Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare by Chiari Sophie;Popelard Mickaël;

Author:Chiari, Sophie;Popelard, Mickaël;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Conclusion: Sources of Light

To conclude this chapter, I would like to turn to a footnote in the 2009 New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which offers a commentary upon Biron’s most famous line on light: ‘Light seeking light doth light of light beguile’ (1.1.77). In order to unfold the many complex meanings and references behind such cryptic formulation, William C. Carroll writes that ‘[e]yes were believed to create the light by which they see, to search for light is therefore a kind of self-blinding’ (2009: 65 n. 77). Yet this had ceased to be the only common optical belief for at least three centuries, over the course of which the supposedly ‘dominant’ theory had appropriated Alhazen’s syncretic demonstration, if only in its Latinised form, substantially different from the original Arabic text. Although eyes were indeed believed to create the light by which they see, they were also thought to receive another kind of light, through intromission. Eyebeams could only give birth to visual perception when met by rays of physical light emitted from the world outside, exceeding the limits of the observer’s bodily envelope. Such intromissive-extramissive theory of vision had resulted from the challenging history of the accommodation of Ibn al-Haytham’s theory into what became known in Europe as Alhazen’s Optics, after many a Perspectivist adaptation and reinterpretation.

This is the reason why Frances Yates’s statement that ‘[t]here can be little doubt [. . .] that one of the books which the king and his court are studying [. . .] is the Opticae Thesaurus of Hasan ibn Hasan or Alhazen’ (1936: 149) sounds rather too linear and evident today, in view of the recent developments and findings about the history of optics. The assumption that ‘Hasan ibn Hasan or Alhazen’ are only linguistically different names associated to one and the same theory rests upon the idea that the Latinised version of Alhazen is an exact translation of the medieval Arabic urtext, which it is not. Centuries of Perspectivist tradition had already incorporated the original text into an eclectic synthesis that integrated varying positions on the subject of eyebeams and rays of light. This does not mean that Yates’s intuition and conviction are irrelevant since Alhazen, if only in his European version, was widely read and woven within the Latin tradition, which allowed his views to become fully compatible with jarring notions, making his De aspectibus a dominant source of Western optics and, as such, a source as plausible as any when looking into Shakespeare’s eyes.

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