Respect

Aided by Kant’s account, in “The Analytic of the Sublime,” of how “respect” is accessed, these pages show that effectively endless series of specific representations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as King Lear open a moment of suspension, or space of “negativity,” within which that which Theseus terms “noble respect,” or France calls “inflamed respect,” can emerge. This route to respect may at first seem purely negative, yet its resulting humiliations of self-conceit release the good will of respect that is latent in the human. In these plays the attainment to respect is achieved in a reciprocal “amendment” or “art of known and feeling sorrows” that transpires most fully between spectator and play. Puck — standing amended beyond his play — envisions that which will “ere long… restore” these “amends.” He speaks as a minor prophet of a theatrical redemption that is outside time and in liminal space, even sweeping aside the play that was.