Bed Tricks and Fantasies of Facelessness: All’s Well that Ends Well and Macbeth in the Dark

Abstract

Shakespeare’s bed tricks hinge on humans without faces. In such dark environs, one is unable to perceive the face of another, and therefore unable to recognize, to acknowledge, or even to deny. But what are the consequences of imagining a faceless human? Out of what desires or temptations might a fantasy of facelessness emerge? Wittgenstein repeatedly drew on the face as a symbol of the interconnected nature of inner experience and outer expression, culminating in his assertion that “The face is the soul of the body.” By saying this, he challenges a particular fantasy of privacy that would seek to see the face as the external machinery of inner feelings. According to such a fantasy, doing away with faces might resolve the threat of duplicity through the erasure of human expression altogether. In this essay, Devin Byker explores how Measure, All’s Well, and Macbeth, through comic and tragic modes, investigate fantasies of facelessness—efforts to disavow the face and thus to alter the demands of human relations. Through such drama, Shakespeare explores both the epistemological and ethical force of the claims of the face and the consequences of a fantasy that wishes to ignore such claims.