Surgeon and Magician: Speech, Sight, and the Shakespearean Corpus

Walter Benjamin’s distinction between painting and cinematography forms the basis of an exploration of two constellations of metaphor in Shakespeare’s texts: that which exists between speech, penetration and surgical healing, and that between sight, distance and magical healing. The ambivalence of penetration as a force that harms as well as heals is then expanded into a reading of the history of Shakespearean scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is shown that various editors metaphorised their labour as undertaking to heal the Shakespearean ‘corpus’ surgically. The editions of Charles Knight and the psychological criticism of Bradley are then used to show that the nineteenth century saw a movement towards healing the text ‘magically’ rather than ‘surgically’.