What 'hangs by geometry': mechanics and the seventeenth-century stage

This project proposes a direct course of influence between geometry and English drama in the seventeenth century. Recent scholarship has traced the relationship between mathematics and literature more widely in the early modern period, but has largely neglected a more focused, specialized examination of the relationship between geometry and drama. As a result, this project unfolds in two parts. Part one outlines a gradual shift in early modern geometry away from static Euclidean theory and towards a field increasingly concerned with mechanist natural philosophy, and the practical mechanical application of geometry in constructing buildings, machines, and spectacles. Geometry’s ‘mechanization’ encouraged practitioners to see themselves as embedded within an interactive and connective nexus within the world, and allowed them to describe and understand the physical interactions of an ever-shifting universe. This kind of geometry was not only concerned with the study of space, but of motion through space. Part two suggests that trends in mechanical geometry similarly influenced how dramatists conceptualized the motion of actors and characters through stage-space. Mechanised geometry possessed an inherently ‘dramatic’ quality, as it incorporated ideas of interactive practice, embodiment, and performance into its methodology. Beginning with the university play Blame Not Our Author (1635), part two considers the psychological anxieties resulting from new mechanised mathematical theories, and the difficulty of achieving true geometric embodiment upon the stage. Attention is then turned to the court masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, and the extent to which Jonson’s geometric metaphors engaged with mechanical processes despite his explicit rejection of the subject. Finally, this study concludes with the closet drama of Margaret Cavendish, whose complicated relationship with the Royal Society negatively impacted her relationship with mathematicians, but for whom geometric and mathematical ideas still provided a sense of shape and order to the structure of her plays