Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Taylor & Francis

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of \u2018enchanted\u2019 and \u2018disenchanted\u2019 practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world\u2019s ordinary functioning might be said to be \u2018enchanted\u2019, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing subs.