Chapter Three moves from the front to the middle of the brain, believed to house the rational faculty that assessed forms and ideas, and put them together in novel ways. The chapter explores a persistent early modern connection between fathers, daughters, and the production of new knowledges — one that found expression in the popular emblem of Truth, the daughter of Time (Veritas temporis filia). After analyzing how this figure was used to embody scientific and religious innovation, the chapter then considers the revival of an ancient myth about the potter Dibutades’ daughter, a girl who traces her absent lover’s form and (according to early modern revisions of her story) invents the art of painting. These two daughters help frame the chapter’s analysis of two Shakespearean ones, All’s Well That Ends Well’s orphaned Helen and The Tempest’s island-bound Miranda. After briefly considering how Helen uses her physician-father’s art to produce her own ambitious project, the chapter finishes with a reading of The Tempest. The chapter argues that Miranda’s beating mind challenges her father Prospero’s rough, old art, and that her brainwork signals intellectual progress and the changes, based on observation, that were emerging from new scientific and philosophical ideas.

This chapter presents a history of the emergence and ideological uses made of the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. The normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is defined through exclusion of what it is not, and this is what the figure represents. Deriving from verbal descriptions linked to the first visual portraits of an Englishman, the figure acquires gender and class inflections and woven into a historical narrative charged with an implicit future project of a ‘true’ (protestant) commonwealth of ‘true’ (pious, ‘plain’ and temperate) Englishmen to be achieved through its exclusion. The centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is dissociated from the male elite at court, perceived as effeminate and of extravagant foreign habits. It is in this context that the four instances of the figure in the Shakespearean canon are discussed. While the first three are shown to resist the turn by which the ‘true’ Englishman becomes a function of normative cultural habits, the fourth, in All’s Well that Ends Well, is shown to be more ambivalent, an ambivalence that may be linked to the political watershed of 1603