INWARDNESS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE RENAISSANCE

This paper presents some historical, cultural and literary elements which are essential to understand the emergence of inwardness from the Middle Ages onwards. It discusses that Shakespeare did not invent inwardness or subjectivity by himself as Bloom and Fineman propose in their works. Rather, he developed a mimesis of inwardness specifically in the drama and that was his greatest innovation in literature. Beforehand, it is necessary to exemplify the emergence of inwardness in mediaeval writings, especially in Augustine’s Confessions and in Dante’s Vita Nuova. Thus, the analysis by Harrison in his book The Body of Beatrice (1988) is helpful to understand such process. He analyses Dante’s Vita Nuova and demonstrates that Dante represented sensual inwardness in his work. Also, it is worth discussing some ideas in Montaigne’s Essays and how he depicted inward feelings, sensations, thoughts and anxieties in his work. Shakespeare introduced the mimesis of inwardness in his drama in an on-going process of the development of inwardness. Key-words: Emergence of Inwardness; Shakespeare; Dante; Montaigne. Resumo: Esse artigo apresenta alguns elementos históricos, culturais e literários que são essenciais para entender o surgimento da interioridade a partir da idade média. Discute que Shakespeare não inventou a interioridade ou subjetividade sozinho, como Bloom e Fineman propõem em suas obras. Ao invés disso, ele desenvolveu uma mímeses da interioridade especificamente no drama e essa foi sua grande invenção na literatura. Antes de Shakespeare, faz-se necessário exemplifiquer o surgmento da interioridade nos escritos medievais, em particuular nas Confissões de Santo Agostinho e na Vida Nova de Dante. Assim, a análise de Harrison em sua obra The Body of Beatrice (1988) é útil para entender esse processo. Da mesma forma, é importante discutir algumas ideias dos Ensaios de Montaigne e de que forma ele representou sentimento, emoções, pensamentos e angústias em sua obra. Shakespeare introduziu a representação da interioridade no drama num processo de desenvolvimento da interioridade em curso. Palavras-Chave: Surgimento da Interioridade; Shakespeare; Dante; Montaigne. This essay presents a discussion about Shakespeare’s authenticity of the creation and representation of inwardness. In fact, Shakespeare did not create inwardness by himself. 1 Holds a Doctor's Degree at English Literature and Master's degree in Comparative Literature at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Professor at Federal University of Tocantins, Campus at Porto Nacional. Email: carlosletras@uft.edu.br 2 Even though this thesis argues that Shakespeare did not invent inwardness by himself, such argument does not diminish his importance and qualities in the literary tradition. It rather discusses this mythmaking and idealising Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 237 However, he deepened the mimesis of inwardness creating renewing mimetical devices for it in the Drama. Thus, the issue of inwardness is rather specific in Shakespeare. It is not what proposed Fineman and Bloom. Fineman’s assumptions about the invention of poetic subjectivity intends to discuss the problem, but his argument is quite obscuring, confusing and complexifying. He does not answer the question; instead, he just creates an awkward analysis which leads nowhere. The problem of the mimesis of inwardness in Shakespeare’s sonnets has been well discussed in Lawrence Flores Pereira’s essay about the specular devices in the Sonnets (2000). Coupled with that, one could argue that the mimesis of the inner-self was already perceived at least in a minimalistic way in both Greek and Roman Literature. In fact, Karen Newman (1985) argues that Greek and Roman drama represented the inner life of the characters, or the lifelikeness through the rhetoric of consciousness. Rhetoric of consciousness is defined as linguistic breaks, uses of I/you pronouns to refer to the self, soliloquies with traits of dialogue and the inner debate of the characters to express the sense of lifelikeness in the drama. According to her, Speeches which manifest characteristics of dialogue such as those we have analyzed in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in Menander, and even in Plautus, create or represent an inner life regardless how typically they may code information concerning sex, rank, fortune or age. (NEWMAN, 1985, p. 52) Thus, the origines of inwardness did not occur in the Renaissance Age, but somehow beforehand. Shakespeare introduced in his drama a mimesis of inwardness, just as other authors introduced mimetic devices in their works. For example, Montaigne created an trends which consider, without convincing and provable arguments, Shakespeare’s authenticity in the creation of inwardness and situates literarily and historically the place of his work in relation to other authors. 3 See Bloom’s Shakespeare: the invention of the human (2001) and Fineman’s Shakespeare’s perjured eye: the invention of the poetic subjectivity in the sonnets, 1986. 4 See Lawrence Flores Pereira’s O jogo especular nos sonetos de Shakespeare. In: Pereira. De Shakespeare a Racine: o engano especular e outros temas. (Tese de Doutorado). Porto Alegre: PUC-RS, 2000. In such essay, the author discusses the problem of narcissism in the sonnets as something related to other forms of mimesis of narcissism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare took and re-shaped in his sonnets in an over-powering mimesis of specular images. 5 See Karen Newman’s Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character, 1985. 6 I am deeply indebted to Lawrence Flores Pereira for this suggestion. In conversion about Auerbach, I told him that Auerbach acknowledged that Dante perceived something in cultural and historical events the emergence of inwardness in Middle Ages. Then Lawrence agreed with that me and added that Shakespeare did not create the human by himself, but that the perceived something ‘in the air’. That led me to search more about such topic and I figured out that many writings in the age were really concerned about the representation of an inner world of the self. Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 238 innovating literary form in his Essays; beforehand, Augustine’s painstaking work, which analysed his innermost feelings in his Confessions, is one of the first moments of the emergence of inwardness; similarly Dante represented a desiring self in his Vita Nuova for the first time. Shakespeare’s authenticity is indeed to deepen the mimesis of inwardness and its quality in the drama, overcoming his coevals, such as Marlowe, Webster and Kyd. It is worth demonstrating here that when Shakespeare started to write, inwardness was an on-going development in literary works. It is noteworthy to place Shakespeare’s innovating mimesis of inwardness in the drama against the former development of literary history. In Shakespeare, Montaigne, Augustine and Dante language and the mimetical devices swerve from the previous literary tradition. They changed language and the structure of the genre, because of an intrinsic necessity in the representation of inwardness, an inner space of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and anxiety. The language and structure of the poem, essay, confession and drama were reshaped to represent inwardness. In order to capture the remoter dimensions, these artists had to develop new stylistic devices: silences, non-said, a rather floating style, and syntactic ruptures in their litterary forms. The mimesis of inwardness needed new literary forms which were able to convey the imagistic constellations, inward floatations of feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts of the self. Hence, this essay presents some ideas which demonstrate that the notion of inwardness had its origins in the Middle Ages or even beforehand, mainly the revealing details by Ariès’s and Duby’s History of Private Life. They demonstrate that there emerged a social and cultural development of individuality and inwardness in that age. After that, Harrison’s reading of Dante’s Vita Nuova, in his revealing book The Body of Beatrice demonstrates the representation of the poet’s inward desires in the ‘blind spot’, projected first in the body of Beatrice and then in Dante’s literary creation. Then, Montaigne’s essays wherein he presents his proposal of self-investigation and self-analysis as an innovation in his Essays is useful to place inwardness in a broader context in the Renaissance. 7 The purpose here is not to analyse inwardness from both ancient Greek and Roman literature, but to highlight the emergence of this phenomenon in the Middle Ages, which will be important to Shakespeare’s configuration the mimesis of inwardness in the drama. 8 Trevelyan also studied some cultural and sociological assumptions which may have influenced the emergence of inwardness in England. In fact, he studies the emergence of privacy in architectural changes to ever-increasing inner comfortable spaces in spaces of smaller rooms, which allowed people’s intimacy and privacy. This is taken as the starting point of many changes, such as privacy, intimacy, and later on inwardness. See Trevelyan’s English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria (1942). Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 239 1 The Emergence of Self from the Middle Ages onwards Phillipe Ariès and Georges Duby, in their classical work History of Private Life II: Revelations of the Medieval World (2009), state that inwardness has its origins in late Middle Ages. Ariès and Duby analyse the emergence of the first images of inwardness in cultural forms of expression, such as autobiographies, chronicles, travel narratives, books of prayers, as well as in Dante’s and Petrarch’s poetry. Thus, there emerged fictions of inwardness, which concentrated on the inner contemplation of the self. Such emergence was caused by the consciousness of the self as an individual whose identity could be delimitted by loneliness and seclusion from society. (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 388). Such contemplation was enabled by lonely reading, seclusion, dreaming and ascetic wanderings. For example, the representation of an oneirical world in literary forms enabled the mimesis of mental dimensions through an ‘unfolded self’ who sought for love, adventure, and divine discovery. The fictionalised representation of the self created the emergence of a ‘subjectivity of the allurement’ which inaugurated the ‘delimitation of the territory of the individual’ in late Middle Ages (ARIÈS; DUBY ,2009, p. 388). Such texts obsessively insisted on time, the ‘perception of a lost time’, in a sort of mourning such lost time (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 388). There was an effort to insist on recuperating the lost memory, the lost time, the lost paradise. As a result, the individual could determine his own destiny and way of living for the first time. The individual of fictions as the young lovers and wandering knights were carried by their desires and went away to a long journey among forests and landscapes. Thus, they could bend over themselves and unfold their inward feelings, emotions, thoughts, unquietness, and suffering. Such seclusion and contemplation were only possible in a state of enclosure and absorption seeking for an inward state of dreaming and distancing (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 389). Therefore, writing allowed the emergence of the self which exposed painful and exalted confessions of the inner self. However, such representation of the ‘self pretentiously unique’ is in fact a rather universal ‘self’ (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 390). This self is constituted by repeated and preestablished images and leitmotifs, through which the individual could only represent an abstract 9 The quotations here are taken from Brazilian edition by Ariès and Duby’s work, História da Vida Privada 2: Da Europa Feudal à Renascença, 2009. This exposition on the development of inwardness in the Mediaeval Ages is based on their work. 10 Also, in Modern Literature, one can perceive the dimension of representation in literature and even in literary adaptation into cinema, comic books and other forms of literary adaptation. For this see Freitas (2017), Falcão and Bueno (2017), Ludwig (2017), Sousa (2016) and Santos (2015) Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 240 and imaginary idea of the self in poetry and narrative. The poetical and narrative self was in the ‘eternal regress’ to his natural origins and was obsessively allured by his own representation. (2009, p. 390). In the same sense, literary imagery was obsessed about the search for a lost identity, which needed to be discovered and scrutinised. It was artificially masked only to be seen in the scrutinising game of identity (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 396). In addition to that, there was an intense feeling and desire of seeking for loneliness during the Middle Ages. The primitive Christians sought for seclusion in the desert as a way of achieving divinity and purety of soul. Consequently, they rejected the body, its feelings, passions and emotions. The anchorite attitude of leaving the city to live secluded in the desert was perceived as an astonishing gesture whereby they could define the self as a private site. Thus, the primitive Christianity and its ascesis was an ur-flourishing of the representation and theatricalisation of inwardness. Living beyond the limits of the city and of the known limits of the land was a way of creating a civilisation in the desert. Monastic and ascetic life was one of the first moments of the acknowledgment of an inner space which needed to be forcely suppressed. Once the ascetics denied the body, sexual life, pleasure and desire, they impinged on their body and mind sufferance, punishment, abstention of food and drink, and sought for contemplation, especially inner contemplation in the absolute silence of the night (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 532). Thus, such denial and abstention meant the rejection of an inner space, which was said to be pervaded by evil feelings, thoughts and desires, and threatened to dominate the individual and purity of the soul. The rejection of such feelings was an obsessive reaction to the percepton of an enigmatic inward life poping up in the body. Likewise, Peter Brown argues that, in the primitive Christianity, the renouncement of corporeal and material pleasure was intensively practiced by ascetic monks and anchorites from the 2 century C. E. onwards. Such renouncement is due to the search for the purification of body and soul as a mystic form to achieve divinity. The rejection of pleasures as well as of the body was caused by the ever-growing consciousness that the self was a sexual being, who kept alive the sexual phantasm, exposing the ‘rebel’ zones of the human being (BROWN, 1995, p. 285). They privileged the soul as a locus of rationality and sanctity, but repudiated the body as the locus of evilness and sin. Therefore, the isolation of monks signalled, through this 11 For that see, see Peter Brown, in his work Le renoncement à la chair (1995). 12 See Brown’s work Le renoncement à la chair (The Renouncement of the Flesh, 1995). 13 For that issue, Ariès and Duby, History of Private Life II: Revelations of the Medieval World, (2009) also present the ascetic and monastic life as a way of spiritual evolution. See details about the anchorites on pp. 534536. Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 241 denegation of the body, the inward negative dimensions, which could not be controlled. The rejection of these inward dimensions and the seeking for the divinity through inner contemplation was therefore a social reaction to the perceptiveness of inwardness. Ariès and Duby argue that the ‘invention of the subject’ came about in the Middle Ages, especifically in the 14 and 15 centuries. According to them, The private writing or the writing about the private introduces unquestionably, as the evidences increase, a deep mutation in the attitude of the individuals regarding the familial and social groups which they belong to: a concern about conveying, at least describing experienced phenomena which former generations silenced about. (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 553). Although there came out these first embryoes of inwardness during the Middle Ages, writing about the self was limitted to a small sum of people. It seems that inwardness was rather perceived in social attitudes. Moreover, ‘the individual defines himself by contrast’, or by the separation and rupture from the circles of the social life, such as family, community, and professional domains (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 554) . The self’s own consciousness enabled the ‘radical questioning of the order’; thus, those who were outside society, such as the mad in the romances, the uproarers, the hermits, caused astonishment and anxieties in other people’s view due to their assumed awkward attitude of seclusion and loneliness. In that sense, Auerbach (2007a) also enhances the emergence of inwardness frorm the Middle Ages onwards. He states that whole groups of people who had hitherto lived in silent obscurity, began to achieve self-awareness, to emerge into the light of day and display their individual gestures; the long buried ancient tradition regarding the portrayal of outward and inner happening had reawakened (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 83-84). Even though the mimesis of an inward space was current in late Middle Ages, a former author had represented inward feelings, ideas, thouhgts and anxieties beforehand: Saint Augustine introduced a mimesis of an inward space of the self in his Confessions (2008). J. M. Coetzee has written a beautiful essay called Autobiography and Confession (1992). Such essay analyses the issue of confession of inward feelings in Augustine, Dostoevski and Tolstoi. 14 See Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World, 2007a. 15 See Coetzee’s interviews with David Attwell and essays in Doubling the Point: essays and interviews, 1992. The purpose here is not to analyse Augustine’s work, but to present some details which show the mimesis of inwardness in his Confessions. Revista ENTRELETRAS (Araguaína), v. 11, n. 1, jan./abr. 2020 (ISSN 2179-3948 – online) 242 According to Coetzee, Augustine reveals his innermost desire when he and his friends stole some pears. What moves such act is not the need of eating pears, because they fed them to hogs later on. Rather, his feeling was the shame of being shameless. What he wanted to confess was something more than the transgression, it was ‘something which lies behind the theft’. Even though he tried to analyse his inward feelings, there was something which would be completely occluded to introspection. In Coetzee’s words, ‘the truth about the self that will bring an end to the quest for the source within the self for that-which-is-wrong, he affirms, will remain inaccessible to introspection.’ (1992, p. 252). What Coetzee perceives in autobiography and confession is the endless attempt to find out the ‘truth’ about the self. He enhances that Augustine perceived in his confession that when we try analyse ourselves, there is something which evades and cannot be grasped and written down. That is what Philosophy, arts and Psychoanalysis have tried to pin down and represent: the overcoming sense of endlessness. Augustine perceived that there are some inward mysterious forces which cannot be controlled, analysed and discoursively grasped in introspection. Therefore, Augustine presented an attempt to represent the inward dimensions in his Confessions. He exposed his feelings, desires, vanity, and inward dispositions of the mind, but he could not make a shape of the endless anxiety which lurks behind his phantasms. In the same sense that the Renaissace age would make a distinction between outwardness and inwardness, Augustine was aware of the distinction between inward and outward dimensions of the self. That is what he called the homo interior and the homo exterior. Thus, the argument of Shakespeare’s authencity of the creation and discovering of inwardness by himself is debased when we look closer to the emergence of the self and the representation of an inward space in the writings in the Middle Ages and especially in

However, he deepened the mimesis of inwardness creating renewing mimetical devices for it in the Drama. Thus, the issue of inwardness is rather specific in Shakespeare. It is not what proposed Fineman and Bloom 3 . Fineman's assumptions about the invention of poetic subjectivity intends to discuss the problem, but his argument is quite obscuring, confusing and complexifying. He does not answer the question; instead, he just creates an awkward analysis which leads nowhere. The problem of the mimesis of inwardness in Shakespeare's sonnets has been well discussed in Lawrence Flores Pereira's essay about the specular devices in the Sonnets (2000). 4 Coupled with that, one could argue that the mimesis of the inner-self was already perceived at least in a minimalistic way in both Greek and Roman Literature. In fact, Karen Newman (1985) 5 argues that Greek and Roman drama represented the inner life of the characters, or the lifelikeness through the rhetoric of consciousness. Rhetoric of consciousness is defined as linguistic breaks, uses of I/you pronouns to refer to the self, soliloquies with traits of dialogue and the inner debate of the characters to express the sense of lifelikeness in the drama. According to her, Speeches which manifest characteristics of dialogue such as those we have analyzed in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in Menander, and even in Plautus, create or represent an inner life regardless how typically they may code information concerning sex, rank, fortune or age. (NEWMAN, 1985, p. 52) Thus, the origines of inwardness did not occur in the Renaissance Age, but somehow beforehand. 6  In such essay, the author discusses the problem of narcissism in the sonnets as something related to other forms of mimesis of narcissism in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare took and re-shaped in his sonnets in an over-powering mimesis of specular images. 5 See Karen Newman's Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character, 1985. 6 I am deeply indebted to Lawrence Flores Pereira for this suggestion. In conversion about Auerbach, I told him that Auerbach acknowledged that Dante perceived something in cultural and historical events the emergence of inwardness in Middle Ages. Then Lawrence agreed with that me and added that Shakespeare did not create the human by himself, but that the perceived something 'in the air'. That led me to search more about such topic and I figured out that many writings in the age were really concerned about the representation of an inner world of the self.
innovating literary form in his Essays; beforehand, Augustine's painstaking work, which analysed his innermost feelings in his Confessions, is one of the first moments of the emergence of inwardness; similarly Dante represented a desiring self in his Vita Nuova for the first time.
Shakespeare's authenticity is indeed to deepen the mimesis of inwardness and its quality in the drama, overcoming his coevals, such as Marlowe, Webster and Kyd. It is worth demonstrating here that when Shakespeare started to write, inwardness was an on-going development in literary works. It is noteworthy to place Shakespeare's innovating mimesis of inwardness in the drama against the former development of literary history.
In Shakespeare, Montaigne, Augustine and Dante language and the mimetical devices swerve from the previous literary tradition. They changed language and the structure of the genre, because of an intrinsic necessity in the representation of inwardness, an inner space of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and anxiety. The language and structure of the poem, essay, confession and drama were reshaped to represent inwardness. In order to capture the remoter dimensions, these artists had to develop new stylistic devices: silences, non-said, a rather floating style, and syntactic ruptures in their litterary forms. The mimesis of inwardness needed new literary forms which were able to convey the imagistic constellations, inward floatations of feelings, emotions, ideas, thoughts of the self.
Hence, this essay presents some ideas which demonstrate that the notion of inwardness had its origins in the Middle Ages or even beforehand, 7 mainly the revealing details by Ariès's and Duby's History of Private Life. 8 They demonstrate that there emerged a social and cultural development of individuality and inwardness in that age. After that, Harrison's reading of Dante's Vita Nuova, in his revealing book The Body of Beatrice demonstrates the representation of the poet's inward desires in the 'blind spot', projected first in the body of Beatrice and then in Dante's literary creation. Then, Montaigne's essays wherein he presents his proposal of self-investigation and self-analysis as an innovation in his Essays is useful to place inwardness in a broader context in the Renaissance. 7 The purpose here is not to analyse inwardness from both ancient Greek and Roman literature, but to highlight the emergence of this phenomenon in the Middle Ages, which will be important to Shakespeare's configuration the mimesis of inwardness in the drama. 8 Trevelyan also studied some cultural and sociological assumptions which may have influenced the emergence of inwardness in England. In fact, he studies the emergence of privacy in architectural changes to ever-increasing inner comfortable spaces in spaces of smaller rooms, which allowed people's intimacy and privacy. This is taken as the starting point of many changes, such as privacy, intimacy, and later on inwardness. See Trevelyan's English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries: Chaucer to Queen Victoria (1942).

The Emergence of Self from the Middle Ages onwards
Phillipe Ariès and Georges Duby, in their classical work History of Private Life II: Revelations of the Medieval World (2009), 9 state that inwardness has its origins in late Middle Ages. Ariès and Duby analyse the emergence of the first images of inwardness in cultural forms of expression, such as autobiographies, chronicles, travel narratives, 10 books of prayers, as well as in Dante's and Petrarch's poetry. Thus, there emerged fictions of inwardness, which concentrated on the inner contemplation of the self. Such emergence was caused by the consciousness of the self as an individual whose identity could be delimitted by loneliness and seclusion from society. (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 388). Such contemplation was enabled by lonely reading, seclusion, dreaming and ascetic wanderings. For example, the representation of an oneirical world in literary forms enabled the mimesis of mental dimensions through an 'unfolded self' who sought for love, adventure, and divine discovery. The fictionalised representation of the self created the emergence of a 'subjectivity of the allurement' which inaugurated the 'delimitation of the territory of the individual' in late Middle Ages (ARIÈS; DUBY ,2009, p. 388). Such texts obsessively insisted on time, the 'perception of a lost time', in a sort of mourning such lost time (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 388). There was an effort to insist on recuperating the lost memory, the lost time, the lost paradise.
As a result, the individual could determine his own destiny and way of living for the first time. The individual of fictions as the young lovers and wandering knights were carried by their desires and went away to a long journey among forests and landscapes. Thus, they could bend over themselves and unfold their inward feelings, emotions, thoughts, unquietness, and suffering. Such seclusion and contemplation were only possible in a state of enclosure and absorption seeking for an inward state of dreaming and distancing (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 389). Therefore, writing allowed the emergence of the self which exposed painful and exalted confessions of the inner self.
However, such representation of the 'self pretentiously unique' is in fact a rather universal 'self' (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 390). This self is constituted by repeated and preestablished images and leitmotifs, through which the individual could only represent an abstract 9 The quotations here are taken from Brazilian edition by Ariès and Duby's work, História da Vida Privada 2: Da Europa Feudal à Renascença, 2009. This exposition on the development of inwardness in the Mediaeval Ages is based on their work. 10 Also, in Modern Literature, one can perceive the dimension of representation in literature and even in literary adaptation into cinema, comic books and other forms of literary adaptation. For this see Freitas (2017), Falcão and Bueno (2017), Ludwig (2017), Sousa (2016) and Santos (2015) and imaginary idea of the self in poetry and narrative. The poetical and narrative self was in the 'eternal regress' to his natural origins and was obsessively allured by his own representation. (2009, p. 390). In the same sense, literary imagery was obsessed about the search for a lost identity, which needed to be discovered and scrutinised. It was artificially masked only to be seen in the scrutinising game of identity (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 396).
In addition to that, there was an intense feeling and desire of seeking for loneliness during the Middle Ages. The primitive Christians sought for seclusion in the desert as a way of achieving divinity and purety of soul. Consequently, they rejected the body, its feelings, passions and emotions. The anchorite attitude of leaving the city to live secluded in the desert was perceived as an astonishing gesture whereby they could define the self as a private site.
Thus, the primitive Christianity and its ascesis was an ur-flourishing of the representation and theatricalisation of inwardness. Living beyond the limits of the city and of the known limits of the land was a way of creating a civilisation in the desert. 11 Monastic and ascetic life was one of the first moments of the acknowledgment of an inner space which needed to be forcely suppressed. Once the ascetics denied the body, sexual life, pleasure and desire, they impinged on their body and mind sufferance, punishment, abstention of food and drink, and sought for contemplation, especially inner contemplation in the absolute silence of the night (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 532). Thus, such denial and abstention meant the rejection of an inner space, which was said to be pervaded by evil feelings, thoughts and desires, and threatened to dominate the individual and purity of the soul. The rejection of such feelings was an obsessive reaction to the percepton of an enigmatic inward life poping up in the body.
Likewise, Peter Brown 12 argues that, in the primitive Christianity, the renouncement of corporeal and material pleasure was intensively practiced by ascetic monks and anchorites from the 2 th century C. E. onwards. 13 Such renouncement is due to the search for the purification of body and soul as a mystic form to achieve divinity. The rejection of pleasures as well as of the body was caused by the ever-growing consciousness that the self was a sexual being, who kept alive the sexual phantasm, exposing the 'rebel' zones of the human being (BROWN, 1995, p. 285). They privileged the soul as a locus of rationality and sanctity, but repudiated the body as the locus of evilness and sin. Therefore, the isolation of monks signalled, through this 11 For that see, see Peter Brown, in his work Le renoncement à la chair (1995). denegation of the body, the inward negative dimensions, which could not be controlled. The rejection of these inward dimensions and the seeking for the divinity through inner contemplation was therefore a social reaction to the perceptiveness of inwardness.
Ariès and Duby argue that the 'invention of the subject' came about in the Middle Ages, especifically in the 14 th and 15 th centuries. According to them, The private writing or the writing about the private introduces unquestionably, as the evidences increase, a deep mutation in the attitude of the individuals regarding the familial and social groups which they belong to: a concern about conveying, at least describing experienced phenomena which former generations silenced about. (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 553).
Although there came out these first embryoes of inwardness during the Middle Ages, writing about the self was limitted to a small sum of people. It seems that inwardness was rather perceived in social attitudes. Moreover, 'the individual defines himself by contrast', or by the separation and rupture from the circles of the social life, such as family, community, and professional domains (ARIÈS; DUBY, 2009, p. 554) . The self's own consciousness enabled the 'radical questioning of the order'; thus, those who were outside society, such as the mad in the romances, the uproarers, the hermits, caused astonishment and anxieties in other people's view due to their assumed awkward attitude of seclusion and loneliness. In that sense, Auerbach According to Coetzee, Augustine reveals his innermost desire when he and his friends stole some pears. What moves such act is not the need of eating pears, because they fed them to hogs later on. Rather, his feeling was the shame of being shameless. What he wanted to confess was something more than the transgression, it was 'something which lies behind the theft'. Even though he tried to analyse his inward feelings, there was something which would be completely occluded to introspection. In Coetzee's words, 'the truth about the self that will bring an end to the quest for the source within the self for that-which-is-wrong, he affirms, will remain inaccessible to introspection. ' (1992, p. 252). What Coetzee perceives in autobiography and confession is the endless attempt to find out the 'truth' about the self. He enhances that Augustine perceived in his confession that when we try analyse ourselves, there is something which evades and cannot be grasped and written down. That is what Philosophy, arts and Psychoanalysis have tried to pin down and represent: the overcoming sense of endlessness.
Augustine perceived that there are some inward mysterious forces which cannot be controlled, analysed and discoursively grasped in introspection. Therefore, Augustine presented an attempt to represent the inward dimensions in his Confessions. He exposed his feelings, desires, vanity, and inward dispositions of the mind, but he could not make a shape of the endless anxiety which lurks behind his phantasms. In the same sense that the Renaissace age would make a distinction between outwardness and inwardness, Augustine was aware of the distinction between inward and outward dimensions of the self. That is what he called the homo interior and the homo exterior. Thus, the argument of Shakespeare's authencity of the creation and discovering of inwardness by himself is debased when we look closer to the emergence of the self and the representation of an inward space in the writings in the Middle Ages and especially in Augustine's work.

Inwardness and Occluded Desires in Dante's Work: The body of Beatrice
As Augustine represented inner feelings in his Confessions, Dante is another author who represented inward dimensions in his work. In that sense, Harrison's argument evidences that Dante represented his unconfessed desiring feelings in his Vita Nuova. Just as Augustine could not grasp his feelings in his endless analysis, Dante could not see what was behind the 'blind spot' in his dream in the Vita Nuova. Thus, by these examples, one in autobiography and other in prose and poetry, it is evident that inwardness was an ever-growing perceptiveness of the individual whose consciousness about obscure zone was achieved throughout the centuries.

Robert Pogue Harrison has written a ground-breaking book about Dante's Vita Nuova,
named The Body of Beatrice (1988). His painstaking study tries to disentail the reading of Dante's first work from his greatest work, The Divine Comedy. Critics normally read the Vita Nuova as a merely preface, introduction or even an appendix to The Divine Comedy. Thus, they simply projected the mystical and theological analysis from the Comedy in Dante's Vita Nuova. What Harrison proves is that the libello has its own aesthetic and poetic meaning independent from The Divine Comedy. He demonstrates the representation of (sexual) desire for the first time, in Western Literature, a desire which is projected onto Dante's literary creation.
Harrison analyses a 'blind spot' in Dante's experience in his 'marvellous vision' of his dream. Dante's 'marvellous vision' comes about in the 3 rd chapter of his Vita Nuova. He is on the street and sees Beatrice 'dressed in the whitest of white', remembering his first vision of the lady when he was a nine-year-old boy. Then he goes to his room, which he also recalls as 'the most secret chamber of the heart' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 147) and there 'a sweet sleep overcame' him. (DANTE, 2001, p. 10). Then, in 'a flame-coloured nebula' he saw the presence of a 'lord of fearful aspect' who said many things, but which the poet understood just a few words, such as 'Ego dominus tuus: I am your lord.' (DANTE, 2001, p. 10). 16 This lord 'held a figure sleeping in his arms', who he identifies as Beatrice, the 'lady of the greeting' (DANTE, 2001, p. 10-11). Most revealingly, she is 'naked except that it seemed to me to be covered lightly with a crimson cloth' (DANTE, 2001, p. 10-11). The lord, whom he identifies later as Love, Amor, is holding the poet's heart completely in fire. Then he makes the lady eat his heart, which she did 'hesitantly' (DANTE, 2001, p. 11). 17 After that, the lord seems to change his joyful mood to a completely sorrowful aspect and thus he weeps bitterly. Finally, Beatrice and the lord vanish unexplainably in the sky.
For Harrison, many critics and even Dante's contemporary poets attempted to interpret this oneiric configuration and its secret. This visionary dream, this marvellous vision hides the mystery about this real woman. For Harrison she is not the 'divine agent or angel', nor the 'Christ figure', nor the 'number nine' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 18). For him, Dante sees something in this figure, which cannot be merely explained as 'poetic hyperbole, phantasmal perception, or even mystical delirium' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 18). Harrison interrogates the nature of Beatrice and sees that she is not an allegorical, theological or mystic figure, but, above all, her presence enhances her as a woman, whom is adored by Dante and is transformed in his poetry in a 'posthumous mummification in paradise' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 18). For Harrison, although some critics tried to see the dream as the foretelling of her death or as the prefiguring of Dante's journey into hell, purgatory and paradise, the deeper meaning of this dream remains completely concealed.
In vain have many critics tried to explain Dante's experience. For instance, Auerbach's (2007a) 18 analysis of Dante's first experience in The Vita Nuova fails to figure out what is at stake in Dante's first work. However, he focuses on philosophical and subjective experience: there was a falling away from Beatrice, a misdirected love, a striving for illusory treasures. Neither the biographical clues at our disposal nor the works that can be situated with some degree of certainty between the last poems of the Vita Nuova and the generally accepted date of his journey to the Other World, gives any exact idea.
[…] the best we can do is to accept Dante's error as a fact, even though we cannot discover its traces in Dante's life and work. (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 70-71).
Auerbach does not see this 'blind spot' in Dante's work, just as many other critics could not. He merely assumes that there are some biographical details which cannot be accessed and which could explain Dante's 'error'. Even Dante acknowledges the failure to see the vision's true meaning. His coeval poets Petrarch and Guido Cavalcanti could not grasp the true meaning of the scene as well.
Harrison wisely states that there is a 'blind spot' which 'lurks at the heart of this visionary experience', which was always there (HARRISON, 1988, p. 21). Beatrice in this visionary dream 'gives herself to perception through a phenomenal guise that reveals and at the same time conceals her nature' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 22). The source of this blindness lies in the problematic recognition created by just one word in the text, which appears just once in the 3 rd chapter: naked (nuda): she was 'naked except that it seemed to me to be covered lightly with 18 See his book Dante Poet of the Secular World, 2007a. a crimson cloth' (DANTE, 2001, p. 10-11). For Harrison, 'were it not for that one word in the prose, nuda, we could never quite be sure of Beatrice's womanhood, her corporeal facticity, as it were' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 22). Thus, her corporeality makes her a concrete figure rather than a merely phantasmatic projection of mystical and theological allegories, as some critics suppose.
Elsewhere in Vita Nuova she appears only dressed and 'above all as her dress' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 22). In the memory of a nine-year-old boy the image of her dress is deeply engraved, and nine years later, when he is 'at the threshold of manhood' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23), he perceives her once again only by her attire. In Harrison's opinion, even granting the claims of color symbolism, one must wonder about the psycho-logic that causes the young man's perception to stop once again at the chromatic surface of Beatrice's clothing (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23). He asks whether Beatrice is simply a shrouded phantasm drifting through the merely symbolic space of a poetic imagination' or 'a real woman walking on the street' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23). The 'marvellous vision' proves Beatrice's womanhood through her 'corporeal density' revealed not by the crimson dress, but by the body which is veiled by the dress.
In a deeper level, Harrison thinks that 'the body of Beatrice is the "repressed" element in Dante's field of vision' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23). He indicts that no one needs much psychoanalysis or psychology to state that the dream and the 'marvellous vision' entail 'a sexual awakening' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23). This vision, engraved in the nine-year-old boy's memory, is awakened in the eighteen-year-old young man's psyche. Then, what remains for Harrison is to ask 'why the psychic pulsations that produce the dream [...] assume this specific and highly charged symbolic configuration?' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23). He sums up such conundrum revealing the ambivalent meaning of her crimson cloth: While it prohibits a view of her naked body, it also allows Dante to recognize the body as a body without violating a code of courtesy to which he was socially and ideologically bound. The cloth, then, acts as a censor, or as a prohibition, but at the same time it acts as the very opposite of this. Insofar as it guards the presence of the naked body by veiling it, the cloth grants Dante the permission to look at the body and to see without seeing, so to speak. (HARRISON, 1988, p. 23).
Thus, the body of Beatrice becomes, at the same time, a site of prohibition and desire which cannot be described and praised overtly, just idealised through mystical and idealistic frameworks. After this vision, Dante starts to reflect upon the body, creating thus the first poem on his beloved Beatrice. However, in the sonnett she figures no longer as naked, but only through the presence of a cloth. 19 For Harrison, this is the 'genesis of the figure of Beatriceher poetic potentiality' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 24). The presence of the crimson cloth 'becomes genetic', it means, it is the genesis of Dante's poetry. For him, 'Beatrice means an inaccessible corporeal density made accessible figurally and poetically, or, more broadly speaking, phenomenally' only by this cloth (HARRISON, 1988, p. 24). Consequently, Dante can only praise and love Beatrice through poetic pontentiality. He instantly projects his desirehis sexual desire in this sexual awakeningon the body of Beatrice; then through thinking, pondering and imagination he drives such desire to poetic creation. Obsessively, he seeks for materialising poetically his desire in poetry, because the body of Beatrice is just made accessible 'in its figurative re-presentation' and in the cloth that veils it (HARRISON, 1988, p. 24). That is his painstaking search through his literary carreer and his painstaking pilgrimage throughout Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Moreover, Dante's 'role of authority' is to manipulate 'the scene of desire'. He creates in this scene a personification genetically engendered by the crimson cloth. His heart, 'fraught with phallic symbolism' is eaten by Beatrice due to his lord's order (HARRISON, 1988, p. 24).
The lord's role in Dante's dream 'is ultimately to guard the cloth's concealment of Beatrice's body and to ensure a wholly figurative transaction of desire' between Dante and her body (HARRISON, 1988, p. 24-25). The lord, who seems a very powerful figure, holds, in one of his hands, the body of Beatrice, veiled in the crimson cloth, and, in his other hand, he holds Dante's heart, which is the 'flaming emblem of passion' in the scene (HARRISON, 1998, p. 25). The projection of his desire on the cloth and her idealising figure, distanced by the lord, is linked to a reversal in the scene. In Harrison's opinion, The reversal whereby the erotic or even phallic fire of the heart is consumed by Beatrice figures as a dubious consummation of desire brought on by the lord, for instead of a consummation we have a momentous incorporation of the heart in the withdrawing body of Beatrice. (HARRISON, 1988, p. 25) It is as if Beatrice captures Dante's heart and desire in a way that the only possibility of 19 'To every captive soul and gentle heart / into whose sight this present speech may come, / so that they might write its meaning for me, / greetings, in their lord's name, who is Love. // Already a third of the hours were almost past / of the time when all the stars were shining, / when Amor suddenly appeared to me / whose memory fills me with terror. // Joyfully Amor seemed to me to hold / my heart in his hand, and held in his arms / my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping. // Then he woke her, and that burning heart / he fed to her reverently, she fearing, / afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.' (Dante, 2001, p. 13) recovering it lies in Dante's possession of her body. Thus Beatrice becomes an idealistic female figure whom Dante seeks for representing in his art. However, 'his active desire gets reduced to a passive impotence and castrated by the overdetermined circumstance. The flaming object tropologically condenses the raw urgency of desire' (HARRISON,1988, p. 25). Also, Harrison suggests that the flaming object means a 'sinister fragmentation', since the extraction of his heart and Beatrice's eating it figure simultaneously as 'a literal dismemberment, a figurative castration' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 25). Such dismemberment or figurative castration makes him a passive lover who cannot achieve his beloved object any more. The metaphor of the dead heart suggesting 'the castrated phallus' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 25) conveys the symbolic meaning that his desire must be punished by castration and impotence. Thus, the crimson cloth figures as a symbol of 'censorship, disclosure, and figuration' of Dante's desire (HARRISON, 1988, p. 26). The crimson cloth remains as a symbol which represents and condenses both the expropriation and apropriation of the body of Beatrice, the permission and denial of Dante's unconfessed sexuality and sexual desire. The metaphoric field of the poetic desire is atomised in the crimson cloth, which metonimically substitutes the body of Beatrice and enables the poet's desire. Moreover, such desire would imaginatively be achieved in a distant afterlife, after Beatrice's death, who, most contradictorily, even there remained untouched by the poet. Then, the body of Beatrice is the 'undisclosed substance of revelation' and its accessibility is only permitted through the veiling cloth, which leads Dante to his 'new life [Vita Nuova] to the aesthetic order [...] to the quest for a revelation through the poetic enterprise' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 28). The blind spotthe concealed body of Beatricein that scene, potentialises, through the withdrawal of her body, the inspiration of Dante as a lover to his poetic creation.
However, Dante's first work fails to represent her body and his desire. His failure is conveyed by Dante's attitude of being silent until he can 'speak of Beatrice more worthily' (DANTE, 2001, p. 80). Such failure reveals Dante's incapability of seeing and confessing 'the true meaning of his 'marvellous vision' in the dream (HARRISON, 1988, p. 30). If the dream and its 'marvellous vision' is the starting point of his literary creation, he cannot re-present the meaning of such revelation and postpone it to his next work, his Divine Comedy. The first stimulus in the dream scene makes Dante more and more distant from the body of Beatrice: 'never again, not even in paradise, will Dante be so near to Beatrice' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 30). Consequently, only the crimson cloth remains as a locus of idealisation of a vision whose meaning was not possible to be grasped. Thus, 'the distance of a veil that holds him off from her naked presence gradually becomes the vast expanse of a cosmos that the poet will traverse in an inexorable venture of representation' (HARRISON, 1988, p. 30). His desire is driven to poetic creation as an attempt to fulfil and depict such desire. Therefore, it is inferable from Harrison's analysis that Dante represents his inward desire, conceals and transforms it into poetic mimesis. He represents in this scene a fully desiring self, as well as his feelings, emotions, suffering, ideas and anxieties. Dante represents a desiring sexual and sensual inwardness in his work, even though it is obsessively veiled by the crimson cloth and then by poetic and imagetic figuration. His poetic undertaking will figuratively hide and repress his innermost uncofessed sexual and sensual desire for Beatrice in his poetry. His poetic creation will veil such desire in metaphors, images, silences and anxieties.  Auerbach (2007a), 'for Dante, as for the earlier poets, the primary factor was an inward striving for form, and such a striving was already present in high degree when he found both a confirmation and a model in the poems of Virgil and other Latin writers' (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 53). Dante creates a new form of language, syntax and twists which enables him to represent inwardness through action. For Auerbach, Dante 'discovered the European representation (Gestalt) of man' and that makes him the father of modern literature (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 174). Auerbach points that man in Dante's work is no longer a remote hero, but a man with human traits. For Auerbach, Dante represents Man, not as a remote legendary, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholesome; and in that he has been followed by all subsequent portrayers of man, regardless of whether they treated a historical or mythical or a religious subject. (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 174-175) Though Augustine represented his inner feelings in his work, Dante's representation of the human being is a rather humanised self in his characters, acting and suffering the consequences of his actions. In Dante, 'the empirical person, the individual with his inner life, could become an object of mimesis' (AUERBACH, 2007a, p. 179  feelings in material things, such as his ducats and his 'turquoise', the ring he was given by his bereaved wife Leah, which Jessica will dispisingly sell for a monkey. As soon as he discovers that Jessica sold his ring, he will uncontrollably rage on the streets for his loss and he will claim his lost ring, wherein he projected his affection regarding his wife. Shakespeare innovated his drama with the mimesis of inwardness, just as he deepened the representations of psychic inner workings such as what Psychoanalysis will name projections, desires, anxieties, and conscience.

Montaigne and the Self-Investigation of an Inward Space
Montaigne employed a mimesis of an inward space in his Essays. The French essayist investigated costums, behaviour, moral feelings, just as his own inward feelings, emotions, thoughts and ideas. His innovating work proposes to investigate the for interieur. In the 'preface' for the Essays, Montaigne enhances that 'it is myself the matter of this book ' (1987, p. 95), which characterises his self-investigative proposal from the start. Montaigne introduced renewing elements in his Essays, in its form, style and content, which influenced Shakespeare a great deal. It is quite known that he strongly influenced Shakespeare after 1603 when Florio's translation of the Essays was first published in England. But there are evidences that perhaps Shakespeare knew some of Montaigne's essays in French before Florio's translation.
Shakespeare read very well in French, as well as he wrote some scenes in French in Henry V.
There were many editions of Montaigne's essays in French in England during the late 16 th century. However, critics point out that Montaigne's impact on Shakespeare's writing is more evident after the translation into English. But what is important now is to notice that just as Shakespeare employed a genuine mimesis of inwardness in the drama, Montaigne used a genuine literary form, the essay, to represent inwardness or, as Friedrich (2010) suggests, subjectivity. 20 Some traits in Montaigne's Essays demonstrate self-investigation, the investigation of conscience and inwardness. He demonstrates blending and nuances of inwardness in his work.
Thereto, he creates mimetic devices to represent inwardness, such as the divagating style, sometimes sinuous and hesitating, which alludes to inward floatation; he inserts syntax without rhetorical ornaments and stiffness. The rhythmic movement, according Auerbach in his Mimesis (2007c), leads the reader to the twist and turns of inwardness and of human condition.
Besides that, his ironic humbleness and his scepticism are innate signs in his style and thought, which enable the self-investigation of the inward dimensions. Montaigne suggests that inwardness is perceived in inward floatation of feelings, changes of ideas and thoughts. For instance, in his essay Of the inconstancy of our actions he uses the analogy of our inward dimensions as a heap of pieces put together by chance. 21 Also in his essay Of Repentance he acknowledges the inward floatation of the self: If I speak variously of myself, it is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. 'Distinguo' is the most universal member of my logic. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, III, ii, p. 153) Montaigne is aware that our feelings, ideas and inward dimensions are put together by chance and they are built with diverse elements which seem to work independently and Montaigne is the first writer to discover the aesthetic quality of the essays. In fact, the divagation about the inward space of the individual needed another rhetoric which could comprehend the floatation and incoherence of the mind and human feelings. As he points out in his essay Of the Inconstancy of our Actions, 'I discompose and trouble myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn her to.' (MONTAIGNE, 1987, II, I, p. 100). Montaigne adapts the form to the content, since he understands that the meaning conveyed in the essays must be enhanced by its innovating structure. This renewing writing contributes, for him, to crystallise his consciousness and thereby he adopts the 'simultaneous observation' of facts and of his inward feelings, which form 'a tracing of the transformations of the floating subjectivity' and of 'the eternal movement of his spirit' (FRIEDERICH, 2010, p. 342-343). Thus, writing is for him a reflection about himself. His consciousness as a writer is part of his consciousness about himself (FRIEDERICH, 2010, p. 340).
This innovating form is essential to define Montaigne's work. According to Auerbach, in his Mimesis (2007), 'Montaigne is something new; the flavour of the personal element' and, precisely, of only one person, presents himself penetratedly and 'the form of expression is still more spontaneous and near to the language spoken every day' (AUERBACH, 2007, p. 259).
Auerbach defines that Montaigne presents a modern and 'rigorous method' (AUERBACH, 2007, p. 255) and he describes it as 'the method of listening to himself, of the observation of his own inward movements' (AUERBACH, 2007, p. 261). Montaigne is the first to create the aesthetics of the essays. There were more elaborated forms of language in the period, but I cannot fix my object; 'tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute, I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention. 'Tis a counterpart of various and changeable accidents, and of irresolute imaginations, and, as it falls out, sometimes contrary: whether it be that I am then another self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations: so it is that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said, I never contradict the truth. Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, III, II, p. 152-153).
Montaigne makes clear in this part that ideas, thoughts and feelings are not fixed and unchangeable, but they are prone to changes, floatation and contradictions. When describing himself, something alters in inwardness, because the analysis changes it, as long as he tries to pin down its meaning and shape. It is crystal clear for him that we are sensitive to outward changes. There is no way of controlling feelings, once they seem to be controlled by some mysterious forces. Such contradictions are therefore what constitute human essence and inwardness.
Even though Montaigne proposes to investigate the aetiology of inwardness, he confesses in his essay Of Fear the difficulty in dealing with such issue. In this essay he acknowledges once again the incapability of controlling feelings such as shame and fear: I am not so good a naturalist (as they call it) as to discern by what secret springs fear has its motion in us; but, be this as it may, 'tis a strange passion, and such a one that the physicians say there is no other whatever that sooner dethrones our judgment from its proper seat; which is so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain that it begets a terrible astonishment and confusion during the fit. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, I, XVIII, p. 153) He observes that certain human feelings such as fear, shame, conscience are uncontrolled by our rationality, just as Psychoanalysis acknowledges such fact in the 20 th century. We see Montaigne's consciousness in distinguishing different twist and turns of the mind, thought, conscience and unconscious. They make part of the human dimensions which make us vulnerable, even though we try to control them. There is something in inwardness which is beyond our understanding and which deceives us all the time. Therefore, when we try to analyse ourselves, the analysis interferes in our feelings and thoughts, changing them immediately. What we think that we represent is only a vague and evasive idea of all our mental fluxes. Again in his essay Of the Inconstancy of our Actions, he points that We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current.
[…] We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly. In any one who had prescribed and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his whole life. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, II, I, p. 98) When we talk about ourselves, we can speak not exactly what we are, but what we seem or want to be. In that sense, such indeterminacy, imprecision and this set of 'mental fluxes', thoughts, feelings and ideas are a space of ambiguities, ambivalences, paradoxes and incongruences of the self. He admits that such incoherence, ambivalence and instability are elements which allude to the uncontrolled dimensions of the inner-self. It is influenced by external elements creating a space of instability. For him, For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn her to. If I speak variously of myself, it is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. 'Distinguo' is the most universal member of my logic. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, II, I, p. 100).
He describes his inward state presenting opposing feelings and attitudes, which signs his awareness that human beings are determined by paradoxical dimensions. Though these dimensions are conflicting, they can co-exist harmoniously in the self, as long as the human being acknowledges them and knows how to manage such uncontrolling dimensions. In that sense, Auerbach observes that in Montaigne 'man is a vacillating being, subject to changes of the world, of fate and of his own inward movements' (AUERBACH, 2007, p. 255). The soul and reason are always modified by the experience. Moreover, the French essayist tries to pin down his inwardness employing diverse images. For instance, he uses the metaphor of the wind as a form of representing the instability of feelings. Thus, outside elements as experiences, sensations and others' opinions interfere in our thoughts, attitudes and feelings.
Montaigne was also aware of the interference that the feelings have in our judgement and understanding. In his essay That is folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity he anticipates some assumptions of modern Kantian Philosophy. As he states, 'tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of those; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story I had no mind to believe […]. Whereas I now find, that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least, as they; not that experience has taught me anything to alter my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. (MONTAIGNE, 1987, I, XXVII,p. 239) Montaigne points out our incapability of judging certain phenomena only by reason.
Sensibility and feelings are essential in the constitution of judgement. In many moments we cannot explain certain phenomena only using reasoning and scientific thought. He insists that there is something in our feelings, imagination and sensibility which come together with rationality. Similarly, in Montaigne's work Auerbach draws our attention to this important trait in Montaigne's essay, which enhances that thinking is co-determined by imagination and sensibility. 23 For Auerbach, the superiority of knowledge acquires a positive meaning, in the view of knowledge theory, only for the moral research of the man; because Montaigne envisages the research of the humaine condition in general with the investigation of life itself as a whole and he manifests thus the heuristic principle of which we use continuously, consciously or unconsciously, sensitively or not, when we are involved in understanding and judging the acts of other men… (AUERBACH, 2007, p. 265) For Montaigne our judgement is fallible if we analyse a phenomenon only by our rationality. He draws the attention to the failure of rationality which negates extraordinary facts.
Even though certain phenomena seem improbable, Montaigne does not reject the possibility of the failure of our judgement and rationality. To doubt is to the French essayist a virtue, since in doubting and questioning the truth, it is possible to create and constitute new forms of thinking and acting. According to Friedrich (2010), any judgement is imperfect and vague. Such discovery is one of the greatest vectors of Montaigne's Essays and its application is essential to his moral Science. (2010, p. 166).
Therefore, mediaeval and early modern authors such as Augustine, Dante, Montaigne and Shakesepare introduced some innovations in literary forms to depict inwardness. Such mimesis depends on the twists of language, level and quantities of figurations, the innovating syntax, deepening and intensification of feelings and inward obscure dimensions suggested in their work. Thus, Shakespeare renewed the mimesis of inwardness in the middle of an on-going process which had its roots in social, cultural, and historical events, such as merchantilism, the invention of the press, the new world discoveries, religious changes. Indeed, the emergence of inwardness was a fact which was 'hovering in the air'. Therefore, in authors such as Dante, Augustine, and Montaigne, one can assert that inwardness was, to some extant, a process being constituted and shaped some centuries before Shakespeare.