Overview

This book demonstrates how a group of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage the fear and exhilaration generated by encounters with the unknown and the extraordinary. Arguing that the maritime art of fathoming--that is, dropping a lead and line into water to measure its depth--operates as a master-image for these plays, it illustrates how they create sublime horror through intuitions of mysterious more-than-human agencies and of worlds beyond the visible. Though tightly focused on a specific body of imagery, the book strikes up dialogue with a number of critical fields, including theories and histories of tragedy; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; oceanic studies; and work on early modern ideas about the body, madness, and language. Countering a tendency within tragic theory to value the textual over the dramatic, it also demonstrates how the tragic effects to which it points are created through specific theatrical strategies, including the use of offstage space, intertheatricality, and the violation of dramatic conventions. Situating its arguments within recent criticism on these plays and on tragedy more generally, and pushing back against scholarship that regards the genre in Shakespeare's time as concerned more with pity than with fear, the book offers fresh and detailed readings of some of the most frequently studied plays in the English canon, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling.

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9780198907084

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Reviews

Original, absorbing, persuasive, and beautifully written: throughout this book, Publicover reveals tragedies' recurring preoccupation with the uneasy experience of stumbling on, or near, hidden mysteries. Even more important, he shows why a language of depth and descent matters for our thinking about tragedy more broadly: it reflects the genre's fundamental investment not simply in affective power, but also in an epistemological abyss that triggers a more all-consuming disorientation. His readings are not only beautiful but moving: this is a rare and unforgettable achievement. * Tanya Pollard, Brooklyn College, CUNY * Laurence Publicover's lucid, elegantly-written book offers fresh and intelligent insight into Shakespeare's major tragedies and some of the most important tragedies of his contemporaries, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Through its focus on imagery of marine depth, the book shows how tragedy sends metaphorical plumb-lines into aspects of experience not normally available to the human senses. If there are more things in heaven and earth than standard philosophy dreams of, Publicover shows there are other, still-more troubling things below the oceans, and tragic experience may be the only way of accessing them, for good or ill. Fathoming the Deep will be stimulating and useful for students of these plays at all levels, and will prompt much interesting thinking among scholars. * Tom MacFaul, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford *

Author Information

Laurence Publicover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, where he works on English Renaissance literature and on human-ocean relations in the early modern period and beyond. He is the author of Dramatic Geography: Romance, Cultural Encounter, and Intertheatricality in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Susann Liebich, of Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea (Palgrave, 2021). Alongside Jimmy Packham, he is writing a human and literary history of the seabed to be published by University of Chicago Press.

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