Tous droits de traduction, de reproduction et d'adaptation réservés pour tous les pays S H AKESPEARE ET L'OPTIQU E ARABE Anne-Valérie DULAC L'histoire des sciences, sous l'impulsion des travaux pionniers de Roshdi Rashed en France, par exemple, a récemment exploré les canaux de transmission de la science arabe à l'Europe latine dès le Moyen Âge. Ces échanges ont été particulièrement fructueux dans le cas de l'optique, dont l'oeuvre d'Ibn al-Haytham a déterminé le développement ultérieur en Europe. Le motif obsédant de l'oeil, qui hante les sonnets composés en Europe à l'époque moderne, porte-t-il en son coeur des traces de ces circulations ? À l'appui des Sonnets de Shakespeare, le présent article retrace les possibles résurgences de la théorie intromissioniste telle qu'elle apparaît chez Alhacen dans la matière poétique du texte shakespearien. Historians of science such as Roshdi Rashed in France have recently uncovered the prominent part played by Arabic scientific works circulating around Europe from the Middle Ages onwards. In this regard, the history of optics proves remarkably telling inasmuch as Ibn al-Haytham's groundbreaking treatise served as a major source of inspiration to later European scientists. Can the recurring eye motif in early modern poetry be seen as echoing these scientific negotiations? The present paper, using Shakespeare's Sonnets, is an attempt at finding echoes of Alhacen's intromission theory within Shakespeare's poetic material. « Néanmoins on écrit des livres, on tient des congrès dont le thème central est « l'Orient », sous l'autorité de l'orientalisme ancienne ou nouvelle manière. De fait, même s'il n'est plus ce qu'il était, l'orientalisme survit dans l'université à travers ses doctrines et ses thèses sur l'Orient et les Orientaux 1. »

The present paper discusses the watercolours of fish painted by John White between 1585 and 1587, following his participation in a number of expeditions to Virginia and the 'New World'. Virginia, thus named in honour of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, corresponds to what is now known as the Outer Banks, inlands and mainland of North Carolina. The watercolour drawings, seventy-five of them, variously depict the North Caroline Algonquians, their customs and costumes, as well as the flora, fish and other fauna of the area at large. These images are one of the surprisingly few clues to John White's role in the many voyages he undertook (five in all, as he himself writes) 1 and to his biography at large which, as David Beers Quinn writes, « remains largely a series of unresolved questions » (QUINN, 1952: 40). John White was an English gentleman, a fine watercolour artist, a map-maker and a surveyor. He was born in the 1540s and was last heard of in Ireland in 1593. As his repeated participation in expeditions to the east coast of North America makes evident, « he was heavily involved with attempts, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh among others, to establish English colonies in the region and in 1587 became governor of a failed attempt at a permanent settlement on Roanoke Island (the so-called 'Lost Colony') » 2 . His unique visual legacy lies in the numerous watercolours he produced of his encounter with a world which was new to the English nation. White's lively images were « probably originally intended to form a presentation album to be given to Queen Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh or another patron at court at some time after the second of his voyages in 1585 and would have been used to encourage support for the establishment of a permanent colony. » (BESCOBY et alii, 2007: 47). The history of the drawings we know of (now in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, 1906, 0509.1.1-73) is as lacunary as White's own, as Fish in Watercolours : John White's Lively Specimens RursuSpicae, 4 | 2022

coéditeurs de Presentist Shakespeares 1 , sont très intimement associés au développement des études présentistes. Dès 1991, dans The Modernist Shakespeare 2 , Hugh Grady recommande à son lecteur de se saisir des « interconnections entre passé et présent 3 » au prix d'une prise de distance revendiquée avec le nouvel historicisme 4 dont il tâche de démontrer les apories et les proximités paradoxales avec l'historicisme positiviste d'un E. Tillyard 5. En 2000, Hawkes, en « président du présentisme 6 », établit une première synthèse de cette tendance dans Shakespeare in the Present 7. Les articles rassemblés dans Presentist Shakespeares s'inscrivent dans la droite ligne de cette histoire, dont la voûte conceptuelle repose sur une clef centrale commune : le rejet du nouvel historicisme et de son pendant britannique, le matérialisme culturel.

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© SFS PARIS. Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy. But we in silence hold this virtue well: We'll not commend what we intend to sell. Troilus and Cressida, IV.i.77-80 8 Paris refuses to practise the seller's art and commend Helen in order to raise Helen's price and value in the eyes of Diomedes, who, conversely, fully masters and exploits the buyer's tricks. This passage from Troilus and Cressida echoes an earlier moment in the play when Troilus and Hector discuss the very meaning and measurement of value: TROILUS. What's aught but as 'tis valued? HECTOR. But value dwells not in particular will.