Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (review)

Adam Max Cohen's Shakespeare and Technology joins a conflux of new studies that investigate relationships between Renaissance literature and a range of early modern practical arts and emergent sciences. The book begins by placing Shakespeare on the cutting edge of a new, technological awareness and sophistication; it imagines the playwright actively participating in the most up-to-date "revolutions" of the book's title. Yet the scientific positivism that apparently animates this study is somewhat misleading. The book's emphasis is on the playwright's ambivalence and sometimes animosity toward technology, by which Cohen means "all the practical and industrial arts collectively" available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as particular "tools, machines, and inventions" themselves (6). Specifically, the book focuses on Shakespeare's references to compasses, maps, and globes (chapter 2), the printing press (chapter 3), firearms (chapter 4), timepieces (chapter 5), and mirrors (chapter 6). These chapters generally discover Shakespeare looking backward, echoing familiar sentiments about globes, clocks, and looking glasses, many sentiments expressed long before the sixteenth century. Despite what the book leads us to expect—the dramatization of "early modern technological revolutions"—the preponderance of the book's own evidence suggests that Shakespeare only rarely concerned himself with the latest advancements of his own time. Shakespeare and Technology may not deliver a neoteric, state-of-the-art, high-tech, scientifically "revolutionary" Shakespeare, but one who, just as importantly, anticipates a modern angst regarding certain devices and machines, whether these are ancient, medieval, or early modern in their origins.

In chapter 1, "'where we lay our scene': The Critical Landscape and the Elizabethan-Jacobean Technology Boom," Cohen offers his book as a corrective to what he claims to be a popular illusion about Shakespeare: "One of the misconceptions that this study will attempt to dispel is that Shakespeare should be considered a Romantic who loved nature and the organic and hated all things artificially made" (17). Alongside this unlikely straw man, however, this introductory chapter sets up several fascinating critical scenarios for the chapters to follow. Shakespeare's plays, Cohen suggests, have a great deal in common with the "theatrum mechanorum, the machine theater," a "new genre of technical literature" (dating from 1400), which featured engravings of unusual or mythical mechanical novelties and inventions (14). Most intriguing of all, Cohen observes that Shakespeare's characters have a propensity to "Turn Tech," as he wonderfully phrases it, that is, to describe themselves and others, metaphorically, as mechanical devices (17). Chapter 1 promises a book that will show how "early modern literary cyborg[s]" reveal a "changed subjectivity" that marks an early era of technological upheaval, in apposition to our own (18).

But Cohen's later chapters do not quite fulfill these aims. The first section of chapter 2, "Englishing the Globe: Navigational Technology On and Around Shakespeare's Stages," may serve as a representative example of Cohen's methods and of the conclusions he reaches about his materials. The chapter begins with an account of late sixteenth-century advances in compass technology and then proceeds by what Cohen calls his "citational approach, selecting and glossing significant passages from a variety of works" (8). Cohen cites four direct or indirect references to compasses in Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet's discovery that one must always speak deliberately and accurately (3.2.367) or "by the [compass] card" (5.1.138) when talking to gravediggers, and the Third Citizen's description of fickle plebeians who fly "east, west, north, south . . . at once to all points a' th' compass" in Coriolanus (2.3.22–24).¹ The first citation, we are told, shows that Shakespeare thought of the "card" as a kind of "precision measurement" (40), while the second registers "the dangers of Republicanism" (41). Although Cohen provides convincing evidence that Shakespeare was interested in compasses and their potential metaphorical application to human thought and behavior, his "citational" approach does not often provide new, sustained, or integrated readings of...