Shakespeare's Sea and the Frontier of Knowledge

In an age of discovery, the ocean voyage pushed back frontiers of the knowable, thereby providing a master trope for knowledge acquisition that, in Shakespeare, authorized the rupture of conventional dramatic form. This article charts the progress of that rupture and the corresponding enlistment of the audience's imaginative cooperation to complete the dramatic illusion. It then considers the kinds of knowledge attainable to those who cross the sea in Shakespeare's dramaturgy and ends by suggesting that as increasingly sophisticated staging facilitated the theatrical representation of wonders, the ocean voyage trope comes to portend a drama where material spectacle would unseat imagination.