Everyone needs a good night's sleep, but the body's need for rest can be at odds with the social need for ever-wakeful vigilance. Benjamin Parris's Vital Strife takes as its starting point Stoic metaphysics and Seneca's Hercules surrendering to sleep, and weaves a narrative that unites a variety of primarily canonical early modern texts into the web of the dreamworld. This web is impressively intricate, drawing richly from a variety of classical, early modern, and contemporary sources, including Stoic metaphysics, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato, Deleuze, Foucault, Kantorowicz, and Agamben. Pneuma, in particular, is privileged: spirit/breath is presented as connecting humanity, nature, and the cosmos to illustrate the ethical and biopolitical textures of sleep. Oikeôsis (or, more broadly, the ethics of self-care and its extension to care of others) is also central to this study, which pits Renaissance humanism's advocacy of wakefulness against a growing recognition of the importance of sleep. In this reading of sleep, vigilant wakefulness (as authorized by scripture) is positioned as the dominant—albeit increasingly undermined—way of understanding sleep in the early modern period. As such, insomnia poses an ethical dilemma.
Parris weaves a tightly presented argument, beginning with a densely executed theoretical and methodological framework before addressing a range of authors in turn. Chapter 1 provides a detailed overview of approaches to sleep and its intersection with bodily feeling, ethics, and pastoral care from antiquity through to the early modern classroom. Inevitably, such a discussion cannot be exhaustive, and, while Parris deftly establishes the framework for this study, the analysis is, perhaps, a little too focused upon Stoic metaphysics. The way in which sleep is understood in the early modern period may not be as binary as the analytical framework might imply.
Chapter 2 turns to Jasper Heywood's 1561 translation of Seneca's Hercules Furens as a case study for the cosmological principles of Stoic ethics. Chapter 3 offers an analysis of three Shakespeare tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. Providing an overview of Ernst Kantorowicz's influential analysis of the king's two bodies (and encompassing Agamben's reappraisal and assessment of the two bodies’ origins in antiquity rather than medieval thought), this second chapter presents Shakespeare as skeptical of rex exsomnis, the sleepless sovereign who watches over their subjects in the same way that good shepherds watch over their flocks. Instead, a sovereign's “careless slumber” is “an event of ecopolitical significance” (99), and kingly insomnia threatens both the body of the monarch and the body of the state. While the book is perhaps stronger on Hamlet than the other two plays, I would have liked to have seen further reflection on the nature of other forms of wakefulness in relation to legitimacy, and on how tyranny might mediate ethical care and insomnia.
Chapter 4 turns to books 1 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene to juxtapose Redcrosse's need for restorative shut-eye with Scudamore's insomnia and being wounded by Care. Drawing from Pauline political theology, Parris points to the “mounting fascination with the vital power of living beings, and their approaching future as objects of scientific and biopolitical concern” (179). Chapter 5 is a highlight of the study, addressing how Paradise Lost modifies Stoic ideas about cosmic reason, physical bodies, and vitality, where the restless insomnia of Satan is pitted against the restorative slumber of prelapsarian humanity and the more recreational sleep of the angels. A somewhat breathy coda briefly introduces Descartes and Margaret Cavendish, and puts Cartesian mechanical philosophy into conflict with Epicurean atomism. While this neatly ties up the argument, it risks presenting a teleological narrative that negates the complexity that Parris seeks to infuse into the thesis. Nevertheless, this is a provocative book that affirms sleep, insomnia, and wakefulness as frames of reference for theological, ethical, and bodily feelings. It begs us to rethink our assumptions about Stoic metaphysics and its influence on early modern thought and English literary history.
