In this post, new CRASSH Conversions Fellow Suparna Roychoudhury writes about her project ‘Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science’:

My book project, “Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science,” investigates Shakespeare’s representation of mental images. Shakespeare was clearly familiar with the principles of faculty psychology handed down to the Renaissance from antiquity, according to which “imagination” is the part of the soul responsible for creating “phantasms” or mental images. The project looks at the ways in which Shakespeare’s portrayal of imagination relates to the scientific revolution—to developments in anatomy, medicine, natural philosophy, and natural history. It examines Shakespearean texts alongside the work of such figures as Andreas Vesalius, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton. Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, speak to the difficulty of determining imagination’s anatomical nature; similarly, Macbeth is a comment on the ever-increasing pathologization of imagination. Overall, I am interested in the connections between Shakespeare’s imagination and the proto-scientific thinking of his time, and how his work translates epistemic problems into aesthetic representations. While in Cambridge, I will be exploring the relation between imagination and early modern mathematics, and how this relation figures in Shakespeare’s plays.

Suparna Roychoudhury, Mount Holyoke College, United States of America.

More information on Suparna’s work is here, and you can contact her here: sr765@cam.ac.uk.