“LOOK WITH THINE EARS”: THE DEPRECATION OF OCULARCENTRIC CULTURE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

Abstract

In his groundbreaking research on the broad phenomenon of Western visual culture in important intellectual eras, Martin Jay touches on the abundance of ocular references in Renaissance literature and cites the example of William Shakespeare whose works are replete with visual metaphors. Notwithstanding extensive research on the role of vision in Shakespeare’s works, it seems that scant attention has been paid to the Bard’s deprecation of ocularcentric culture. Shakespeare was, admittedly, not the first writer who depicted and challenged the biased privileging of sight in Western culture, but the present study focuses on the example of King Lear to show that Shakespearean drama played a significant role in reflecting the dire consequences of ocularcentrism in society. Drawing on first-hand Renaissance accounts of vision, Martin Jay’s exhaustive research into the history of ocularcentrism in the West, and James Shapiro’s historical account of the year Shakespeare’s King Lear was first performed, this study employs a New Historicist methodology to examine how Shakespearean drama marks both a turn away from the traditional hegemony of vision and a turning point in the criticism of modern ocularcentric culture in the West. We conclude that King Lear serves, among other things, to remind us that visual subjugation transcends the boundaries of time and culture and that we could all ourselves be Lears or Gloucesters, deluded by the proverbial concept that “seeing is believing”