Chapter 4 is oriented around a letter-making signet ring whose imprint makes Curculio’s forged text “real.” Its agency, however, is not confined to epistolary deception, and this chapter unpacks the anulus’ potent theatrical agency by elucidating its operation in excess of human design. I shift my focus in exploring the metatheatrical portrait generated by Curculio’s epistolary motif. Whereas Chapters 1 through 3 consider the common ability of letters and scripts to evoke absent people, here I look at the power of these media to conjure up faraway places. Both epistles and dramatic texts bring “here” to “there” (or vice versa), a capacity enacted in Curculio’s composition of a letter at Epidaurus which encapsulates his encounter in Caria and flaunted in the choragus’ tour that blurs the line between theatrical and experiential space. Finally, this chapter returns to questions of innovation and artistic dependence. Curculio’s missive invites us to reflect on the impossibility of originality for the author on the outside when an author on the inside makes the play by recomposing yet another author’s text. A coda considers the play’s seal as related to the literary sphragis.

This chapter concerns the early modern redefinition of psychology as the science of mind. It examines the way the “invention of mind” was incorporated into Descartes’s metaphysical project. This Cartesian innovation marked a rupture from the traditional science of the soul as a division of natural science or physics. Rejecting the Aristotelian partition of the soul into distinct powers and the Scholastic view of the principle of thought (the intellect) as only the highest psychic power, the new Cartesian psychology required the unity of the soul as the thinking substance. What constituted early modern psychology as a metaphysical science of mind, this chapter argues, was fundamentally Descartes’s “realist” thesis that mind is a thing (res). Together with this Cartesian substantialist view, its critical reception structured the modern science of mind. The early modern alternatives to Descartes’s ontological thesis about mind, the chapter highlights, were based either on the argument that mind is not a thing or on the argument that mind is a non-substantial thing, a mere mode. The chapter illustrates the first argument with Hobbes, the second with Regius and Spinoza.

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe people and things

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe people and things

This chapter looks at nine nouns in Heaney poems, and considers how each shoulders the weight of narrative or meaning in its poem. The chosen nouns are scoop, bucket, lorries (two), car, bicycle, rope and two individual doors. The chapter examines Heaney’s own exhortation in ‘Oysters’, ‘Verb, pure verb’, putting the physical objects and their too-solid nouns at the centre of a close reading of eight poems, including ‘Sunlight’, ‘A Constable Calls’, ‘Súgán’ and ‘Postscript’. The chapter argues that nouns provide a kind of touchstone reality in the poems and are emblems and artefacts of the idea of belonging, deployed to service the relationship between the physical (often domestic) world and the human experience of it.