Shakespeare: Perspectives and Words of Glass

Abstract

Renaissance culture’s concerns about and celebration of the human mind were frequently represented through comparison with the properties of truthful or distorting mirrors. In the following quote from Francis Bacon, the emphasis is on the mind’s unreliable and unstable properties:

For the mind of Man is farre from the Nature of a cleare and equall glasse, wherein the beames of things should reflect according to their true incidence; Nay, it is rather like an inchanted glasse, full of superstition and Imposture. (2000b, 116)

Shakespeare’s mirror-motifs reflect Renaissance understanding of vision and language as tools of revelation and distortion.