The Derivation of Identity
The Derivation of Identity: Gender, Masculinity, and Sexuality in Coriolanus
Matthew Chacko (L. Monique Pittman, English)
William Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus (1608) when two epistemological modes, theater and empiricism, asserted competing constructions of selfhood. Theater imagined identity as fluid, subject to external manipulation by exposure to the stage. In contrast, as Renaissance anatomical texts imply, empiricism voiced an increasingly stable and innate subjectivity. Likewise, Coriolanus faces a dilemma of selfhood. Outside agents attempt to change his subjectivity, mirroring the theater, while Coriolanus asserts his immutable identity, paralleling empirical understandings. Coriolanus’s concerns of selfhood echo Renaissance subjective anxieties during a changing period as different epistemologies, theater and empiricism, launched rival notions of identity.