Technology and Séance in Shakespeare's Early History Plays.

In his first tetralogy, Shakespeare interrogates his age's faith in technological progress as a triumph of the rational over the superstitious. In 1 Henry VI and Richard III, he dramatises an epistemological aporia: the overloading of the rational summons forth a future of ghosts. In keeping with Derrida's mystical foundation of law, the imposition of the material, more immediately represented as the gunpowder technology in 1 Henry VI, creates ruptures in meaning that resist assimilation into rational discourse. This material excess lingers into a putatively rational age in Richard III, where confidence in historical progress is consistently frustrated by representational enigmas. Even Richard, the play's arch-rationalist, finds himself unnerved by the ghostly other that fractures his carefully constructed economy of reason. Rather than reaching self-sufficiency, then, Shakespeare's vision of technological modernity remains inextricably bound to its repressed counterpart: the very superstition it seeks to erase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]