Abstract
If it is true as former Royal Shakespeare Company director John Barton has claimed that time is the most important word in Shakespeare’s plays, then it may also be true that the mirror is one of Shakespeare’s most important metaphors. Because mirror imagery is so prevalent in the plays it has received a great deal of critical attention.1 In his comprehensive study of mirror imagery in medieval and early modern English literature Herbert Grabes dedicates a chapter to the study of Shakespeare’s seventy mirror passages. Grabes claims that even though Shakespeare’s mirror imagery covers conventional territory, he often “exploits conventions of metaphor, extending, varying and combining them contextually and enriching them functionally.”2 This chapter will focus on the technological and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s mirror metaphors, paying special attention to those metaphors that depict individuals as mirrors and those metaphors that reveal moral ambivalence regarding the mirror.
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Hamlet, 3.2.16–22
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Notes
For studies of mirror scenes and mirror passages see H. T. Price, “Mirror Scenes in Shakespeare,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. J. G. McManaway et al. (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 103–113;
Rudolf Stamm, “The Glass of Pandar’s Praise: The Word-Scenery, Mirror Passages, and Reported Scenes in Troilus and Cressida,” in The Shaping Powers at Work: Fifteen Essays on Poetic Transmutation ( Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1967 ), pp. 32–51.
Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 ), p. 204.
Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man ( Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1985 ), p. 140.
See Caroline Barron, “Richard II: Image and Reality,” in Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych ( London: National Gallery Publications, 1993 ), p. 13.
Jean des Caurres, Recueil des Oeuvres Morales et Diversifiées (Paris, 1575).
See, e.g., Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 279–296.
Lawrence Danson, “Henry V: King, Chorus, and Critics,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 29.
From Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones, trans. Thomas H. Corcoran ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 ), pp. 2–3.
In Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967 ), p. 6.
See Richard Deacon, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I ( London: Frederick Muller, 1968 ), pp. 80–81.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 ), p. 17.
For more on the history of scrying see Theodore Besterman, Crystal-Gazing: A Study in the History, Distribution, and Practice of Scrying ( London: W. Ryder, 1924 ).
In George L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929 ), p. 185.
Melchior-Bonnet, p. 189. Francis Bacon criticized mirror scrying on epistemological grounds. He used the distorting mirror of divination as a metaphor for the way that the intellect interacts with and ultimately distorts the stimuli it receives from nature: “Just as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of things, so the mind also, when it is acted upon by things through the sense, treacherously implants and mixes its own nature into the nature of things, in the process of forming its own erroneous notions.” Only the regimented use of a philosophical method could transform the intellect into a true reflecting glass. See Francis Bacon’s “Plan of the Work” for The Great Instauration, in Novum Organon, ed. and trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson ( Chicago: Open Court Press, 1994 ), p. 23.
See A. Goodrich-Freer, “Recent Experiments in Crystal-Vision,” Proceedings of the Society for Physical Research 5 (1889): 495.
For more on the mirror’s role in this scene see Peter Ure, “The looking-glass of Richard II,” Philological Quarterly 34 (1955): 219–224.
For more on drama as a mirror see Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy ( San Mateo, CA: Huntington Library, 1958 );
Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; repr., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970 );
Ruth L. Anderson, “The Mirror Concept and its Relation to the Drama of the Renaissance,” Northwest Missouri State Teachers College Studies 3 (1939): 47–74; and
Eugene Waith, “The Comic Mirror and the World of Glass,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 9 (1966): 16–23.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 ), pp. 13–14.
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© 2006 Adam Max Cohen
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Cohen, A.M. (2006). Shakespeare’s Halls of Mirrors. In: Shakespeare and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12004-5_6
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