ABSTRACT
I offer in this chapter a new reading of scepticism in early modern drama that advances the textual and thematic analyses of past studies to explore how scepticism manifests itself in performance—through both ethical and visual doubt. I do so by exploring the philosophical contexts that attend citations of the word “strange” across pamphlet literature, sermons, and lyric poetry, distilling its central paradoxes and ambiguities in order to understand its remarkable centrality to Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King and Heywood’s Age plays, alongside Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These plays repeatedly employ “strange” descriptions to challenge received ethical norms and, more fundamentally, to interrogate sensory perception, moral understanding, and description. Accordingly, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, and Shakespeare turn such “strange” scepticism upon the language and tools of theatrical representation itself. In particular, the term’s appearance in Heywood’s stage directions and commentary indicates a tension between multimedia representation on the stage and verbal description of the printed page, instiling “strangeness” with an ineffable liveness.
