‘Fatal Visions’: The Image as Actor in Early Modern Tragedy

Abstract

Throughout William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, sights rather than deeds seem to generate real material effects. For example, it is significant that an ‘apparition’ plants the seed or ‘suggestion’ of murder in Macbeth’s mind. Important too, is the empty sign that leads Macbeth to kill: ‘Is this a dagger […] that marshall’st me, and the instrument I was to use’ (2.1.33–43). The ‘dagger’ to which Macbeth refers is, of course, an ‘instrument’ of his imagination and, therefore, intangible. Yet, by ‘acting’ in place of its human imager, the dagger tacitly assumes a position of subject, one that stands in for, or even displaces, the human ‘actor’. It is this displacement that I am interested in examining in this essay. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass point out that: ‘to treat an object like a subject is to idolize, to fetishize’ (1996, 3). Their succinct theoretical point echoes a far-reaching series of doctrinal debates on the nature and status of idolised objects, and of representation more generally, in early modern England. Such debates found expression initially through biblical exegesis and theological controversy. However, as this essay argues, these debates gained a much wider audience through biblically inflected dramatic productions on the early modern English stage. By exploring three Jacobean tragedies, this essay will draw upon linguistic theory, and in particular stylistics, in order to elucidate the power of the image as ‘actor’.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’th’ other senses,

Or else worth all the rest.

(Macbeth, 2.1.44–5).¹