Shakespeare: Natural-Born Mirrors

Abstract

These last two chapters explore the bearing of current and Renaissance ideas about extendedness on the literary through an exploration of how they are revealed and exploited imaginatively in Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare is representative of Renaissance writers in that he is influenced by both contemporary and classical literary traditions and material, and his works abound with literary explorations of Renaissance constructions of cognition and subjectivity. The properties and literary tradition of the mirror naturally lend it to the representation of cognition and subjectivity and at this time, when new and improved mirrors were beginning to become more widespread, mirror-motifs in Renaissance discourses are especially prolific and polyvalent. These chapters tackle the relation between forms of social, technological and self-reflexive mirroring, exploring this earlier vision of self-self and self-other relations as variously fluid or opaque, which invokes familiar concerns about firstperson versus third-person access to our own or to others’ subjective cognitive experiences. The particular interest in how EM interacts with understandings of the self relates to this work’s employment of EM as a means of reading Shakespearean selves, having provided a grounding for this by demonstrating Renaissance parallels in their depictions of cognition and subjectivity.