Champs du visible : horizons du voir dans King Lear et Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

My contention in this paper is to try and probe into King Lear’s heath and Antony and Cleopatra’s « Nilus » as the only true — if moving and changeable — spaces for vision to occur. The visual field metaphor as such is thus to be replaced by that of a visual and paradoxically invisible space. Such uncommon « places » allow the audience to experience vision as a necessarily incomplete perceptual process. One is carried away within the very sensory texture of the world so that no hindsight or proper perspective can ever be drawn. By displaying a proto-phenomenological conception of optics, these two plays invite the reader to peer beyond and through them from a historical point of view. One may indeed sense the distant though lingering influence of Lucretius and Giordano Bruno’s views on vision and perception. The very word « influence » proves all the more telling when bearing in mind its former and original cosmological meaning whereby it applied to the liquid emanation of stars, accounting for their impact on the sublunary world. The main transformation undergone by vision in Shakespeare’s plays consists in having metaphors of flowing and liquefied matter to describe perception instead of resorting to the traditional scholastic tradition of rays of light and fire. Not only do Shakespearean eyes subvert the then common solar « burning » visual fields, they also lead to a radically anti-Aristotelian definition of space as being infiltrated by time and therefore submitted to the changing phases of the « moist star ».