Dominican philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was imprisoned in Rome for heresy in 1594-7; exiled to Calabria, he was incarcerated in Naples (1599-1626) after inciting a failed rebellion against Spanish rulers. Campanella claimed in On the Sense of Things and On Natural Magic that ‘in order to know the feelings [affetti] of a particular man’, you had only to imagine you had ‘the same nose, skin, face or forehead’. He used similar methods of empathetic mimicry to pretend he was mad – thereby surviving torture and avoiding a death sentence. French orientalist Jacques Gaffarel visited him in prison in 1620 to find him grimacing, and assumed he was mad. But Campanella was writing to Cardinal Magalotti, mimicking his features and expressions so he could write a more persuasive letter; he asked his visitor if the Cardinal now had a beard.
Campanella’s ‘method-acting’ will be contextualised in relation to late sixteenth century belief that preachers, poets, actors and artists have to feel the feelings they are expressing in order to move their public; this is endorsed in Campanella’s treatise on Rhetoric, and exemplified by, among others, the sculptor Bernini and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics was a major catalyst, as well as a post-reformation insistence on emotional authenticity, and on physical and mental empathy with the sufferings of saints. The creation of personae who were not in prison allowed Campanella to transcend his pain, exile and imprisonment, and to create company in solitary confinement.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 