The Imagination’s Arts: Poetry and Natural Philosophy in Bacon and Shakespeare

Abstract

This article argues that natural philosophy and poetry were complementary arts in the early seventeenth century. Together these arts harnessed the imagination to discover the natural order and to restore a legitimate model of sovereignty. I delineate this complementary relationship in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna . I argue that Prospero’s ability to bring both fabled creatures and the natural elements under his sovereign rule dramatizes the complementarity between poetry and natural philosophy that Bacon codifies in his natural philosophical reforms.