Shakespeare's Staged Spaces and Playgoers' Perceptions

D. Farabee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137427144
• eBook ISBN: 9781137427151
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This engaging study offers fresh readings of canonical Shakespeare plays, illuminating ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for playgoers. The discussions engage materials from the period, present revelatory readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

1

Perceptions and Possibility in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“To leave the figure or disfigure it”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses early modern notions of vision to alter and confound the ways playgoers see the play. The initial conflict arises from Hermia’s insistence that she cannot possibly “choose love by another’s eyes” (1.1.140). Like many of the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she insists that her own visual perceptions are trustworthy and immutable. In this play, the frequent mention of the word “eyes,” the importance of the visual tricks, and the characters’ misperceptions of other characters’ actions belong to a world made of different ways of seeing.¹ I shall take up sight in the play specifically as it relates to the ways early modern playgoers understood vision to function and then explore how characters see: see events, see themselves, see other characters, and “see” in the more abstracted sense of understand. This exploration opens the possibility of examining afresh what playgoers see when watching the play; it also offers an answer to the question, how do these framings of characters’ sensory experiences alter or even produce playgoers’ understanding of the play? Obviously, not all playgoers react in the same fashion, experience the play similarly from their respective vantage points, or necessarily visually comprehend the play in the terms that I set out here. However, this reading outlines a system of visual markers that exists within the narrative organization of the play and that intrinsically connects to early modern notions of sight.

In the early modern era, multiple concurrent and irreconcilable descriptions of vision offered explanations for sight and attempted to bolster belief in the certainty of vision. Pre-Keplerian notions of vision depend heavily on the idea of objects being visible through representational impressions on the eye, hence the common descriptions of representational figuring, marking, stamping, or impressing on the mind or memory. In Richard Banister’s Breviary of the Eye (1622), he explains initially that ‘seeing beames come from the Eye.”² Banister goes on to explain how those beams function: “Three things are required for sight: That the beames associate the Ayre. That seeing spirits slide not out. That the visible spirits be united with the Ayre. A certaine alteration, and not a substance is cast into the Eye.”³ A wide variety of descriptions of the mechanics of that impressing and the role of imagination in perception complicates matters.

Andreas du Laurens (translated into English by Richard Suphlet in 1599) explains that the philosophers agree on the parts of the eye and the necessary elements for vision to occur. But once the philosophers go on to “shew the maner of this action [...] they jarre among themselves and cannot agree.”⁴ Laurens describes the two general approaches:

Some of them would have that there should issue out of the eye bright beames or a certaine light which should reach unto the object, and thereby cause us to see it: other some would have it, that the object commeth unto the eye, and that nothing goeth out of the eye: the first doe hold that we see by emission or having something going forth of the eye, the latter by reception or receiving of the object into the eye.⁵

Both of these versions of seeing, “emission” and “reception” in Laurens” terms, theorize that vision depends on some type of representational impression.⁶ Stuart Clark argues that the “representational model of vision” collapsed between the early fifteenth and the late seventeenth century “under the weight of the anomalies counting increasingly against it.”⁷ Clark points particularly to the increasing number of what he terms visual paradoxes: “situations where appearances that were supposed to be true proved difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish from appearances that were deemed to be false.”⁸ It was not only a matter of ghosts, spirits, or visionary seeings; new methods of measurement made ever more clear that the visual perception of distances could often be tricked simply by the circumstances of sight. The Renaissance “rediscovery” of linear perspective, as Samuel Edgerton describes it, allowed representational art to develop visual verisimilitude, but it also encouraged the development of perspective paintings that tricked the viewer’s eye.⁹ While the early modern era struggled with both the desire for visual veracity and the awareness of the breakdowns of that model, the drama of the period – and particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream – depends on contemporary playgoers who can understand these disparities through their own experiences.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play’s frequent questioning of visual accuracy changes the ways playgoers understand their experience of the play. This effect, I think, was greater for early modern playgoers who had rather different and disparate ideas of how vision worked. However, any Shakespeare production reminds us of our roles and labors as playgoers. In The Defence of Poesy Sidney might disparage the conventions that both mark and shift locations on stage, but his description makes clear that these conventions are easily understood:

Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place: and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke: and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers: and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?¹⁰

Sidney’s description points out several tasks early modern playgoers apparently perform without difficulty, and it is worth taking a moment to think about how these tasks require of any playgoers different imaginative actions. We are meant to be able to fix locations and shift them quickly; not only must we imagine the stage a garden, we must quickly shift to seeing the same place as a seaside rock. The other two examples Sidney offers require that playgoers fix locations through recognition of the characters and actions we see performed. In the first instances, the locations appear through exposition (“we hear news”), in the cases of the monster and the soldiers through actions (entrances with “fire and smoke” or “swords and bucklers”). The shifting settings require certain self-conscious imaginative work of the playgoers. Brent M. Cohen has pointed out how the “Elizabethan theatre includes us in the action without permitting our total absorption or abandonment of self-consciousness.”¹¹ In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the question of visual veracity can engage that self-consciousness of the playgoers and alter the perception of events presented on stage.

Two moments in the opening scene of the play, Egeus’ complaint against Lysander and Theseus’ description of Hermia’s duty, use the language of forms and impressions in ways that are not immediately visual, but clearly relate to Hermia’s understanding of the root of her love for Lysander. Pressure and the resulting impressions appear in Theseus’ description of the role Hermia ought to play:

To you your father should be as a god;

One that compos’d your beauties; yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax,

By him imprinted, and within his power,

To leave the figure, or disfigure it. (1.1.47–51)

Theseus emphasizes the strength of control and formative power her father has over her, but his reference to “imprinting” refers to the thoughts and impressions in her mind as well as the unpleasant suggestion of physical violence. This paternal control extends so far as remaking the mental images, the figures, and can extend to the visible alteration, disfiguration. Egeus accuses Lysander of having “stol’n the impression of [Hermia’s] fantasy” (1.1.32). G. Blakemore Evans glosses this line as “stealthily stamped your image on her imagination, i.e. made her fall in love with you” and thus asserts that Lysander is guilty of imprinting his own desires onto Hermia’s notions. Peter Holland glosses the line as “stamped his image on her imagination by secret trickery” or “captured her imagination by making a secret impression on it.”¹² Both of Holland’s readings show Lysander as the maker of the impression. However, there is also the possibility that Hermia’s fantasy has itself exuded a force for impressing, and Lysander is guilty of the theft of that resulting impression. This line exhibits difficulties endemic in the concurrent notions of how eyesight functioned. The fallibility of perceptions is the fearful possibility raised by Egeus’ description of the possible trickery Lysander has performed. Shakespeare establishes an exchange here that depends on playgoers who can entertain contradictory notions of how vision worked.

Singularity of vision

The continual questioning of visual veracity is paired with a certainty of the singularity of the visual experience in the play. Hermia asserts the individuality of visual impressions when she responds to Theseus, “I would my father look’d but with my eyes” (1.1.56). This impossibility forms a central question of the drama: what would it mean to look with another’s eyes? The question becomes not simply a desire for another to see from exactly the same vantage point, but a larger existential question of inhabiting the senses of another to begin to feel what another feels. Ralph Berry points out that “the ‘eye’ in this comedy is a channel of passion as well as an organ of perception.”¹³ The “channel of passion” implies the possibility of fully experiencing another person’s perspective. The Oxford English Dictionary notes 1605 as the first use of “perspective” to denote, “The relation or proportion in which the parts of a subject are viewed by the mind; the aspect of a subject or matter, as perceived from a particular mental point of view,” while the senses of the word relating to “light, vision, and visualization” were the more common early modern uses.¹⁴ Clearly, when Hermia asks that her father inhabit her visual perspective, the connection she draws depends on the possibility of both the visual aspect and the shift to a particular mental understanding, to look with someone else’s eyes. Helena begs Hermia for a lesson in just this kind of sense swapping: “O, teach me how you look, and with what art/ You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart” (1.1.192–3). Helena, fixated on Hermia’s eyes, continually compares herself to the ways Hermia appears, the way Hermia looks, and the way Hermia sees. Part of Helena’s conviction that Hermia’s eyes are the cause of the difficulties depends on period descriptions that credit the eyes with an amazing array of actions. For example, Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy manual Mikrokosmographia (1615) describes how,

these Eyes doe burne and shine, they twinckle, they winke, they are sorrowfull, they laugh, they admire, they love, they lust, they flatter, and in one word they decipher and paint the image of the Mind with so artificiall a pencill, that they seeme to be a second soule.¹⁵

In Crooke’s description the eyes perform multiple actions, but the culmination of the actions appears in the verb “decipher” – if we take seriously Crooke’s “in one word.” Ciphers refer usually to puzzling writings, and deciphering intimates a relationship, figurative or literal, to writing. Crooke makes explicit this figurative connection with his description of “so artificiall a pencill” and suggests that a viewer might understand the eyes of another person as a second soul since the eyes have written in them these various actions. Helena’s complaints about the strength of Hermia’s eyes depend on these encyclopedic attributions of visual action. Interestingly, Helena and Hermia, so focused on both the manner of appearance and on the ways each sees through her own eyes, go through the entirety of the play with their vision intact.

Despite Egeus’ accusation that Hermia’s vision is wrong or tricked, her vision is not tricked through magical means: Puck does not alter her vision with the love potion. However, her own senses are untrustworthy once Lysander’s vision is altered. When she originally departs from Lysander, she describes the sight of him as a visual sustenance: “we must starve our sight/ From lover’s food till morrow deep midnight” (1.1.222–3). After the misplaced potion has its effect on Lysander, Hermia wanders alone in the woods, finds the other characters, and notes her confusion in relation to the altered abilities of her senses:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,

The ear more quick of apprehension makes;

Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,

It pays the hearing double recompense.

Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;

Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound. (3.2.177–82)

Hermia finds herself in the dark, literally; playgoers realize she is in the dark metaphorically as well. She describes her sense of hearing as more quickly grasping signs of Lysander’s existence. “Apprehension” in this period means a variety of types of acquisition: “physical seizur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1 Perceptions and Possibility in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “To leave the figure or disfigure it”
• 2 Grounded Action and Making Space in Richard II: “How comest thou hither?”
• 3 Narrative and Spatial Movement in Hamlet: “To find his way”
• 4 Place, Perception, and Disorientation in Macbeth: “A walking shadow”
• 5 Direction and Space in The Tempest: “Through forth-rights and meanders”
• Conclusion: Movements of Genre and Other Directions: “As strange a maze”
• Bibliography
• Index