Shakespeare’s Alhazen: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the History of Optics

International audience; Also exploring Shakespeare’s borrowings, Anne-Valérie Dulac turns to optics and takes Love’s Labour’s Lost as her departure point. She first reminds us that in her Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost , published in 1936, Frances Yates repeatedly mentions the importance of Ahazen’s optical theory in grasping the play’s many references to light, eyes, and vision. Dulac first deals with two mistakes made by Yates in her rather short description of the 1572 edition of the Opticae Thesaurus , a compendium including a truncated Latin version of Alhazen’s treatise along with Witelo’s Perspectiva . She then demonstrates that this was due to the fact that, at the time when Yates was writing, historians of science had not yet shown as forcefully how different the translations of the Kitab al-Manazir ( The Books of Optics ) are, or, in other words, how different Alhazen is from Alhacen and Ibn al-Haytham. Dulac eventually looks into the Latinised version of Alhazen’s optical theory to enquire into whether it could shed light on some of the most intricate metaphorical networks of the play.