ABSTRACT
In 1651 Thomas Hobbes writes a response to William D’Avenant’s chivalric epic poem, Gondibert, the preface of which is addressed to Hobbes. The conversation between Hobbes and D’Avenant about the nature of poetic form serves as an exemplary commentary on the importance of “affect,” images, and spatial modalities within Restoration political and aesthetic theory. In his preface, D’Avenant talks of his attempts to find a model for “representing nature, though not in an affected, yet in an unusual dress.”1 His disclosure betrays a desire to hide, “dress,” or conceal “affect”—variously characterized as states of perceptual feeling-within the context of material form, an impulse echoed in Hobbes’s response to D’Avenant:
The analogy refers to anamorphosis. In this case, the use of two perspective planes in anamorphosis allows for a second image to be “hidden” within the first image, requiring an intervening apparatus or change in the position of the viewer to bring into focus another message or image, often of an illicit or transgressive nature.
