Abstract
This chapter writes the backstory of how Fancy arises as an imaginative tool in first half of the seventeenth century. Its early signature is discernable in Ariel’s self-conscious fanciful touches to Prospero’s domineering will in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When Ariel is released at the end of the play, the “Ariel function” proceeds in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. When Bacon invokes Shakespeare’s island in constructing his own, Bacon unwittingly imports Fancy’s presence into the structure of his new natural philosophy, sketched out on the island of Bensalem. Bacon emphatically excludes women from the island’s rationalizing endeavors by positioning them (like Ariel’s fanciful touches) as threads that go nowhere. Oddly, it is this dead-end position of the female within his new science that becomes an oppositional interlocutor for later women writers.
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Notes
- 1.
I capitalize these terms when I refer to them as they are distinguished in the period; this is particularly helpful in this chapter, when I am discussing a version of the imagination that will be called Fancy by the mid-century but is not always called so during the first half of the century. This chapter will trace the teasing apart of this “fanciful” version of the imagination in the early part of the century and will use the term “Fancy” to refer to the collection of attributes that will be consolidated into Hobbes’s Fancy in 1651. Occasionally, I will use “small-i” imagination as a catch-all term for a more general idea of creativity.
- 2.
For example, Robert Burton routinely refers to the “Phantasie, or Imagination” in The Anatomy of Melancholy What It Is. With All the Kindes, Causes Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of It (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1621).
- 3.
See John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1, note 1.
- 4.
John Dryden, “An Account of the Ensuing Poem, in a Letter to the Honorable, Sir Robert Howard” in Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders (London, 1667).
- 5.
William D’Avenant, A Discourse Upon Gondibert an Heroick Poem/ Written by Sr. William D’Avenant; with an Answer to It, by Mr. Hobbs (A Paris: Chez Matthieu Guillemot…, 1650), p. 132. Hereafter referred to as Answer to Davenant’s Preface.
- 6.
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4, eds. James Spedding et al. (London: Longman, 1857–1870), 28.
- 7.
It is not clear whether Bacon is referencing Shakespeare’s play directly. As Paula Findlen notes, Bacon often did not cite works that he read, “putting into practice his advice that knowledge be born from experience rather than authority.” See Findlen, “Francis Bacon and the Reform of Natural History in the Seventeenth Century,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 240. Elizabeth Spiller establishes an early modern audience whose reading practices would have included reading literary works like The Tempest and scientific texts such as The New Atlantis, and thus provides the grounds for imagining Bacon, and his audience, as intimately familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Spiller incorporates into her critical methodology, as I too do here, the “early modern practice of collecting what might otherwise seem to be disparate texts” (13), thereby replicating the experience of early modern readers “as they repeatedly move from science to literature and back” (14). See Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 8.
Linda Charnes, “Extraordinary Renditions: Character and Place Reconsidered,” in Shakespeare After 9–11: How Social Trauma Shapes Interpretation, eds. Julia Reinhardt Lupton and Matthew Biberman (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 7.
- 9.
See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
- 10.
See Bryan Reynolds and Ayanna Thompson, “Inspriteful Ariels: Transversal Tempests,” in Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, ed. Bryan Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 189–214. See also the Introduction to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 73–124. Vaughan and Vaughan note that it is only in contemporary productions that Ariel is usually cast as male, while in the Restoration and eighteenth century in particular, Ariel was inevitably female.
- 11.
To make his case for “Great Britaine,” James turned to the pre-existing form of the island that contained England, Wales (already under the English throne), and Scotland. Soon after taking the throne in 1603, King James appealed to Parliament: “Hath He not made us all in one island, compassed with one sea and of itself by nature indivisible as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late borders cannot distinguish, nor know, or discern their own limits?” (“A Speech to Parliament,” 1603, in Works, 1616). In other words, James staked his claim to unite both countries under one name, Great Britain, on the very structure of the land on which these two nations rested. His was inherently a formal claim. Parliament rejected both his claim and his title, King of Great Britain; in fact, Francis Bacon would be the one to inform the King that he could not use this royal style in any legal documents. However, the King’s ambition of this imagined national future would continue to hang over the culture for the next century, making the figure of the island itself particularly meaningful at this historical moment.
- 12.
During the Age of Exploration in the late medieval and early modern periods, European writers often represented traveling to new lands as equivalent to traveling to the old world; since they considered Europe the most advanced civilization, they tended to see residents of other lands as more primitive versions of humanity. Thus, rather than discovering new worlds, explorers thought of themselves as recovering old ones. As John Gillis points out, in this timeframe, “space has no existence apart from time. Travel out in space was to be seen as travel in time, backward and forward,” meaning that explorers did not just think of themselves as finding old worlds in the present moment, but of traveling back in time through space. See John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 60. By the seventeenth century, this understanding of other lands had shifted: Europeans were more familiar with the idea of the “new world” in the way we recognize it now, and they no longer thought of sea travel as time travel. With these conceptual changes and especially after Thomas More’s foundational Utopia (1516), it was possible to see the island as outside time and containing societies that were alternatives to, rather than older or newer versions of, European ones.
- 13.
John R. Gillis, “Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds,” in Islands in History and Representation, eds. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19–31. John Gillis explores the importance of the figure of the island in the western imagination in more detail in Islands of the Mind.
- 14.
Roland Greene, “Island Logic,” in The Tempest and Its Travels, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 141.
- 15.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Anne Barton (New York: New Penguin Shakespeare, 1968), 22.
- 16.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. David Lindley, Updated Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70.
- 17.
For a more detailed overview of the adaptations of and scholarship on The Tempest since its first performance, see David Lindley’s Introduction to the Cambridge edition of The Tempest. See also Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s Introduction to the Arden edition of The Tempest, especially 72–124; and The Tempest and Its Travels, eds. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
- 18.
See Mary Crane Thomas, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially 178–210; and Evelyn B. Tribble, “‘The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time’: The Tempest and Memory” in College Literature 33.1 (Winter 2006), 151–168.
- 19.
Prospero’s “dull thing” is sometimes read as referring to Ariel, a reading that would further underscore Prospero’s irritation at Ariel’s statement. The “I say so,” however, suggests that Prospero is correcting Ariel’s renaming of Caliban as a human “son” and not an animal offspring like “whelp.” Though I favor the second interpretation, both readings support my point, and it may well be the case that, with this line, Shakespeare has it both ways.
- 20.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 3: 146.
- 21.
In her work of staggering breadth, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), Picciotto argues that Bacon is responsible for redeeming “curiosity from its association with original sin” (3), making knowledge production dependent upon the collective work of natural philosophers, whose objectivity recaptures Adam’s innocence. Picciotto explores how the Royal Society (as well as many “experimentalist writers”) took up these ideals in the seventeenth century. See also Steve A. McKnight, “Religion and Francis Bacon’s Utopianism,” Zygon 42.2 (2007), 463–486. who, like Picciotto, argues against the dominant view that frames Bacon’s natural philosophy as implicitly secular.
- 22.
Brian Vickers points out that in The New Atlantis, Bacon was always thinking about the institutionalization of science. As one of many examples of the influence of Bacon’s island on the Royal Society, Vickers cites the desire of one of its members, Clodius Hartlib, to establish “‘an universal laboratory…as may redound, not only to the good of this island, but also to the health and wealth of mankind,’ and in May 1654 Hartlib wrote to Boyle about a visit he had made to Lambeth Marsh ‘to see part of that foundation of building, which is designed for the execution of my lord Verulam’s New Atlantis.’” (5). See Brian Vickers, English Science, Bacon to Newton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). More recently, Deborah Harkness outlines how Bacon’s disciplined, collegiate vision of natural philosophy’s practice countered the already-ongoing practice of science that took place more “on the streets,” if you will: “Bacon was not calling for something new. He was calling for something different—a science that was located not in the unruly and raucous streets of the City but in the orderly precincts of a college setting.” Deborah Harkness, Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 214.
- 23.
Amy Boesky, “Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Laboratory of Prose,” in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, eds. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148.
- 24.
For a different interpretation of the Bensalemites’ general disposition, see Jerry Weinberger, “On the Miracles in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Bronwen Price (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 106–128. My argument certainly does not negate Weinberger’s observation that “there is something unsettling and even creepy about the Bensalemites” all around, suggesting that they appear “lobotomized” and act like “zombies” (107).
- 25.
On the surprising centrality of accident and chance to Bacon’s natural philosophy, see Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially 111–129.
- 26.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon 4: 32–33.
- 27.
McKnight, “Religion and Francis Bacon’s Utopianism,” 478.
- 28.
By the end of the century, the optimism in possessing complete and certain knowledge expressed by Bacon had waned considerably. In Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England, Barbara Shapiro argues that, as the century progressed, this ideal was increasingly understood by scientific practitioners to be impossible; rather, what prevailed was a sense of skepticism over the degree to which we can trust the knowledge we generate. See Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
- 29.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 37.
- 30.
For instance, Bacon turns to the aphoristic style in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620) in response to the expository form used by many other natural philosophers, which Bacon believed mistakenly presented knowledge as coherent and finished when it was anything but. He believes instead that “knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth”; it also allows the natural philosopher to avoid any inaccurate leaps of thought to cover over rough patches of reasoning; rather, the white space of the page between the numbered aphorisms highlights the parts of knowledge that need still to be filled in. See Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon 3: 292.
- 31.
See John Guillory, “The Bachelor State: Philosophy and Sovereignty in Bacon’s New Atlantis” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, eds. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 72.
- 32.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 30.
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Smyth, M. (2017). Threads That Go Nowhere in The Tempest and The New Atlantis . In: Women Writing Fancy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49427-2_2
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