“The Quality of Nothing:” Shakespearean Mirrors and Kepler’s Visual Economy of Science

Abstract

The gradual dissolution of early modern trust in vision as a source of knowledge of the natural world reached its climax towards the end of the sixteenth century. The outlines of this distrust are poignantly expressed in some of Shakespeare’s major plays. Shakespeare’s protagonists initiate a thorough investigation into what kind of knowledge is possible in a world of apparitions and visual deceptions. In his 1604 treatise on optics Kepler confronts similar doubts, suggesting a new visual economy based on “unsubstantial” shadows “similar to nothing”, artificially produced within a camera obscura. In his short 1611 musings with the six-cornered snowflake, Kepler suggests mathematical ways for the observation, measurement and manipulation of nihil (i.e., Nothing). Confronting this new visual economy and the ensuing epistemological difficulties early modern natural philosophers suggested along with their scientific methods, a new poetics that allows the mind’s eye to intuit a new sort of knowledge founded on a new super-sensory sight.