Shakespeare’s Human at Scale

This paper explores the way Shakespeare imagines the human in scalar terms. From Hamlet’s diminution of Godlike “man” to a “quintessence of dust” to Lear’s demand that the storm “Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world” and “all germens spill at once / That makes ingrateful man,” some of the most celebrated passages in Shakespeare employ the rhetoric of scale to emphasize the place of the human in the cosmic order. I argue that recent theoretical articulations of scale help illuminate the way Shakespeare’s use of scale clarifies how the human was viewed in relation to both created nature and the divine cosmos broadly conceived. I focus on what scale theorist Joshua DiCaglio calls the “situated dislocation” that results from a subject’s awareness of their existence at discontinuous scales. I argue that Shakespeare routinely stages “situated dislocations” that both reveal the tenuousness of the human as a category in a shifting early modern cosmology and open possibilities for ethical human action.