"To look, but with another's eyes"

translating vision in a Midsummer night's dream

pp. 99-120

in: James A. Knapp, Image ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Considering the complexity of the debates over the place of visual experience in the ethical development of the early modern subject, it is not surprising that we find a significant meditation on the ethical power of the visual at an early point in Shakespeare's dramatic development. Unlike the poet Spenser, who abandoned material images as his art developed, as a dramatist Shakespeare had to confront the embodied character of visual experience directly. Embodied action is the medium in which his dramatic art took form. Although I will argue in subsequent chapters that Shakespeare's meditation on the ethics of vision becomes more urgent in later plays, the playwright's treatment of vision in A Midsummer Night's Dream establishes epistemological conditions on which his staging of ethics would depend in later plays such as Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. In this chapter I argue that A Midsummer Night's Dream provides an introduction to Shakespeare's phenomenology of early modern ethical experience, one that takes St. Paul's epistles as a starting point for translating inaccessible truths into the language of the world. The phenomenology of ethical experience offered in the play is one that emphasizes the texture of the visible world at the very same time that it has as its first principle an insistence on an equally important invisible world beyond human apprehension.