Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

This book visits the wondrous, magical, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, studying the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? The book asks what happens in theatre, as a medium that can give power to or curtail experiences of wonder, addressing plays that reflect contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice.