Resentment: Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Anger without Privilege

This essay traces the literary and cultural history of resentment from the word’s first arrival in English. It argues that resentment harbors the seeds of a new paradigm of anger, tied to a new sense of anger’s social content: where ancient accounts of anger center on the anger of the powerful, this form of anger—embodied most famously in Nietzsche’s theory of Ressentiment—addresses the anger of disempowered social agents. The argument unfolds in three stages: first, I use digital tools and a large-scale archive to analyze what early modern writers wrote about when they wrote about resentment; second, I pursue the word into the history of science and new ways of thinking about the nature of anger; and third, I read literary history and the Shakespearean plot of tragic intrigue in particular as an extended imaginative investigation of this changing set of concerns in the sociality of anger.