“No darkness but Ignorance”: Thinking Foggily in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Fog, and its relationship to thinking and mental states, is a frequently employed metaphor in early modern English. This essay considers the range of these uses, positioning meteorological, poetic and dramatic examples, particularly Shakespeare’s, against those of early humoural thinkers, such as Robert Burton and Thomas Bright. In order to explore these examples further, a number of studies from experimental cognitive linguistics are then introduced and connected to theatre studies in particular. The final section of the essay builds on these foundations to develop a close reading of the fog in Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth. In particular, it considers what the salience of the fog-ignorance metaphor means for a cognitive analysis centred on the incoming mayor of Jacobean London.