Abstracts
Abstract
The present article explores how William Shakespeare’s King Lear thoughtfully challenges the primacy of sight among the senses, with implications for our understanding of the play’s relationship both to its immediate political context and to the history of ocularcentrism in early modern England. Adopting a new historicist approach, this article claims that writing King Lear in the midst of heated debates on the Anglo-Scottish Union was both a reaction to any possible ocularcentric behaviour by King James and a part of active criticism against the ocularcentrism of the period. Regardless of his personal opinion on James’s plan for the Union, Shakespeare was worried that the king would act according to his ocularcentric understanding of the two countries under his rule. Therefore, King Lear can be read as an advance warning to King James, who needs to be wary of superficial, sight-centred behaviours so as not to suffer the same fate as Lear.
Résumé
Cette étude explore comment Le Roi Lear de William Shakespeare remet judicieusement en question la primauté de la vue parmi les sens, ce qui a des implications pour notre compréhension de la relation que cette pièce entretient à la fois avec son contexte politique immédiat et avec l’histoire de l’oculocentrisme dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité. Adoptant une approche empruntée au « New Historicism », cette étude soutient que l’écriture du Roi Lear, en plein débat sur l’Union anglo-écossaise, fut à la fois une réaction aux éventuels comportements oculocentriques du roi Jacques Ier et une véritable critique de l’oculocentrisme de l’époque. Indépendamment de son opinion sur le plan de Jacques Ier pour l’Union, Shakespeare craignait qu’il n’agisse selon sa compréhension oculaire des deux pays sous son autorité. Par conséquent, Le Roi Lear peut être lu comme un avertissement au roi Jacques Ier de se méfier des comportements superficiels centrés sur la vue afin d’éviter de subir le même sort que Lear.
Appendices
Bibliography
- Armstrong, Philip. Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288874.
- Aronson, Alex. “Shakespeare and the Ocular Proof.” Shakespeare Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1970): 411–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/2868426.
- Buchanan, Nick. What Happens in Shakespeare’s King Lear. 2nd ed. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2015.
- Casey, Francis. King Lear by William Shakespeare. London: Macmillan Education, 1986. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08342-8.
- Charalampous, Charis. Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy and Medicine: The Renaissance of the Body. London: Routledge, 2019.
- Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Craig, Leon Harold. Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442677999.
- Donne, John. The Sermons of John Donne. Edited by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
- Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
- Freedman, Barbara. Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501735325.
- Gosson, Stephen. “Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582).” In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard, 84–114. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
- Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501734908.
- Harvey, Elizabeth D. “Introduction: The ‘Sense of All Senses.’ ” In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 1–21. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
- Herrick, Robert. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick. Edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- James I. The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron. Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996.
- Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
- Knapp, James A. Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117136.
- Kornstein, Daniel. Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
- Lyons, Bridget Gellert. “The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear.” In Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, 23–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442652996.
- Meek, Richard. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315248400.
- Montrose, Louis A. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” In The New Historicism, edited by Harold Aram Veeser, 15–36. New York: Routledge, 1989. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315799995.
- Nordlund, Marcus. The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999.
- Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of de Remediis Utriusque Fortune. Translated by Conrad H. Rawski. Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
- Phillips, Bríd. “ ‘Eyes without Feeling, Feeling without Sight’: The Sense of Sight in Hamlet.” In Hamlet and Emotions, edited by Paul Megna, Bríd Phillips, and R. S. White, 177–98. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03795-6_9.
- Pieters, Jürgen. Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001.
- Shakespeare, William. King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. Edited by René Weis. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315833910.
- Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Peter Holland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Shapiro, James. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
- Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
- Smith, Simon. “Hamlet’s Visual Stagecraft and Early Modern Cultures of Sight.” In Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary Readings in Sensory Culture, edited by Simon Smith, 110–32. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. http://doi.org/10.5040/9781474273268.ch-005.
- Sun, Emily. Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823232802.001.0001.
- Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597266.
- Tomkis, Thomas. Lingua; or, the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority. London, 1657.
- Watson, Jackie. “ ‘Dove-Like Looks’ and ‘Serpents Eyes’: Staging Visual Clues and Early Modern Aspiration.” In The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660, edited by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny, 39–54. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
- Weis, René, ed. King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. By William Shakespeare. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315833910.
- Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare on Page and Stage: Selected Essays. Edited by Paul Edmondson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Wilson, Richard. “Introduction: Historicising New Historicism.” In New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, 1–18. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315504452.
- Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique. Edited by Thomas J. Derrick. New York: Garland Publishing, 1982.