The Mind’s Eye: Seeing Things in Shakespeare

Abstract

This essay discusses Shakespeare’s fascination with delusion, particularly the kind of stubborn self-delusion which results from the habit, famously described by Bacon, of ‘submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind’. Treated initially as a subject for comedy, the rearrangements and distortions of reality this tendency precipitates, and the sense of self-entrapment it brings with them, took on darker and less tractable forms in the plays Shakespeare wrote from the late 1590s onwards, and made inevitable his switch to tragedy as the genre where this subject matter could be more searchingly treated. A late attempt, in The Winter’s Tale, to include a self-deluded protagonist whose paranoia equals that of Othello or Macbeth, and yet to rescue him for comedy in the play’s finale, is only partially successful.