Parallel Lives: Shakespeare and the Debate Over Emotional Involvement

The decades around 1600 saw a Europe-wide vogue for artists, writers, orators, and actors to fully identify with their sitters, subjects, or characters, the practice often being justified with the Horatian dictum, ‘If you want me to cry, mourn first yourself’ (Russell and Winterbottom 1972: 282 [Ars 101]). Among the more extreme manifestations are the young sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who in 1617 burnt himself while preparing to carve the martyrdom of St Lawrence on a gridiron, and the French actor Montdory, famous for full-throttle mad scenes, who in 1637 suffered a paralytic stroke to the tongue and right arm while acting Herod (Bernini 1713: 15; Bernini 2011: 103; Wiley 1960: 103–6).1 The philosopher and heretic Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) cited Horace’s dictum in his treatise of rhetoric (Campanella 1954: 751, 763), adding yawning to the roster of expressions — ‘if you want me to yawn, yawn first yourself…’. When Campanella was in the Inquisition’s prison, he became notorious for mimicking people’s physiognomy, sometimes only on the basis of a verbal description, claiming it enabled him to read their mind. He would grimace as he imagined he possessed their features and even hair, so that visitors thought he was suffering the permanent affects of torture, or was insane (Campanella 2007: 116–17; Gaffarel 1629: 266–70). The purpose of this essay is two-fold. I want to historicize this ‘baroque’ fashion, arguing that the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics helped put what I term sympathetic mimicry centre stage. I will also analyse four relevant scenes from Shakespeare — three of which centre on portrait painting — in which the issue of sympathetic mimicry is explored in various ways. I shall argue that Shakespeare exhibited both fascination and scepticism for this classical technique and the raw power it unleashes, and that he particularly associated it with painters.