Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England
Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama

Through detailed discussion of plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe, Poole explores the supernatural in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Kristen Poole (Author)

9781107463301, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 November 2014

306 pages, 15 b/w illus.
23 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

"This is an important, clever, and well-written book that makes a striking contribution to early modern studies, and its epilogue offers a vision of a ‘‘reenchanted geography’’ (219) that is richly suggestive and should inspire new thinking about the period."
--Renaissance Society of America

Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.

Prologue: setting – and unsettling – the stage
Introduction: the space of the supernatural
1. The devil's in the archive: Ovidian physics and Doctor Faustus
2. Scene at the deathbed: Ars Moriendi, Othello, and envisioning the supernatural
3. When hell freezes over: the fabulous Mount Hecla and Hamlet's infernal geography
4. Metamorphic cosmologies: the world according to Calvin, Hooker, and Macbeth
5. Divine geometry in a geodetic age: surveying, God, and The Tempest
Epilogue: re-enchanting geography.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Shakespeare plays [DDS]