Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.

"Poole navigates herself deftly though the minefield of ambiguities of literal and metaphorical language of the early modern supernatural....Supernatural Environments certainly succeeds in bringing to attention the important role of cartographic and mathematical developments in changing concepts of supernatural spaces and how these conflicting ideas are addressed in the theater. While much of the book’s introductory material on the need to reevaluate “the decline of magic” sounds all too familiar, the arguments that Poole follows with are significant as the implications of Clark’s monumental study have yet to be fully addressed in a theatrical context. Poole writes engagingly and the argument is fascinating. Supernatural Environments is an ambitious project and Poole quite rightly reveals the possibility of more research in the area. It will be interesting to see what follows."
--Marlowe Society of America Newsletter

"This is an important, clever, and well-written book that makes a strikingcontribution to early modern studies, and its epilogue offers a vision of a ‘‘reenchantedgeography’’ (219) that is richly suggestive and should inspire newthinking about the period."
--Renaissance Society of America