New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets

Indebted to Shakespeare’s understanding of perspective in the visual arts as much as to the tradition of ut pictura poesis , Sonnet 24 uses poetry’s capacity for ambiguity and references drama’s ability to create slippage between character and actor to demonstrate that manipulated surfaces—to wit, the perspectival paintings in vogue since the early fifteenth century—cannot delve into the interior but only discover, or create, more surfaces. By understanding and to some degree exploiting the techniques of perspectival artists, Shakespeare is gradually able to create a play space at once deeply physical and insistently metaphysical. The chamber scene in Hamlet , with its mirror and thrust-through arras, and the final scene in King Lear , with its stage-versioned vanishing point at the silent mouth of the dead Cordelia, suggest that Shakespeare uses his knowledge of perspective and its limitations in part to explore the dramatic possibilities for character interiority.

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New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Shakespeare’s Play with Perspective: Sonnet 24, Hamlet , Lear

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