Overview

Representations of the mind have a central place in Shakespeare's artistic imagination, as we see in Bottom struggling to articulate his dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, and Prospero humbling his enemies with spectacular illusions. Phantasmatic Shakespeare examines the intersection between early modern literature and early modern understandings of the mind's ability to perceive and imagine. Suparna Roychoudhury argues that Shakespeare's portrayal of the imagination participates in sixteenth-century psychological discourse and reflects also how fields of anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history jolted and reshaped conceptions of mentality. Although the new sciences did not displace the older psychology of phantasms, they inflected how Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians thought and wrote about the brain's image-making faculty. The many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams scattered throughout Shakespeare's works exploit this epistemological ferment, deriving their complexity from the ambiguities raised by early modern science. Phantasmatic Shakespeare considers aspects of imagination that were destabilized during Shakespeare's period-its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature-reading these in concert with canonical works such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Shakespeare, Roychoudhury shows, was influenced by paradigmatic epistemic shifts of his time, and he in turn demonstrated how the mysteries of cognition could be the subject of powerful art.

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9781501726552

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Reviews

I don't know of any other book that focuses, as this one does, on the ways in which changing early modern ideas about imagination are reflected in Shakespeare's works. The readings of Shakespeare's poems and plays are fresh, original, and shed new light on much-read passages. -- Mary Thomas Crane, Professor of English, Boston College and author of <I>Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England</I> Phantasmatic Shakespeare features astonishingly good close readings of many of Shakespeare's most important works. It will make a significant contribution to Shakespeare studies as well as the history of the imagination. -- Jenny C. Mann, Associate Professor of English, Cornell University and author of <I>Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England</I>

I don't know of any other book that focuses, as this one does, on the ways in which changing early modern ideas about imagination are reflected in Shakespeare's works. The readings of Shakespeare's poems and plays are fresh, original, and shed new light on much-read passages. --Mary Thomas Crane, Professor of English, Boston College and author of Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England Phantasmatic Shakespeare features astonishingly good close readings of many of Shakespeare's most important works. It will make a significant contribution to Shakespeare studies as well as the history of the imagination. --Jenny C. Mann, Associate Professor of English, Cornell University and author of Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England

Roychoudhury's study makes a compelling contribution to the field of cognitive theory and embodied experience in early modern drama. * The Review of English Studies * [A] shrewd analysis of [Shakespeare's] verse and drama.... Roychoudhury's study makes a compelling contribution to the field of cognitive theory and embodied experience in early modern drama.... The strength of the book resides in its close reading of Shakespeare's language of imagination which Roychoudhury teases out with dexterity and tenderness. * The Review of English Studies *

I don't know of any other book that focuses, as this one does, on the ways in which changing early modern ideas about imagination are reflected in Shakespeare's works. The readings of Shakespeare's poems and plays are fresh, original, and shed new light on much-read passages. -- Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, and author of <I>Losing Touch with Nature</I> Phantasmatic Shakespeare features astonishingly good close readings of many of Shakespeare's most important works. It will make a significant contribution to Shakespeare studies as well as the history of the imagination. -- Jenny C. Mann, Cornell University, and author of <I>Outlaw Rhetoric</I>

I don't know of any other book that focuses, as this one does, on the ways in which changing early modern ideas about imagination are reflected in Shakespeare's works. The readings of Shakespeare's poems and plays are fresh, original, and shed new light on much-read passages. -- Mary Thomas Crane, Boston College, and author of <I>Losing Touch with Nature</I> Phantasmatic Shakespeare features astonishingly good close readings of many of Shakespeare's most important works. It will make a significant contribution to Shakespeare studies as well as the history of the imagination. -- Jenny C. Mann, Cornell University, and author of <I>Outlaw Rhetoric</I> [A] shrewd analysis of [Shakespeare's] verse and drama.... Roychoudhury's study makes a compelling contribution to the field of cognitive theory and embodied experience in early modern drama.... The strength of the book resides in its close reading of Shakespeare's language of imagination which Roychoudhury teases out with dexterity and tenderness. * The Review of English Studies *

Author Information

Suparna Roychoudhury is Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College.

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