Suparna Roychoudhury - Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science

Representations of the imagining mind have a central place in Shakespeares art. Instances of perceiving and conceiving pervade the plays and poemswe see Bottom struggling to recount a magical dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, Prospero humbling his enemies with wondrous illusions, the speaker of the sonnets recalling the face of his beloved. These and countless other moments naturally prompt the question of what Shakespeare knew about the cognitive process of mental representation. In a sense, the question is easy to answer. The prevailing model of psychology in late sixteenth-century Europe, we know, held that the mind consists of several powers or faculties. Of these, imagination is one; specifically, it is the faculty of the sensitive soul that creates and manipulates phantasmsintelligible mental forms. With the aid of phantasms, imagination, along with the other faculties of understanding and memory, carries out essential functions of mental cognition. As is evident, Shakespeare knew the principles of faculty psychology. Yet, as I mean to show in this book, his representations of imagination do not merely echo those principles. Rather, they foreground ambiguities in the early modern conception of imagination that arose around the same time as important shifts in early modern sciencein such fields as anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history. Shakespeares portrayal of imagination draws on the uniquely idiosyncratic discourse of the image-making mind; those idiosyncrasies in turn connect with the work of contemporary natural philosophers and protoscientists such as Andreas Vesalius, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon. The interdiscursive impact that science had on faculty psychology is registered in various ways throughout Shakespeares corpus. Adapting the intellectual tensions of his time to literary form, Shakespeare brings the increasingly ambiguous epistemology of imagination firmly into the purview of art. Imagination in Shakespeare, then, is less the wellspring of artistic production than a set of problems that require representation for their expression. Situating Shakespeares depictions of imagination amid the epistemic transitions of his time, in this book I contend that the power of those depictions draws from the newly destabilized and therefore dynamically generative idea of imagination that prevailed in Renaissance culture.

A reading of Shakespeares best-known pronouncement on imagination, a brief exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta near the end of A Midsummer Nights Dream, will help introduce the overarching concerns of this study. The variegated and ambivalent characterization of imagination that we see here is deeply steeped in the rich psychological discourse of the late sixteenth century. Not only does Shakespeare allude to premodern intellectual traditions of imagination, of which Aristotelian faculty psychology will be our special focus; he also gestures toward the broader philosophical and protoscientific attitudes of the age. In a short space, Shakespeare broaches the particular facets of imagination that would occupy him throughout his careerand that I will explore in greater depth in the subsequent chapters of this book.

Pondering the bizarre report of the lovers midsummer adventure, Hippolyta remarks, Tis strange my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. To which he replies,

More strange than true. I never may believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more

Than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,