Shakespeare's Air: Sovereignty, Omnipotence, and the Problem of the Other

Abstract

At once life-giving and potentially fatal, the air’s inscrutability and capacity to enter into the body elicits powerful fears and fantasies in Shakespeare’s poems and plays. Violent winds, spectral presences, and airy spirits suffuse the atmosphere of his works; troubling the boundaries of the body, these phenomena become charged with desires and anxieties arising from the experience of relatedness. In a series of extended close readings of Venus and Adonis (1593), Macbeth (1606), and The Tempest (1611), I argue that the air provides a rich resource for addressing the relationship between self and other, offering a space in which experiences of dependency and power can be imaginatively worked out. After an introductory chapter offering a broad overview of the project, Chapter Two turns to Venus and Adonis, examining the poem’s exploration of the relationship between imitative poets and their predecessors. Showing how eroticised tropes of inspiration shaped both ancient and Renaissance discussions of imitation, it argues that Shakespeare’s depictions of breathy transfer enable him to explore the enigmatic process whereby one artist influences another. In contrast to Harold Bloom’s Oedipal struggle, Venus and Adonis offers the sexual encounter as a model for the relationship between poets; in imitative poetry, as in sex, the question of who is acting upon whom resists easy resolution. The chapter then turns to the tradition of depicting moving air animating the beloved’s body in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Petrarch’s Rime sparse. Itself a highly imitative trope, the image of the beloved’s hair ruffled by the breeze points towards the precarious threshold between play and violation, and enables Shakespeare to probe this ambiguity in both sexual and literary spheres. Chapter Three begins by examining two moments in Macbeth when the protagonist imagines himself in peculiarly atmospheric terms. Following Fleance’s escape, Macbeth describes his thwarted dream of becoming ‘[a]s broad and general as the casing air’, while he later claims that his ‘charmèd life’ is as invulnerable as the air itself: ‘as easy mayst thou the intrenchant air / With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed’. Repeatedly drawing on the air to imagine his own unassailable power, Macbeth recalls contemporary associations between the air and sovereignty; according to early seventeenth-century writers, the sovereign was ‘the breath of our nostrils’, an indispensable presence that infused his subjects with life. By placing this fantasy alongside the airy bodies of the witches, however, Macbeth points to maternal power as the appropriated and occluded other at the heart of patriarchal kingship. Drawing attention to Macbeth’s identification with the omnipotent mother, the play reveals sovereignty’s disavowed dependence on the maternal figure. In Chapter Four, I argue that Ariel, the airy spirit of The Tempest, concentrates Shakespeare’s reflections on the elusive possibility of an autonomous aesthetic sphere. The central agent of artifice on the island, Ariel is also insistently associated with the air, not only through his name and airy spirituality, but also through the ‘sweet airs’ that he sings. Despite this, the figure that we observe onstage is a conspicuously embodied performer, far removed from the liberated and ethereal being that the play invites us to imagine. This tension between imagined and embodied Ariels points towards the play’s sophisticated reflections on art and freedom. For Theodor Adorno, the artwork’s ‘spirit’ is that aspect that allows it to transcend the empirical world, not by standing outside the domination of nature but by exposing its terrible costs. These ideas illuminate The Tempest’s remarkable capacity to hold onto the idea of aesthetic autonomy, even while subjecting it to rigorous sceptical critique. The play rediscovers art’s transcendence not by affirming a positive vision of freedom, but by exposing the domination of nature inherent in art itself. Finally, the Coda draws together these themes through the animation of the statue in The Winter’s Tale: ‘Still methinks / There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?’ As Leontes is restored to life through his encounter with a breathing statue, Shakespeare gestures towards the indispensable and vitalising effects of otherness on the self.