“Forward and Backward”: Actants and Agency in Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

This essay presents a posthumanist reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, two plays which feature scientist/magus who attempts to control his environment through personal agency. After detailing the analogy between agency posthuman figures workings computerized writing machines, as Katherine Hayles has proposed, my shows how Kott’s writing, especially notion “Grand Mechanism” history, anticipates theories that are currently dominating literary assessments. His critique makes this idea perfectly clear when he disputes standard Prospero represents medieval magus; instead argues was more akin Leonardo DaVinci, “a master mechanics hydraulics,” one would have embraced revolutionary advances in “astronomy” well “anatomy” (1974: 321).