Shakespeare and Technology Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions

Early modern historians now agree that revolutions in military technology, information technology, navigation, clockmaking, surveying, and many other technical fields exerted considerable influences on Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. Shakespeare and Technology examines the multifaceted impact of early modern technological revolutions on Shakespeare's dramaturgy. By reading the plays in their immediate technological contexts, Cohen offers new insights into some of Shakespeare's key metaphors, his methods of character development and plot development, his ideas about genre, his concept of theatrical space, and his views on the theater's role in society. The study finds that Shakespeare acknowledged long-standing stigmas associated with each of the technologies that defined his culture, and it highlights the ways in which characters described themselves and others as machines. Shakespeare and Technology should be of interest to literature scholars, early modern cultural historians, and historians of science and technology.

Dr. Cohen is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he specializes in Shakespeare, early modern literature, and early modern cultural studies. His current research projects explore the intersections between early modern literary studies and the history of science and technology. He has published articles in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and The Wordsworth
Circle, and he has contributed chapters to several essay collections.