SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Where in the body does imagination occur? This essay reads the conflicts among heart, eye, and mind frequently portrayed in Shakespeare’s sonnets alongside Renaissance ideas of cognition, arguing that the aesthetic vitality of such quarrels is connected to the state of early modern commentaries on the imaginative faculty. The anatomical position of this faculty remained unclear, all the more so with the advent of Vesalian dissection. In the corporeal confusions of the sonnets that depict the beloved’s phantasmatic image shifting among the lover’s organs, imagination’s uncertain location spurs explorations of the body’s functional fabric and the nature of inward vision.