Abstract
This is a book about how Shakespeare moves from the portrayal of different kinds of mirrors (specula) in his plays to the consideration of “speculative” thought in this word’s several senses, ranging from “cognitive” and “philosophical” to “hypothetical” and “provisional.” Sabine Melchior-Bonnet indicates the antiquity of this register:
Whether mirrors of nature or mirrors of history, encyclopedias known as specula, like the Speculum Doctrina of the thirteenth-century Dominican, Vincent de Beauvais, brought together all contemporary knowledge urging man toward “speculation.” In the Middle Ages, when the philosophical polarity between subject and object did not exist, “speculation” was a consideration of a relationship between two subjects like that between the mirror and what it reflects. This mode of thought embraces all the visible world in that it resembles the invisible, serving as a testing ground, providing the clues with which man rises beyond the known to the unknown.1
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Notes
Quotation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems in the chapters in this volume are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6th edn. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009).
Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (1994; New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 113.
Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (1973; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 202–20.
Grabes, “Glassy Essence: Shakespeare’s Mirrors and Their Contextualization,” Hebrew University Studies in Literature and Art 9 (1981): 175–95.
Carol Banks, “‘The purpose of playing …’: Further Reflections on the Mirror Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Signatures 2 (2000): 1–12.
Philippa Kelly, “Surpassing Glass: Shakespeare’s Mirrors,” Early Modern Literary Studies 8.1 (May 2002): 32.
Arthur Kinney, “Shakespeare’s Mirrors,” Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 1–34.
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972), 107.
Allan R. Schickman, “The Fool’s Mirror in King Lear,” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 75–86.
Christina Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetoric”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England [Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2002], 37.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London: Valentine Simmes, 1604), 105.
Ben Jonson, Timber; or Discoveries, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8:563–649, esp. 625.
Edmund Spenser, Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 1.
Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass: A Reading of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: U of California P, 1966).
David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988), 101.
Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1985), 95–176.
Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2007), esp. 106–205. Also see Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs, 3–5.
George Gascoigne, The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene, ed. William L. Wallace, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 24 (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), 86–138, 188–206.
Debora Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind,” Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999), 21–41.
The thought of this sentence and that of the previous one derived from Sonnet 3 have, in a somewhat different form, been cited as precedent for Leontes’ seeing—momentarily, at least—the truth of Hermione’s and his conception of Mamillius (and the falseness of his jealousy) in the mirror of the boy’s face in The Winter’s Tale. See Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, 186, and Yves Peyré, “Mirrors in the Eyes: The Winter’s Tale, from Mannerism to Baroque?” Contexts of Baroque: Theatre, Metamorphosis, and Design, ed. Roy T. Eriksen, Novus Studies in Literature 1 (Oslo, Norway: Novus Press, 1997), 79–98, esp. 79–85.
In the most recent analysis of Sonnet 3, Aaron Kunin, in “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124 (2009): 92–106, esp. 96–97, notes that “[t]he late introduction of the young man’s mother [in this sonnet] makes this account of reproduction … incoherent even on its own terms: the young man’s image is supposed to be exactly reproduced in the face of his child, but he has received that image from his mother … rather than from his father, which implies that ‘some’ mothers are more important than others” (97). Kunin’s shrewd insight does not affect Shakespeare’s assumption of the possibility in this sonnet of subjective understanding delivered via a mirror.
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© 2011 Maurice A. Hunt
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Hunt, M.A. (2011). Introduction. In: Shakespeare’s Speculative Art. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339286_1
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