This book visits the wondrous, magical, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, studying the instabilities of 'enchanted' and 'disenchanted' practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world's ordinary functioning might be said to be 'enchanted', is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? The book asks what happens in theatre, as a medium that can give power to or curtail experiences of wonder, addressing plays that reflect contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
NANDINI DAS AND NICK DAVIS
Introduction: Dis-enchantments/Re-enchantments
Demonism and Disenchantment in the First Part of the Contention
Mortal, Martyr, or Monster? Working on the King's Corpse in the Henriad
The Charm in Macbeth
Enchanted Materialism in Paracelsus, Hobbes, and Hamlet
"Wondrous" Healing: the "New Philosophy", Medicine and Miracles on the Early Modern Stage
"Things which are not": Idolatry and Enchantment in The White Devil
Charisma and the Making of the Misanthrope in Timon of Athens
"The wealthy magazine of nature": Knowledge, Wonder, and Gunpowder in Fletcher's The Island Princess
"Almost a miracle": Penitence in The Winter's Tale
Ghost-Stories and Living Monuments: Bringing Wonders to Life in The Winter's Tale
Contributors
Nandini Das is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK.
Nick Davis is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. A member of the Group for Research in Literature, Psychology and Medical Humanities, he co-edits The International Journal of Literature and Psychology.