“I am that I am”

Shame, a strongly social affect, has a major role in education. In the education of children, perhaps even more than today, shame was an element in Renaissance pedagogy, especially moral pedagogy. Erasmus, in “On the Education of Children,” comments that “Shame is fear of just criticism and praise is the foster-mother of all accomplishments; these must be our instruments for bringing out our children's natural abilities” (332). ¹ Shakespeare's Erasmian procreation sonnets to some degree mobilize shame in this way. ² But later sonnets in the young man sequence focus on shame as an educative element in a more reflective adult context. Their treatment of shame prefigures the reflective moral approach to shame taken by Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim in philosophic texts I discuss below. Shame in the Sonnets is often insistently referred from general social occasions to the particular relationship: “You are my all the world, and I must strive / To know my shames and praises from your tongue,” Shakespeare comments in sonnet 112. ³ So while shame is an interesting disembodied agent in the disciplinary process by which early modern subjects were formed, it is also, I will suggest, a component of the reflective adult self-consciousness, the moral-psychological complexity, for which the Sonnets are justly famous.