Abstract
If, generally, the association of Shakespeare with the visual arts has focused on the influence of his works on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors, Shakespeare and the Visual Arts: The Italian Influence claims to invert that pattern. By drawing on the sine qua non of intertextuality, and on more recent concepts of ‘cultural mobility’ and ‘permeability between cultures’ in the early modern period, this edited collection purports mainly to consider the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and ‘intermedial genre’ and to explore how Italian visual culture, in particular, functions in Shakespeare’s works. Drama’s ‘hybridity’, which combines the ‘figurative power of imagery’ with the ‘plasticity of the acting process’, is extended to the field of pictorial arts and its concomitant socio-cultural context (18).
The volume, comprised of seventeen contributions by an array of international researchers at various stages in their scholarly development, is divided into three sections. Part 1, ‘Intermediality: Visuality and Drama’, opens with Claudia Corti’s attestation to ‘rambling’ through Shakespeare’s plays (41) to identify different modes of emblematic representation (the bear in The Winter’s Tale, the crow in Cymbeline, and Caliban in The Tempest). Paromita Deb follows in the same vein with respect to the emblematic significance of hand and tongue in Titus Andronicus, focusing too on Shakespeare’s ekphrastic use of Lavinia’s absent body parts for verbal representation. Peter Látka offers new insights into two iconographic episodes in Venus and Adonis structured around ‘Courtship’ and ‘Departure’, which has long been linked to Titian’s adaptation of ‘The Departure Scene’ from Ovid’s myth. Olivia Coulomb examines the influence of Italian arts and English sculpture on the construction of Octavia and Cleopatra, viewing them, respectively, as the embodiment of an ‘English stature-like stillness’ and of the ‘Italian-English sculpture’ – reflecting Protestant versus Roman Catholic tastes. Hanna Scolnicov speculates, again in terms of Antony and Cleopatra, that the goddess ‘Venus’ to whom Cleopatra is compared may refer to ‘a possible intermediality’ with various Classical and Renaissance art depictions of ‘Venus’, modelled on real women (97). Claire T. Guéron appropriates terms of early 15th-century geometric perspective, stemming from the theorisations of Brunelleschi and Alberti, both to underscore Shakespeare’s interest in the optics of Renaissance art and to offer a profound analysis of certain scenes, mainly from The Rape of Lucrece and the late plays, in terms of vanishing points and the horizons of spectator perception.
Part 2, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of the Visual’, begins with Michele Marrapodi’s discussion of erotic tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Rape of Lucrece, as seen through the ekphrastic description of the sleeping woman (mental rape in the first two and actual assault in the third) and through the paintings of Venere dormiente by Giorgione and other coeval artists (paragone with the plays), and by Giordano and Titian, among others (paragone with the poem). Camilla Caporicci reconsiders the (received) affinity between the Elizabethan miniature and the Petrarchan sonnet in terms of Shakespeare’s use of ‘the little portrait’ from various standpoints: political in Hamlet, eulogistic in The Merchant of Venice, and confrontational in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night. Rocco Coronato’s essay offers an intermedial encounter between Caravaggio’s representations of the Medusa-head and the decapitation motif in Measure for Measure. Muriel Cunin studies, in architectural terms, Leontes’ ‘misconstruction’ (as bad architect in The Winter’s Tale) and Paulina’s ‘reconstruction’ (as wise architect) of the trompe l’oeil effects of reality evoked by ‘sculptor’/painter/architect Giulio Romano and remedied with the help of Time. Anthony R. Guneratne discourses on Shakespeare’s moulding of genre paintings to his purposes, following primarily the hypothesis of ‘Shakespeare the avid reader’, who gathered his knowledge through available printed material and contact with the literary and artistic elite of his time. Necla Çikigil draws on Paul Valéry’s notion of ‘intellectual dance’ (elaborated in ‘Philosophy of the Dance’) to suggest, however discursively, that Shakespeare employs dancing, allusions to dancing, and Elizabethan dance terminology both as a theatrical device and as a rhetorical strategy to create ‘visual art’.
Part 3, ‘Representing the Visual Arts’, is launched by José Manuel González’s essay that catalogues various uses of pictorial material and visual effects to represent gender (especially female beauty), not just in Shakespeare, but also briefly in Golden-Age Spanish contemporaries, mentioning the function of portraiture and tapestry in the drama of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca. Sandra Pietrini considers some aspects of Shakespearean iconography in largely neglected 19th-century illustrated editions of the plays, concentrating on the symbolic use of specific objects inspired by poetic metaphors and illusions – in particular, the depiction of animals, and especially of serpents, to elucidate specific dramatic points. Timothy A. Turner turns to the Fourth (Painter) Addition in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, often discussed in terms of ekphrasis and portraiture, to suggest that it enhances the play’s innovative framing device (which itself may reflect the emerging Italian influence, through the reception of perspective theory in the 1580s and 1590s, on the developing visual medium of the Elizabethan playhouse) and to correlate (if only in passing) the different modes of linear perspective referenced in both play and Painter Addition to other notions of representation, such as found in Velázquez’s Las Meninas (its composition some fifty years later, notwithstanding). In an extended study, laden with details of the Polish artist’s biography and personal diaries (jarringly, in the present tense) and of the Hamlet plot line, Sabina Laskowska-Hinz discusses Władisław Czachórski’s painting Hamlet Receiving the Players (1872–1875) which, the author conjectures, must have been influenced by Renaissance artists (such as Titian, Masaccio, Veronese, Carpaccio), all the while that it attempts to capture and expose, in intermedial fashion, the emotional tension experienced by the Prince. Graham Holderness argues that Shakespeare embedded into his text of Julius Caesar three locations and visual frames of Rome: the imagined city of ancient Rome, the concrete reality as played on the Globe stage in the late 1590s, and the later 16th-century picture of Rome in decay – which hardly stopped the fascists from mounting a 1935 production in the Forum-Palatine to ally the ancient Roman empire to Mussolini’s imperial ambitions and to link both Shakespeare and the ruins (restored for the purpose) into a ‘cultural vindication of the regime’ (343).
The three sections are framed by Marrapodi’s bipartite introduction and Stuart Sillars’ afterword. The first part of the introduction, virtually a separate essay on Timon of Athens to illustrate the dramatic appropriation of paragone in terms of the well-known rivalry between poet and painter, is conceived as a segue into a mostly compact, yet at times elliptical, overview of the book’s content. In similar fashion, Sillars uses the assembly of essays as the basis for his own discourse on the origin and direction of the present strand of criticism, highlighting, above all, the problem of ‘achieving balance between the work of visual art and the written or performed text, preserving the aesthetic integrity of both’ (359).
Although some of the chapters could have benefited from further unpacking of abstruse prose and/or tightening of prolix style and idiom, all in all the volume evinces a rich diversity of perspectives which, as Sillars concludes (362), both attest to Italy’s place at the forefront of work on visual Shakespeare and suggest avenues of future study, perhaps even (one would hope) as the plays or poems are mounted in performance.