Static and Transformative Images in Shakespeare's Dramatic Art

As early as 1794, Walter Whiter set out to explain how Shakespeare's images illuminate his plays by drawing on John Locke's then-novel theory of the association of ideas.¹ Subsequent scholar, ranging from Edward Dowden and A. C. Bradley to Caroline Spurgeon, G. Wilson Knight, and Robert Heilman, stressed the importance of images to the formal, thematic, and affective power of Shakespeare's dramatic art.² More recent scholarship has been no less concerned with the playwright's visual imagery, although scholars have increasingly focused on how Shakespeare's art explores the character of early modern visuality and the visual culture of the early modern era more generally.³ In the brief space of this essay, I examine Shakespeare's attention to the phenomenality of images: the way images are experienced perceptually and how they influence the perception of events. In keeping with the topic of this special issue on "Shakespeare and Phenomenology," my particular aim is to show how Shakespeare's attention to images as phenomena can be illuminated by reading the plays in dialogue with the work of modern phenomenologists such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Luc Marion.

Phenomenology offers a particularly fruitful language through which to interrogate Shakespeare's attention to the complexity of our experience with images because images and visual perception are central to phenomenological inquiry. Examples of the key concepts in the work of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Marion include, respectively, the face-to-face encounter, the chiasm (or intertwining of visible and invisible), and the icon as a saturated phenomenon.⁴ Though phenomenology extends to the whole arena of embodied experience and all the senses, the prevalence of such concepts in phenomenological thought points to the importance of vision and visibility to the tradition. The same can be said for Shakespeare, a literary artist writing for a form—dramatic theater—that is overtly visual. While acknowledging language as Shakespeare's medium, recent Shakespeare criticism has stressed that the visuality of the theater is central to its power.⁵ In what follows, I explore how phenomenology might illuminate our understanding of Shakespeare's images.

I

To begin, consider Duke Theseus's musings on the relationship between apprehension and comprehension after hearing of the lovers' newfound concord in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

        I never may believe theseAntique fables, nor these fairy toys.Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Such tricks hath strong imagination,That if it would but apprehend some joy,It comprehends some bringer of that joy;Or in the night, imagining some fear,How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

(5.1.2-6, 18-22)⁶

Theseus offers this explanation in order to dismiss "strong imagination" in favor of "cool reason," the faculty capable of discerning truth from illusion. According to Theseus, the Athenian lovers' sudden and collective change of heart after one night in the forest can only be a product of the "shaping fantasies" of "strong imagination." For comparison, he offers the example of the bear and bush, both things (potentially present, "given" to perception) and images (known by their shape or figure). As things perceived as visual images, bear and bush produce (and are produced by) different cognitive responses: one runs from a bear out of fear (knowing it to be dangerous) but not a bush (even if its outline resembles a bear's). Theseus reveals that the conditions for apprehension (perception), as well as for comprehension (understanding), obtain in the interaction between the entire sensible visual field and the particular observer's mind: an ostensibly present bush seen "in the night" is perceived as a presumably absent bear because the observer is "imagining some fear." For Theseus, "cool reason" is the missing curb to strong imagination in such cases—free from passion, reason aids in the proper comprehension (understanding) of visual experience, the world of apprehension, which is otherwise susceptible to imagination's "tricks."⁷

Shakespeare frequently dramatizes Theseus's account of how imagination aided by passion results...