“How strong imagination works!”: Dumb shows, Ghosts and the Early Modern Inquiry into Spectatorship
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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to bring into focus theinsights that early modern studies of vision provide for the period’s shiftin understanding perception and its relationship with embodiment; second,to extend these insights beyond disciplinary boundaries and locateJohn Webster’s stagecraft within this changing intellectual and culturalcontext. The early modern period marked unprecedented developmentsin visual technology. The inventions and improvements in handling perspectivecast light on the problem of perception by making people awareof optical oddities and inconstancies. By tracing how art, philosophy, andliterature created, responded to, and appropriated occasions of visual fallibility,I show the extent to which both fascination and suspicion of theeye, the time-honored medium of acquiring knowledge, contributed toparadigmatic changes in early modern epistemology. I examine the historyof perspective in art as a revealing example of how theories, practices,and technologies of science and art dynamically interplayed and gaveforce to the rise of early modern discourses of sight, including skepticism,in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Then, by takinga close look at two moments from The White Devil, that is, the dumbshows in 2.2 and Isabella’s ghost in 4.1, I argue that Webster with hiscomplex stagecraft accommodates spectacles of vulnerable spectatorshipfallen into the rupture between knowledge and visibility. Staging the failurein recovering the pure observation of reality and its simulation,Webster shares the sustained early modern awareness of the problematicrelationship between perception and embodiment.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to bring into focus theinsights that early modern studies of vision provide for the period’s shiftin understanding perception and its relationship with embodiment; second,to extend these insights beyond disciplinary boundaries and locateJohn Webster’s stagecraft within this changing intellectual and culturalcontext. The early modern period marked unprecedented developmentsin visual technology. The inventions and improvements in handling perspectivecast light on the problem of perception by making people awareof optical oddities and inconstancies. By tracing how art, philosophy, andliterature created, responded to, and appropriated occasions of visual fallibility,I show the extent to which both fascination and suspicion of theeye, the time-honored medium of acquiring knowledge, contributed toparadigmatic changes in early modern epistemology. I examine the historyof perspective in art as a revealing example of how theories, practices,and technologies of science and art dynamically interplayed and gaveforce to the rise of early modern discourses of sight, including skepticism,in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Then, by takinga close look at two moments from The White Devil, that is, the dumbshows in 2.2 and Isabella’s ghost in 4.1, I argue that Webster with hiscomplex stagecraft accommodates spectacles of vulnerable spectatorshipfallen into the rupture between knowledge and visibility. Staging the failurein recovering the pure observation of reality and its simulation,Webster shares the sustained early modern awareness of the problematicrelationship between perception and embodiment.
참고문헌 (24)
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