Suparna Roychoudhury's Phantasmatic Shakespeare begins with Theseus's response to the bewildered lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. His meandering meditation on fancy is perhaps unsurprising in a play known for its meddlesome fairies, floral aphrodisiac, and coveted changeling. Teasing out the textures and tensions of this speech, Roychoudhury argues that Theseus's incohesive thoughts on the imagination demonstrate two things: first, that early modern theories of the imagination were elusive and evolving; second, that such theories, though inchoate, were of particular interest to Shakespeare.
This ambitious and beautifully written examination of the image-making mind offers readers a thorough account of how Shakespeare's variegated representations participate in the shifting field of faculty psychology. Roychoudhury joins scholars such as Evelyn Tribble, Mary Thomas Crane, and Carol Thomas Neely in analyzing how early modern literature negotiates the period's often incongruent theories of cognition. Roychoudhury is unique, however, in focusing primarily on the operations of the image-making faculty (rather than its ethical or aesthetic value) and how exactly Shakespeare engages in “epistemological problem solving” (8). Consulting an astonishing array of texts—including medical manuals, travelogues, and sermons—Roychoudhury organizes Phantasmatic Shakespeare around the epistemological ambiguities Shakespeare confronts in his plays and poetry.
Proto-scientists exhibited acute concern with the epistemological underpinnings of the imagination, reexamining philosophies of the mind inherited from medieval and classical thinkers, such as Aristotle, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas. Dissection, while illuminating, deepened rather than resolved debates regarding, for instance, the precise location of specific functions. Roychoudhury argues that the speaker of Shakespeare's Sonnets, an anatomist in his own right, betrays, at times, greater interest in the inner workings of his body than in the beloved. This first chapter shows that the Sonnets belong very much to a culture in which anatomical investigation was just as much about “dissecting subjectivity” as it was about delineating the human form (55).
Chapters 2 and 3 remind us that early moderns commonly associated fancy with idleness and vanity, believing it could prevent intellectual growth and lead recklessly to irreligious phantasms. As Roychoudhury suggests, Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost probes the imagination's relation to empiricism, reconceiving traditional curricula by privileging the sensory reality of the observer. The play calls for a transformation of the imagination too, suggesting that it “must become alert to things outside itself, to nature rather than preconceived notions about nature” (81). Chapter 3 argues that literary representations of fancy drew heavily on Lucretian tropes, depicting the imagination amid a cosmos abuzz with nearly imperceptible “motes, worms, and winds” (88). Such depictions “coexisted with traditional connotations of vanity, render[ing] imagination both carnal and spiritual, gross and sheer, vital and morbid” (84). Roychoudhury claims that we see this tension as Mercutio attempts to disprove the validity of dreams. That he becomes possessed by his own fantastical images demonstrates not only the imagination's infectious power, but also the extent to which natural philosophy—the testing of hypotheses—relies on the sensual imagination.
Roychoudhury's fourth chapter returns to the period's medical advances, specifically new optical models that divorced the imagination from vision. Venus and Adonis illustrates this rupture while King Lear stages the shortcomings of the imagination when sight fails. Although the influence of empiricism was felt across fields, Roychoudhury explains, in chapter 5, that discourses on melancholy were still largely informed by humoral medicine, which attributed the illness to an excess of black bile and cited hallucinations as its most common manifestation. Demonological discourses, however, obscured the boundary between natural and supernatural diseases, warning readers of similar delusions. Roychoudhury argues that the Macbeths’ indeterminate melancholy and recurring hallucinations stage anxieties regarding chaos, humoral imbalance, and the influence of the supernatural.
In her final chapter, Roychoudhury again touches on the risks of imaginative thought, pointing to the figure of the chimera, a hybrid beast, that came to stand for the imagination's grotesque potential. Roychoudhury suggests that the period's travel literature and zoological writings relied on what she terms “chimeric description,” a string oftentimes of similes used to depict new living forms. In The Tempest, Shakespeare not only “reveals the combinative imagination at work,” but also forces us, as readers and playgoers, to reenact this process, particularly as we mentally negotiate the many creaturely descriptions characters ascribe to Caliban (181).
Roychoudhury attends to the metatheatricality of several isolated moments, arguing, in her epilogue, that Midsummer’s rude mechanicals underscore the imaginative work dramatic productions necessitate. A more sustained engagement with the image-making minds of audiences could, however, offer the field of performance studies a fruitful investigation into the phenomenological experience of playgoing during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, Phantasmatic Shakespeare is an exciting addition to scholarship on early modern cognition and embodiment and a timely contribution to the fields of cognitive literary studies, history of consciousness, and phenomenology.
