The Idolatrous Eye by Michael O'Connell

CITATION: O'Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Understanding

• Question: How did drama negotiate word and image during early modern debates regarding iconoclasm?
• Answer: While early modern dramatists did not directly respond to contemporary scholars, they responded to Medieval ecclesiastical debates regarding incarnation, text, and embodiment.
• Method: First, O'Connell refers to ecclesiastical restrictions on religious and secular theater alike in order to establish their common idolatrous visuality. Second,  O'Connell contextualizes logocentric early modern humanism against a tradition of embodied Christianity stretching through the early modern period. Third, O'Connell proposes the importance of dramatic bodily torture to late-medieval religious drama. Fourth, O'Connell juxtaposes dramatic bodily torture with a textualized dramatic God. Fifth and finally, O'Connell addresses Jonson and Shakespeare's image-textual epistemology in the tug-of-war between humanists and Puritans.
• Assumptions: O'Connell assumes that pre-Filioquean controversies reverberated in a meaningful way through the York cycle and into Shakespeare's plays.
• Sententiae: "What I am proposing is that the iconoclasm of the Reformation was not a mere change in the style and emphasis of the worship of Christian Europe. Rather, it emerged from tensions in the relation of image and word that inhere in the central religious doctrine of Christianity, the incarnation, the belief that God, in taking on a human form, became subject to representation as an image." (200)

Overstanding

• Assessment: O'Connell has buried the lede, which says that the incarnation of power and pain in Christ implicates the bodies and consciousnesses of the audience. This seems to extend from a passage of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, but is necessary for understanding O'Connell's treatment of iconicity, iconophobia, and iconoclasm.
• Synthesis: O'Connell's project is an interesting compliment to Knapp's, because O'Connell treats the prehistory of early modern image, whereas Knapp addresses early modern history in images.
• Application: The most interesting challenge from O'Connell is to locate how, exactly, early modern dramatists propose that their senses were embodied by players. What play-texts support an extension of Scarry's Christology?