Abstract
Overwhelmed by a miniature portrait of his beloved Portia, the hero of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is prompted to ask: ‘What demi God / Hath come so near creation?’ (3.2.122-23).1 Facing Portia’s likeness, Bassanio marvels in Petrarchan fashion at the liveliness of the eyes, lips, and hair portrayed before him. The spell only lasts a moment, however, for almost as soon as he falls under the image’s power, he turns and repudiates it: ‘Yet looke how farre / the substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow / in underpinning it, so far this shadow / doth limp behind the substance’ (3.2.133-37). Bassanio’s sudden shift provides a window onto the anxiety of an era in which visual images evoked both admiration and scorn. His praise of the miniature’s appearance comes only a few lines after a fairly doctrinaire speech in which he had summed up the perils of visual appearance with the memorable aphorism: ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves / the world is still deceived with ornament’ (3.2.79-80). By following Bassanio’s speech on the proper attitude toward ‘outward shows’ with a scene in which the hero is called upon to respond to a particular visual image thrust before his eyes, Shakespeare stages an important and unresolved struggle over the ethical response to images in early modern England. That struggle is the subject of this book.
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Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations of Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Evans’s editorial square brackets have here been silently elided.
Patrick Collinson describes the ethos in England after 1580 as “iconophobic” (The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [New York: St. Martins Press, 1988], 99). On iconoclastic and antivisual sentiment in early modern England, see John Philips, The Reformation of Images: The Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973);
Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Vol. I Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988);
Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
On the question “Is England a visual nation?” Nikolaus Pevsner concludes that “though the cases of Dürer and Rembrandt (and many others) show sufficiently that individual genius can flourish in reformed, as vigorously as in unreformed, countries … in England it did not” (The Englishness of English Art [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964], 206). Pevsner begins his survey of English art with Hogarth, though he adds that “if one includes architecture, design, and planning, and if one includes the Middle Ages, the significance of the English contribution to European art grows considerably” (205). The flourishing of—as well as the prejudice against—the early modern English theater, the art form closest to visual experience itself, is evidence of an abiding cultural interest in visuality. On the reaction to the theater, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981);
Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2005);
Jennifer Waldron, “Gaping upon Plays: Shakespeare, Gosson, and the Reformation of Vision,” Critical Matrix 12 (2001): 48–77;
O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye; and Diehl, Staging Reform. On the importance of the visual elements of print, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
On the visual arts and their relationship to literature in early modern England, see Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the 17th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978);
David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1900).
Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.
St. Bonaventura, The Mind’s Road to God, trans. George Boas (New York: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1953), sec. II, par. 13.
See, for example, Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Common Places of the most famous and renowmed Diuine Doctor Peter Martyr, diuided into foure principall parts … (London, 1583);
William Perkins, A commentaire or exposition, vpon the fiue first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1604).
George Hakewill, The vanitie of the eye first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight, upon occasion enlarged and published for the common good (Oxford, 1615), chapter 18. Hakewill is among those who seemed intent to reject all visual experience as corrupt. His treatise was written for a blind woman, and in the second half he lauds the benefits of a lack of sight. See Clark, Vanities of the Eye. Clark structures his account of the intellectual history surrounding early modern vision on Hakewill’s treatise.
Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the five senses (London, 1620), 3–4.
Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561; Rpt. New York: National Alumni, 1907), 344.
Marsilio Ficino, “Platonic Theology,” trans. Josephine Burroughs Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944), 227–242, esp. 236.
Unless otherwise specified, scriptural references are to The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). I have expanded abbreviations and modernized spelling.
On Spenser’s images “in bono et in malo,” see Carol Kaske, Spenser’s Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 2.
Thomas Blundeville, The true order and method of Writing and reading Histories, 1574, ed. Hugh G. Dick, Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1940): 149–170, esp. 165.
Aristotle, The problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitions. Wherein are contayned diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie. (Edinburgh, 1595), sig. L7r—L7v. This curious compendium of answers to popular questions was published from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century.
See Ann Blair, “Authorship in the Popular Problemata Aristotelis,” Early Science and Medicine 4, No. 3 (1999): 189–227.
John Davies, Wittes pilgrimage, (by poeticall essaies) through a world of amorous sonnets, soule-passions, and other passages, diuine, philosophicall, morall, poeticall, and politicall. (London, 1605), sig. B3r.
Christopher Marlowe, The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910).
John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry, ed. A. L. Clements (New York: Norton, 1966), ln 5–8.
Donne’s familiarity with Kepler has been established. See William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume I, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
See also, Wilbur Applebaum, “Donne’s Meeting with Kepler: A Previously Unknown Episode,” Philological Quarterly 50.1 (January 1971), 132–34.
According to John Cartwright and Brian Baker: “It is clear that Donne had read both Kepler’s and Galieo’s works” (Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction [Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005], 64).
Unless otherwise noted, references to The Faerie Queene are to The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1979).
Richard Strier, “An Exchange on Shakespeare and Power,” The New York Review of Books 54.9 (May 31, 2007). For Strier’s elaboration of this argument, see his Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chapter 7.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” The New York Review of Books 54.6 (April 12, 2007).
See Beatrice Groves, “‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 136–50.
See, for example, Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995);
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
Helkiah Crooke, Mikrocosmographia (London, 1615), 561.
Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 139–40.
See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 5–7.
See, for example, Marcus Nordlund, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999), especially chapter 4.3 (on Lear).
Although Derrida’s turn to ethics is often identified with the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993 (English translation in 1994), his interest is present throughout his career, as is clear from his serious engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” included in the 1978 collection Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978]). And the intense meditation on ethical questions in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]) and The Gift of Death (trans. David Willis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995]), published in 1992 in French, are only now receiving the attention they deserve. Of course, a significant group of Derrida’s commentators saw this interest in the ethical all along; Mark Taylor, John D. Caputo, Simon Critchley, and Derek Attridge are only the most well-known champions of an understanding of Derridian philosophy as a philosophy of ethical engagement. See, for example, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008, sec. 6, pp. 32–37, 52, 55–56, 58.
Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316.5827 (May 18, 2007): 998–1002.
For a recent effort to reaffirm this argument, see Paul A. Cantor, “Playwright of the Globe,” Claremont Review of Books 7.1 (Winter, 2006).
Samuel Johnson, “Shakespeare’s Truth to Life,” from the Preface to Johnson’s edition (1765), in His Infinite Variety: Major Shakespeare Criticism since Johnson, ed. Paul N. Siegel (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 10.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a22–26, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
For a discussion of the shift from Book I to Book II in The Faerie Queene, see Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2), and chapter 3 of the present study.
For an example of the effort to clarify Shakespeare’s religious affiliation see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theater, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
An approach to religion in Shakespeare that resists this temptation can be found in Ewan Fernie’s collection Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005);
Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1591–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 203–204. See also Cefalu, Moral Identity.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 175.
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© 2011 James A. Knapp
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Knapp, J.A. (2011). Introduction: Image Ethics. In: Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117136_1
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