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  • Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions
  • Karen L. Edwards
Adam Max Cohen . Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin' s Press, 2006. xiv + 230 pp. index. illus. bibl. $69.95. ISBN: 1-4039-7206-0.

Lyra's ability to read the alethiometer in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials may be understood as a parable about the intimacy between human beings and their machines. The alethiometer reveals its truths when Lyra conforms her thinking to the language in which it is written; only when she becomes its servant does it serve her. Turning Tech is the phrase Adam Cohen uses for Shakespearean characters' recognition of the machine in themselves or another, so that "the whole individual is described as a machine or the byproduct of a mechanical process" (17). This is the second of the two larger trends he notes in Shakespeare and Technology, the first being Shakespeare's acknowledgement of the "long-standing stigmas associated with each of the technological revolutions that redefined his culture" (16). (Given the central role of the Bible in Shakespeare's culture, the discussion of such stigmas might usefully have considered the exegetical tradition that regards Cain as the ancestor of all those who work in metal.) Cohen's subject is the sheer pervasiveness of the machine in the Elizabethan garden, his dual goal, "to reconceptualize early modern England from a technological perspective" through focusing on the use of "technological metaphors" in Shakespeare's plays (8). The introduction provides an overview of the technological landscape; subsequent chapters concentrate in turn on the compass, the printing press, gunpowder, the mechanical clock, and the mirror. A final chapter considers the interaction or "confluence" of these innovations, with a glance at the new instruments for surveying.

Shakespeare and Technology contains a wealth of facts. When these are allowed to develop a close working relationship with Shakespearean metaphor, the result is productive indeed, as it is in the discussion of pistols and Pistol. Cohen's explanation of how sixteenth-century wheel-lock pistols worked (they "made lots of noise, but they rarely struck their targets") and who owned them ("two very distinct groups: nobles on one hand, and thieves, criminals, and poachers on the other") illuminates the significance of Pistol's name and his presence among Falstaff's company (113). It is an anachronistic presence, observes Cohen, as pistols were not invented until well after the events depicted in the tetralogy. He speculates that in the fight between the cudgel-wielding Fluellen and the "combustible" [End Page 664] Pistol, Shakespeare dramatizes the debate between ancients and moderns (115). Shakespeare and Technology is enriched by the inclusion of a dozen illustrations, and it would have been helpful to see a diagram of the cock, wheel, and flashpan arrangement that ignited the powder in the pistol's barrel — or failed to ignite it, thus giving us the expression "flash in the pan" (113).

This extended exploration of "historical metaphorics," a term that Cohen borrows from E. R. Curtius and Herbert Grabes, is the exception rather than the rule in Shakespeare and Technology (8). More usually, a technological metaphor is merely mentioned or discussed fleetingly, as in the discussion of navigational technology and "character mapping" (44). There, Cohen notes before turning to Twelfth Night that "Titus calls Lavinia his 'map of woe'" (45). It is an arresting metaphor: why a map of woe? What does the metaphor tell us about woe? Is it a map such as the one Donne's cosmographer-physicians pore over? Does Titus read the map of Lavinia's body as Northumberland reads Morton's face, that is, "as a printed page announcing ill tidings" (80)?

Such questions are not addressed in Shakespeare and Technology. One might argue that the book takes on too much, that if Cohen had limited himself, say, to the role of horology and the print revolution, he would have been able to achieve his dual goals more successfully. But the fact that such questions spring to a reader's mind emphatically demonstrates that Cohen's book does achieve its important first goal. In so doing it sensitizes us to traces of a...

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