ABSTRACT
The rhetorical devices of strangeness have their counterpoint in technological devices. This chapter explores “strange works” in seventeenth-century theatrical culture. Technology develops rapidly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and generates widespread interest in court and in public and commercial life, from Cornelius Drebbel’s perpetual motion machine (1607, 1612) to rope-based special effects in masques. This chapter explores the centrality of strange devices to stage technology and reads Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Jonson’s The Alchemist as self-conscious plays of engineering. Stage devices are imbued with moral significance in The Tempest, where Prospero is foremost not a magician but an engineer; Jonson, however, banishes visual action to the off-stage realm and consequently fetishises “strange devices” and opens them to both intrigue and interrogation. Central to both plays, this chapter demonstrates, is the moral uses and effects of technological display. In turn, Jonson and Shakespeare self-consciously explore the materials of theatrical performance and their own moral, social, or political efficacy.
