Bans, Shani; (2023) 'Diversitie of the Eye': Optics in Shakespeare's Tragedies. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis offers an extensive reappraisal of the significance of optics in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, examining how Shakespeare’s visual metaphors inform his dramatic exploration of the relativity of human perception. Situating these tragedies within scientific, medical, philosophical, and artistic discourses on optics, I examine how Shakespeare’s tragic characters experiment with their monadic perspectives; how such experiments in perspective fail to provide access to an objective reality but, instead, compel characters to grow increasingly sceptical of the veracity of their monadic perception, introducing them to new and altered viewpoints; and the epistemological and ontological consequences of such fractured perception. Chapters One and Two offer an introduction to the four strands of optics in Shakespeare’s England: visual theory, the visual imagination, sensory scepticism and artistic perspective. Chapter Three explores Hamlet’s experiments with the visual arts and his attempts to show others his monadic viewpoint, before Chapter Four assesses how Othello’s demand for empirical evidence is manipulated by Iago who introduces him to a radical scepticism. Chapter Five illustrates how ‘sightless substances’ affect Macbeth’s fearful imagination and destabilize his optical sovereignty, while Chapter Six examines how characters mediate Lear’s and Gloucester’s vision, correcting or corrupting their viewpoint. The ‘eyes so much differ’, argues The Sceptick (1590), that they ‘do not conceive the self-same object after the same manner, but divers[e]ly, according to the diversitie of the eye.’ This thesis argues that the diversities of the eye in Shakespeare’s tragedies cause a destabilization of characters’ singular perspective, throwing them into subjective and epistemological uncertainties. Perceiving the world through the tainting colours of their passions, Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are taught the significance of seeing from multiple and varying points of view. I thus propose a new way of understanding Shakespeare’s tragedies and theatre as a site for sceptical and perspectival experiments.

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