Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked Phantasmatic Shakespeare as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A startling finding when I was researching Elizabethan ideas about the mind was how far their attitudes to the imagination differed from ours.
We see it as a creative force to be encouraged and liberated, but for them it was dangerous, deceptive, and unruly, leading towards sinfulness and madness. Roychoudhury explains how early scientific thinking was starting to unsettle this traditional view of the imagination as reprehensible, and traces the effects of this in works including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Sonnets, and Macbeth.
I would add that the new commercial playhouses for which Shakespeare wrote became experimental crucibles:…
From Helen's list on how Shakespeare thought about the mind.
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