Abstract

The faces that continually appear and disappear in Macbeth supply an idea about how seeing and knowing might fold or fail or simply spoil in Shakespeare's play. Drawing upon animal studies, art history, film theory, and neurobiology, I argue that Duncan's difficulty in reading faces exemplifies an early modern world where the face's importance and ubiquity were complicated by urban mobility and print technology. Queen Elizabeth I's portraits try to control the problems posed by early modern faces, but the uncertainty Shakespeare descries in Macbeth renders the legibility of faces more important than their expressiveness or responsiveness.