Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England

10. Mirror Tropes and Renaissance Poetry

Mirror Tropes and Renaissance Poetry Ilona Bell Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not boudge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the [inmost] part of you. Hamlet to Gertrude, Hamlet, 3.4.18–20 1. “THE MIRROR, ABOVE ALL THE MIRROR IS OUR TEACHER”1 The mirror was one of the most universal tropes, in all genres , from thirteenth to mid-seventeenth century England; it provided an analogy or symbol for virtually everything under and above the sun: time and eternity, nature and art, truth and subjectivity, earth and heaven, man and God. The preoccupation , nay obsession, with the mirror as trope coincided with technological discoveries in glass-making and mirrormaking that revolutionized the history of science and art, and, some argue, helped to birth the modern subject. This essay focuses on a microcosm of this vast topic, the classic Petrarchan trope of the mirror, microcosmic because its 14line body is itself so small, but large in scope, reaching from 10v 229 230 Mirror Tropes and Renaissance Poetry fourteenth century Italy to seventeenth century England, touching upon major developments in technology, ideology, history, and literature. The English word “mirror” was first used around 1300 to mean a person or thing embodying a feature or characteristic deserving imitation: a pattern or exemplar. By 1325 the word had also come to mean a person or thing embodying something to be avoided, a detrimental example or warning. These original, exemplary meanings, both positive and negative, remained remarkably prevalent, especially as book titles, well into the seventeenth century.2 Around 1325 the word “mirror” acquired its modern meaning: an object having a smooth, flat, or slightly curved surface, intended to reflect an image—a looking-glass. In the sixteenth century the word “glass” was used interchangeably, and even more often than “mirror”; its multiple meanings (hourglass, drinking glass, window, eyeglass, eyeball, watery reflection, telescope) deepened and extended the mirror’s metaphoric and symbolic import. The material, metaphorical, and exemplary meanings are deeply intertwined, but this essay focuses on poetic tropes in which the mirror as material object functions as metaphor or symbol. The four-century fixation on mirrors coincided with technological discoveries in glass-making and mirror-making that culminated in the modern plate glass mirror. Most early mirrors were small metal disks made of bronze, tin, or silver. There were also small, convex glass mirrors in antiquity, but the method of making them seems to have been lost and then rediscovered around the thirteenth century. Early glass mirrors were small because the metal backing was applied with heat, which would shatter large pieces of glass. These early mirrors—whether polished metal or convex colored glass—produced a cloudy, distorted reflection. Hence, Paul’s famous remark, “For now [on earth] we see through a glass, darkly; but then [in heaven] face-to-face: now I Ilona Bell 231 know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). In biblical times and classical antiquity, the mirror was a prevalent image of transcendence. For Plato, the mirror, like the world itself, was an imperfect image of ideal forms. For Judeo-Christians, the mirror was a reminder that man was created in God’s image: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). For Saint Augustine, examining one’s inner self was the path to divine revelation: “to return to my own myself. Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul...I entered, and with the eye of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of my soul, over my mind.”3 Drawing on these paradigms, medieval philosophers interpreted the cloudy, somewhat distorted, mirror image as a sign of the divine, and as a moral exemplum that life on earth is but a passing shadow of eternity.4 The analogy was taken literally by medieval pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Land carrying mirrors, which were held up to sacred relics. Upon returning, the pilgrims claimed—and apparently believed— that the mirrors actually contained the sacred scene.5 In 1507 Venetian glassmakers wrote to the Venetian Council seeking a monopoly; they had discovered “the secret of making good and perfect mirrors of crystalline glass, a precious and singular thing...