“Forward and Backward”: Actants and Agency in Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

Robert Sawyer

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.24.07

Authors

Robert Sawyer East Tennessee State University, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.07

Keywords:

Posthumanism, Actant, Agency, Prospero, Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles, Ariel, Caliban, Transmedial, entanglement, daemons, Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle

Abstract

This essay presents a posthumanist reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, two plays which feature a scientist/magus who attempts to control his environment through personal agency. After detailing the analogy between the agency of posthuman figures and the workings of computerized writing machines, as Katherine Hayles has proposed, my essay shows how Kott’s writing, especially his notion of the “Grand Mechanism” of history, anticipates the posthumanist theories that are currently dominating literary assessments. His critique of The Tempest makes this idea perfectly clear when he disputes the standard notion that Prospero represents a medieval magus; he instead argues that Prospero was more akin to Leonardo DaVinci, “a master of mechanics and hydraulics,” one who would have embraced revolutionary advances in “astronomy” as well as “anatomy” (1974: 321).

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University, USA

Robert Sawyer is Professor of English at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches Shakespeare, Victorian Literature, and Literary Criticism. Author of Victorian Appropriations of Shakespeare (2003), Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry (2017), and Shakespeare Between the World Wars (2019). His most recent publication is Chapter 6: “Dramatic Escapes,” in the Shakespearean International Yearbook which focuses on the refugee crisis (2021).

References

Aristotle. The Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. 2 Vols. Princeton U.P., 1995.
Google Scholar

Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. 1985. 2nd ed. London, Methuen, 1995.
Google Scholar

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham NC. Duke University Press, 2010.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w

Bevington, David and Eric Rasmussen, eds. Doctor Faustus: the A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers, by Christopher Marlowe, Revels Plays Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1992.
Google Scholar

Campana, Joseph and Scott Maisano, eds. Renaissance Posthumanism. New York: Fordham P, 2016.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823269556.001.0001

Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Duke U.P., 2012 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395263
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395263

Desmet, Christy. “Alien Shakespeares 2.0.” Actes des congrès de la Sociètè française Shakespeare (online 2017): 1-19.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.3877

Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeares: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203300770

Greimas, Algirdas Julien and Joseph Courtés. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. 1982.
Google Scholar

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Google Scholar

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1999 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226321394.001.0001
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226321394.001.0001

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 23(7-8): 159-166. 2006 https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/8.1.159
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406069229

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. MIT press. 2002.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7328.001.0001

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. New York: W.W. Norton, 1974.
Google Scholar

Kott, Jan. “The Aeneid and The Tempest.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. New Series 3.4 (1976): 424-451.
Google Scholar

Kott, Jan, and Daniela Miedzyrzecka. “The Tempest, or Repetition.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 10.3 (Spring 1977): 9-36.
Google Scholar

Kunat, John. “Play me False”: Rape, Race and Conquest in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 65.3: (2014): 307-327 https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2014.0036
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2014.0036

LaGrandeur, Kevin. “Early Modern.” Literature and the Posthuman. Ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini. Cambridge UP, 2017. 16-28.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316091227.005

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674039964

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.
Google Scholar

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Google Scholar

Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Creature Caliban.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 1-23 https://doi.org/10.2307/2902320
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2902320

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus: The A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen. Revels Plays. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1992.
Google Scholar

“The Origin of the word Daemon,” http://ei.cs.vt.edu/-history/Daemon.html Accessed 12 August 2021.
Google Scholar

Oxford English Dictionary. Online http://www.oed.com. Accessed 17 July 2021
Google Scholar

Raber, Karen. Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018.
Google Scholar

Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. London: Routledge, 2007.
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203696156

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London, 1999.
Google Scholar

Surrey, Henry Howard. Aeneid of Henry Howard Surrey. Ed. Florence H. Ridley. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California Press. 1963.
Google Scholar

Ubersfeld, Anne. Understanding Theatre. University of Toronto Press, 1999 https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442679023
Google Scholar DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442679023