Of Stones and Stony Hearts: Desdemona, Hermione, and Post-Reformation Theater

Abstract

A number of Shakespeare’s writings position stones and stoniness as boundary markers for the terrain of the human. Stoniness stands both as the endpoint of biological life—as when Falstaff’s body is described as “cold as any stone” ( H5 , 2.3.23)—and for a corresponding emotional and ethical condition of death-in-life: the insensitivity of the stony heart. In The Rape of Lucrece , Tarquin’s “rocky” heart grants “no penetrable entrance” to Lucrece’s plaining (559), while Tamora is similarly unresponsive to Lavinia’s pleas in Titus Andronicus : her heart is as “unrelenting flint to drops of rain” (2.3.141). Yet, far from securing the borders of the human, these references to stone often depict a confusion of categories in which stones become lifelike and humans become stony. This chapter examines the ways in which Shakespeare shapes the category of liveliness in relation to stone, arguing that Shakespeare’s layering of classical (primarily Ovidian) and Christian (both Catholic and Protestant) versions of the stone/human opposition produces a theatrical and philosophical effect of “liveness.” 2 At the most general level, the particular post-Reformation genealogy of liveliness that I trace here offers a new approach to the shifting definition of the human subject in relation to objects in this period. 3 It also lends another perspective to discussions of Shakespeare as the inventor of “the human” as we now know it. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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