The Nice Valour’s Anatomy of Shame

Abstract

Thomas Middleton’s 1622 tragicomedy The Nice Valour: Or, the Passionate Madman takes shame as its central preoccupation. The limited scholarship on this play has focused primarily on its representations of unconventional sexuality: homoeroticism and masochism. This essay examines the intersection of sexuality with shame, and specifically how the play offers access to the phenomenology of shame through the sensations of the sexualized body. After analyzing how the play uses that body to provide language for pinpointing the experience of shame, the essay then turns to how the masochistic practices of one of its central characters offer up a queer, mock-utopian strategy for neutralizing shame’s destructive potential. The Nice Valour is a comic celebration of shame that demonstrates that to deny the shared shame of our common bodiliness is to isolate ourselves from the pull of the blood that constitutes the strongest bonds between the self and others. [J.P.]

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