This book demonstrates how a group of tragedies by Shakespeare and his contemporaries stage the fear and exhilaration generated by encounters with the unknown and the extraordinary. Arguing that the maritime art of fathoming—that is, dropping a lead and line into water to measure its depth—operates as a master-image for these plays, it illustrates how they create sublime horror through intuitions of mysterious more-than-human agencies and of worlds beyond the visible.

Though tightly focused on a specific body of imagery, the book strikes up dialogue with a number of critical fields, including theories and histories of tragedy; ecocriticism and the environmental humanities; oceanic studies; and work on early modern ideas about the body, madness, and language. Countering a tendency within tragic theory to value the textual over the dramatic, it also demonstrates how the tragic effects to which it points are created through specific theatrical strategies, including the use of offstage space, intertheatricality, and the violation of dramatic conventions. Situating its arguments within recent criticism on these plays and on tragedy more generally, and pushing back against scholarship that regards the genre in Shakespeare's time as concerned more with pity than with fear, the book offers fresh and detailed readings of some of the most frequently studied plays in the English canon, including Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling.

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