Shakespeare's Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze (review)

In recent years a significant body of material has appeared which demonstrates the congruency between historical and psychoanalytical approaches to early modern texts. Philip Armstrong's book joins the shelf with others that explore the emergence of subjectivity through the double lenses of historical particularity and psychoanalytic conceptualizations. Armstrong's focus is on changing technologies and ideologies of vision—maps, globes, mirrors, perspective glasses, physiology of vision, dramaturgy—and how they intersect with Shakespearean tragedy. In essence, Shakespeare's Visual Regime provides an extended gloss on Jaques Lacan's remarks (in his Four Fundamental Concepts [1977]) about the use of anamorphosis in Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors:"at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us . . . the subject as annihilated. . . . the geometral dimension enables us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision"(quoted in Armstrong, 147). Where an earlier psychoanalytic approach posited the subject's interiority and depth, Armstrong, following Lacan, explores the subject's exterior sources of complexity—that is, the imprinting of structures of identity through race, gender, nation, or class and the resulting displacement of self-experience. Armstrong pushes the potential of psychoanalytic criticism in a social direction, and the book therefore offers strong counterevidence to those who persist in characterizing psychoanalysis as merely a set of themes about sexuality.

Armstrong scrupulously avoids employing psychoanalysis as a tool to master the earlier texts, insisting on a "double project" (92) of charting similarities or analogies. As he himself is well aware, his "dual reading" (85) puts two unequal discourses into dialogue, since Lacanian psychoanalysis does not just resemble Shakespearean drama but derives from it. Armstrong's refusal to privilege theory is admirable, especially because he explicitly connects the temptation to exert critical mastery with a colonizing impulse that was itself emergent in the early modern period. Still, the price of such even-handedness seems to be clarity in the argument itself. Many of the interpretations Armstrong explores are familiar—blindness in King Lear, vision and race in Othello, visual fantasy in Macbeth,cartography in the English histories—and the precise lines of his own interpretive contributions might have been more clearly delineated. One misses the elegance of Barbara Freedman's formulations about a related set of ideas concerning Shakespearean comedy and wishes for the incisiveness with which Ned Lukacher claims that "anamorphosis is fundamental to Shakespeare's project while being only incidental to Lacan's."¹ Armstrong sees Shakespearean tragedy both as contributing to the development of the humanist subject, with its monocular perspective, and as subverting the stable viewpoint such a subject craves. The dispersed thesis of Shakespeare's Visual Regime makes it seem a detailed precursor to Armstrong's Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (2001)—more concerned to compile accumulated ideas than to strike a fresh critical path. Still, for that very reason it will prove useful for many readers. The first three chapters, on Hamlet, King Lear,and Othello,consider traditions of interpretation alongside the dramatic texts themselves; in the second half of the book, the focus falls more directly on historical contexts, with chapters on Troilus and Cressida,the histories, and Macbeth.

In his chapter on Hamlet, Armstrong compares Lacan's mirror stage to the antitheatricalists' fear of stage images impressing themselves on viewers; he self-consciously seeks a critical position that can acknowledge the inherent instability of dramatic interpretation and, along the way, includes attention to the ideological enforcement of patriarchy in the play. The outlines of the discussion of blindness in King Lear are similarly familiar, although the formulations are sometimes quite striking: Gloucester's blinding "threatens to 'castrate' its audience" (36), and Lear not only splits his kingdom but "divides himself into his own double" (37). Armstrong traces Gloucester at Dover as he "falls...