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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2020

Prophecy and the supernatural

Yan Brailowsky

Résumé

This chapter explores the language of prophecies to understand and question early modern conceptions of the supernatural from a linguistic perspective. Can language produce supernatural effects? How is the supernatural expressed through language? Does the language of prophecy work differently from ordinary language? In what follows, I firstly consider the context of early modern theatre in which the preternatural, or supernatural, power of prophecies was highly problematic, in a context in which Church and State endeavoured to counteract prophetic practices in Elizabethan and Jacobean England in the hope of avoiding the spread of seditious rumours. The evocative power of the language of prophecy resisted these regulatory efforts, however, and even monarchs such as James I could not help but recognise the close link between prophecies and poetry. This link dated back to the figure of the poet-prophet in Antiquity, a relationship that may explain why Shakespeare’s plays so frequently draw on prophecies to fuel a dramatic narrative. In the second part, I will discuss how the language of prophecy could trick audiences into believing in the supernatural power of prophecies, despite the fact that the language used to utter such prophecies turns out to be, paradoxically, non performative. Instead, to borrow a concept taken from Gilles Deleuze, I will argue in the third part that prophecies make language ‘stutter’, rather than actually serving to advance the plot. As we shall see, prophecies ultimately posit a number of hypothetical futures, perennially questioning our interpretation of historical narratives and supernatural phenomena. By producing the supernatural through language, rather than through characters or special effects, prophecies challenge our interpretations of the plays and all ‘the things that we have heard and seen’ (Julius Caesar, 2.1.15).
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hal-02605561 , version 1 (21-12-2023)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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Yan Brailowsky. Prophecy and the supernatural. Brailowsky, Yan; Bladen, Victoria. Shakespeare and the supernatural, Manchester University Press, pp.137-156, 2020, 978-1-5261-0907-1. ⟨10.7765/9781526109071.00016⟩. ⟨hal-02605561⟩
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