This panel brings together three papers on attention and distraction in Shakespeare’s plays. Popular debates over the effect of digital media on concentration sometimes imply that the present time poses uniquely acute challenges to sustained attention. However, the problem of distractibility has a long history, with important roots in the premodern era. As David Marno has shown, theologians from Augustine through Aquinas worried over the spiritual implications of humans’ limited powers of concentration, and religious ideals of holy attentiveness influenced seventeenth century religious poets and empiricist philosophers. Building on this work, we explore manifestations of attention and distraction in the early modern secular commercial theater. Both the words attention and distraction entered common usage in the sixteenth century. Our papers consider what dramatic depictions of these states reveal about Elizabethan conceptions of cognition and sensory stimulation. When characters obsess over the trivial, lose control of their bodies under the influence of music or deviate from logical discourse, they reflect contemporary theories of sense perception and faculty psychology. Notably, though, factors that sustain or derail concentration are not located solely within individuals. We track the economies through which attention is shared, redistributed or denied to persons and things, and consider how they intersect with shifting constructions of gender, disability and religious identity. As well as depicting attentive characters, Shakespearean drama also works to hold audience attention in a city offering ever more distractions to theater-goers. We ask how modes of attention modeled within the plays relate to the attention they demand as literary works, and explore the role of early modern theories of attentiveness in conditioning how we experience and respond to aesthetic objects today.

In our first paper, David Hershinow considers pettiness. Of the 34 times Shakespeare uses the word “petty” in his plays and poems, he almost always means it as a cognate of “small” or ‘unimportant,” but his use of the term carries a different sense when, in Titus Andronicus, Aaron stops a “petty brabble” between Chiron and Demetrius before the brothers’ spiteful bickering comes to blows. The OED, which gives first attribution of this usage to Francis Bacon, offers the following definition: “Of persons, their behaviour, etc.: characterized by an undue concern for trivial matters, esp. in a small-minded or spiteful way.” Pettiness is an affective intensity that ropes attention in a very particular way, provoking a confusion of scale that leads people under its sway to cathect on objects of vexation and to marshal against such objects vast energies of gleeful vindictiveness. This paper argues that Shakespeare mines pettiness for its dramatic potential, crafting characters that are not only petty in their own right, but that invite petty attention from viewers and readers. In this sense, it takes up pettiness as but one instance in which affect serves as the intellectual and emotional medium in which economies of attention manifest themselves. Principle case studies are Malvolio and Shylock.

Our second paper, by Maggie Vinter, explores the ethical and political ramifications of different modes of embodied attentiveness to sound in The Merchant of Venice. Multiple characters in the play articulate their experiences of Venice’s social order by analogy to experiences of listening. Lorenzo’s totalizing account of the music of the spheres connects aural and visual beauty with goodness, and treats musical receptivity as a universal sign of moral character. Jessica’s remark “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.77) might offer Lorenzo evidence of her “attentive” (l. 78) spirits—and so prove her integration into this transcendent vision—but might also register her incomplete assimilation into Christian Venice at an aesthetic and affective level. Shylock’s comparison of his hatred of Antonio to the feelings of people who “when the bagpipe sings i’th’nose /Cannot contain their urine” (4.1.49-50) is a paranoid inversion of Lorenzo’s vision. While inducting all hearers into an auditory community, the bagpipe also marks some out as irrationally and offensively different. It thus offers an apt model for Shylock’s experience of Venetian legal, social and interpretive structures that govern interfaith interactions and locate Jewishness unstably in belief, practice and the body. In these idiosyncratic depictions of listening, theories of aesthetics, ethics and embodied identity continually substitute for one another. Attending to them clarifies Shakespeare’s depiction of interfaith relations, and also offers a vantage from which to interrogate our own embodied attentiveness to this troubling play.

Finally, Drew Daniel turns to distraction. The word “distracted” appears more times in “Hamlet” than any other Shakespeare play; pushing off from a pattern of usage, this paper considers attention and distraction as an antithetical doublet that releases diagnostic energies along gendered contours within Elsinore. Provoked by the “tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect” of the tragic actor weeping for Hecuba (2.2.1627), Hamlet notably strives to occupy this position, as when he presumes that Laertes “must needs have heard, how I am punished with sore distraction.” (5.2.3867) In Hamlet’s case, such “distraction” constitutes a hyper-legible index of the theatricality of mad behavior and is a critical commonplace. But this paper will suggest that Hamlet’s distracted exemplarity might itself be a critical distraction from the more compelling gendered antithesis of forms of distraction offered by Polonius and Ophelia. If Polonius’ bad ratio of matter to art indexes a capacity for self-distraction coiled within the copia of the period’s rhetorical trick-bag, Ophelia’s distraction is another matter, both totalizing and fatal. Where Q1 gives “Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing.” (Q1), the First Folio bluntly states “Enter Ophelia distracted”, and this state arguably precipitates her death. Ophelia’s “distraction” rezones the psychophysiological links between embodiment and mental life, revealing an ableist criteria of capacity strung unstably across the distance between legible bodily attitudes and implied states of mind.

Taken together, these papers demonstrate the capacity for attention studies to enrich a wide range of approaches to early modern literature, from recent critical trends like affect studies and the cognitive turn to disability studies, literature and religion, and neo formalism.