning court familiars for flattery or grave-diggers questioning why a suicidal noblewoman should be given Christian burial, characters of the early modern English stage show deep concern about the distinction between what is and what seems to be, and the mind both as an object of suspicion and an apparatus for finding one’s way out of the labyrinth of doubt. Meanwhile, in his fascinating reading of seven Shakespearean plays, Stanley Cavell also investigates early modern skepticism, though rather more focused on the radicalized doubt of Descartes as a critical lens than either academic or Pyrrhonist skeptics, coming out as one of the few major scholars of early modern literature to take Descartes seriously. And yet even Cavell’s work somewhat reflects the anti-Cartesian bias, where his Shakespearean reading does not thoroughly consider rationalism or the extent that early modern subjectivity prefigures Cartesian mind. Cavell reads Descartes mainly as a skeptic, rarely zooming out to his most important claims, and this selective reading represents, not only Cavell’s deep investment in skeptical thought but a larger trend in early modern literary studies. One could easily see Descartes drawing upon Popkin-esque subjective criteria to establish mind as a source for axiomatic knowledge; reflexive self-knowing figures prominently in Cartesian thought, as well as in scholarship on early modern subjectivity. And yet the threads between Descartes, subjectivity, and drama in the early modern period remain an underdeveloped area of study.
This monograph draws such connections and considers Descartes and his philosophical forebears as vital to early modern thought and culture. But such a claim requires an immediate point of clarity. To suggest the importance of Descartes to Shakespeare is not to place the former as a contemporary of the latter in a historical moment before his great works were written, so much as to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in context with the history of philosophy from which Descartes draws, and to take note of certain similarities between their interactions with such histories. While Descartes produces his greatest works in an era of radical philosophical transition, with his work playing no small part in that shift, he clearly owes a great debt to his late-medieval predecessors; this study argues that early modern dramatists owe similar debts, make similar philosophical moves, and cull from many of the same sources. But this is another claim that immediately courts controversy; many scholars have been explicit in their denial of any such overlap between the thought of Shakespeare and Descartes. Paul S. McDonald, for instance, argues that while Shakespeare makes frequent reference to the mind as an “inner person,” those moments should be understood in terms of their “proposed behavioral and functional framework,” noting that “it is surely one of Shakespeare’s most distinctive descriptive principles that the nobility or baseness of an individual’s true nature shines through by way of its outward forms.” To support his argument, MacDonald cites Paul Cefalu’s contention that early modern drama does not anticipate Descartes, and that while Descartes argued for mind-body dualism, Shakespeare’s characters seem to hold with a functionalist account of mind. This monograph challenges this point of view, pointing in particular to many instances of disjointed social function in early modern drama, where tracing easy connections between inward mind and outward behavior becomes problematic such that Cartesian rationalism works as a better interpretive framework than modern behaviorism or functionalism. As Han Thomas Andriaenssen writes, Cartesian ideas were present within medieval critiques of species theory, such as that of Peter Auriol and William of Ockham, the latter of whose philosophy, as chapter one argues, plays an important role in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus. Likewise, the terminological affinity between Descartes and Spanish scholastic philosopher Francisco Suarez provides background to discussion of mind in Meditations on First Philosophy, and, as well, within my reading, to conceptualist ideas in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Henriad plays. To provide such philosophical genealogies is only to take Cavell seriously in his contention that “Shakespeare could not be who he is…unless his writing is engaging the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture,” and to suppose that such preoccupations would have intellectual histories of their own. In short, this study argues that Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly were influenced by the philosophers who prefigured Descartes, and, at least in Shakespeare’s and Kyd’s case, come to some of the same conclusions that Descartes himself did.
As mentioned above, early modern scholars have directed a program of targeted critique toward Descartes, creating one of the stock villains of our long critical moment. There have been many sound rebuttals of Cartesian thought, whether it is Francis Bacon writing on the inefficacy of logic to parse the material world or Michel Foucault’s anti-foundationalism, or the simple observation that the clarity and distinctiveness of an idea do not necessarily provide a reliable criterion for the truth of that idea, as Descartes claims. But early modern literary studies has shown a strange contempt for Descartes, often based in outdated readings and plain misunderstanding of his thought. This has come to pass likely because many in the field interpret Descartes as the champion of a uniquely contested concept, disembodied subjectivity. Hugh Grady characterizes such theorizations of subjectivity as:
“a sense of selfhood…which is experienced as a self by its subjects, but which is illusory in the sense that (Belsey asserts) subjectivity is an effect of language…not self-creating and autonomous as it seems to be to its subjects… This automaton-like status…is the lugubrious condition which Belsey’s Althusserian/Foucauldian idea of a self constituted solely by and in language/ideology/discourse tends to.”
Grady’s description of illusory subjectivity is typical of the anti-Cartesian bias, often expressed in terms of a strong Foucauldian influence, where “strategies of domination” inhere every institution and ideal, and where scholars “sardonically identif[y] the objectified construct of the technology of power with the humanist subject.” Grady cites Catherine Belsey, who explicitly ties her arguments against subjectivity to the pernicious influence of Descartes; she contends that Descartes “believed that, whereas he was a mind, he had a body. The two were radically distinct from one another. The organism had its own mechanical processes and reflexes, but reason was wholly independent of physiology.” But this characterization diverges significantly from the Descartes of the Meditations and the Discourse on the Method. Francis Barker makes similar critiques and likewise cites “Descartes’ elaboration – at the founding moment of the philosophical discourse of modernity – of the disembodied cogito” as ground zero of the “troubled existence…of a febrile ‘consciousness.’” Barker elaborates, writing that “the exclusive prioritization of consciousness is, of course, a kind of madness,” and that “Descartes’s disbelief in the existence of his own body is ludicrous.”
Other critics of subjectivity whose work features similar readings of Descartes include Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass; they compare the methods of painters Anthony van Dyck and Hans Holbein, showing that the former deemphasized objects in his portraits and focused instead on his sitters’ facial expressions, thereby “help[ing] to establish a more Cartesian subject of portraiture,” whereas Holbein “was criticized…[for] pay[ing] as much attention to objects as subjects.” Stallybrass and Jones thus set up a clear contrast between the Cartesian van Dyck and the “hybridist” Holbein. Paul Budra, meanwhile, takes Descartes to task for his over-theorization of cognitive wonder and the ahistoricity of certain Shakespearean scholarship in applying Cartesian theory to early modern theater. According to Budra, we unduly attribute a cognitive critical response to early modern tragedy when early modern audiences were much more concerned with the emotional responses of the body. Budra writes, quoting Descartes, “unlike the other emotions, [cognitive wonder] does not alter the constitution of the body: ‘it has no relation to the heart and blood … but only to the brain, where the organs of the senses are that contribute to knowledge.’”
Budra does not explicitly claim that Cartesian mind entails a disembodied response as Belsey and Barker do but rather that it entails a response of “brain” as the “organ of senses,” as opposed to the body. This seems to suggest that the brain should not be considered a part of the material body and therefore should not be considered to contribute to bodily response. But how should the body register the novelties of theater except by way of the brain? These readings contrast with the work of scholars such as Joel Feinman and Gail Kern Paster, who are equally critical of transcendent subjectivity but who nevertheless do not explicitly signal a reductive antagonism between bodies and minds, though, on Paster’s part, the anti-Cartesian bias is still quite evident. Paster, citing Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in General, notes the early modern “moment in the history of bodies, mind, and souls when bodily fluids could still carry the full weight of a character’s destiny, a moment when dense causal networks linked body, mind, culture, and the physical world.” Feinman, meanwhile, in his discussion of the epideictic rhetoric of Shakespearean sonnets, speaks of the “effective correspondence or reciprocity between objective reference and subjective self-reference, a correspondence that, at least ideally, erases the difference between objective and subjective discursive indication.” Feinman argues that the sonnets’ epideictic mode reflexively locates, and thus to a degree erases, the subject-object distinction, such that the discursive space between the speaker and the receiver of praise dissolves; this formulation of the subject-object relation in moments of reflexive self-awareness also significantly evokes Cartesian reflexivity of mind. Gabriel Egan, meanwhile, argues much more in line with Belsey and Barker, that “Rene Descartes was wrong, and Shakespeare could have told him so.” Egan writes that “Descartes’s hard distinction between the inanimate and the merely living machine-matter on one hand, and the mind made of an immaterial essence on the other, no longer convinces anyone.” Julián Jiménez Heffernan, cites Egan in a work of blistering (and sarcastic) polemic against phenomenological interpretation of Shakespeare, offering a powerful defense of the interpretive possibilities of Cartesian philosophy in the process. In addition to his discussion of Egan, Heffernan notes the “anti-Cartesian bias” evident in the work of Jonathan Dollimore, Karen Raber, and others, where Descartes provides a “retaliatory dream,” an imagined philosophical text and a convenient philosophical rival. Heffernan’s analysis agrees with that of Darren Gobert, who also cites the philosopher’s treatise on the passions, as well as a litany of recent philosophical interpretations of Descartes, all of whom recognize “a failure to see mind and body as united work[ing] in tandem with a reductive view of the Cartesian passions.” One philosopher, Deborah J. Brown, has gone so far as to deny that Descartes was a dualist at all, instead styling him a “phenomenological monist.”
And so Descartes’ reputation among many literary theorists as the purveyor of the irreconcilable separation of mind and body seems unrepresentative of his larger thought, which describes mind as more in line with the modern theory of embodied and distributed cognition, or what Miranda Anderson describes as “[c]ognitive approaches…suggest[ing] that discourses are constituted by, as well as constitutive of, the experience of the lived body.” This monograph supposes that, given the common misreading of his works, Descartes has become ripe for reassessment as an important theorizer of early modern subjectivity, and therefore, as a critical lens through which to view early modern drama and its many discussions of inward self and the ways mind relates to the material world. The concept of early modern subjectivity itself, likewise, and for the same reason, merits another look. As Grady has suggested, a “differentiated” theory of subjectivity would seem warranted, and Descartes provides a good point of departure.
From Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds: Finding Descartes on the Early Modern Stage. Used with permission of Edinburgh University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Nathan Pensky.
