Roger Holdsworth

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word “hallucinate” entered the language in 1604, between Hamlet and Macbeth, and in the same year as Othello. This conjunction of dates could have been predicted. Shakespeare’s three plays, which mark the peak of his interest in the subjective nature of vision, the mind’s capacity to take control of what the eye sees, were staged just when theorists of perception were addressing the same question in study after study. Du Laurens’ A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight appeared in 1599, Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in 1601 (enlarged in 1604), Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures in 1603 (used by Shakespeare in King Lear), and De Loyer’s A Treatise of Spectres, or Strange Sights, Visions, and Apparitions Appearing Sensibly unto Men in 1605. In that last year, in The Advancement of Learning, Bacon described a human tendency “to submit the shows of things to the desires of the mind”. This paper discusses the growing complexity of cases of prejudiced, ambiguous, or self-generated vision in Shakespeare’s plays. Initially the problems are merely ones of misinterpretation, and the result of accident or trickery. In The Comedy of Errors the twins “wander in illusions”, but they find that true seeing is easily restored, however much bias or credulity have played a part in the mistakes. In the late 1590s, however, as Shakespeare moves from the drama of action to the drama of character, he starts to explore states of obsessive, guilt-ridden, or otherwise afflicted consciousness, and to seek the means by which such internal trauma might be dramatised. Hallucinations, sometimes made visible to the audience, sometimes not, are his main method.