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Abstract

Identifying the Copernican Revolution as a crisis in Western thought, this research will

explore how it had consequences in theatre of Late Renaissance England taking up the

specific case of Shakespeare and Inigo Jones. It will see the change of text in Shakespeare’s

plays in contrast to the Greeks as a response to the crisis. Also inspecting the architecture and

scenography of these two artists, the research will finally see how there are various forms of

cosmopoiesis or world making and its possible political implications.

Rationale and Intervention

Nicholas Copernicus in his On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres showed how the earth is

not at the centre of the system. Galileo strengthened this further with his observations about

the phsases of Venus. Galileo further suggested the world is not a finite closed system but an

infinite universe exists. The significant impact of the Copernican Revolution and further

Galilean intervention was the loss of Heavens or transcendence. Further, it leads to the

infinitization of the world which comes up as a crisis. AlexdandreKoyre shows that the idea

of the infinite universe was prevalent at this time not just in science but in philosophy and

other traditions. The research is situated in this backdrop and I will see how the different

elements of theatre were responses to the crisis.

In a part of the research I will see how this infinitization leads to the change in the

philosophical idea of the tragedy. One of my propositions is that a new philosophy of the

tragic can be seen in Shakespeare by understanding the new relation of the finite and infinite

which did not exist in Greece which was the founding place of tragedy. Moreover, I will also

look into other aspects of Shakespeare’s theatre texts like the ‘play within a play’ structure

and show how this can also be seen as a result of the new relation. Lionel Abel conceptualizes

the idea of the play within a play as a meta-theatre and I will extend this further to show that

this meta-theatre is possible only because of this new relation with infinite. Moreover,
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Shakespearean plays cannot be specifically categorized as genres and against the trend of

literary studies, I will see how in these texts there are mixing up of genres.

An important response to this crisis is the making of different worlds which Mazzotta calls

cosmopoiesis. Mazzotta looks for this making in different literary texts like Polizziano’s

Orpheus or Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I will take up this idea and extend it further to show that

the site of art itself becomes a ground for cosmopoiesis. For this research, the art is

specifically the theatre and to enquire into the problem I will take up various elements of the

theatre like the text, theatre architecture, scenography and the spectators and see them as

responses to the crisis. There has been extensive work on the Shakespearean Stage like E.K.

Chambers four volume work The Elizabethan Stage, is an extensive study of different

elements of theatre during the Elizabethan period taking an approach of theatre history.

Frances Yates’ book Theatre of the World suggests that it is a work on the history of thought

showing the Vitruvian influences on the Globe theatre. Similar works can be seen regarding

Inigo Jones theatre especially through the work of AllardyceNicoll. Taking different elements

from this I will contrast the Globe with the theatre architecture of Inigo Jones, and show what

are the philosophical implications of the open Globe and the closed theatres of Jones. Further,

I propose to see them as different ways of world making and hence different responses to the

central crisis as mentioned earlier. This also implies that the world made have two distinct

elements as their basis, in the Globe the voice or sound becomes important as Shakespearean

theatre was an actors’ theatre while in Jones’ theatre sight becomes crucial and vision

becomes the basis. I will also elucidate on these essential points through the research. The

final aspect of the research will focus on the spectators of these two kinds of theatres. Inigo

Jones used perspective, which was invented during the Renaissance to create his scenes.

Through the work of Panofsky its clear how linear perspective is far from truth and thus a

kind of making rather than an imitation. Hubert Damischsuggests that perspective creates a
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regime of control through the fixed point. Though these texts are focused on the question of

perspective in painting they can be used to analyze the case in theatres which I will work on.

The use of perspective scenes creates a regime which reassures the position of Sovereign

after the loss of transcendence by the formation of a homogeneous spectator. Inigo Jones

theatre thus becomes a kind of theatre of the State. The multiple stage setting of the Globe

and the placing within the central circle of the Globe suggests a different kind of spectator.

The spectator in this case has an unguided vision and there is no central perspective. Against

the understanding of the spectator of the Globe as barbaric, I think the spectator here is

anonymous. Thus, in contrast to the spectator of Jones I will show that the spectator in the

Globe can be seen as a subject of a different politics unlike that of the State.

Methodology

For the given research I will take up the framework proposed by Giuseppe Mazzota, the

Italian philosopher in his book Cosmopoiesis. He suggestsa new interpretation of the

Renaissance as different from the two dominant strains. One strain of interpretation looks at

the Renaissance through a philological-rhetorical approach which focuses on history and

politics. The other strain is shaped by a Cartesian and Hegelian viewpoint via Burckhardt.

This strain sees the Renaissance as a form or a precursor to the abstract rationality of the

Enlightenment. From this viewpoint Renaissance was a time of individualities having abstract

ideas. Against these two strains Mazzotta takes up the eighteenth century Italian philosopher

GiambattistaVico and his ideas discussed in his encyclopedic New Science. For Mazzotta,

Vico becomes important because of several reasons. Firstly, he theorized art as poiesis or

making and as a work of imagination. Secondly, he understood the Renaissance as an

ambiguous time of extraordinary achievements and inexorable decadence. Thirdly, Vico

suggests a way to move beyond the current understanding of Renaissance. Thus, through
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Vico’s thinking Mazzotta tries to move beyond the abstract dualism of the two dominant

strains and he suggests that “One can do so by linking up philosophy’s abstractions with

philology’s historical facts, politics with science, rhetoric and imagination, knowing and

making.”(2001:xi) Thus, through Mazzotta and primarily through Vico I’ll approach my area,

looking into theatre as a place of conversation for various fields. Moreover, throughout the

research I’ll point out towards two sides of Renaissance as varied responses to the crisis

opened up through the Copernican Revolution.

This being the framework, the material I’ll majorly access are the texts of Shakespeare to

enquire into different aspects like play-within-a play or the philosophy of tragic. So, for the

first part of the research, Shakespeare’s own play texts will act as primary sources.

For the understanding of the stage there are two major sources, E.K. Chambers’ Elizabethan

Stage and G.E. Bentley’s Jacobean and Caroline Stage, as they extensively document the

material background to Shakespearean Drama and masques of Inigo Jones, a picture of the

society in which the drama flourished, the acting companies, their theatres and their acting

and staging. I will also look into specific diagrams like C.W. Hodges’ plan of Globe theatre or

De Witts’ sketches and also other visual material which are majorly plans of buildings or

sketches of theatres.

Further, I will look at the different texts written at time which are not just restricted to the

field of theatre, as these will be helpful in understanding the history of thought and justify the

basis of ‘conversation’.

Moreover, to understand the concept of perspective I will majorly look into the texts on art

history and theory like Panofsky and Damisch and extend the arguments to the case of

theatre. For this, I have to analyze the backdrops as used by Jones which are available as

archives. Thus, to put it simply my work will be based on reading, observing and interpreting

the specific texts and documents of that time focusing on theatre but also moving beyond it.
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Chapter Breakdown:

Introduction

In the introduction it is essential to give the background where the work is situated which is

the world after the Copernican Revolution. The Copernican revolution was a paradigm shift

from the earlier understanding of the geocentric world to a heliocentric world. The history of

the Western Civilization can broadly be divided into three sequences by looking into the

changing relationship between the finite and the infinite with respect to the immanent and the

transcendent. In the first sequence that is the Greek, the transcendent is the One while the

immanent is finite. There did not exist any idea of infinite in this sequence. In the Christian

that is the second sequence, the transcendent which is the One also becomes the infinite but

the immanent still remains the finite. The third sequence opened by the Copernican

Revolution and further Galilean intervention introduces for the first time infinity in the

immanent world. With the work of Galileo the hierarchy of the heavens and its older relation

to earth also breaks because his theory of inertia posits all bodies to follow a universal law.

Apart from this radical break in science, the proposition of the infinite can be seen in different

fields like the Hermetic traditions or even in Christianity. Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of

Cusa were two such figures. Though the ideas in these fields differed all of them had the

fundamental proposition of the infinite. AlexandreKoyre discusses these developments in

From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. ‘This scientific and philosophical revolution

- it is indeed impossible to separate the philosophical from the purely scientific aspects of this

process: they are interdependent and closely linked together - can be described roughly as

bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance, from philosophically

and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and

hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the

hierarchy and structure of being, rising from the dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher
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and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres) , and its replacement by an indefinite

and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental

components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of

being.’ (Koyre, 1957:2) From Koyre, it is clear that there is an emergence of a crisis after

“this scientific and philosophical revolution” because of the infinitization of the world. This

crisis leads to several implications in different fields. Through the following chapters I will

look into the different responses to the crisis with specific focus on theatre.

Chapter 1

In this chapter I will see how a new philosophy of tragic comes up in Shakespeare and how it

is different from that of the Greeks. Tragedy emerged in Greece where the idea of infinity

was detested. Perfection in Greek art or life was seen as something which is closer to the

One. In Greece, the gods were immanent and not the One. The tragic flaw or hubris can be

seen as an attempt towards the infinite. Thus, in Greece the attempt for an infinite leads to

tragedy. In Shakespeare’s time, which falls in the third sequence the world is opened up as

infinite as mentioned earlier. With this new relation of the world with infinite the form of

tragedy cannot remain the same. Moreover, as this comes up in third sequence the second

sequence has to be considered. In the second sequence we see that although the

transcendental is infinite and the world is finite, mediation is possible which may lead to a

comic move or else there might be tragedy. The infinitization poses a challenge to the

transcendence and the transcendence is lost in a certain sense. One of the responses to this

crisis can be a new definition of transcendence. I will see an aspect of the Shakespearean

tragedy as an instance of this response because in this case the power of transcendence is

taken up by history or the Grand Mechanism, to coin the term from Jan Kott. Moreover,

history also acts as an element to create the public sphere for the spectators. Taking up the

specific case of Hamlet, Carl Schmitt suggests that there is a historical grounding or history
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remains as a political unconscious through the play, by the intrusion of history into the

contemporary thus making the character into a kind of myth, unlike the case of Hecuba. For

Schmitt the tragic core is always located in history and cannot be autonomous of the artist’s

creation. Thus, for him Hamlet and his mother can be seen as King James and Mary Stuart

respectively though he suggests that the derivation from history is universalised such that

Hamlet becomes a universal character by becoming a myth. Thus, it is clear how important

history is in the context of Shakespearean texts. Moreover, the categorization of the plays into

genres of tragedy or comedy is problematic in Shakespeare, as everything is subsumed under

the category of history. I will also explore how these categories themselves get problematized

in Shakespearean texts.

Chapter 2

In this chapter I will see how the play-within-a play structure in Shakespeare was not just

limited to the text but the theatre architecture of the Globe itself represented the idea. In

contrast to this I will see a different version of the theatre in Inigo Jones and its implications.

From E.K. Chambers and C.W. Hodges we can get an idea of the Globe that it was circular in

structure and was an open theatre. Thus, it was open to the Heavens. Moreover, the stage of

the Globe had a constructed Heavens above it. Thus in the Globe we can see a play-within-a

play structure through the outer structure comprising of the spectators and the inner structure

consisting of the stage where the actors perform. Frances Yates through her work speculated

that the Globe must have had Vitruvian influences. This she suggests comes up because of the

‘Preface to the Elements by Euclid of Megera’ written by John Dee which became an

influential text at time and several architect/joiners were influenced by it. Shakespeare’s

theatre was also the actors’ theatre and it gave priority to the voice and so following the

Vitruvian model the sound vessels were placed under the seats. “...the Shakespearean type of

theatre represented as never before since antiquity the most important aspects of the ancient
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theatre as described by Vitruvius, its aural, musical and cosmic aspects, that the designers of

this type of theatre knew something of classical theory on these matters and produced an

adaptation of the Ancient theatre which was actually closer to its spirit and function as the

vehicle of poetic drama than any other Renaissance adaptation.” (Yates, 1965:125) Taking

this idea forward I will investigate how the Globe represented a new world which was a

construction or a making and in this world the concept of harmony becomes predominant as

it did not exist after the crisis.

In Renaissance England a different kind of theatre architecture can be seen through the work

of Inigo Jones, the most famous English architect of the Renaissance who brought the

Palladian influences in England. Two aspects of Inigo Jones are crucial: firstly, he made

theatres which were closed and secondly, his theatre was majorly focused on visual. His

writings on the stone-henge show that he considered that the open buildings can only be

temples and not theatres and in his model of the Cockpit theatre it is clear that for him theatre

must necessarily be closed. I would consider this closed theatre as a response to the

infinitization of the world. Unlike the Globe which opens up the world, Inigo Jones’ theatre

closes itself. This response primarily rejects the possibility opened up and the closed structure

also creates a different world but something entirely different from the Globe.

Chapter 3

In this chapter, I will consider the two attempts of harmonization which are distinct and also

leads to creation of different spectators. As mentioned earlier the Shakespearean theatre was

the actors’ theatre and priority was given to the voice. As Wittkower pointed out that sound

becomes the crucial element on basis of which harmony in architecture was constructed and

this can be seen in the Globe.

The attempt for harmonizing was not restricted to the use of sound or music as a basis.

Alberti in On Painting suggests that beauty is inherent to nature and harmony can brought out
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in painting by the exact copying of nature by the use of perspective or perspectiva artificialis.

Thus, the perspective which was a Renaissance invention became a way for constructing

harmony. This use of perspective is significant in Inigo Jones’ theatre as it is focused on

scenography. With detailed scenography Jones replaces the Globe’s functionalist theatre by

an illusionist theatre. In Inigo Jones’ masque theatres priority is given to visuals and this is

clear from the Johnson Jones debate. Gordon elucidates that in the masque of Oberon, the

Faery Prince, produced at Christian festivities of 1610-11 which was written by Ben

Johnson, Jones debated with Ben Johnson that the spectacle was important than the text of the

play and Johnson differed on this point. In the construction of the scenography Jones used

linear perspective as mentioned earlier. Perspective allowed the construction of the subjective

world in the objective frame. It was not just a technical device. It allowed the construction of

the negative space in a two dimensional frame and also the supposed imitation of the world

which resembled beauty as Alberti mentioned. Erwin Panofsky suggested that the linear

perspective in Renaissance is less close to truth than the angular perspective of the Antique

because it does not consider the curvature of the eye. So, perspective does not allow an

imitation but rather a construction of the imitation, and thus a different kind of world.

Perspective too falls under the fundamental aspect of making during the Renaissance. With

regard to the spectators, it can be said that perspective provides a means of staging the

captured and playing it out in a reflexive mode. But taking up from Hubert Damisch I

consider perspective as ‘a regulative configuration intended not so much to inform the

representation as to orient and control its regime’. Perspective is anti-humanist in the sense

that it reduces the human to an eye and that too positioned in a specific way. Thus Jones’

production of masques creates a regime which guides the spectators towards the specific

vanishing point. This, vanishing point represents the eye of the Sovereign. Thus, the closed

theatre of Inigo Jones with the use of perspective scenes creates a regime which reassures the
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position of the Sovereign after the loss of transcendence by the formation of a homogeneous

spectator. Inigo Jones’ theatre thus becomes a kind of theatre of the State. Carl Schmitt

contrasts Shakespearean theatre with Racine’s and says “from the perspective of the

Sovereign state it is understandable that Voltaire would see in Shakespeare a “drunken

savage”.” Further, he suggests that the political or formation of State was seen as an antithesis

to barbarism. In this “barbarism” of Shakespeare I find the coming up or formation of a

different people. The Globe because of its structures with multiple stages allowed the

constitution of a kind of vision which was anonymous. This vision further leads to the

construction of a new spectator, unlike Jones’ theatre and hence has a trace of a different form

of politics.

Thus, through the construction of the theatre architecture and the making of new worlds, the

Renaissance shows different strains and responses to the central crisis which comes with the

infinitization of the world.

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