b. Motivation
The habit of generalized thinking operated also in the explanation of human motivation. Thinkers and writers were not concerned with the unique impulse that drove a man to certain ends but with the broad desires that all men experienced. This aspect of personality was understood in terms of the struggle between passion and reason which went on in each man.
It was an Elizabethan commonplace that reason allied man with God, passion with the beasts. Imagination, which receives images of experience and relays them, should be subordinate to reason. Unfortunately, since it is often allied with the affections, the affections rule man. As Bacon explained it:
The affections themselves carry ever an appetite to apparent good, and have this in common with reason; but the difference is that affection beholds principally the good which is present: reason looks beyond and beholds likewise the future and sum of all. And therefore the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished and overcome.[31]
This “good which is present” is often the satisfaction of the senses or passions without concern for the consequences. When the affections, like the imagination, are under the control of reason, all is well. When the passions lead man, they often lead to disaster.
Man, therefore, was moved either by his reason or his affection. If he were learned in or persuaded by a moral or politic course, he could measure the particular good in terms of the enduring good. Thus reason, moved by consideration of ethics or policy, obeyed objective and rational motivations which, individual though they might have been in particular circumstances, had in common with all cases the attainment of goodness or power. But if affection ruled, then man was moved to satisfy it. Although his personality might make him liable to certain passions more readily than to others, he could give way to any of them. His past life did not accumulate motivations which impelled him or influenced his reception of new motivations. Instead, immediate and direct contact was effected between the object of desire and the governing passion.
Functioning in such a way, man was moved by generalized ends. The habit of seeing motivations in general terms is reflected in the titles of essays by such men as Bacon, Charron, and Sir William Cornwallis: “Of Ambition,” “Of Envy,” “Of Affections,” etc. Although a physio-psychological theory in part replaced temptation by the devil as an explanation of motivation, entities such as pride, lust, ambition, and envy, among others, continued to be regarded as genuine temptations by the Elizabethan. By and large the motives for man’s actions were taken for granted or symbolized. Often in the drama they are never made explicit. Here too correspondence was observed. Women were easily given to lust, unpromoted men to envy, young men to prodigality, Italians to revenge. An Elizabethan audience would assume or ignore the reasons for Iago’s or Antony’s or Bertram’s actions. They would be interested in what they did and how they felt.
c. Passion
In concentrating on what happened to the characters, the audience found its attention directed toward the passions that the characters experienced. Passions were divided in kind and number. They were either concupiscible or irascible, that is, arose either from coveting or desiring some end, such as Love, or from accomplishing or thwarting some end, such as Anger. However, there was disagreement over the number of passions. Coeffeteau lists more than fifteen, Bright only six, some writers even fewer.[32] In the matter of detail there is no concurrence, but the difference arises from the degree of subordination observed by the different writers. Behind all their thinking is the habit of regarding a passion as an autonomous quality which is either operative or not. An inclination toward or a repulsion from an object induces physiological changes in the bodily humors. These changes feed the passion so that it dominates the individual entirely. But the passion is a fixed thing. It betrays external symptoms; for example, fear leads to trembling and love to sighing. It affects internal operation, such as the contraction of the heart and the acceleration of breathing. It alters the view of reality, for passions are like “greene spectacles, which make all thinges resemble the colour of greene; even so, hee that loveth, hateth, or by anie other passion is vehemently possessed, iudgeth all things that occure in favor of that passion, to bee good and agreeable with reason.”[33]
Moreover, a particular passion was the same for all persons affected by it. Fear in one was the same as fear in another. Love in one man was not very much different from love in another. One man was not distinguished from another by the quality of a passion, but by his propensity toward it. Man was thought to have a dominant temperament or complexion. It might fall into one of four principal categories: the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, or the melancholic. The Elizabethan physiologists developed a series of correspondences, of course disagreeing among themselves, between temperament and physique, intellect and passion. Supposedly each type was liable to certain passions more readily than others. Yet, when a man is carried away by a passion uncongenial to his temperament, he assumes the quality of the passion fully. “Each passion alters the complexion of the entire body, which assumes, at least temporarily, the very qualities which excite the emotion.”[34] Thus, in Elizabethan thinking, there was a range of distinct passions and a range of distinct temperaments. Although there was a tendency for certain passions to cluster about a certain temperament, any passion could enter into any temperament. When it did, it transformed the temperament into its quality.