ABSTRACT
Most examinations of trauma in early modern literature are underwritten by modern psychology, either psychoanalytic or cognitive. Interpretation in such cases usually proceeds along one of three paths. First, a critic may take as a given various features of traumatic experience (e.g., intrusive recollections or delayed response) and then analyze the historically specific contexts of that experience. For example, in her essay on Titus Andronicus, Deborah Willis examines how vengeful responses to trauma are informed by various aspects of Roman and Tudor cultures of honor. Alternatively, a critic may downplay the explicitly psychological dimensions of trauma and foreground aspects of traumatic narrative. This approach is exemplified by Heather Hirschfeld’s investigation of trauma and typology in Hamlet. Or, third, insights gleaned from traumatic psychology and narrative may be retooled as part of an inquiry into collective or cultural trauma – an enterprise recently attempted by Thomas Anderson. In all cases, though, what is assumed is that early modern persons experienced trauma much as we do – that, when subjected to distressing circumstances, their minds and bodies responded in roughly the same ways. No student of early modern literature has yet considered how early moderns explained, or even if they recognized, symptoms that we now classify as “traumatic.”
