The Phenomenology of the Visual in William Shakespeare's
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0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND ‘Pictures like a summer’s cloud.’ The Phenomenology of the Visual in William Shakespeare’s Plays and on the Stage of the Contemporary Theatre In order to connect the theatrical poetics of Shakespeare’s plays with some nuances of stage image, the author of the paper outlines the changes in the phenomenology of the visual from the early modern period through to our times. This change corresponds with the emergence of the fully autonomous subject, proclaiming his dominion over the ‘external world’ at the beginning of the modern era and rehearsing this sovereignty through late modern and postmodern times. It is also argued that the process described may have changed the theatrical image into an idol which had no other function but to reflect the captivated sight of the viewer. Keywords: Shakespeare, Marion, early modernity, theatre, phenomenology of the visual, icon, idol. 1. The fixed gaze It always helps to start with the most obvious: the evidently noticeable, the unquestionably given, the clearly discernible, but the play I have chosen to refer to forces us first and foremost to deal instead with the deviously spectral, the teasingly doubtful and neurotically imaginary. ‘Can such things be/And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,/Without our special wonder?’1 asks Macbeth, answering his wife’s reproach that he has broken up the merry feast with ‘most admired disorder’. The murderer has been frightened out of his wits by a spectre with ‘marrowless bones’ and cold blood, in whose eyes ‘no speculation’ is to be discerned. No wonder he is disturbed! We can assume that in describing the ghost of Banquo, Macbeth seeks to dispel his own fear, trying to convince himself that his best friend, who was the source of his anxiety before, is now dead and must therefore also be safely buried deep underground. Macbeth’s anxiety is thus based, through and through, on rational premises: if Banquo is dead, he cannot walk the face of the earth; and following this, as Macbeth tries to convince himself, he FRXOGQRWKDYHVHHQ what he has seen. But all his desperate attempts to calm himself yield contrary results. It is much more difficult to rid oneself of fears than of dead bodies. Of course the audience who came to see the play in the Elizabethan open air theatre could also enjoy Macbeth’s compelling verbal rendering of 1 7KH 2[IRUG 6KDNHVSHDUH 7KH &RPSOHWH :RUNV, ed. by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 110-111 (3.4.). All further quotations from William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets refer to this edition. 58 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND the mysterious apparition. Probably very few of the spectators would choose to glance around or upwards during the performance to catch a glimpse of the picturesque backdrop of summer’s clouds which, as Shakespeare reminds us through Macbeth’s words, ‘overcome us [including everybody on stage and around it ...] without our special wonder’. Could the playwright find a better example of what would almost certainly escape the audience’s attention during each and every performance in those public playhouses, than the blue canopy of the sky and the passing clouds? What the viewers, pursuing the actions of Shakespeare’s villains or lovers, would surely miss, even though it was always within their range of vision? On the other hand, the casual remark about summer clouds might equally imply exactly the opposite: perhaps we should infer from it that spectators in the Globe theatre FRXOGEH distracted by the insignificant background and therefore KDG WR EH reminded about what they ought to focus on while watching the performance. One way or another, we need to remember that Shakespeare was well aware of the difference between the ‘unfaithful gaze’ and the ‘attentive look’. Sonnet 20, for instance, offers a surprisingly modern version of this distinction, which allows us to connect it with the ‘gendered’ theory of gaze. The poem associates the inattentive, unconcerned look with female inconstancy and praises the eyes of the speaker’s male lover for being ‘more bright than theirs [women’s], OHVV IDOVH LQ UROOLQJ/JLOGLQJ WKH REMHFW ZKHUHXSRQ LW JD]HWK’ (lines 5-6; emphasis added). This praise sounds somewhat ambivalent, though; on the one hand, the eye of the man is complimented for embellishing reality, as the gilt of sunlight does, but on the other, the glamour of gilded things proves to be superficial. One may therefore discern in these lines a note of irony, if the superficiality of ‘gilding’ the object is associated with the inattentiveness of the nearly homophonic ‘gliding’ over it. Alternatively, we could say that the young friend’s Midas-like gaze changes any object into a golden calf (in this case we should say: a JLOGHG calf) of his desire, or, more precisely: the idol of his gaze. We shall look further into the far-reaching implications of this second reading later in the course of this paper. In 7KH 7HPSHVW, on the other hand, Shakespeare reminds us that the director of an indoor performance is a magician who can control what the spectators see by ‘framing’ their view with the help of a curtain. When we hear Prospero call upon Miranda with the command, ‘The fringed curtains of thine eyes advance/and say what thou seest yon […]’,2 we may assume that he seeks to discipline his daughter’s careless (indeed, one might almost say ‘wanton’) sight, to bring it into focus and fix it on the spectacle he has 2 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 411-412 (1.2.) .