Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (2013)

Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama, by Kristen Poole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 304. Cloth $90.00.Reviewer: D. K. SmithIn this thought-provoking and impressive book, Kristen Poole extends the study of early modern cartography in fascinating new directions, carrying an examination of the period's increasing geodetic awareness into the realm of the otherworldly. In a marked break from recent approaches, which have set up a clear division between religious views of the world and the shift toward scientific and mathematical precision, Poole examines the way that cartographic epistemologies may be seen as embedded within a fundamentally theological cultural view.New religious ideas in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, along with changing ways of thinking about physical space, produced a series of competing ideas about the structure of the universe. Even as it was becoming more precisely measureable and fixed, the world in early modern England reare mained a fundamentally religious space, and the experience of a person's place in that physical space was closely tied to her understanding of the supernatural and religious order of things. In this light, the increasing concern with how physical space could be measured and organized co-existed with ongoing concerns about demonic and supernatural manifestations in the world.For Poole, the spatiality of the theater-its staging of characters moving through the world-offered an area for the representation of these competing physical and imaginative experiences. In a series of varied and intriguing chapters, she considers how an array of early modern dramas-Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Tempest-can be seen to highlight this ongoing negotiation between spatial and supernatural epistemologies.The first chapter, The devil's in the archive: Ovidian physics and Doctor Faustus, considers the nature of the physical world, which was increasingly seen in fixed and measureable terms, but which also had to make room for the fluidity of demonic and divine intrusion. This was a world in which Satan moved freely, a world in which supernatural occurrences were, if not common, at least well accepted. And to accept Satan's actions in the world was to accept a reality of unstable and shifting materiality, a world in which imagination and physical reality had equal play. To convey the imagined experience of this period, Poole introduces the intriguing concept of Ovidian physics: an epistemology of material reality that allows both for a fixity of space and for the destabilizing experience of sudden metamorphosis. This is a far cry from the modern understanding of the world, but by reading Doctor Faustus through this epistemological lens, Poole allows us to consider the lived experience of a character whose view of the world simultaneously encompasses these shifting extremes.In her second chapter, Scene at the deathbed: Ars moriendi, Othello, and envisioning the supernatural, Poole examines the supernatural environment that would have felt most immediate and universal to the play's audience: the imaginative and physical space of the deathbed. She explores the complex understanding of the experience as represented in ars moriendi. In this literary form, the dying figure is seen to argue against an invisible host of demons, recounting for the audience the lived experience of this spiritual trial, and highlighting the simultaneous experience of the physical and spiritual worlds. …