Theophany on the Shakespearean Stage

This thesis offers a reading of five of Shakespeare's late plays––Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen––via the idea of theophany. Theophany takes a different form in each of these plays. In Pericles and Cymbeline, Diana and Jupiter appear, ostensibly in body, on the stage. In the other plays examined here, theophany might retire into the imaginative hinterland of the work, or be veiled in language or explicit artifice. The Two Noble Kinsmen does not divulge its cardinal deity openly; likewise The Winter's Tale offers a number of gods and divine suggestions, and burdens the reader or audience with deciding the contours of the play's implicit divine hierarchy. The Tempest presents nearly intractable difficulty and mystery, which the relevant chapter attempts to elucidate. Nevertheless, the thesis contends that each of these plays presents a moment, set of moments, or a general suffusion which is answerable to the term 'theophany'. In order to understand such peculiar moments in the Shakespearean corpus, the thesis draws on a number of considerations, such as 1) the various precedents in classical and contemporary literature and visual culture; 2) the importance of genre in understanding Shakespeare's theophanies and those on the early modern stage in general; and 3) the staging of these scenes. The thesis also enquires into Shakespeare's use of allegory and its importance for his thinking about the relationship between the gods and ideas. Owing to its focus on genre, the thesis also explores competing and coexisting concepts of Providence and Fortune in the plays, as well as other modes of thinking about destiny. Finally, the thesis finds that, instead of sidelining Shakespeare's theophanies as criticism has frequently done, placing them at the very centre of enquiry yields a rich and holistic reading of these complex plays.