Shakespeare's Benthic Communities:Journeys to the Seabed

This essay discusses Shakespearean bodies imagined travelling towards and then resting on the seabed. Journeys into the deep might appear to constitute the ultimate loss of community, given the underwater world’s hostility to human life; but as the essay aims to demonstrate, what Dan Brayton has called Shakespeare’s “benthic imagination” implies that the displacement involved in sinking to the seafloor might allow for new forms of emplacement within more-than-human communities. The passages from Shakespeare granted particular attention are Clarence’s dream from Richard III, Ariel’s vision of Alonso’s sea-burial in The Tempest, the prince’s lament over Thaisa’s lifeless body in Pericles’s shipboard scene, and Bottom’s report of his ‘dream’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.