openings

Around the turn of the seventeenth century, English depictions of the supernatural often entailed a duality, a simultaneous presence of the stable and the labile, the seen and the unseen, the material and the fantastic. These dualities, I have been arguing, are a consequence of conflicting latent spatial epistemologies. The various spaces I have been examining – the space of a contract, the deathbed, and purgatory – have been terrestrial. I turn now to the cosmological, to spatial structures of the universe. Cosmological structures are integral to two of the period's important theologians, John Calvin and Richard Hooker. In the former, we find an understanding of creation as having a spatial order that is subordinate to the fluctuations of God's providence; this leads to a world that is full of the possibility of unanticipated mutability. In the latter, we find a model of creation that is more rigid in adhering to immutable divine laws; this leads to a world that privileges the predictable and the absolute. Macbeth, I will argue, stages an impossible simultaneity of these incompatible, even irreconcilable understandings of divine cosmic structure.