Can postmodern accounts of the gaze deriving from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Fanon and Riviere tell us anything about those structures of vision prior to, and repressed by, modernity? This study examines the tragedies, histories, and Roman plays for an emergent early modern spectatorial subject, thereby locating Shakespearean theatre within those discourses most crucial to the contemporary exposition and disruption of regimes of vision: perspective painting, cartography, optics, geometry, Puritan anti-theatrical polemic and the occult.