Shakespeare’s Mirrors

Clear mirrors and scripture in English, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama. Implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, Shakespeare developed a method of characterization, through metadrama, self-awareness and soliloquy, to project St. Paul’s idea of conscience onto the Elizabethan stage. This revolutionary method of characterization, aesthetic existence beyond performance, has long been sensed while remaining elusively undefined. By reviewing Shakespeare’s mirror metaphors, the method that created characters, “detachable from the play like real people,” slowly emerges. Shakespeare used mirror metaphors far more than his contemporaries. Shakespeare’s Mirrors charts the way his drama developed the representation of the unstageable: St. Paul’s metaphysical conception of human nature glimpsed through a glass darkly.