Shadows and the Substance of Shakespearean Drama

England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the stage for explorations of the physics of light and its representation in art. Although much critical attention has been paid to this interest in light, there has not yet been sufficient attention to the concurrent fascination with its absence as epitomized by shadows. I argue in this dissertation that the phenomenon of the shadow existed as a powerful trope for artistic and literary expression in the period; I conceive of the Renaissance shadow not, however, just as a figure of negativity or privation, but also as one of doubling and of excess in English usage. My study identifies three prominent and interconnected senses of shadows that are of special importance to Renaissance dramatists such as Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Richard Brome, and John Webster. I investigate debates surrounding the nature of the “shades” of ghosts, familiars, and other supernatural phenomena as they are discussed by natural scientists and demonologists, and as they are staged in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The problems of imitation, subordination, and spectrality that haunt these plays also figure in staged relations of social “shadowing” that obtain between speakers and mediators in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, and between masters and servants in The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi. As synonyms for the forms and practices of art, shadows are associated with popular denigrations of visual and rhetorical art; in Cymbeline and Philaster, they also evoke the anxiety surrounding art’s power to betray its objects with unfaithful semblances and to encourage scandalous acts of imitation. In examining these works, I show how the discourse of shadows reveals the liminal spaces and hidden undersides of early modern scientific, philosophical, and theatrical cultures. Attention to the shadow, its cognate terms, and its related phenomena engages debates that captivated dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century regarding the operations of the mind; the unstable boundaries between science, magic, and art; and the social value of the theatre itself as a site of highly affective language and gesture.Ph.D.2020-11-19 00:00:0