Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Objects in the Drama 9781408179758, 9781408179789, 9781408179765

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Shakespeare’s Pictures

REL ATED TITLES Shakespeare and Costume Edited by Patricia Lennox and Bella Mirabella Stage Directions and the Shakespearan Theatre Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Broadcast Your Shakespeare Edited by Stephen O’Neill Shakespeare and the Visual Arts: A Dictionary Armelle Sabatier

Shakespeare’s Pictures Visual Objects in the Drama Keir Elam

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Keir Elam, 2017 Keir Elam has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv-xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Ben Whishaw and Imogen Stubbs in Trevor Nunn’s Old Vic production of Hamlet (2004). © Alastair Muir. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-408-17975-8 PB: 978-1-3501-0610-9 ePDF: 978-1-408-17976-5 eBook: 978-1-408-17977-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Lilly, for your lovely sake

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  x Acknowledgements  xv

Introduction  1 i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

A Shakespeare picture book  2 Shakespeare’s pictures  13 State of the arts  24 Shakespeare as intermedial artist  37 Terms of art: Shakespeare’s iconographic lexicon  41 Counterfeit representation: Ekphrasis and antiekphrasis  47

1 Doing things with pictures 55 i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Pictorial performativity  56 The portrait as proxy  58 ‘Such and such pictures’: Iachimo’s inventory  73 The Falstaff guide to interior decorating  82 The picture as frame  91 Paint a doleful cry  110

2 Wanton pictures: Intermedial intercourse in The Taming of the Shrew 119 i. ii. iii. iv.

Dost thou love pictures?  120 Wanton supposes  126 Modes of visual–verbal intercourse  136 Ovidian metamorphoses and Shakespearian ekphrases  146

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3 Pictures in boxes: Containers and contained in The Merchant of Venice 153 i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

Sightseeing in Venice  153 Private Venetian portraiture  168 An English portrait in Italy  172 Looking at pictures in Belmont  176 Fair Portia’s counterfeit  187 Memento mori in the Ghetto  198

4 Hamlet as portrait: A shadow’s shadow 201 i. Shakespeare’s achievements, Hamlet’s properties  201 ii. I know not ‘seems’: Hamlet and the simulacrum  204 iii. The politics of portraiture  215 iv. The painting of a sorrow  218 v. Hamlet’s picture: A painted tyrant  224 vi. Upon this picture, and on this  243 vii. The portraits in performance: Hamlet’s pictures pictured  251

5 ‘That is and is not’: The double life of images in Twelfth Night 259 i. Double vision  260 ii. Trumping the eye  262 iii. Living in my glass: Optics  264 iv. The secret self  269 v. Much like the character: Graphics  273 vi. The phantom portrait: Mistress Mall  278 vii. Show you the picture: Olivia as self-portrait  283 viii. Perspectives on ‘perspective’  288

Contents



Afterimage: The queen’s picture 305

Abbreviations  311 Appendix: Shakespeare’s iconographic lexicon  313 Notes  325 References  337 Index  359

ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1 Gerard Dou, Old Woman Reading a Bible: oil on panel, c. 1631–2 (courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)  1 Fig. 2 ‘Every picture tells a story’: advertisement for Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills, Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, 26 March 1914 (courtesy of Sheffield Archives)  13 Fig. 3 Heinrich Friedrich Füger, portrait miniature of an unknown woman holding a portrait miniature: watercolour on ivory, c. 1780 (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)  18 Fig. 4 Manuscript sketch for Shakespeare’s coat of arms, 1596. College of Arms MS Draft Grant of Arms to John Shakespeare (reproduced by permission of the Kings, Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms)  38 Fig. 5 Scott Wentworth’s 2015 Stratford Ontario production of Pericles, 2.2 (courtesy of Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival)  55 Fig. 6 Eleanor Handley as Emilia in Michael Kahn’s 2011 production of The Two Noble Kinsmen; Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival (© Lee A. Butz)  68 Fig. 7 Frontispiece to Cymbeline: drawing by François Boitard, copperplate engraving by Elisha Kirkall, from Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, 1709 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)  74



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Fig. 8 Justus van Egmont, tapestry of The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: wool, silk, silver and silver-gilt thread, c. 1650 (courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art)  80 Fig. 9 Tobias and the Angel, White Swan Inn Stratford: sketch by Francis Reader (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)  86 Fig. 10 Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait of Shakespeare, together with Ben Jonson’s poem: from the First Folio, 1623 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  96 Fig. 11 Raphael, The School of Athens: engraved by Giorgio Ghisi, 1550 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  100 Fig. 12 Simon Russell Beale as Timon in Nicholas Hytner’s 2012 National Theatre production of Timon of Athens (© Johann Persson/ArenaPAL)  107 Fig. 13 Robert Smirke, ‘Taming of the Shrew – Induction, Scene II, a Room in the Lord’s House’: engraved by Robert Thew for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Folio, 1794 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  119 Fig. 14 Lucas d’Heere (attrib.) after Michiel Coxie the elder (attrib.), Psyche at her Toilet: distemper on plaster, c. 1575, Hill Hall, Essex (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)  124 Fig. 15 Fragments of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engravings from I modi, 1524 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  129 Fig. 16 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Giulio Romano, engraved illustration to Aretino, Sonnet 11 (courtesy of University of Bologna Library)  139 Fig. 17 Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradiso: oil on canvas, 1594, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Ducal Palace  162

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Fig. 18 Sights within sights  163 Fig. 19 Domenico Tintoretto, Il Doge Marco Barbarigo: oil on canvas, 1592, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Ducal Palace, Venice  165 Fig. 20 Titian, Portrait of Aretino: engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, c. 1527 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  169 Fig. 21 ‘A proper man’s picture’: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, by unknown Italian artist: oil on canvas, 1546 (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)  175 Fig. 22 ‘A coin that bears the figure of an angel’: Elizabethan 10-shilling gold coin (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)  180 Fig. 23 Andrea Andreani, Memento mori: chiaroscuro woodcut, 1586–1610 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  182 Fig. 24 British school, Portrait of Gawen Goodman of Ruthin: oil on panel, 1582 (courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales)  183 Fig. 25 Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (attrib.), Laughing Fool: oil on panel, c. 1500 (courtesy of Davis Museum at Wellesley College)  186 Fig. 26 Nicholas Hilliard, Elizabeth I: watercolour on vellum pasted on card, 1572 (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)  193 Fig. 27 Titian, ‘La Bella’, 1536: engraved by Antonio Muzzi (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  197 Fig. 28 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, The Cave of Plato: engraving by Jan Saenredam, c. 1603 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  208



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Fig. 29 Gerard Johnson, sculpture of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, kneeling in prayer by the tomb of his father, St Peter’s Church, Titchfield: marble and alabaster, 1594 (photograph by Helen Banham)  222 Fig. 30 Lucas van Leyden, A Young Man Holding a Skull: engraving in black on ivory laid paper, c. 1519 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)  228 Fig. 31 Hans Holbein, The Fool: woodcut, 1545  232 Fig. 32 Nicholas Hilliard, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland: table miniature on parchment, c. 1594–5 (courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)  238 Fig. 33 Thomas Woolnoth, Edmund Kean as Hamlet: stipple engraving, 1818 (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)  242 Fig. 34 Nicholas Hilliard, An Unknown Man: watercolour on vellum pasted onto card, c. 1600 (courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)  245 Fig. 35 William Macready as Hamlet in the closet scene: engraving, 1845 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)  254 Fig. 36 Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet in Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 National Theatre production (© Johan Persson/ ArenaPAL)  257 Fig. 37 The duck–rabbit picture  259 Fig. 38 ‘We three loggerheads’ inn sign, Tonbridge, Kent (courtesy of Paul Skelton, [email protected])  277 Fig. 39 Mary Fitton, attrib. to circle of George Gower: oil on canvas, c. 1595 (courtesy of Arbury Hall)  281 Fig. 40 The composite nature of ‘Mistress Mall’  282 Fig. 41 Nicholas Hilliard, Self-portrait: watercolour on

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vellum pasted onto card, 1577 (courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum)  286 Fig. 42 Sebastiano Serlio, comical scene: engraving (courtesy of University of Bologna Library)  295 Fig. 43 Raphael, design for perspective flat for Ariosto’s I suppositi, 1518–19 (courtesy of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)  296 Fig. 44 Scene from Curzio Gonzaga’s Gli inganni, 1592: woodcut (courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence)  298 Fig. 45 Angelika Kauffman, Elizabeth Hartley as Hermione: oil on canvas, c. 1775 (courtesy of the Garrick Club, London)  305 Fig. 46 Title-page from Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems, second part, 1586 (courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library)  314

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began life as a paper given at a symposium in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, organized by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Fernando Cioni: I am grateful to them and to the other symposium members, Ann Thompson, Sunhee Kim Gertz, Andreas Höfele, Jacquelin Bessell, Anna Northam and Lilla Maria Crisafulli, for their stimulating comments and suggestions, which have borne fruit years later – in ways for which they are not be held responsible. Parts of the chapters started out as conference papers or lectures, and my gratitude goes to both those colleagues who invited me and those present who offered me helpful responses: among them, Michele Marrapodi, Robert Henke, Maria del Sapio, Shaul Bassi, Carol Rutter, B. J. Sokol, Claudia Corti, Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Holland, Lisanna Calvi, Guido Avezzu, Rosy Colombo, Donatella Montini, Daniela Guardamagna, Iolanda Plescia, Jonathan Hope and the greatly missed Mariangela Tempera. Warm thanks to William Carroll for giving me the benefit of his wisdom and wit in conversations and correspondence over the years on matters Shakespearian and existential. I would also like to thank my graduate students at the University of Bologna for bearing with my musings about Shakespeare’s pictures, and for their often stimulating ideas. Earlier and partial versions of Chapters 2 and 5 appeared in volumes edited respectively by Michele Marrapodi (Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition, Ashgate, 2014) and by Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown (Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader, Arden Shakespeare, 2014): my thanks to all three, as well as to Erika Gaffey of Ashgate. Research for this book was carried out in various international libraries. I wish to thank especially the staff of the following: the British Library, the London Library, the

xvi Acknowledgements

University of London Senate House Library, the University of Bologna libraries, especially the LILEC, Ezio Raimondi and ‘I.B. Supino’ Visual Arts libraries together with the extraordinary Archiginnasio, haven of Renaissance studies. I also desire to acknowledge the courtesy and generosity of the galleries, museums and libraries that provided the images that are an essential part of the texture and discourse of this volume: Arbury Hall (especially Lord Daventry and Caroline Darlington); the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales (special thanks to Catherine Hopkins); the Davis Museum at Wellesley College (thank you Helen A. Connor); the National Portrait Gallery; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the British Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (many thanks to Vera Laura Verona); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence. Thanks also to Paul Skelton and to Liza Giffen of the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. Special thanks to Helen Banham of Intriguing Family History for so generously going out of her way to photograph for me the Wriothesely Monument in Titchfield. While I was putting the finishing touches to this volume, my great friend and colleague Alessandro Serpieri passed away. To Sandro, doyen of Italian Shakespearians and of theorists of the drama, but also the most generous and inspiring friend I have had the privilege to know, my work owes an enormous debt, not least in these pages. Another great colleague who died while this work was in progress is Umberto Eco, grand maestro of semiotic and intermedial relations: his influence is also tangible in my approach to Shakespeare’s pictures. I am very grateful to Margaret Bartley of Arden Shakespeare for having courageously commissioned this volume and for her continual support and titanic patience as I worked on it. Thanks also to Susan Furber of Arden Shakespeare for her highly competent and always good-humoured help with illustrations, permissions and the rest. I also warmly thank Kim Storry, first-rate Project Manager for this volume, at Fakenham Prepress Solutions, for her helpful and gracious

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guidance, and my excellent copy editor, Aruna Vasudevan of The Literary Shed, who made many real improvements to the text, especially with regard to clarity. The obscurities that remain are my own. It is hard to put into words the gratitude I owe Chris Laoutaris for his exceedingly generous and insightful comments and suggestions at various stages in the writing of this book, which might not have come about without his encouragement. Last and most, my limitless thanks go to my wife Lilly – to whom this book is dedicated – for her loving support, unfailing companionship and invaluable advice during the long gestation of Shakespeare’s Pictures.

Introduction

FIG. 1  Gerard Dou, Old Woman Reading a Bible: oil on panel, c. 1631–2

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i. A Shakespeare picture book In Gerard Dou’s oil on panel portrait of an old woman reading the Bible (Fig. 1), the beholder’s attention is drawn to the fact that what she is actually examining is an illustration. We thus find ourselves spying on the private act of looking at a picture rather than reading the surrounding holy text, a choice that may throw doubt on the sitter’s apparent piety, or her literacy. The painting stages the viewing of an image as an ideologically ambivalent activity, especially in a Protestant context. Illustrations in early modern Bibles could serve devotional and educational ends, but were sometimes seen by the right-minded as a distraction from the Word, turning the gospels into an idolatrous picture book.1 On closer scrutiny of Dou’s painting, the observer may discern the inscription ‘Evangelium Luce xix cap.’, a clue to the fact that the picture illustrates the nineteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, which declares that those who wish to do good must give away half of their possessions to the poor, a doctrine in striking contrast to the woman’s rich attire. There is thus a three-way dialectic between the picture, text and sitter which involves us, in turn, as observers of the painting. We cannot know whether the sitter goes beyond the picture to read Luke’s recommendation and, if she does so, whether she is prepared to accept it, although her fur collar suggests otherwise. Our own judgement has to be suspended. Looking at pictures is also a recurrent event in the plays of William Shakespeare. The picture frequently performs an important role in Shakespearian drama, entering directly into the action and into relationship with the dramatis personae. As in the Dou painting, it also engages in a significant dialectic with the play’s text or dialogue. Pictures are shown, scrutinized, described and even directly addressed in the plays. They may, as in the Rijksmuseum painting, be supposedly devotional images. They may instead be secular portraits depicting the living or recalling the dead. They may be large-scale public narratives representing biblical or mythological episodes. They

Introduction

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may on the contrary be smaller household objects displaying social status. They may be private gifts expressing love or desire, or part of personal attire representing private and sometimes secret affections. They may possess symbolic or even magical value for their owners. They often arouse powerful passions in those that behold them: admiration or anger or bewilderment or sorrow. They are frequently the targets of ambivalent moral and spiritual response, veering from the idolatrous to the iconoclastic. In performance, they also attract the attention and curiosity, and perhaps the moral judgement, of the play’s spectators who, as in Dou’s painting, find themselves looking at a character looking at a picture. This volume is a Shakespeare ‘picture book’, in the sense that it is concerned with the role of pictures in Shakespearian drama.2 It is not, therefore, a book about pictures of Shakespeare or, indeed, about illustrations to scenes from his dramatic works, but rather is about the use to which the dramatist himself puts visual objects in the plays. There are several episodes in Shakespeare in which pictures are introduced physically, as material objects in the plot, and thus as stage props in performance. The best-known of these scenes is probably Hamlet’s passionate comparison of the portraits of his father and uncle in the ‘closet scene’ (Hamlet 3.4). Another celebrated episode is Bassanio’s triumphant discovery of Portia’s portrait in the lead casket in The Merchant of Venice (3.2). Less well-known, but nonetheless still memorable scenes include Julia’s pained examination of Silvia’s portrait in Two Gentlemen of Verona (4.4); Olivia’s zealous bestowal of her ‘jewel’, or portrait miniature, on the bemused Cesario in Twelfth Night (3.4); the Painter’s hopeful display of his portrait of Timon in the opening scene of Timon of Athens; and Emilia’s hesitant comparing of the pictures of Arcite and Palamon – twice – in The Two Noble Kinsmen (4.2 and 5.3). In the final scene of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Princess of France alludes to a portrait miniature she has received from Navarre (‘A lady walled about with diamonds!’, 5.2.3) that she shows to the other ladies (‘Look you’, 4). There are also two further picture scenes in The Merchant of Venice: one

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(1.2) in which Portia probably holds a portrait of her English suitor Falconbridge; the other (2.9) in which the disappointed Prince of Aragon extracts from the silver casket not Portia’s portrait but the image of a fool’s head instead. The pictures introduced into the action and performance in these episodes are nearly all portraits and, indeed, it is the portrait that Shakespeare elects as his main iconographic paradigm. Portraits, especially miniatures, are easy to bring onstage, held by the actor or worn about his/her person. The portrait – being, more often than not, a depiction of one of the dramatis personae – is able to substitute a given character, in the eyes of the beholder, as object of passionate feeling. The portrait likewise expresses Shakespeare’s abiding interest in the representation of individual subjectivity. There is a marked affinity between dramatic dialogue and portraiture in the emergence of the early modern subject. As Jodi Cranston observes: the notion of subjectivity – denoting both the world of the mind and the designations of the subject – originates and projects from the portraits themselves and positions the viewer in a visual exchange that parallels the operations of a verbal dialogue. The sitter gazes directly at the viewer, seemingly unaware of his/her presence outside the frame, and situates the beholder in a visual relationship best articulated by the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘thou’. Face-to-face, both seeing and seen, the sitter and the viewer shift from one pronominal designation to the other. (2000: 6) Plays and pictures, especially portraits, have in common an intersubjective engagement that creates a space within which identity is affirmed and put to the test. The prevalence of portraits in the ‘picture’ scenes also reflects sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English artistic practice, since portraiture was the one art in which early modern English painters excelled. The portrait often functions as a mirror in the plays: Hamlet sees himself reflected in his father’s portrait and finds himself inadequate; at the same time, he holds up Claudius’s picture to Gertrude and tells her to see her inner self reflected

Introduction

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in it, which she does. He also sees his own image reflected in Laertes’s ‘portraiture’. Viola views Olivia’s portrait as an image of her own gender disguise and its effects; she also takes her own reflection as a talismanic mirror image of her ‘dead’ twin: ‘I my brother know / Yet living in my glass’ (3.4.376–7). At the same time, however, Shakespeare repeatedly underlines the fact that a play is not a picture. A play in performance is a dynamic multi-channel sensorial phenomenon that involves the moving and speaking body of the actor in real time and in three-dimensional space. If Shakespeare uses the portrait as a point of reference and comparison with his own art, conversely, he uses it to affirm the unrivalled vitality and mimetic realism of the living art of theatre, as in the finale of Twelfth Night, in which Orsino affirms the ‘natural perspective’ of theatrical performance compared to the artificial or ‘scientific’ perspective of Renaissance painting and Italian ‘perspective’ scenery (see pp. 300–3 in this volume). Other kinds of images visible both to dramatic characters and to theatre audiences can play a significant part in the dramatic narrative. The most conspicuous is the supposed statue of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, which dominates the play’s finale and brings about the dramatic resolution (statues were classified as ‘pictures’ by Shakespeare and his contemporaries: see p. 319). An elaborate scene in Pericles (2.2) is devoted to the display of ornamented tournament shields and to the description of their impresas, visual devices accompanied by mottoes (see pp. 56–7). Central to the main action of Othello – especially when it goes missing – is a picture in the form of an embroidered image, namely the ‘handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries’ (3.3.438). Othello gives it to Desdemona and he attributes to it great symbolic value as part of his family and ethnic history and identity (‘Did an Egyptian to my mother give’, 3.4.68), as well as supernatural powers (‘there’s magic in the web of it’, 3.4.71). The red spotted ‘napkin’ also has a prophetic role, pre-announcing the blood-stained sheet on which Desdemona dies (involving the play’s other main property, the onstage bed). This volume is also concerned with other, more ‘virtual’ kinds of iconographic presence in the plays. Pictures may be

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part of the plot, and may even be explicitly pointed to without necessarily being visible onstage. Iachimo, in Cymbeline 2.2, notes ‘such and such pictures’ in Innogen’s bedchamber (later recollected in detail in 2.4), but in most performances of the play there is little or nothing for the spectator to see. Likewise, in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew the Lord promises to show ‘wanton pictures’ to Christopher Sly and they are described poetically, and at length, for his and our benefit, although the actual showing usually takes place offstage. Elsewhere, pictures may enter into the dramatic action through the dialogue. Verbal references to paintings and other pictorial objects are frequent in Shakespearian drama, as well as his poetry. A particularly well-informed exponent of pictorial allusion is Falstaff, source of graphic evocations of domestic decorative art in more than one play (see pp. 82–9). Briefer references to painted, engraved or embroidered images abound, from Hamlet’s derisive allusion to his uncle’s portrait ‘in little’ (2.2) to Toby Belch’s cryptic mention of a portrait, possibly of the disgraced Mary Fitton, in Twelfth Night 1.3.120–2 (see pp. 279–83). In all these cases, the reference to the picture is functional to the narrative and thematic structure of the play.

The picture in the play The presence of pictures in Shakespearian drama has attracted relatively little critical attention. It is not, however, a casual or marginal phenomenon. The material inclusion of a painting or other visual object often entails the construction of an entire scene or episode, sometimes solo scenes, which place the character alone onstage with his or her picture(s). The pictorial object is physically or verbally signalled and is placed in direct relationship with ongoing events. It attracts the explicit interest of onstage characters and likewise calls upon the attention of theatre audiences. Even the description of an offstage picture requires its own dedicated time and space within the dialogue. The material or verbal inclusion of a picture is therefore a meditated choice on the part of

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Shakespeare. Pictures, as in the case of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice or Othello, may be intimately related to the dramatic destinies of the beholders or recipients. Likewise, they may reflect and define a given character’s attitudes and modes of perception, as in the case of Julia, Olivia or Emilia. The picture, moreover, may offer an important inter­pretative key in the reading of a play. Hamlet’s comparison of the portraits is a decisive moment in the perceptual and emotional economy of the play, strictly related to his relationship both with his father (who reappears in the same scene) and with his mother, and as such represents a pivotal factor in the develop­ ment of interpersonal relations in the tragedy. The pictures discovered by Portia’s suitors are significant clues to the underlying thematic oppositions in the play, regarding, among other things, mercantile values and the competing forces of love and death. In Twelfth Night, the gift portrait miniature raises crucial questions concerning intimacy, gender identity and self-deception. Similarly, the opening scene of Timon of Athens sets up the picture, in its interactions with the word, as a primary semantic filter in the play, framing, as it were, its discourses of flattery, materiality and spurious representation. Historically, the picture onstage is a direct and important link with early modern visual culture. The showing or describing of a painting or other visual object may associate it with one of a number of artistic genres, from the portrait miniature to the emblem or impresa; illustrated books to cheap prints; or painted cloths to popular street art. One of the Renaissance iconographic genres most frequently presented or evoked in the plays is the vanitas painting, i.e. the symbolic or allegorical representation of the vanity of human aspirations in the face of mortality (the Dou portrait, Fig. 1, is a variation of this; see p. 1). A variation on the theme of vanitas is the memento mori painting or object reminding the beholder of his mortal destiny, a visual genre equally present in Shakespeare, notably in Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice (see pp. 181–4, 198–9, 226–33). The shadow of death conditions Shakespeare’s plays and their pictures as much as it did medieval and early modern art in general.

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Pictorial objects and discourse in the plays may also allude to early modern English artistic conventions or to continental pictorial modes and theories, regarding, for example, perspective. Shakespeare’s pictures, in other words, open up dramatic discourse and theatrical performance to the variegated world of visual culture and to the interrelations between the arts that was so vital a part of early modern poetics. They also relate the drama to the political and religious controversies of the time. Pictures and other images were ideologically charged on the early modern stage, being one of the prime targets of the contemporary moral and doctrinal debate (see Collinson 1986; Aston 1988; Tassi 2005). No image is innocent: its very existence is the result of an ideological choice. The attitude towards pictures expressed in Shakespeare’s plays is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the picture exercises an irresistible fascination for the beholder, becoming the target of multiple desire (as in The Merchant of Venice), or the seat of idolatry (as in Two Gentlemen) or a fetish object (as in The Two Noble Kinsmen). Pictures may be vehicles of truth, imagines veritatis (as in Hamlet). On the other hand, pictures are shabby and lifeless imitations, if not morally depraved (as in Timon). At the heart of Shakespearian drama is a conflict between opposing conceptions of visual representation, expressed in the two meanings of the Shakespearian word ‘counterfeit’: perfect copy of the subject or false simulacrum of the object. This conflict raises questions of truthfulness, of verisimilitude, of identity, and of the ethics of visual representation itself. Shakespeare was not the only early modern English dramatist to introduce pictures, or discourse on pictures, into his plays. In the following chapters, reference will also be made to those contemporaries – notably, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood and John Marston – who similarly dedicated dramatic scenes or episodes to the visual arts. Allusions to pictures in the plays connect with the contemporary discourse on painting and the other visual arts. The early modern period saw the first translations into English of continental treatises

Introduction

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on art, such as Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge, caruinge & buildinge, translated by Richard Haydocke in 1598, which introduced the English-reading public to the theory of linear perspective. This was also the period of the first ‘indigenous’ treatises, from the anonymous The arte of limming (1573) to Henry Peacham’s The art of drawing with the pen (1606). Finally, the introduction of pictures raises particular performance choices for directors and performers of the plays. The physical stage presence or otherwise of a picture is a directorial choice that may affect the overall reading of a scene. The form, shape and genre of the picture, as well as its dimensions and its consequent visibility or otherwise for the audience, will vary from production to production, and will have an interpretative fallout on the performance as a whole. What the actor does with the picture and how his interlocutors respond to it determine the precise interpersonal dynamics of the performance. The case of Hamlet is again instructive: theatre history testifies to a wide range of performance solutions to the pictures shown to Gertrude, such as miniatures, coins, fulllength portraits and tapestries. In performance, Hamlet may use them aggressively as arms threatening Gertrude or more reflectively as distant objects of contemplation. Such choices are, in turn, keys to the overall directorial reading and staging of the play.

Every picture tells a story This book brings to the reading of Shakespeare’s picture scenes a wider engagement with their artistic and cultural contexts. It attempts to place the chosen pictorial moments in the drama at the point of intersection between the competing discourses of visual culture, dramatic and literary poetics and performance. Shakespeare’s Pictures is thus about relationships: intermedial relationships, but also intercultural and social relationships, in an age in which the patronage and consumption of the arts, like the patronage and consumption

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of the drama, was undergoing radical changes. In order to get Shakespeare’s pictures in focus, I have resorted to a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. In addition to critical analysis and critical theory, I have made wide reference to the history and theory of the visual arts, not least iconography and picture theory. Similarly, I have called upon insights from psychoanalysis, semiotics, anthropology and the study of material culture. And as Shakespeare’s texts were designed for performance – and the showing of a picture, in particular, is a powerfully performative gesture – I have also taken into consideration performance history and theory. The book is divided into six chapters, including this introduction. After an initial consideration of the contradictory status of the picture in drama, this introduction examines the critical tradition on Shakespeare and the visual arts and recent theoretical approaches to pictures. It addresses the dramatist’s rich iconographic vocabulary, with its often specific and sometimes ‘technical’ pictorial terms. Finally, it considers Shakespeare’s professional expertise in the arts as a maker of the intermedial ‘device’, a form that leaves a powerful trace on the plays and their visual–verbal interaction. The first chapter is devoted to the performative power of pictures and the many things that can be ‘done’ with them in Shakespeare’s plays. Doing things with pictures may take the form of their public display for ceremonial and political purposes, as in both Pericles and Timon of Athens, in which the onstage picture in the opening scene acts as a thematic and interpretative frame for the play as a whole. Portraits may be used in courtship or as a surrogate for the beloved sitter, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen. They may be used, instead, as visual ‘evidence’ in the attempt to persuade a husband of his wife’s infidelity, as in Cymbeline. Or they may be alluded to as a mode of cultural one-upmanship and economic self-advancement, as in recurrent references, in more than one play, to household paintings on the part of Falstaff, self-elected ‘connoisseur’ of English decorative arts. The successive chapters devote attention to individual plays,

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beginning with the ‘wanton pictures’ alluded to at length in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, and which – even if they fail to materialize onstage – turn out to have a rich and intricate intertextual and intermedial history. The story of Sly’s ‘pictures’ takes us back in cultural and literary time, from George Gascoigne to Ariosto, Aretino and Giulio Romano, and even further back to Roman pornography and erotic episodes from Ovid. It finally comes up, however, against the insurmountable barrier of Sly’s rustic English illiteracy. The pictures of the Induction also have an intimate connection with the themes of the main play, especially the reification of women as collector’s items. Chapter 3 addresses The Merchant of Venice, a comedy in which pictures are signs of destiny, fatal pointers towards success or failure, salvation or damnation, love or death. Portia’s portrait takes on special magical powers and a life of its own, acting as proxy for its sitter and object of an intercultural quest. The dominant dialectic in the play’s visual discourse is between death – especially in the form of the vanitas image – and desire: the desire for images and desire through images. Particular attention is paid in the chapter to the relationship between the casket plot, with at its centre Portia’s hidden portrait, and the act of looking at visual objects in Venice, privileged site of the gaze. Among those who gazed at pictures in the historical Venice were early modern English visitors, whose perception of Venetian art throws light on Shakespeare’s representation of the act of beholding in the play. The fourth chapter concerns Hamlet, particularly in relation to the portrait, which features prominently in two important scenes. Hamlet, suspicious of all forms of representation and signification, both verbal and visual, perceives a world of shadows or simulacra. Nevertheless, he invests a great deal of cognitive and emotional faith in pictures, especially the portrait of his father, whose ghost reappears, not by chance, immediately after the picture scene, as if to confirm the truth of the depiction. Indeed, Hamlet thinks in pictures. He compares himself to other pictorial images: to the ‘painted

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tyrant’ Pyrrhus who, like Hamlet, hesitates before killing the king but, unlike him, goes on to carry out the act; and to the ‘portraiture’ of Laertes. He is continuously captured by gestural topoi from contemporary portraiture: a young man holding skull; a young man holding book; a young man holding picture. It is, moreover, one of the central ironies of the tragedy that Hamlet, despite his scepticism towards visual ‘shows’, is deceived by the empty image of Claudius kneeling in prayer, a theme common to many early modern funeral effigies. Claudius usurps his place not only as king but as ‘mourner’. Chapter 5 discusses the phenomenon of the doubling of the image in Twelfth Night, a play intensely concerned with visual objects, in which nothing is what it seems or rather nothing is only what it seems: images (pictures, reflections, ‘perspectives’) have a second and secret life unbeknown to the beholder. One of the results of this is the ‘trumping’ or deceiving of the eye that affects nearly all characters, leading them into interpretative error. Pictures in the comedy are objects of intimate exchange, concealed from general view, so much so as to give rise to the recurrent trope of curtains covering paintings, notably in the veiled Olivia’s self-presentation as ‘portrait’ in 1.5. At the same time, they are closely related to social status, as in the case of the mysterious ‘Mistress Mal’, whose portrait has been removed from public view. The iconographic discourse in Twelfth Night is also part of a dialogue in the play between drama and the visual arts in the representation of the subject. Finally, the Afterimage – by way of a brief conclusion – revisits the scene of Hermione’s living statue in The Winter’s Tale. This episode, Shakespeare’s most literal version of a ‘speaking picture’, looks back over his career-long dramatic iconography. Every picture tells a story, said the old advertisement for Doan’s backache kidney pills (see Fig. 2), and this is true of Shakespeare’s pictures, each of which tells a story – often far from painless – and is itself part of the overall dramatic story.

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FIG. 2 ‘Every picture tells a story’: advertisement for Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills, Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, 26 March 1914

ii. Shakespeare’s pictures What is a picture? asks Lacan in a celebrated seminar (XI, 1964), and responds to his own question with his complex and influential theory of the gaze: It is obviously not for nothing that we have referred to as picture the function in which the subject has to map himself as such. … I shall advance the following thesis – certainly, in the picture, something of the gaze is always manifested. The painter knows this very well – his morality, his search, his quest, his practice is that he should sustain and vary the selection of a certain kind of gaze. Looking at pictures, … you will see in the end, as in filigree, something so specific to each of the painters that you will feel the presence of the gaze. (1998: 100–1)

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For Lacan the picture is an exchange between the gaze embodied in the visual object and the gaze of the observer. This is pertinent to the picture-beholder relationship in several plays in which ‘the presence of the gaze’ is bi-directional: Shakespeare’s dramatis personae look and are looked at. More recently Michael Newall poses and answers the same question in his What is a Picture?: A picture is a kind of representation; that is, it arouses in the viewer the thought of some other, typically absent, item – the picture’s subject matter. (2011: 1)3 Newall’s definition likewise emphasizes the gaze and the gazer. A picture is defined in relationship to the beholder and the effect that it arouses in him or her – a mental image – rather than its actual figurative content. At the same time its presence is often a sign of absence, namely of the subject that it represents. This definition is helpful with reference to Shakespeare’s plays, in which pictures are always perceived through their dramatic beholders rather than their actual content. In performance pictures in the plays usually – although not invariably – represent absent (offstage) subjects. But there is also a more intrinsic absence at play in the picture, namely the supposed object of representation, whose pictorial presence depends on it being missing: as Lacan puts it: ‘Indeed, there is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture – which is not the case in perception. This is the central field … In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole’ (1998: 108). What, then, are Shakespeare’s pictures? At the most general level, they can be defined as visual objects that arouse a perceptual and often affective response in one or more dramatis personae. As such, they are part of the wider perceptual and narrative scene to which they pertain. As the neuroscientist Moshe Bar observes: ‘We see the world in scenes, where visual objects occur in rich surroundings, often embedded in a typical context with other related objects’ (2004: 617). Shakespeare’s visual objects are likewise embedded in a scene with rich

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surroundings. The picture may partake of a number of modes and materials present in early modern visual culture: it may be a painting, an engraving, a drawing, a popular print, a piece of embroidery or needlework, a statue. It may take the form of a large or miniature portrait, a funeral effigy, an impresa, an emblem, a wall hanging, a heraldic figure, a medal or coin. It may likewise be made of one or more of a number of materials: a painted table, vellum or cloth, engraved stone or metal, typographical paper. All of these forms and materials are present in Shakespeare’s pictorial discourse (see pp. 43, 311–22). Shakespeare’s pictures inhabit the border territory between the material and the imaginary. They are likewise situated at the confines between the literary and the theatrical, between the text and the stage. In the domain of the text, the reference to a picture is a verbal event, apparently no different in kind from an allusion, say, to features of the landscape. In performance, however, the picture takes on potentially a quite different, non-verbal, dimension, becoming part of the visible stage world of bodies, of objects and of costumes, its material and semantic neighbours. This makes the status of the picture in drama quite different from that of images described or alluded to in purely literary texts, which can never aspire to concrete manifestation in real space and time. The potential stage materiality of the picture conditions its presence in the play text. A picture – like a play – is made to be shown, and Shakespeare’s picture scenes always involve a form of verbal showing, ready to be transformed into a physical showing onstage. ‘What’, asks Wittgenstein, ‘is the meaning of the words “this image”? How does one point at an image?’ (2010: 125e). In Shakespeare’s picture scenes pointing to ‘this image’ is the central event. The key word in many of these episodes is precisely the ‘showing’ word par excellence, the demonstrative this. Hamlet famously repeats it to his mother in her closet: ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this’ (3.4.51). Olivia employs it peremptorily in donating her ornament-encased portrait to Cesario: ‘Here, wear this jewel for me: ’tis my picture’ (3.4.203). This is the most potent of verbal pointers (deictics), since it seems to guarantee

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the individual existence, the verifiable thisness of the object. It promises visible materialization (what Othello [3.3.363] calls ‘ocular proof’). It brings into play the actor’s body, with which the picture entertains a privileged relationship. It may therefore take on some of the force of a personal adjective (‘my’), as in Olivia’s ‘my picture’. Olivia has her jewel in her hand at the moment in which she speaks, Hamlet (possibly) the portraits in both hands. The phrase ‘this picture’ is thus the form of showing in which the speaker invests most and through which she or he proffers most. Other showing terms such as the adverb here are likewise intimately connected to the sphere of the speaker and his or her body. Here may suggest an object that is about to be picked up, about to become this or my, as in Bassanio’s What find I here? [He opens the leaden casket.] Fair Portia’s counterfeit. (3.2.114–15) Bassanio discovers Portia’s portrait, and is on the verge of making it (and her) his own, so much so that the following line is ‘Move these eyes?’ (116), implying that in the meantime Bassanio has taken out the picture and is holding it in order to admire its lifelike mimetic qualities. Other pointing terms are at first sight less powerful, because less personal, less tactile. That and there suggest relative distance from the speaker and possibly closeness to his or her interlocutor, although the greater spatial and personal distance may itself take on signifying force: ‘What have you there?’, asks the poet in Timon, to which the painter replies ‘A picture, sir’ (1.1.26–7). Not only is the picture there, distant from the poet and in contact with his rival, it is also other, object of artistic jealousy: ‘Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope’, as Sonnet 29 puts it. There may also imply a movement of separation from an object that has so far been here, in intimate contact with the speaker, as in Emilia’s somewhat melancholic laying down of the portraits she has been fondly holding, almost by way of an act of burial: ‘Lie there, Arcite’ (4.2.43).

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This is (not) a picture Nothing is apparently so concrete as a picture held up by an actor onstage. Its material presence is often underlined by the existence of an actual stage object, by the player’s pointing to it, and by the characters’ talking about it. Everything – the dialogue, sometimes stage directions, the actors and their gestures, and above all the stage prop – conspires to make the picture ‘real’, part of the phenomenal world of stage and playhouse, as well as the fictional world of the drama, so much so that pictures can be used as physical instruments, as in the case of Hamlet’s portraits, used as ‘weapons’ against Gertrude (see pp. 243–4). And yet the picture may not actually be ‘there’, or ‘here’, onstage. It may be a memory. It may be visible to one but not others, like the image of the ghost of old Hamlet and possibly even the portraits. Alternatively, the picture may itself be a mental image, a visual memory, a vision or hallucination – like Macbeth’s dagger – and thus, in material terms, nothing: in the words of Gertrude, ‘Nothing at all, yet all that is I see’ (Hamlet, 3.4.129). To the audience, the image perceived by the dramatis personae may or may not be visible. Even when it is materially present onstage, the picture’s visibility is determined by its genre and dimensions. If most of Shakespeare’s pictures take the form of portrait miniatures, then they become to all extents and purposes imperceptible to the spectator. The diminutive size of the portrait miniature – which could be as small as 3 × 44 × 3 centimetres – made it easy for it to be held in the actor’s hand, or hidden in a casket, but difficult for the audience to discern in any detail. The whole point of miniatures was precisely that they allowed a private, intimate viewing that excluded the gaze of intruders. As Shearer West observes: Miniatures were small portrait images that could be held in the hand, or placed inside lockets, snuff boxes, or other tiny ornaments. Their minute size functioned to create a seemingly private relationship between the sitter and the owner of the image. (2004: 59; see also Reynolds 1988)

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The art of the miniaturist was to create a lifelike image in an extremely reduced and exclusive space. Illustrative of this representational tour de force are miniatures in which the sitter holds another miniature, usually a minuscule portrait of the beloved owner of the larger picture, in a specular game of crossed gazes (see Fig. 3). The skill of the painter was to achieve a visible and internal portrait in an exponentially reduced space, thereby multiplying the effect of intimacy, since only the viewer holding the miniature close to his face could perceive the inner picture (of himself).4

FIG. 3  Heinrich Friedrich Füger, portrait miniature of an unknown woman holding a portrait miniature: watercolour on ivory, c. 1780

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On the Elizabethan stage, an analogous image was created, but to the opposite effect. The audience perceived the actor holding a small property, but was not able to scrutinize the actual contents of the handheld object (on handheld properties, see Bruster 2002). Instead of the extreme close-up of the kind called for in Fig. 3, we have, in cinematic terms, an extreme long shot, with the prop miniaturized out of view. In its basic unframed form, the miniature was often a portrait painted on the back of a vellum playing card,5 altogether lacking in thickness and solidity, a mere two-dimensional form. It may have been sufficient for the player to hold a small rectangular card. The audience had to take it on good faith it was a painting, and that this painting was a true likeness of the sitter or other subject (as attested by the characters present). This is the paradox of the picture in the play: visual phenomenon par excellence, it is often destined to remain unseen. On the other hand, if it is large enough and stable enough to be clearly perceived by the audience, the picture ceases to be part of the stage action and becomes instead part of the scenery, like the wall paintings in some productions of Hamlet (see pp. 252–4). It may even become the scenery tout court in the form of a painted backcloth. It is the relative imperceptibility of the property that guarantees its authenticity as visual object. Thus, like Magritte’s two ‘This is not a pipe’ paintings6 famously analysed by Michel Foucault, what at first seems a solid object disappears in the self-cancelling play of representation: The ‘pipe’ that was at one with both the statement naming it and the drawing representing it – this shadow pipe knitting the lineaments of form with the fiber of words – has utterly vanished. … Nowhere is there a pipe. (Foucault 1983: 29) The picture in Shakespeare likewise turns out not to be what it seems. ‘This’ is not a picture, but a ‘picture’: that is to say, it is not an object, but the representation of an object. There are good dramaturgical reasons for the presence/ absence of a non-picture onstage. One of the main functions of

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Shakespeare’s pictures is that of object of the projected desires, passions or memories of a given character or characters. In order to represent, say, the perfect beauty of the beloved or the heroic virtues of a mourned father, the picture cannot show an actual image, which would be destined to inadequacy or at least to non-correspondence. An actual image would render any ekphrastic description – Bassanio’s, Emilia’s – at best redundant, at worst off-target. It would raise unhelpful questions regarding likeness to a sitter physically present onstage (Claudius, Portia). It would also call for hyperbolic pictorial skills – ‘What demi-god / Hath come so near creation?’ (3.2.115) – quite beyond the capacities of the theatre company, even if Richard Burbage is known to have been an able painter (see pp. 39–40). The relative invisibility of the picture also means that the ontological distance between showing a picture and talking about a picture is less definite than it may appear. The spectator depends in any case on the dialogue to inform her or him of the nature and the subject of the visual object. It is this that gives the picture its exquisitely dramatic role: it is as much part of the play’s discourse as it is of the player’s performance.

Holders and beholders In performance, the picture and its physical position are defined in relation to the beholder. Beholding is lexically and conceptually linked – only in English – to the act of holding: Old English bihaldan means to hold, while the active sense ‘To hold or keep in view, to watch’ (OED 7a) – as in Macbeth’s ‘Prithee see there. / Behold, look, lo, how say you?’ (3.4.65–6) – precedes historically the more passive modern meaning ‘to see’ (7b), as, again, in Macbeth’s ‘When now I think you can behold such sights’ in the same scene (112). Beholding – seeing, but also looking – is a mode of sensorial holding. The image is held in the beholder’s eye and mind, just as it held in her hand: it is taken up and taken in. Alternatively, beholding may at times entail greater

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perceptual and cognitive distance from the object. As W. J. T Mitchell observes: The beholder is the embodied spectator, but not, perhaps, simply immersed in the spectacle, carried along by it (as in cinema), but holding the image at arm’s length so as to contemplate it, and allow its impression to be retained, to be held in memory. (2012: xvii) ‘Beholder’ is Shakespeare’s word for the observer of a visual object. In The Winter’s Tale, just prior to the unveiling of Paulina’s ‘statue’, a Gentleman recounts the onlookers’ emotional response to the opening of another object, the ‘fardel’, or bundle, containing the documents proving Perdita’s identity: ‘A notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th’importance were joy or sorrow’ (5.2.15–18). It is also the dramatist’s word for theatre spectator: the Chorus in the opening of Troilus and Cressida addresses the audience ‘To tell you, fair beholders, that our play / Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils’ (Prologue, 26–7), just as Queen Margaret refers to ‘the beholders of this frantic play’ in Richard III (4.4.68). Looking at pictures and looking at plays – or, indeed, looking at people looking at pictures in plays – are related perceptual and affective acts. At the same time, the beholder’s showing of the picture becomes also a way of negotiating personal relations. Being the object of possession, desire, affection or scorn, the picture channels the emotional and political energies of the speakers, becoming what we might term a transactional object in the dialogic exchange, as in Hamlet’s accusations against Gertrude. Pictures also help stake out the interpersonal configurations of characters in stage space, registering the differences in distance, gesture and attitude with regard to the object, which also acts as a clue to the emotional or political attitudes at work between the dramatis personae. In the drama, what matters most is the beholder’s response to the object. The visibility (verisimilitude, artistic quality and

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so on) or otherwise of the portrait is secondary to its perception and reception. What we, as spectators, see is not so much the picture as the response of the beholder to the picture. We are beholders of beholders, as with Gerard Dou’s portrait (Fig. 1). Our attention is called primarily not to the picture itself, but rather to its impact on the dramatis personae.

Pictures engendered Visual objects and their perception are always gendered in Shakespeare. The protagonists of Shakespeare’s picture scenes are often women who are not, however, confined to a single role. In the early modern period, the pictorial agency of women was largely limited to the role of sitter, especially as object of the (preferably idolatrous) male gaze, notably in the case of portrait miniatures. This is the role played by the painted Portia in The Merchant of Venice, held and beheld by the ecstatic Bassanio. Alternatively, women were receivers and thus final viewers of gifts in the form of male portraits. Shakespeare and Fletcher quadruple this receiver role, to tragicomic effect, for Emilia, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, who is the recipient of portraits of her rival courtiers and also the admiring beholder of both in two solo scenes (thus 2 x 2). Another variation played by Shakespeare on gender roles in the reception of pictures is to make a woman – specifically a cross-dressed woman – the receiver and observer of a female portrait: in The Two Gentlemen of Verona the disguised go-between Julia – in another solo scene – is obliged to hold and behold a portrait of her ‘rival’, Silvia, that has been requested by Proteus (4.4). A more radical variation in gender roles appears in Twelfth Night, in which Olivia gives her portrait to the reluctant Viola, and takes on a third role, as commissioner or patron. Commissioning pictures was historically an activity generally reserved for conspicuous and prosperous male patrons, but important examples of early modern female patronage are not lacking. As Chris Laoutaris has shown, the radical Protestant

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activist Lady Elizabeth Russell – the self-styled Dowager Countess of Bedford and lead signatory in a campaign to prevent Shakespeare and the rest of the Chamberlain’s/ Hunsdon’s Men from opening the Blackfriars Theatre in 1596 – promoted her own protagonism, as well as her status as ‘Countess’, by commissioning several pictures. The life-size portrait of the Countess herself, which now hangs in the Great Hall at Bisham Abbey, Berkshire, is probably by an artist in the circle of Robert Peake the Elder (c. 1596–1600). She also is thought to have commissioned a miniature portrait of herself in an ermine cloak by Nicholas Hilliard. In addition, she commissioned and designed her own lifesize funeral effigy at the Church of All Saints, Bisham, and the funeral monuments for her husbands, Sir Thomas Hoby (also at the Church of All Saints) and John, Lord Russell, and for her daughter Bess Russell (both at the Chapel of St Edmund, Westminster Abbey, London).7 Olivia, herself a countess endowed with an indomitable sense of initiative, is a supposed exponent of such female patronage, as she ‘commissions’ her own portrait. Indeed, in performing the three distinct roles of patron, sitter and donor of the picture, she recalls – not by chance – the patron–sitter– donor par excellence of portraits, Queen Elizabeth I. Olivia also toys with the idea of performing a fourth role, the most highly gendered of all, namely that of painter of her own selfportrait (see pp. 283–8). Hermione, in The Winter’s Tale, goes even further by being the self-commissioner, creator and even material of her statue, namely her own self – a precocious and literal form of ‘body art’ – revealed in the final scene to astonished male observers (and fancifully attributed to a celebrated male painter, Giulio Romano). Elsewhere, women may be the enforced beholders of male portraits, as in the case of Gertrude, physically obliged by her son to observe the pictures of her husband and ex-husband (‘Look here’, 3.4.51). One of the reasons for the sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant protagonism of women in these episodes is that, with one exception, Shakespeare’s pictures exert their influence in the private sphere. Nearly all the picture episodes are intimate scenes within a domestic setting. Among

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other things, this frees the pictures of the primarily dynastic or promotional role that portraits played in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. They have a relationship of intimacy with the beholder as objects of amorous or familial exchange. This does not mean that they lack a social and political dimension, however. Hamlet’s twin portraits express the political conflict at the heart of the play, while the wanton pictures promised to Christopher Sly in Shrew are an exercise in social and intellectual one-upmanship. The one play that consistently foregrounds the public role of pictures is Timon of Athens, which, not by chance, features a male painter and a male sitter–patron.

iii. State of the arts Shakespearian scholars have not always been ready to acknowledge Shakespeare’s interest in visual culture. A good example of critical resistance to the topic is the tellingly brief entry on ‘Art’ in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare by the authoritative Shakespearian scholar Michael Dobson: The comparative paucity of references to the visual arts in Shakespeare’s works – largely confined to figurative tapestries (such as those which decorate Innogen’s bedchamber, Cymbeline, 2.4.68–76) and to portraits (most famously those of King Hamlet and Claudius, Hamlet, 3.4.52–66) – accurately reflects the poverty and inaccessibility of the visual arts in Shakespeare’s England. (2001: 22) Dobson’s dismissive overview of the role of visual arts in the plays is not entirely unfair. It is certainly true that the cultural context of Shakespeare’s plays is quite different from the one enjoyed, for example, by Italian Renaissance dramatists, whose plays engaged in an intense dialogue with contemporary artistic practice and theory, thanks to the predominance of painting among the arts, not least stage performance itself

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(see Phillips-Court 2011). The visual culture of Shakespeare’s England was undoubtedly a far more modest affair. It is also true that allusions to the arts in Shakespeare frequently reference portraits – a recurring theme of this book – and tapestries or related forms of decorative wall hangings. What Dobson’s overview fails to take into account, however, is the extent to which several of Shakespeare’s plays draw on the visual arts not only through occasional allusion, but also in their very dramatic and narrative structure. This book argues that the supposed ‘paucity’ of artistic references turns out, on closer investigation, to be a surprising richness of iconographic discourse. Not only were the visual arts more accessible to Shakespeare and his audiences than is often believed, but their material and verbal presence in the plays of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries is much more extensive than is generally acknowledged in the existing critical literature. More sympathetic accounts of Shakespeare and the visual arts have certainly not been lacking. One of the earliest of such studies, Charles Wilfrid Scott-Giles’s Shakespeare’s Heraldry (1950), is still a valuable source of information and analysis which demonstrates Shakespeare’s competence in heraldic theory and practice, including his ability to make fun of it. This is seen, for example, at the beginning of The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the Welshman Evans transforms the ‘dozen white luces’ (i.e. pike) in Justice Shallow’s coat of arms into ‘The dozen white louses … passant’ (the heraldic term for ‘walking’), 1.1.16–17 (Scott-Giles 1950: 18; on heraldic terms and colours in Shakespeare, see pp. 44–5 in this volume).8 Another field of iconographic investigation that has made a very considerable impact on Shakespeare studies from the 1960s onwards is that of the emblem. Dieter Mehl’s highly influential studies of emblems in English Renaissance drama (1969), with particular reference to Shakespeare (1970), led the way to a body of work that has shed important historical and critical light of the interaction between word and image in Shakespeare’s dramatic poetics. The emblem, with its

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characteristic three-way interpretative dialogue between picture (pictura), motto (inscriptio) and explanatory text (subscriptio), can be seen – together with the closely related impresa or device – as a model for the intersemiotic richness of dramatic representation, bringing together, as it does, scripted speech and visual stage configuration. Among the several significant contributions to this critical tradition, one might mention John Doebler’s Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery (1974), which offers, in the author’s words, ‘tentative scholarly and critical suggestions about the different ways in which the tool of iconography can be used to enrich our understanding of verbal and especially of stage imagery’ (xii), with reference to six Shakespeare plays, including The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Peter M. Daly’s Literature in the Light of the Emblem pays particular attention to ‘emblematic drama’, especially Shakespearian (1988: 153–86), underlining the fact that: ‘During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drama in its various forms was the most emblematic of all the literary arts, combining as it does a visual experience of character and gesture, silent tableau and active scene, with a verbal experience of the spoken and occasionally the written word’ (153). Michael Bath’s Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture, shows, inter alia, how ‘emblems persuade the reader that he has “seen”, not “read”’ (1994: 55; on emblems, see p. 314 in this volume).9 Regarding the impact of pictures on early modern literary genres, there are several useful studies of poetry (including Shakespeare’s own) in relation to the visual arts. Lucy Gent’s pioneering Picture and Poetry 1560–1620 (1981) and Norman K. Farmer’s Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (1984) are among them. David Evett’s Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (1990) extends the field to other genres (see also Belsey 1985; Barkan 1995; Semler 1998; Berger 2000; Porter 2011 for other valuable studies of relations between the arts). One of the earliest – and still highly valid – studies of the visual arts in individual plays is B. J. Sokol’s Art

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and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale (1994). Going against the grain of the ‘universal negative consensus concerning Shakespeare’s appreciation of fine arts’ in earlier criticism (1), it argues persuasively that the play dialogues with contemporary (especially Italian) visual culture, but in a critical and non-celebratory fashion: Contrary to a celebration of the superiority of art to morality, there was widespread in Shakespeare’s cultural environment a compulsively expressed doubt about the morality of all artistic endeavour. I hope to show that The Winter’s Tale participated in and extended this field of questioning in subtle and compelling ways. (3–4) Editions of single plays have likewise privileged their relationship with visual culture. A good example is Nicholas Brooke’s Oxford edition of Macbeth (1990), whose predominantly iconographic introduction affirms that ‘the aesthetic structures of Roman baroque art in the first half of the seventeenth century … can provide a context for understanding Macbeth’ (24): in particular, Brooke compares the tragedy’s baroque poetics to the paintings of Caravaggio. Alison Thorne’s ground-breaking Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare discusses the process of ‘looking through language’, i.e. ‘how visual and verbal modes of figuring the world, ways of seeing and ways of talking, are brought into productive relationship in Shakespeare’s work’ (2000: ix). Philip Armstrong’s Shakespeare’s Visual Regime (2001) offers a psychoanalytic perspective on the tragedies, histories and Roman plays, which together ‘typify the conflicted and emergent nature of the [early modern] geometrical visual order and of the subjectivity associated with it’ (3). Frederick Kiefer’s Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre (2003), after a useful introductory overview of early modern English arts, proceeds to examine Shakespeare’s characters as visual stage personifications of emblematic moral abstractions (Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Revenge in Titus Andronicus). The present study is indebted to the work of Stephen Orgel, notably his Imagining

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Shakespeare (2003), which sets out from the question ‘when we read the text of a play, what do we assume that text represents – what do we see? … For Shakespeare, there always was an imagination intervening between his text and its audience, the imagination of actor, director, producer – roles that, in his own time, Shakespeare played himself’ (1). Of great pertinence to the topic of this book is the body of critical and scholarly work dedicated to Shakespeare and Protestant iconoclasm. The defacing or whitewashing of images in the process of ‘Protestantizing’ churches was a familiar process in Elizabethan England, continuing a postReformation practice that had begun under Edward VI, but had been suspended under the Catholic Mary I: around the time of the dramatist’s birth, his own father, John, had supervised the destruction and limewashing of wall paintings in the Stratford Guild Chapel (see p. 87). Critical literature on the subject begins with James Siemon’s pioneering study Shakespearean Iconoclasm (1985), which analyses the way in which contemporary opposition to the ‘image’ and the ‘idol’ impinges on the rhetorical structure of Shakespeare’s language. Michael O’Connell’s The Idolatrous Eye (2000) takes iconoclasm more literally as a visual phenomenon with which Shakespeare engages directly, and argues that ‘the metadrama of his plays represents a response to iconoclasm, and it is significant that the defences of theatricality implicit in those metatheatrical moments at the same time encompass various forms of skepticism about representation’ (144). Such ambiguity is likewise the central thesis of Marguerite A. Tassi’s important study The Scandal of Images (2005), which discusses early modern English drama in the context of post-Reformation iconophobia, and includes a chapter on Shakespeare, in whose plays ‘a double vision of art emerges, a vision characterized by appreciation and wonder on the one hand, and skepticism, or fear, or irony, on the other’ (179). There is no doubt that this contradictory attitude creates a fundamental ideological tension – between faith in images and mistrust of visual representation – in plays such as Hamlet (see pp. 204–24).

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Among recent approaches, a particularly valid contribution to this study of iconic discourse in the plays is Richard Meek’s Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009), which addresses ‘the ways in which Shakespeare repeatedly reflects upon the power of narrative and the ability of art to deceive his audiences and readers’ (8), dedicating particular attention to ekphrasis (the graphic description of a visual image) and other narrative–descriptive modes in the poems and plays. Chris Laoutaris’s innovative studies10 have shed new light on the relationship between the plays and different modes of visual representation in the period. Yasmin Arshad’s illuminating discussion of a hitherto misinterpreted portrait of Lady Anne Clifford as Cleopatra (2011) opens up new ways of understanding the intimate three-way dialogue between portraiture, performance and politics in the Stuart England of the early 1600s. Rebecca Olson’s Arras Hanging (2013) is devoted to the influence of tapestries on Elizabethan poetry and drama, including Shakespeare, arguing that the importance of the arras for literature lay not in its figurative content but in its texture and form, since in their interweaving of language and themes ‘texts could be, and were, read like tapestries’ (2). The best and fullest study of the field – and closest to the interests of the present volume – is Stuart Sillars’s Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (2015), which explores how ‘the structures, allusive practices and concepts of the visual art of Shakespeare’s time were appropriated and transformed into the forms and ideas of the poems and plays’ (1).11 Such studies are highly valuable contributions to the field and constitute a considerable critical literature, to which this book aims to contribute. None of the existing scholarship, however, focuses specifically on the dramatic role of pictures and visual objects in Shakespeare’s plays; on the often central place they occupy in the action and dialogue; or, indeed, on the importance they assume for Shakespeare’s dramatis personae. It is to this active, cognitive and affective agency of Shakespeare’s pictures that this book, instead, is primarily dedicated.

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Pictures as agents The literature of art history and theory provides – in addition to precious information on early modern arts – invaluable tools for the analysis of pictures in the drama. The earliest contributions to which this study is indebted are the classic studies of Erwin Panofsky on iconography and iconology (Studies in Iconology, 1972) – including his seminal volume on tomb sculpture (Tomb Sculpture, 1992) – and Ernst Gombrich’s theories of the psychology of perception, in his monumental Art and Illusion (1960) and Symbolic Images (1972). More recent studies on Renaissance visual arts, to which this volume owes much, include Joanna Woods-Marsden’s Renaissance Self-portraiture (1998), which explores the visual construction of identity by means of the portrait, and Jodi Cranston’s The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (2000), which discusses analogies between the portrait and Renaissance verbal dialogues. Shearer West’s Portraiture (2004) also provides useful conceptual and historical stimuli. Of great theoretical and analytic value is W. J. T. Mitchell’s work on picture theory (1986, 1994a), with its underlying principle that ‘all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts’ (1994a: 5). Of special interest is Mitchell’s theorization of what he calls ‘imagetexts’, namely ‘composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text’ (1994a: 9), a category that is highly pertinent to Shakespeare’s visual–verbal dialectic. In the case of the drama, the relationship between the two spheres is not always that of harmonious collaboration: The image–text relation in […] theatre is not a merely technical question, but a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation. (1994a: 91) An analogous concept, in a slightly different terminology, is that of the iconotext, discussed in Peter Wagner’s Reading Iconotexts (1995) and Liliane Louvel’s Poetics of the Iconotext (2011).

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One of the more significant developments in art theory, for the purposes of this volume, is the relatively recent emphasis on the agency and affective power of images. A number of studies have discussed, from quite different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, the ability of artistic and visual objects to attain a form of emotional and psychological agency with regard to the beholder. Such studies are of direct pertinence to the drama, in which the picture has not so much an aesthetic as a personal and affective value. In other words, it is not the artistic quality of the image that impinges on characters and events but its ability to move, emotionally, mnemonically and politically. Lacan had already argued the dependence of the subject on the gaze from without, emanating from the picture itself: What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. (1998: 106) We are, says Lacan, ‘beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world’ (75). More recently, in the field of anthropology, Alfred Gell’s brilliant and controversial Art and Agency (1998) argues that the agentiality of art is its primary cultural and social function, allowing it to interact with and even substitute the human subject: ‘art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents’ (7). The agency of pictures and their interaction with the observing subject is also the topic of Horst Bredekamp’s theory of the Picture Act (Der Bildakt 2015). Bredekamp argues that paintings and other visual objects perform picture acts, by analogy with speech acts, including what he terms substitutive picture acts, through which ‘bodies are treated as pictures, and vice versa’ (137). Historically – and paradoxically – the agential power of pictures is confirmed by post-Reformation iconoclasm, which ‘reinforces what it rejects: it maintains that the images are inanimate, but in destroying them, treating them as living criminals, high traitors or heretics, it attributes life to them’ (169). Mitchell

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likewise affirms, ‘In the terminology of speech-act theorists, the use of a picture in a particular act of communication gives that picture a certain lure a certain illocutionary force, and the illocutionary force given to a particular picture may vary from context to context’ (1994b: 220). A recurrent theme regarding the agency of pictures is the attribution to the visual object of compelling affective powers over the beholder. An early and influential version of this idea is Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum, i.e. poignancy, in photography: This time it is not I who seek it out …, it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. … A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (1981: 26–7) The image, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney ‘cometh unto you’ and captures you, and, like Sidney’s ‘tale’, ‘holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’ (113). In the field of art history, one of the first and most significant studies to turn its attention to the affectivity of pictures is Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality (1988): a painting … had first to attract the beholder, then to arrest and finally to enthrall the beholder, that is a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move. (22) Here again it is the image that ‘calls’ to the beholder, enthralling and absorbing him, but such total ‘absorption’ depends on theatricality, namely ‘the fiction of [the beholder’s] absence or nonexistence’ (103). The beholder is, as it were, absorbed into the picture. Another challenging example of the affective approach to art is David Freedberg’s The Power of Images (1991). Freedberg attempts to rewrite art history from the perspective of the engaged and at times overwhelmed beholder, a factor

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often overlooked in standard histories. ‘People’, affirms Freedberg ‘are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt’ (1). Such a passionate response is what tends to take place in Shakespearian drama (Hamlet docet). For Freedberg, the primordial kind of artistic agency is what Gell terms captivation (otherwise known as fascination), whereby the picture takes on the paralyzing force of sympathetic magic: Gazing at the picture, my jaw drops, in admiration – and defeat. … I am left suspended between two worlds; the world in which I ordinarily live, in which objects have rational explanations and knowable origins, and the world adumbrated in the picture, which defeats explanation. Between these two worlds, I am trapped in a logical bind. (69) The sympathetic and talismanic agential power of images is a vital part of early modern popular culture, and is repeatedly reflected in the drama.12 W. J. T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (2004) likewise argues that images exercise a social or psychological agency, although Mitchell calls into question the supposed potency of images, suggesting instead the notion of the desire of images: In any event, it may be time to rein in our notions of the political stakes in a critique of visual culture, and to scale down the rhetoric of the ‘power of images’. Images are certainly not powerless, but they may be a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak. (33)

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Pictures themselves become (albeit weak) desiring subjects, that would like to take the place of the more powerful observer: The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture in what might be called ‘the Medusa effect’. (36) The Medusa effect is equivalent to Gell’s ‘captivation’, but seen as a desideratum on the part of the image itself, rather than as a magical phenomenon. Pictures want to capture us, whether they actually do so or not. The effect is fully achieved, at a high personal and political price, by the image of the murdered King Duncan that transfixes Macduff: ‘Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon’ (Macbeth 2.3.71–2). Perhaps the most audacious expression of the affective approach to art is James Elkins’s Pictures and Tears (2005), which addresses the history of weeping in front of paintings. Elkins affirms, among other things, that ‘To be in love with a painting – to cry – you need … to be able to believe a painting can be alive: not literally, but moment by moment in your imagination. … Everything else is just business’. Shakespearian dramatis personae, such as Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen, would concur. Elkins argues that High Renaissance art is ‘dry-eyed’, quoting Michelangelo’s derisive comment to the poet Vittoria Colonna on Flemish people weeping over paintings (160–1). Elkins admits, however, that ‘the CounterReformation broke down some of the humanist resolve’ (160), opening up to greater affectivity in the later Renaissance. One might add that such an affective ‘turn’ is reflected in Lomazzo’s claim regarding the ability of paintings to move the whole gamut of passions in the observer, from laughter to desire to sorrow, through a process of identification: So a picture artificially expressing the true natural motions, will (surely) procure laughter when it laugheth, pensiuenesse when it is grieued, &c. And, that which is more, will

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cause the beholder to wonder, when it wondreth, to desire a beautifull young woman for his wife, when he seeth her painted naked: to haue a fellow-feeling when it is afflicted; to haue an appetite when he seeth it eating of dainties; to fall asleepe at the sight of a sweete-sleeping picture; to be mooued and waxe furious when he beholdeth a battel most liuely described; and to be stirred with disdaine and wrath, at the sight of shameful and dishonest actions. (1598: Book II, 1–2)

Early modern English visual culture This book has also greatly benefitted from studies of early modern English art, which have shown that the visual culture of Shakespeare’s time was broader and richer than is usually supposed, not least by Shakespeare scholars. Eric Mercer’s seminal English Art: 1553–1625 (1962) has proved a valuable point of reference, especially with regard to early modern artistic genres. The many and celebrated studies of Roy Strong, eminent authority on English portrait miniatures (Strong 1969, 1975, 1977, 1983, 1995), have been indispensable in understanding the rise and the intricacies of an art form that is central to Shakespeare’s visual imagination, as have the intriguing enquiries into the same genre by Graham Reynolds. More recent work has greatly enhanced our understanding of the unsuspected richness and wide geographical and social diffusion of portraiture, heraldry, devices and other art forms in Shakespeare’s England: notably, Tessa Watt on cheap print and its impact on English domestic art; Anthony Wells-Coles on English decorative arts and their dependence on continental prints; Robert Tittler on the rise of portraiture, including Protestant portraits, in provincial sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; Nigel Llewellyn and Peter Sherlock on post-Reformation funeral monuments; Susan Foister on Elizabethan inventories; Tarnya Cooper on, among other subjects, portraits of the urban ‘middling sort’ and the progressive increase in access to and interest in portraiture, especially from the 1590s

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onwards (2008, 2010, 2012); and Tara Hamling on visual objects in post-Reformation households. Such work has done much to remedy the often exaggerated account of post-Reformation iconoclasm and the supposed disappearance of the image from English culture. The historical narrative of a transformation of Protestant iconoclasm into outright iconophobia from the 1580s onwards (i.e. during the reign of Elizabeth I), first proposed by Patrick Collinson (1986), has been strongly challenged by later historians (see, for example, Watt 1993: 134), as has Collinson’s claim regarding the lack of pictures in Elizabethan books: Nothing demonstrates more forcefully the absolute refusal of so many late Elizabethan and Jacobean religious communicators to appeal to the senses and to popular taste than the pictures which are missing from their books, where you might expect to find them. (294; this claim is refuted, among others, by Davis 2013: 216) Collinson’s narrative has been taken up by Shakespeare scholars, including Tassi, with her emphasis on the prevalence of hostility: The very terms used commonly by Elizabethans to refer to painting – cunning, shadowing, counterfeiting, and tricking – are far from neutral. They possess negative connotations, such as lack of authenticity and moral baseness, that, when implied, condemn the art. (2005: 46) This was only partly true: terms like ‘shadow’ or ‘counterfeit’ did not always have negative connotations (see pp. 190, 246, 313 and 321). The historical and cultural situation, moreover, was far more complex than the simplistic notion of a universal iconophobia allows. The work of Michael Hunter (2010), Malcolm Jones (2010) and David J. Davis (2013) on the early modern printed picture, including book illustrations, have amply demonstrated the partiality of Collinson’s sweeping generalizations.

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The Italian connection Equally important to this study is the body of work on the English reception and translation of continental artistic theory, which belies the idea of intellectual insularity. The vast influence of Italian artistic practice and theory, above all, has produced a critical literature that is of vital interest to Shakespeare studies. Such Italian influence regards, among other matters, the theory and application of linear perspective; the cults of the emblem and the impresa; the dialectic between the arts in the form of the paragone; and the literary discourse modes of ekphrasis and blazon. The relevant scholarly work includes John Dixon Hunt (1988) and Duncan Salkeld (2011) on the English theatrical implications of Leonardo’s Paragone; Clark Hulse (1990) and Alison Thorne (2000) on Lomazzo and his English literary associations; B. J. Sokol (1994), Bette Tavacchia (1999), Raymond Waddington (2000, 2004) and Stephen Orgel (2003) on the influence of Giulio Romano’s art, and especially his erotic drawings.

iv. Shakespeare as intermedial artist Shakespeare, though no Leonardo, nor even a Lomazzo, was himself a maker of pictures. More precisely, he was an inventor of ‘devices’ or impresas that included pictures. The dramatist may well have devised the coat of arms for the Shakespeare family approved by the Garter King of Arms on 20 October 1596 (Fig. 4). The application for the title of gentleman and for the officially authorized arms was made in the name of his father John, but Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that ‘both the initiative and the shaping ideas came from the younger Shakespeare’ (2001: 92). The device, as it appears in the second draft manuscript of the herald William Dethick, has aristocratic, heraldic and chivalric pretensions, showing at its centre the spear of a tilting staff, while the chromatic indications of the draft specify a gold staff with silver tip against black foil.

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FIG. 4 Manuscript sketch for Shakespeare’s coat of arms, 1596. College of Arms MS Grant of Arms to John Shakespeare

The spear alludes to the second part of the Shakespeare family name. It may also, however, be read as a silver-nibbed pen, a homage to William Shakespeare’s profession as writer. This mix of claimed aristocratic lineage along with the creation of playful visual-nominal puns makes the device, as Duncan-Jones observes, ‘more like an impresa than a coat of arms’ (93). An impresa, a visual device accompanied by a motto, was a more personal combination of word and image than the emblem, since it brought into play the family history and social status of the subject rather than a general moral theme. It was characterized by the semantic and hermeneutic interpenetration of

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visual and linguistic sign. The visual symbolism took on its full sense when translated into verbal language, not least because it was often conceived as the graphic representation of a verbal signified: this is particularly evident in the relationship between image and accompanying motto, but it often applies also, as in the Shakespeare coat of arms, to the iconographic items themselves (for example, ‘spear’). In Shakespeare’s impresa, the iconographic-nominal punning continues in the crest, which shows a noble bird, a silver falcon with its wings displayed, possibly inspired by the well-known coat of arms of the Earl of Southampton, with its four silver falcons (see p. 222). Shakespeare’s falcon is seen wielding the spear-pen, an action that can be verbally translated as ‘shake-spear’, thereby completing the cognominal conundrum. Finally, the motto, in chivalric medieval French – NON SANZ DROICT (‘Not without right’) – affirms the legitimacy of the application for the title of gentleman and, hence, the legitimacy of the device itself. Shakespeare’s impresa is highly self-referential and self-performative, acting out not only its own meanings but its own act of creation (by the very pen it adopts as doubly present symbol). It is also a kind of social ‘picture act’ (Bredekamp 2015), a public intermedial gesture with the explicit aim of self-promotion, designed to procure and advertise its author’s status as gentleman. Some sixteen years later, towards the end of Shakespeare’s life, his name appears in the context of another impresa. On 31 March 1613, Thomas Screvin, steward to Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, recorded two payments: ‘to mr Shakespeare in gold about my Lordes Impreso, xliiijs; to Richard Burbage for paynting and making yt, in gold, xliiijs’ (Rutland MSS iv: 494, qtd in Schoenbaum 1991: 220). The ‘Impreso’ in question, probably a painted tournament shield, was evidently executed by Burbage, a talented painter, whose portrait, in the Dulwich Gallery, is very likely his own work. Shakespeare earned his 44 shillings through his efforts ‘about’ the device, i.e. in providing the motto and perhaps the conceptual content, possibly a sketch, for his King’s Men colleague, analogous to the sketch used as the basis for his

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family coat of arms. Shakespeare, in other words, was a professional exponent of what Mitchell terms the imagetext. The commission bears witness to Shakespeare’s competence in heraldry, and may testify to the success in improving his social status that his own impresa sought to promote. That two actors, one of them also a dramatist, should receive such a commission is neither unduly surprising nor at all inappropriate. Actors were called upon to paint scenic objects of the kind listed by Henslowe, and, in the 1610s, possibly more extensive scenery required for masques and for the more elaborately iconographic scenes performed on the Blackfriars stage. The devising of an impresa, with its strategic and often highly theatrical interplay between image and language – both inscribed and implicit – was not unlike the composition of a text for performance. The working relationship between Shakespeare and Burbage as inventor and executor of the heraldic device was itself analogous to the collaboration between dramatist and lead actor in the creation of a stage performance, for example in the case of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s skills as a professional creator of impresas also have implications for his dramatic texts. Like his heraldic devices, his plays are the expression of mixed-media art, where the divide between speech act and iconographic form is always permeable. Indeed, the impresa is in many ways a model for Shakespeare’s conception of intermedial relations, since iconography in the plays always calls upon and at the same time depends upon dialogic commentary. Dramatic language (like the motto) is interpretant13 of the stage image, and vice versa. Another consequence of the impresa model is the abundance in the plays of allusions to emblems – as a venerable critical tradition has demonstrated – and to heraldry, with its rigid symbolic and chromatic codes and its highly technical language: as Tara Hamling notes, ‘Heraldry was probably the most ubiquitous form of imagery in early modern England and it permeated virtually all spheres of experience’ (2014: 79; see also Scott-Giles 1950; and below, pp. 44–5). Pictures also interacted with other iconographic elements onstage, as part of what one might call the pictorial continuum

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present in the Elizabethan playhouse: the stage’s frons scenae bore carved statuary, while according to some scholars the central opening in the frons was ‘concealed behind a hanging or elaborate cloth woven in panels with pictures of scenes from classical myths’ (as in the reconstructed Globe: Gurr and Ichikawa 2000: 6). Other pictorial elements included entire scenic paintings such as ‘the sittee of Rome’ (presumably a painted cloth) mentioned in Henslowe’s Diary (2002: 319; see p. 90) and the canopy or ‘heavens’ over the stage displaying paintings of celestial bodies, which, among others, Barnardo (‘yond same star that’s westward from the pole’ [Hamlet 1.1.35]), Hamlet (‘this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ [2.2.265–7]) and Lorenzo (‘Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold’ [The Merchant of Venice 5.1.66–7]) point to and describe.

v. Terms of art: Shakespeare’s iconographic lexicon Shakespeare’s interest in visual culture is said by some commentators – as we have seen – to be limited, and his allusions to forms of art correspondingly few (see p. 24). This claim is placed in question by, among other things, the extraordinary iconographic richness and density of Shakespeare’s language, replete as it is with references to visual representation of all kinds. The number and variety of his ‘terms of art’ is illustrated in the lexicon in the Appendix (pp. 311–22), which does not claim to be exhaustive but does at least give an idea of the dramatist’s acute awareness of artistic and visual modes, processes and materials. It also provides a lexical and semantic map for the critical exploration of the multiform iconic universe created by his plays and in his sonnets and poems, which frequently reflect on questions of representation. The aim of this lexicon, therefore, is to provide a brief guide to the verbal–visual world of Shakespeare’s pictures.

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Picture words The first striking characteristic of Shakespeare’s iconographic vocabulary, as illustrated in the lexicon, is its surprising semantic abundance. It is true that the most recurrent term for visual work or object is the generic ‘picture’, which occurs fifty-nine times in substantive form and covers a wide range of meanings and genres, from painting to emblem to statue to verbal description. There are also, however, a number of words that act as its partial synonyms, such as ‘image’, ‘imagery’, ‘idol’, ‘painting’, ‘piece’, allowing the dramatist a wider lexical choice and a greater degree of semantic precision. A second form of abundance is the variety and specificity of artistic genres alluded to. Although the term ‘portrait’ (like ‘portraiture’) occurs only once, it too has a number of synonyms, including ‘counterfeit’, ‘effigy’ and ‘shadow’. The portrait is, as we have seen, one of the major pictorial paradigms in the plays, one of Shakespeare’s ways of seeing persons and one of his characters’ ways of perceiving self and others. Another significant paradigm is the genre of the impresa and its synonyms and cognates: especially ‘device’, but also ‘character’, ‘emblem’, ‘moral’, ‘sign’. To the same semantic field of the device belongs the verbal discourse accompanying the visual design: ‘inscription’, ‘insculpture’, ‘motto’, ‘scroll’, ‘word’, underlining the central Shakespearian dialectic between image and verbal discourse. A further form of symbolic art alluded to is the vanitas genre: ‘Death’s head [face]’, ‘memento mori’ etc. Other visual genres abound. Narrative or historical painting is present in ‘story’, which, however, may at times refer to a framed picture in general (Foister 1981: 275). An important and recurrent category is the decorative art adorning domestic or public walls, especially in the form of hangings: ‘arras’, ‘tapestry’ and ‘painted cloth’, the latter associated with inexpensive and popular English art (see pp. 86, 88–91). The ‘arras’ has a particular prominence because of its actual stage presence (in the form of tapestry fabric or painted cloth), most famously as Polonius’s hiding place. The embroidery that

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produces tapestry and analogous sewn designs is another lexical domain, primarily feminine: ‘counterpoint’, ‘embroider(y)’, ‘gold [thread]’, ‘needle’, ‘needlework’, ‘silver [thread]’. Other domestic genres take the form (at least, according to Falstaff) of wall paintings or hangings, presumably familiar to Shakespeare’s audience: the comic ‘drollery’ and the relatively cheap ‘waterwork’. In the outside world, popular street art, instead, is represented in ‘sign’. The architectural form of buildings appears in ‘figure’ and ‘model’. The art of engraving, familiar both from funeral effigies and from printed pictures, is reflected in ‘character’, ‘engrave’, ‘graven’ and ‘insculpt(ure)’. Equally common were pictures and designs deriving from pressure on a soft surface: ‘impressure’, ‘seal’, ‘wax’.

Artistic processes Allusions to the ‘statue’ and other three-dimensional art works (‘[stony] image’, ‘insculpture’) may call into play the form and size of the actor’s body. Shakespeare’s insistent emphasis on the contours of the human body, or on its shaping into artistic form, is reflected in a varied figural vocabulary: ‘compose’, ‘fashion’, ‘figure’, ‘form’, ‘line’. Other artistic or artisanal processes – the modes of making pictures – are the domain of a large number of specific terms, especially verbs: ‘carve’, ‘character’, ‘cut’, ‘draw’, ‘embroider’, ‘engrave’, ‘gild’, ‘insculpt’, ‘limn’ (an old but newly fashionable term), ‘paint’, ‘pencil’, ‘picture’, ‘seal’, ‘stell’. The number and frequency of iconographic verbs points to the fact that Shakespeare is often concerned with the arts as process, as modes of action rather than ready-made products. Artistic agency is similarly underlined by references to their makers: ‘artist’, ‘carver’, ‘(stone) cutter’, ‘master’, ‘painter’. Strongly represented is likewise the materiality of paintings, sculptures and other visual forms through reference to materials and tools: ‘alabaster’, ‘gold’, ‘marble’, ‘needle’, ‘pencil’, ‘silk’, ‘silver’, ‘table’, ‘wax’. The equally material ‘curtain’ covering paintings provides Shakespeare with a powerful trope (three occurrences). Places

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for the making and display of images include ‘gallery’ and ‘shop’. The objects on display or in the possession of a household may be listed in an ‘inventory’, which is, perhaps, an unpromising discourse genre for purposes of the drama, but which Shakespeare puts to powerful rhetorical use in Cymbeline and to more grotesquely comic ends in Shrew (see pp. 73–82 and 122–3, respectively, in this volume).

‘Total gules’: The language of heraldry A major semantic field for the dramatist’s iconography is heraldry, which was certainly one of the most important sources not only of images and designs but also of specific iconic concepts and technical terms in early modern England. One of the reasons for the almost obsessive presence of heraldic concepts and terminology in early modern English society, and particularly Shakespeare’s plays and poems, is that it was at once a somewhat rigid social code and at the same time a specific and highly technical semiotic code, in terms of the precise significance of colours and forms. Countless guides to the rules and language of heraldry were available, from John Fernes’s Blazon of Gentrie (1586) to Gerard Leigh’s Accence of Armoury (1591) and William Wyrley’s The True Use of Armorie (1592). The strict observation of heraldic rules was guaranteed by the College of arms and the Garter Principal King of Arms, William Dethick, as Shakespeare himself discovered when in 1596 he applied for a family coat of arms attesting to his status as gentleman. In addition to ‘heraldry’ itself (six occurrences), Shakespeare has such heraldic terms as ‘badge’, ‘crest’, ‘ground’ and ‘seal’. As Scott-Giles suggests, ‘At least he knew enough of the language of heraldry to use it at need with reasonable accuracy’ (17). Such technical terms provide the dramatist with a socially-charged chivalric vocabulary, as well as a rich source of colour metaphors. Heraldic terminology, even when adopted generically rather than technically, lends a certain formality to his more literary descriptions or ekphrases. The

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heraldic colour code provides Hamlet, among others (as well as Shakespeare himself) with one of his many sources of lexical abundance, a rich storehouse of synonyms – ‘sable’ for black, ‘gules’ for blood red, ‘azure’ for light blue – and they literally colour his discourse. More significantly, however, the code gives both Shakespeare and the prince a powerful filter for the perception and narration of events. When Hamlet tries to recall the player’s narrative monologue on Pyrrhus’s killing of Priam, what he primarily remembers is the heraldic language in which the speech was framed: Let me see, let me see – … It begins with Pyrrhus – The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in th’ominous horse, Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared With heraldry more dismal, head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly tricked With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons … (2.2.384–96; my emphasis) The heraldic colour words here are not simply metaphorical or synonimical. The ominously sable-armoured Pyrrhus bears an armorial shield that has likewise been reduced to a single colour – ‘total gules’ (red) – deprived of its distinctive graphic forms, and at the same time the world’s heraldic chromatic code has, as it were, been limited to a single choice. In the player’s speech, Pyrrhus, hesitating to kill Priam, is a ‘painted tyrant’, because he is about to be covered with Priam’s blood: the epithet ‘heraldry’ in the speech denotes the blood Pyrrhus has smeared on his face like armorial markings. There are implications in this for Hamlet himself: the reference to ‘total gules’ relates back to the killing of his father in total transgression against the chivalric code, and also forwards to the the tragedy’s finale, when the Globe platform stage was transformed into a spectacular blood bath, becoming predominantly red-coloured, or ‘total gules’.

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Mimetic words Finally, the very question of mimesis – likeness to the original, verisimilitude, the falsehood or immorality of images – is raised by a set of more abstract and highly ideological substantives: ‘counterfeit’, ‘effigy’, ‘form’, ‘idol’, ‘idolatry’, ‘model’, ‘semblable’, ‘semblance’, ‘shadow’. The latter term, polysemic and highly problematic, is the object of extensive theatrical as well as discursive exploration (see pp. 207–15). Much the same can be said for another term that implicates both painterly technique, theatrical visual effects and ways of seeing, namely ‘perspective’ (see pp. 288–302). The richness of Shakespeare’s terms of art suggests that Lucy Gent’s rather drastic affirmation – namely that ‘The desperate shortage in sixteenth-century English of terms to do with art is a clear index of a lack of contact with works of art being produced, or recently produced, in Italy and France’ (1981: 16) – requires qualification. The last decade of the sixteenth century, in particular, made available a new English iconographic vocabulary through translation from Italian and through native handbooks. Not by chance a term like ‘perspective’ itself became fashionable at the turn of the century. The verbal representation of iconographic forms, ekphrasis, is itself another fertile lexical area: words for pictorial words, such as ‘blazon’, ‘image’ and ‘picture’ itself.

Discursive sites The distribution of terms of art in the plays is uneven. Some of the words in question are concentrated in a few iconographically intense passages: the episodes that act as particularly rich sources of pictorial information include Gremio’s veritable catalogue of his treasures in The Taming of the Shrew (2.1); Falstaff’s advice to Mistress Quickly on how to decorate her walls, 2 Henry 4 (2.1); Iachimo’s inventory of Innogen’s pictures and furnishings in Cymbeline (2.2) and his description of her chamber (2.4).

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Shakespeare’s iconographic lexicon creates – to borrow John Florio’s famous title – a world of words that is also, however, a world of forms, colours, genres, processes, materials, instruments, makers of images and modes of reception and perception. It is both a material and a metaphorical world in which pictorial and other visual phenomena are caught up with kinds of action as well as kinds of perceptual and emotional response. The abundance and comprehensiveness of the dramatist’s terms of art underline the highly and constantly iconic quality of his language. Shakespeare thinks (and writes) in pictures.

vi. Counterfeit representation: Ekphrasis and anti-ekphrasis Ekphrasis, the vivid description of a picture, involves the transference of the image from the visual plane to the verbal. The efficacy of the description lies in its ability to create in the listener or reader a mental image analogous to the one provoked in the beholder by the actual viewing of the picture. In its early Greek and Latin rhetorical definitions, ekphrasis is simply a way of creating a vivid image in the listener’s mind. It is such vividness, enargeia, that distinguishes it from other discursive modes: in the words of Nikolaos the Sophist, ‘it is in this [vividness] particularly that ekphrasis differs from diēgēsis (narration). The latter sets out the events plainly, while the former [ekphrasis] tries to make the listeners into spectators’.14 In classical rhetoric, the vividness or enargeia of ekphrasis could take the form of the figure hypotyposis,15 namely the lifelike description of a thing or scene, re-baptized by George Puttenham as ‘the counterfeit representation’ (2007 [1589]: 323). This makes graphically present in the audience’s mind a visual object that is physically absent: as Puttenham affirms, ‘which to do it requireth cunning, for nothing can be kindly counterfeit or represented in his absence, but by great discretion in the doer’ (323). The desired result is a kind of trompe l’oreille, a deception of the ear that

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persuades the organ of hearing that it is able to see: in the words of Murray Krieger, ‘What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage’ (1992: xvi). The more specific modern meaning of ‘ekphrasis’ as description of a picture was introduced in the twentieth century (OED). Nevertheless, pictorial ekphrasis has been a recurrent feature of poetry since Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (Book 18, ll. 478–608), and Virgil’s description of the engravings on the doors of the temple of Juno in Carthage (Aeneid, 1.453–93). One of the major Elizabethan exponents of the device is Edmund Spenser (2007), notably in his description of the tapestries depicting Jove’s amorous activities, viewed by Britomart in the House of Busirane in Book III of The Faerie Queene (‘For round about, the wals yclothed were / With goodly arras of great maiesty …’, 3.11.28), a description that is ‘So liuely and so like, that liuing sence it fayld’, like the tapestry itself (3.11.46; see McKeown 2005; Grogan 2009).

A thousand lamentable objects Shakespeare’s own most extensive non-dramatic exercise in ekphrastic description – to which I can devote only a brief discussion here – occurs in The Rape of Lucrece, II. 1366–533, where the heroine, shortly after her rape, contemplates a pictorial representation of the fall of Troy: At last she calls to mind where hangs a piece Of skilful painting made for Priam’s Troy, Before the which is drawn the power of Greece, For Helen’s rape the city to destroy, Threat’ning cloud-kissing Ilion with annoy; Which the conceited painter drew so proud As heaven, it seemed, to kiss the turrets bowed. (1366–72) The verb ‘hangs’ implies that the picture she views is a narrative wall hanging, possibly a tapestry (Hulse 1978; Olson 2008) rather than a mural or table, but the phrase

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‘skilful painting’ seems to suggest instead that it is a painted cloth (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen, Arden 3 [2007]), a more modest form of tapestry-like wall hanging that adorned many an English home of the middling sort (see pp. 88–91). The poem’s ekphrasis proper, describing the form and content of the narrative picture, opens with a paradox: A thousand lamentable objects there, In scorn of nature, art gives lifeless life (1373–4) The hanging gives life not only to the dead but to inanimate objects that are by definition lifeless. The objects not only lend greater verisimilitude to the ‘living’ bodies shown in dynamic movement, but even substitute them metonymically: ‘for Achilles’ image stood his spear’ (1424). It is for this reason that the painted objects are ‘lamentable’, since they are caught up in a net of highly affective relations with the dying Trojans. As Peter Schwenger observes with regard to Aeneas’s perception of the shield in Virgil’s ekphrasis, ‘there is a melancholy associated with physical objects. … The melancholy I am speaking of … is generated by the act of perception, perception of the object by the subject. This perception, always falling short of full possession, gives rise to a melancholy that is felt by the subject and is ultimately for the subject. It is we who are to be lamented, and not the objects that evoke this emotion in us without ever feeling it themselves’ (2006: 1–2). Shakespeare’s ekphrasis recalls Virgil’s in its attribution of affectivity to objects. A notable example of pictorial affect is the painted tear, standing for the ‘distress and dolour’ (1446) not only the defeated Priam and his men but also for the onlooking women (‘despairing Hecuba’, 1447): ‘Many a dry drop seemed a weeping tear’. The tear, an emotion frozen in pictorial space and time, in turn anticipates and provokes the affective response of Lucrece to the picture: On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes, And shapes her sorrows to the bedlam’s woes … (1457–8)

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More than the description of a picture, the passage is the narration of a perceptual and emotional exchange between painting and beholder. Lucrece watches and is simultaneously watched by the suffering subjects from the historical and mythical past: not by chance, both painting and narration foreground synecdochically the ‘dying eyes’ (1378), ‘those far-off eyes [that] look sad’ (1386), ‘Ajax’ eyes’ that roll with their ‘blunt rage and rigour’ (1398), and Hecuba’s ‘old eyes’ (1448). The encounter with the picture is an empathetic meeting of gazes across temporal and ontological barriers. At the same time Lucrece’s perception of the picture is necessarily conditioned by her own traumatic experience of the rape. In the forefront of the episode is the potent agency of the picture in its irresistible impact on Lucrece, not least because looking at the picture – and being looked at by the picture – immediately precedes and foreshadows her own death. The ‘piece of skilful painting’ is therefore a transitional event between Lucrece’s rape and her suicide. The ekphrasis is entirely functional to the main narrative, rather than a contemplative interval. Shakespeare proceeds not by direct detailed description of the contents but by evocation of the experiential process, foregrounding not so much what is seen as what ‘you’ – i.e. one, Lucrece but also the reader – could have seen, ‘here and there’ (1390): ‘There might you see’ (1380); ‘You might behold’ (1388); ‘There pleading, might you see grave Nestor stand’ (1401), etc. In addition to the ‘lamentable objects’, he singles out compositional forms: ‘here one man’s hand leaned on another’s head’ (1415). The emphasis is on the painter’s technical and persuasive skill rather than the narrative contents: ‘For such imaginary work was there: / Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind …’ (1422–3). The intent, therefore, is not to reproduce the ‘imaginary work’ as such but to represent the experience of being captivated by a masterpiece. The claim of the poem is to translate into words not a picture but a kind of visual possession or, as it were, sensorial rape. Richard Meek rightly notes that this passage ‘not only suggests that language can do the work of the visual sign but also emphasises the ways in which visual

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signs function in a way analogous to language’ (2009: 57; see also Duncan-Jones 2005; Belsey 2012). At the same time, it suggests that what makes the two kinds of sign analogous is their shared ability to act on the viewer or reader. The illusion of being ‘there’, on the scene of Lucrece’s sorrowful gaze, is what gives the visual object its apparent tangibility in the episode, despite the narration’s relative lack of detailed descriptive realism. This effect recalls Valentine Cunningham’s well-known reflection on the power of ekphrastic writing: Fundamentally, I suggest that thereness is what’s in question. Writing is always tormented by the question of real presence, by challenges to knowability, by the problematics of truth and validity, the difficulty of being sure about what it might be pointing to outside of itself, by its deictic claims and desires, by what its grammar of pointing, its this and that and there might be indicating … The ekphrastic encounter seeks, I think, to resolve this ancient and continuing doubting by pointing at an allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness. It lays claim to the absolute thereness of an aesthetic object … (2007: 61)

Ekphrasis onstage The ‘thereness’ and ‘tangible, fingerable, thisness’ of ekphrasis would seem to make it particularly apt to the drama, which is the realm of the thisness of bodies, objects and actions. Not by chance Erasmus recommends graphic description (hypo­typosis) in explicitly theatrical terms: We shall enrich speech by description of a thing when we do not relate what is done, or has been done, summarily or sketchily, but place it before the reader painted with all the colors of rhetoric, so that at length it draws the hearer or reader outside himself as in the theatre. The Greeks call this hypotyposis from painting the picture of things. (1963: 47)

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Erasmus’s recommendation, however, regards non-dramatic discourse, which ekphrastic description serves to enliven ‘as in’ the theatre. It is the literal non-theatricality of the ‘colours of rhetoric’ that is the necessary condition for their becoming metaphorically theatrical. In the theatre proper, where the action is already ‘before the eyes’, and where discourse itself is a form of doing rather than merely saying, verbal description is subject to quite different pressures. As Joel Altman aptly demands, ‘Therefore, when they claim that writers or speakers who compose vivid descriptions can transform mere readers or listeners into theatrical spectators, the question arises: what happens when the listeners are already spectators?’ (2013: 271). The description of a visual (even if not necessarily visible) object onstage runs the risk of redundancy and inefficacy, since the degree of ‘thisness’ it achieves cannot compete with the more imposing tangibility of actor or stage property. For this reason, ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s plays is usually reserved for the offstage picture which, in the words of Puttenham, is ‘counterfeit or represented in his absence’, like Othello’s embroidered handkerchief, described only when it has gone missing (‘Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries …?’, 3.3.437–8). The description itself, moreover, has a primarily narrative rather than pictorial role, since it becomes part of the dialogic action rather than an alien intermedial interloper. A celebrated example is Enobarbus’s vivid description of Antony’s meeting with Cleopatra on the river Cydnus (‘The barge she sat on, like a burnished throne …’, 2.2.2ff.), a non-pictorial event that nevertheless becomes a ‘picture’: ‘O’erpicturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature’ (10–11). Enobarbus’s description recounts and explains Antony’s pre-dramatic infatuation for the Egyptian queen, but is also designed to persuade the Roman interlocutor Agrippa – and the audience – of Cleopatra’s political, as well as exotic and erotic, seductive powers. In other words, it contributes to the geopolitical dynamics of the play. And above all it is a bravado oratorical performance, as Enobarbus pre-announces: ‘I will tell you’ (1). Another case in point is Iachimo’s description

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of Innogen’s bedchamber in Cymbeline. In the scene of the actual viewing of the chamber (2.2), Iachimo notes the visual objects present (‘such and such pictures’) but strategically avoids describing them, reserving his detailed ekphrasis for a later scene (2.4) in which the pictures are by now an offstage recollection. Again his description is functional above all to the political economy of the play – designed as it is to discredit Innogen in her husband Posthumus’s eyes – and to show off his rhetorical superiority over his interlocutor, the gullible Posthumus himself (see pp. 73–82). The description of onstage visual objects, instead, often takes the form of what we might term anti-ekphrasis, whereby the object resists description, or is subject to a pseudodescription that turns out to deliver other than what it promises. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, Emilia’s apparently detailed ekphrases of the rival portraits prove to be an erotic and rhetorical game in which each description tends to cancel out the other (see p. 69). Hamlet’s description of the portrait of Claudius – whose features we can verify for ourselves, even if the portrait is not visible – is reduced to a single scathing simile (‘like a mildewed ear’, 3.4.62), as if to say that the sitter is beyond all description, or that no description can in any case do justice to the all-too-cumbersome thisness of the King. Such is the contradictory and often paradoxical nature of pictures in Shakespeare’s plays. As material stage props, they tend to lose their supposed status as art works and become, instead, the phantasmal objects of the beholders’ passions, desires, projections or interpersonal strife. Their role in the drama depends largely on the verbal and gestural responses they elicit. At the same time, ekphrastic descriptions of onstage pictures turn out to be auditory illusions: rather than delineating verbally what the audience cannot see physically, they become rhetorical performances in their own right, with little pretence to evoking the invisible images in question. Shakespeare’s pictures are therefore located in a liminal space between the unseen and the unsaid. Nevertheless, as the following chapters will endeavour to show, they bear a dramatic and discursive weight that goes far beyond their ghostly material presence.

1 Doing things with pictures

FIG. 5 Scott Wentworth’s 2015 Stratford Ontario production of Pericles, 2.2

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i. Pictorial performativity Shakespeare’s pictures are highly performative. They are often an integral part of the dramatic action. They take on an agency of their own as surrogates for their sitters. They exercise power over the beholder through their subjects or through their symbolic value. They act as ‘transactional’ objects in mediating between dramatis personae. They recreate the pre-dramatic past and condition the dramatic present. Onstage they become a material and gestural aspect of the actor’s performance. They may even become the performative protagonists of colourful spectacle in their own right. Probably the most spectacular, and the most literally performative, pictures in the Shakespeare canon are found in the co-authored play Pericles, written by Shakespeare with George Wilkins. The tournament episode in Pericles (2.2), a scene sometimes attributed to Wilkins (Jackson 2003; see also Vickers 2004: 318–22) has a procession of knights – each of them suitor for the hand of Thaisa – present their tournament devices onstage to the princess. As James Shapiro points out (2005: 33–4), the scene recalls the Accession Day tilts held in the tiltyard of Whitehall Palace, in which knights presented to Queen Elizabeth paste-board shields bearing their respective impresas (of the kind devised by Shakespeare and Burbage for Rutland), which were then put on show in the Palace’s shield gallery. In the play, Thaisa describes each impresa picture and motto in turn for the benefit of her father Simonides, King of Pentapolis, who then interprets some of them. Particular attention is paid to the impresa of Pericles himself, eventual winner of the tournament: [The sixth Knight], pericles, passes in rusty armour with bases and unaccompanied. He presents his device directly to Thaisa]. simonides And what’s the sixth and last, the which the knight himself With such a graceful courtesy delivered?



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thaisa He seems to be a stranger; but his present is A withered branch, that’s only green at top; The motto, In hac spe vivo. simonides A pretty moral. From the dejected state wherein he is He hopes by you his fortunes yet may flourish. (39–45) Pericles’s ‘present’ (i.e. the image presented in his impresa) precedes him: Thaisa and her father first know him through his picture and motto, which pre-announce his success but also – in the movement of the shield across the stage – his itinerant story. This intensely heraldic scene is the most elaborate picture episode in the ‘Shakespeare’ canon, involving as it does six impresas and mottoes, six literal ekphrases from the beholding princess and three hermeneutical glosses from the king. Thaisa’s descriptions may suggest that the devices were not seen in any detail by the Globe Theatre audience, although some modern productions have rendered them spectacularly visible, as, for example, in Scott Wentworth’s 2015 Stratford Ontario production (see Fig. 5). The knights are judged for their aristocratic and moral value (the former symbolized by the heraldic shield decoration, the latter by the motto: ‘A pretty moral’) as well as their combative prowess; in the case of Pericles, despite his rusty armour, all three coincide. The episode – even if possibly written by Wilkins – is in many ways representative of Shakespeare’s pictorial poetics. One of the key performative characteristics of Shakespeare’s pictures is precisely their interaction with accompanying textual forms, from inscriptions to captions to scrolls to enigmas. For this reason, the ‘device’ or impresa, such as Pericles’s shield, is (together with the portrait) a recurrent iconographic paradigm in Shakespeare’s plays, calling upon a strategic dialectic between image and ‘word’ or motto. Shakespeare’s characters do things with words, but they also do things with pictures, and often with pictures and words together.

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This chapter examines some of the things that are done with and through pictures in Shakespeare’s plays. Each section is concerned with a different kind of ‘doing’ and thus with a different kind of pictorial performativity. The first section considers the ‘proxy’ role of pictures, whereby they become ‘persons’ acting as substitutes for their subjects, especially in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The second section discusses the strategic use to which Iachimo puts household pictures in Cymbeline, as part of his rhetorical and political campaign to persuade Posthumus of the infidelity of Innogen. Still on the domestic front, the third section is dedicated to Falstaff’s professed expertise on wall hangings, especially painted cloths, object of his satirical wit but also a means to his social and cultural self-promotion. The fourth section is devoted to the opening scene of Timon of Athens, in which the discourse on painting, especially in its conflicting relations with poetry, acts as a perceptual and ideological frame for the play as a whole. The final section regards the so-called ‘Painter scene’, Shakespeare’s 1602 addition to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, an episode that represents a tragicomic exploration of the powers and limits of mimesis. What these sections have in common is the fact that Shakespeare includes the pictures in question as active participants in the narrative and thematic texture of their respective plays.

ii. The portrait as proxy Being a person in Shakespeare – as in life – is a complex business. The very category of person was unstable in the early modern period and indeed on the early modern stage. Historically and etymologically, a person was first a dramatic ‘role’ (Latin persona: OED 1) before it became, precisely in the sixteenth century, an individual subject (OED 3a). The modern philosophical sense of ‘a conscious or rational being’ arose a century later (5). Shakespeare’s dramatis personae often find themselves caught in the aporia between persona (role) and personhood.



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This is a central theme of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a play of formation, or Bildungsspiel, about the difficulties of becoming an adult person. In the struggle of its late adolescent characters to achieve subjectivity – rather than merely adopt a role or mask – the picture plays a significant part. One of the recurrent topics of Two Gentlemen is the dialectic between person and thing, subject and object. In Launce’s solo scene in 2.3, in which he confusedly acts out the story of his farewell to his family, objects become subjects and vice versa, as stage properties are given the parts of Launce’s relatives, while he and his dog Crab exchange roles: Nay, I’ll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father. No, this left shoe is my mother … it hath the worser sole. This shoe with the hole in it is my mother, and this my father. … This hat is Nan, our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself. (2.3.13–22) The semiotic principle at work in Launce’s farcical tour de force is that one thing – anything – can stand for another, but not, perhaps, itself. A further underlying message is that the relationship between person and thing is not fixed: a thing can play a person, a person can become a thing (or beast).1 Personification and reification are interchangeable. This principle also applies to the main plot, in which the protagonist Proteus turns into a reified mask, or series of masks, rather than a full human subject, as Launce himself has occasion to note: I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of knave; but that’s all one, if he be but one knave. (3.1.259–61) It is in this context of subject–object exchange, of personification/reification, that the picture – as stage object supposedly representing a dramatic subject – takes on a significant role in the play.

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The Two Gentlemen of Verona stages a considerable trafficking in visual objects. The picture becomes a running narrative trope, especially in the fourth act, where it occupies the best part of two scenes: this suggests the considerable thematic and symbolic importance that Shakespeare attributes to it. This narrative sequence begins in 4.2 with Proteus’s request to the recalcitrant Silvia to give him her portrait, while his erstwhile love, the disguised Julia, watches on and comments acrimoniously: proteus Madam, if your heart be so obdurate, Vouchsafe me yet your picture for my love, The picture that is hanging in your chamber. To that I’ll speak, to that I’ll sigh and weep; For since the substance of your perfect self Is else devoted, I am but a shadow, And to your shadow will I make true love. julia [aside] If ’twere a substance you would sure deceive it And make it but a shadow, as I am. silvia I am very loath to be your idol, sir. But, since your falsehood shall become you well To worship shadows and adore false shapes, Send to me in the morning, and I’ll send it. (4.2.116–28) At first, the picture in question is a distant erotic object, offstage in Silvia’s chamber and thus associated by proximity with Silvia’s bed and with unachievable desire. Proteus requests it as an explicit surrogate for the sitter, a target of courtship in her place (‘To that I’ll speak’). This is the phenomenon that Shearer West has described as the proxy function of the portrait (2004: 59; see pp. 173, 196). We are likewise in the domain of Bredekamp’s substitutive picture act, in which ‘bodies are treated as pictures, and vice versa’ (2015: 137; see p. 31), or of Gell’s idolatry, ‘since nowhere are images more obviously treated as human persons than in the context of



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worship and ceremonies’ (1998: 96; see p. 31). Proteus desires Silvia’s picture in part because the sitter herself is inaccessible, but mainly because the portrait lends itself more readily than an actual ‘person’ to the kind of idolatrous worship he has in mind. The recurrent theme word in the exchange is ‘shadow’, to which each of the three lovers gives a different meaning. Proteus claims to be a mere shadow because he cannot be his true self – or person – without Silvia’s love, which begs the question that he is a ‘person’ to begin with. Julia is the shadow of her former self because of the betrayal by Proteus. For Silvia, instead, her portrait is a shadow since it is a ‘false shape’, not because it fails to present her likeness but because on the contrary it represents her only too well, being a perfect counterfeit or simulacrum of her outer person. What is at stake here is the nature of selfhood, or subjectivity, and its representation. Proteus’s description of his shadow-like self amounts to a virtual confession of the insubstantiality and instability of his persona, and thus the inauthenticity of the self he presents to others, making the picture a suitable object of his devotion: he himself is little more than the ‘picture’ of a gentleman and lover. Such falseness (in love) is confirmed by Julia, who opposes to the shadow the ‘substance’ of the authentic correspondence between outward representation and inwardness. There are thus three kinds of inauthenticity at play: Proteus’s mutable self, Julia’s disguised and betrayed identity, Silvia’s false portrait. Silvia’s response intertwines two related ideological discourses. Her scathing allusion to the ‘idol’ immediately recalls for Shakespeare’s audience Protestant iconoclastic attacks on the idolatrous worship of images, especially images of the divine (see Philips 1973; Collinson 1986; Tassi 2005). Her picture is like the representations of God and Christ destroyed by militant reformists in English places of worship. This in turn mocks Proteus’s trite deification of her person. At the same time, her reference to the shadow as a false image is rooted in Platonist scepticism towards all forms of representation (see pp. 207–10). Proteus, instead, believes in the

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truth of images, in the perfect correspondence between visual object and portrayed subject. As David Freedberg observes of this passage, For all the talk of shadows (which places these lines in one of the most venerable of all traditions of thought about imagery), the point, of course, is that Proteus says he wants to talk and weep to the image as if it were the real Silvia, neither image or shadow. (1991: 334) The debate here, therefore, is less philosophical (scepticism versus realism) than affective. Proteus desires the picture as a fetish object with which he can engage in a tactile, erotic and quasi-religious relationship, almost independently of Silvia herself. The question arises as to why, in the light of her resistance to Proteus’s advances and her critique of his shallow idolatry, Silvia nevertheless gives him her picture. As William Carroll points out (Arden 3, 2004) this is in part ‘a practical plot necessity’, preparing for the appearance of the picture in 4.4 as object of exchange and commentary. The gift also implies, however, the definitive dismissal of Proteus and his values: in giving Proteus her picture, Silvia, far from rewarding him, is giving him what he deserves, namely nothing, a shadow, thereby ‘merely ratifying his defeat’, in the words of June Schlueter (Carroll, Arden 3, 2004: 246). The picture appears onstage in 4.4, within an intricate narrative sequence of gifts and substitutions: 1 Lance, commissioned by Proteus to offer Silvia a miniature dog – ‘my little jewel’ (46), loses it and then replaces it with his dog Crab, ‘a dog as big as ten of yours, and therefore the gift the greater’ (55–6). 2 Proteus then sends Silvia, via Julia, the very ring that Julia herself had given him as ‘token’ (72). 3 Julia, prior to delivering the ring, gives Silvia a letter supposedly from Proteus, but mistakes the missive,



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giving her instead what is presumably one of her own love letters from Proteus. 4 Silvia tears up the correct letter. 5 Julia then gives Silvia her own ring (substituting, as it were, the object of the gift). 6 Silvia, in turn, gives Julia a purse, taking her for the male servant she pretends to be. It is in this context of erroneous gifts and substitutions that the portrait – itself a gift and a substitution (for Silvia herself) – makes its first material appearance. Proteus again sends Julia to reclaim his prize, maintaining the conventional Petrarchan deification of her image: ‘Tell my lady / I claim the promise for her heavenly picture’ (84–5). Silvia is far more pragmatic about the portrait, going unsentimentally about the business of keeping her promise: silvia O, he sends you for a picture? Ursula, bring my picture there. [She brings it.] Go, give your master this. Tell him from me, One Julia, that his changing thoughts forget, Would better fit his chamber than this shadow. (4.4.113–18) The portrait is at first still situated at a distance (‘there’), probably still in Silvia’s chamber. In the space of two lines, however, it makes a rapid triple passage, from the chamber wall to Ursula’s hands to Silvia’s hands to, finally, Julia’s hands (‘give your master this’). The speed of this multiple exchange suggests the desire to be rid of it: Ursula is merely carrying out orders; Silvia wants nothing more to do with the object of false idolatry; Julia is reluctant to receive it and even more so to pass it on to her beloved. The picture is a property without a proprietor and perhaps without a subject, since Silvia has, as it were, ‘erased’ her own relationship with the image. From a material point of view, it might be noted that Silvia’s portrait, unlike most of Shakespeare’s pictures, starts

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life as a relatively large-scale affair ‘hanging in your chamber’ (4.2.118). Silvia in her final lines again associates the portrait with a ‘chamber’ (4.4.118), loyally inviting Proteus to take Julia rather than the picture to his bed. A portrait displayed on the wall would be a familiar feature of a courtly Italian domestic space of the kind Silvia supposedly inhabits, but as Tarnya Cooper has shown, it was also becoming a relatively common presence in the homes of the English ‘middling sort’: ‘By the 1590s, portraits of private individuals were becoming reasonably familiar objects in England for a widening range of the urban elite’ (2010: 173). The supposed size and location of the portrait, however, does not necessarily translate into a correspondingly large-scale stage property. While it is true that onstage a bulky prop creates the opportunity for physical comedy, the sheer rapidity of the portrait’s passage from person to person suggests, instead, a manageable handheld prop, probably a miniature. If so, its dimensions onstage might represent another element in the chain of substitutions and protean metamorphoses at work in this scene: the chamber wall portrait is transformed into a portrait miniature, thereby enacting the opposite process to the substitution/ transformation of Proteus’s miniature canine ‘jewel’ into the large-scale and far from precious Crab.

The picture as letter The exchange sequence includes two letters, one erroneous and one destined to be torn up (much like the torn letter in 1.2 that Julia tries to put lovingly back together). There is a certain kinship between the picture and the letter. Pictures are read like texts; letters are displayed like pictures. Both are indicated deictically as ‘this’ (compare Julia’s ‘Madam, please you peruse this letter’, 4.4.119). Both are handheld objects that can be ‘read’ by the actor but not by the audience: the stage letter is also a non-letter, without actual contents (i.e. without actual letters: or if they are present, it makes little difference, the text of the letter being the domain of the



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actor’s memory). Both are objects of exchange, especially in courtship, that can be devotedly pored over, discarded or destroyed, according to the mood of the receiver. They act as surrogates for sender and sitter respectively. They are similar in size and pass rapidly from hand to hand. In Shakespeare, pictures and letters often go together: in The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, as in Two Gentlemen pictures and letters alternate. The cultural affinity between the portrait and the letter is testified to by a long tradition of handheld letters within portraits. In the words of Jodi Cranston, ‘The letter [in the portrait] … reflexively signifies the surrogate function of the portrait and the role of the beholder in sustaining such a fiction’ (79).2 Not by chance, given this narrative and stage affinity between picture and letter, when Julia is left alone onstage with Silvia’s portrait, her soliloquy recalls her analogous ‘Poor wounded name’ solo scene involving the torn letter in 1.2.104–29. In this case, she issues an apostrophe (i.e. a direct address) to the picture, considering it not as art work, but rather as proxy for Silvia (‘’tis thy rival’, just as the ‘wounded name’ in 1.2 is a magical referential sign for Proteus himself). Julia’s solo scene is a study in inwardness of the kind that is quite missing in Proteus, thus confirming the moral and psychological superiority of women in the play. Julia’s psychodrama is a struggle between her humiliation as the go-between holder and beholder of her rival’s image, and her feeling of female solidarity towards the sitter, the fellow victim of Proteus’s sexual whims. Her language has been contaminated by Silvia and, to some extent, by Proteus: she describes herself as a ‘shadow’, because she has been abandoned by Proteus, while the picture itself is – for both Julia and Silvia – the empty and shadowy object of idolatry: Come, shadow, and take this shadow up, For ’tis thy rival. [Looks at the picture.] O thou senseless form, Thou shalt be worshipped, kissed, loved and adored; And were there sense in his idolatry

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My substance should be statue in thy stead. I’ll use thee kindly for thy mistress’ sake That used me so; or else, by Jove I vow, I should have scratched out your unseeing eyes To make my master out of love with thee. (4.4.195–203) The conflicted subject position of the cross-dressed Julia in relation to the portrait of her betrothed’s beloved overturns the conventions of male ekphrastic effusion. Julia attempts no ekphrasis of the portrait: indeed, she endeavours to ignore its content altogether in order to comment only on the ‘form’, deemed ‘senseless’ because insensible and without thought, but also because vacuous and futile. Julia confirms Silvia’s erasure of the subject of the picture. Julia develops the idea of senselessness – in her one punning allusion to the physical features of the painting – in repressing her desire to ‘have scratched out your unseeing eyes’, which would have deprived the sitter of the organs of sight but also of the sexual allure of her gaze. Julia is thus torn between a passionate response to the image of her rival and the attempt to affirm the vacuity of the picture as mere ‘form’, a vacuity that reflects not the sitter Silvia – to whom Julia expresses female solidarity (‘for thy mistress’ sake’) in this comedy about male bonding – but its future proprietor Proteus. The solo episode ends Act 4 and likewise concludes the narrative picture sequence. Julia is to deliver the gift to Proteus, but in practice it disappears from view and from the dialogue, becoming a mere shadow of the play’s own past.

A joust of pictures If The Two Gentlemen of Verona has one portrait that appears in two separate scenes, The Two Noble Kinsmen has – in addition to two authors – two pictures that feature in two distinct solo scenes (4.2 and 5.3). Both episodes involve Emilia and the respective portraits of her two suitors, the cousins Palamon and Arcite. Some recent critics have attributed both



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scenes to Shakespeare’s co-author, John Fletcher (Gossett 2009: 190), but a consolidated tradition, based largely on linguistic and stylistic analysis (including computer-assisted stylometrics), attributes the second of the episodes, 5.3.41–6, to Shakespeare, and the first, 4.2.1–54, to Fletcher (Waith, Oxford edn, 1989: 18–23; Hope 1994: 83–8; Vickers 2004: 491–500). Given Shakespeare’s penchant for picture scenes, it seems intuitively likely that one of the scenes be indeed his. If, as Lois Potter argues (Arden 3, 2015: 36), Fletcher constructed the final draft of the play, working in the light of Shakespearian material, it may be that, in writing 4.2, Fletcher was inspired by the (probably Shakespearian) material of 5.3, whose themes it anticipates. Both scenes also echo picture episodes in earlier Shakespeare plays – Julia’s solo scene in Two Gentlemen (4.4), and Hamlet’s comparison of the portraits in 3.4 – which either Fletcher or Shakespeare himself could have imitated or re-elaborated. The 1634 quarto entry stage direction to 4.2 – ‘Scaena 2. Enter Emilia alone, with 2. Pictures’ – is the only one in a picture scene to make explicit reference to props (it is presumably Fletcher’s or the bookkeeper’s). As Lois Potter notes, the ‘pictures’ concerned appear to be handheld objects, and therefore ‘probably miniatures, such as were often exchanged by lovers’ (2012: 374). Emilia presumably holds one in each hand, and addresses each in turn. Alternatively, as her affirmation at 73–4 seems to suggest (‘Upon my right side still I wore thy picture, / Palamon’s on the left’), she may wear the portraits, for example as lockets, on either side (see Turner and Tatspaugh, Cambridge edn, 2012, at 5.3.41–55). The precise nature of the props varies in modern performances: in Michael Kahn’s 2011 Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival production, Eleanor Handley as Emilia entered with two fairly large-scale and highly visible colour photos (Fig. 6). Emilia’s comparison of the pictures in the Fletcherian scene – largely preparatory to 5.3, even if considerably longer – is a dramatization of egocentric girlish caprice; the issue is not which of the two rivals and cousins is the truly beloved object but the sheer arbitrariness and undecidability of desire (‘What

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FIG. 6 Eleanor Handley as Emilia in Michael Kahn’s 2011 production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival

a mere child is fancy … Cannot distinguish’, 52–4). The two images in the end prove perfectly interchangeable. Emilia goes through the motions of hyperbolic ekphrastic description of Arcite in the form of an anatomy or blazon by means of the formulaic ‘what a …’ trope (‘What a sweet face has Arcite!’; ‘What an eye’; ‘What a brow’), mixed with standard Ovidian allusion (comparing him to ‘wanton Ganymede’ [15], his brow ‘arched [with a pun on Arcite] like the great-eyed Juno’s’, 20). There is a hint of androgyny in the beauty she attributes to Arcite, since she compares him to Jove’s sister-wife Juno and to his ephebic catamite Ganymede. These qualities appear at first to win him the competition, with Palamon relegated to the role of ‘a mere dull shadow’ and ‘foil’, i.e. the mere background to an image or jewel, rather than an image proper.



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This apparent preference is immediately overturned, however, as Emilia remorsefully reverses the terms of the comparison: On my knees I ask thy pardon; Palamon, thou art alone And only beautiful … (36–8) Palamon is praised for his virility (‘this brown manly face’, 42), in contrast with Arcite’s effeminacy, and appears in turn to prevail. But in the end the men’s respective qualities cancel each other out. Emilia cannot choose because she does not really see the sitters, only her projected desire to be desired. She wants the privilege and power of choice, but as she says ‘I have no choice’, since in reality she is the object of rival male desire rather than a desiring subject in her own right. Choosing one or other, moreover, would end the comparison game and thus her supposed power. She wishes to enjoy an affective relationship with both pictures – ‘[I] must cry for both’ – but in reality her attention is addressed primarily to herself. The episode bears slight dramatic or narrative weight, but it does exhibit a degree of theatrical bravado, as Emilia enjoys a physical, tactile relationship with the pictures, which she takes up and lays down in turn in a game of alternating spatial vicinity and distance. There is a prophetic aspect to this stage business with the pictures: the symbolic fall and distancing of Arcite on the Blackfriars stage (‘Lie there’), as he is momentarily replaced in Emilia’s favour by Palamon (‘this’) – [Lays Arcite’s picture down.] Lie there, Arcite; Thou art a changeling to him, a mere gypsy, And this the noble body. (43–5) – anticipates the dramatic outcome of 5.3, in which Arcite first wins the joust, and thus Emilia’s hand, then falls from his horse and dies, thereby leaving the prize to Palamon. The virtual repetition of the same picture scene is unique in

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the canon. It is true that Hamlet 3.4 partly takes up the reference to Claudius’s ‘picture in little’ in 2.2, but the two scenes are quite different. In The Two Noble Kinsmen instead, 5.3 reprises and echoes 4.2 (or vice versa), and serves to underline the same point about Emilia’s indecision. The second, Shakespearian, picture episode in 5.3 is the more effective of the two in terms of its dramatic and narrative function. Emilia is again alone onstage, while offstage the joust, that will determine which of the rivals will win her hand, is in progress. The portraits act as proxies for the combatants at the very moment each is putting his life in peril for her. Emilia symbolically enacts the joust, weighing their respective physical and psychological merits, as if in the conviction of being able to influence the outcome of the contest, but is again unable to choose between them: Arcite is gently visaged, yet his eye Is like an engine bent, or a sharp weapon In a soft sheath; mercy and manly courage Are bedfellows in his visage. Palamon Has a most menacing aspect; his brow Is graved, and seems to bury what it frowns on, Yet sometime ’tis not so, but alters to The quality of his thoughts. Long time his eye Will dwell upon his object. Melancholy Becomes him nobly. So does Arcite’s mirth. But Palamon’s sadness is a kind of mirth, So mingled as if mirth did make him sad And sadness merry. Those darker humours that Stick misbecomingly on others, on them Live in fair dwelling. (41–55) Emilia’s second rhetorical performance, based on a series of antitheses and parallelisms, reverses the symbolic connotations of her lovers’ facial features in the earlier scene. Here it is Arcite who becomes the epitome of virility: Emilia’s summary description of him is couched in the language of armoury, as his eye becomes unmistakably phallic and penetrating, ‘a sharp weapon / In a soft sheath’ (42–3), while ‘bedfellows’ (44)



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underlines the eroticism of the exchange of gazes (although it may also suggest the reverie of a ménage a trois). Emilia, nevertheless, in a negative image of her previous overturning of preferential priorities in 4.2, opts for Palamon because of his very lack of Arcite’s masculine virtues: of gentleness, of penetrating gaze, of mirth. In this second picture scene her indecision takes on tragicomic implications, since she reduces the ongoing mortal combat to an egocentric game. At the same time, the alternation of distance and vicinity – anticipated in 4.2 – as the pictures exchange positions, bears greater dramatic weight, since it enacts the simultaneous circular action of the offstage joust. In its mimesis of a simultaneous contest the scene has a specular relationship with the tournament episode in Pericles: in the earlier play the female object and prize of the tournament is able to watch the male contenders and their decorated shields, all present onstage, while in The Two Noble Kinsmen there is a strategic split between the offstage joust and the onstage pictures and their female (be)holder (on tournament impresas, see Young 1988). The parallelism between picture episode and joust in Emilia’s second solo scene is underlined by the stage ‘noises off’, which trace an auditory narrative of the progress of the contest: Cornets. Trumpets sound as to a charge. Hark how yon spurs to spirit do incite The princes to their proof! Arcite may win me And yet may Palamon wound Arcite to The spoiling of his figure. Oh, what pity Enough for such a chance? If I were by I might do hurt, for they would glance their eyes Toward my seat and in that motion might Omit a ward or forfeit an offence Which craved that very time. It is much better I am not there. Cornets; A great cry and noise within, crying, ‘A Palamon!’ Oh, better never born Than minister to such harm! (56–66)

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Envisaging the perilous action of the joust, Emilia pictures her imaginary presence as the lethally distracting object of the rival gazes (‘glance their eyes’). She thereby not only justifies her absence from the event, but dramatizes it as a form of fatal protagonism, excited as she is at the idea of being the missing object of a potentially (and in the event, actually) mortal battle. In reality, however, she misinterprets the noises off, namely the shouts of the crowd, and constructs an initially mistaken, although in the end prophetic, narrative of the battle: Shout, and cornets: cries of ‘A Palamon!’ … emilia … Poor servant thou hast lost. Upon my right side still I wore thy picture, Palamon’s on the left. Why so, I know not; I had no end in’t else; chance would have it so. On the sinister side the heart lies. Palamon Had the best-boding chance. (71–7) In her apostrophe, or direct address, to Arcite’s portrait, Emilia incorrectly imagines Palamon’s victory and thus adapts her preference to this predicted outcome. She interprets the respective positions of the two portraits, with reference to her body, as fatal omens: Palamon, on the left, is closer to her heart and thus has the best chance of winning (77). This proves to be true, although not in the tournament, which he loses, but rather in the final victory for her hand. In contrast to the Pericles tournament, the winner of the competition is not the same as the winner of the prize: Arcite wins but dies immediately afterwards. In a sense, Emilia’s misreading can be seen to decree Arcite’s doom in the very moment of his victory. This ironical final reversal re-enacts the interchangeability of the two kinsmen, and projects onto the tragicomic plane of arbitrary fate, or ‘chance’, Emilia’s voluble desire. She becomes the femme fatale of her own fantasy.



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iii. ‘Such and such pictures’: Iachimo’s inventory How does one point twice at the same image? (Wittgenstein 2010: 125e) Whereas in Two Gentlemen, one portrait dominates two scenes, in The Two Noble Kinsmen there are two. In Cymbeline, a number of pictures are described twice, again in two separate scenes (2.2 and 2.4). It is the only Shakespeare play in which the main events are determined by the power of ekphrasis. The descriptions of the pictures are a strategic part of Iachimo’s campaign to convince Posthumus of his own successful seduction of Innogen, Posthumus’s wife. What Iachimo intends to offer Posthumus is ‘sufficient testimony’ (or, to use Othello’s words regarding Desdemona, ‘ocular proof’) of Innogen’s adultery: in 2.2, Iachimo, having crept out of the ‘chest’ or trunk in which he was hidden, proceeds to take note of the other furnishings in the chamber of the sleeping Innogen, in order to describe them to Posthumus in 2.4, as evidence of his intimate knowledge of both Innogen’s bedroom and her body. The furnishings, he notes, include pictures: But my design – To note the chamber. I will write all down. [He begins to write.] Such and such pictures, there the window, such Th’adornment of her bed, the arras, figures, Why, such and such; and the contents o’ th’story. Ah, but some natural notes about her body, Above ten thousand meaner moveables, Would testify t’enrich mine inventory. (2.2.23–30) The key word here is ‘inventory’. Iachimo jots down fittings and items of furniture in the form of a simple list, analogous to Elizabethan and Jacobean inventories of aristocratic homes (‘a dozen pictures of a yard broad, or thereabouts’: The Earl

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FIG. 7 Frontispiece to Cymbeline: drawing by Francois Boitard, copperplate engraving by Elisha Kirkall, from Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, 1709



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of Somerset’s inventory, 1615 [Kempe 1836: 408]; compare also the Lumley inventories [Evans 2010]) made in order to assess the overall worth of the family possessions. Shakespeare himself was an exponent of the inventory: his last will and testament is among other things a list of the prized domestic items he leaves to his heirs (‘my broadsilver gilt bole … plate, jewels, and household stuffe whatsowever’, not to mention his second best bed: but no pictures). For Iachimo, likewise, each item has cashable value as rhetorical property in his successful attempt to convince Posthumus of Innogen’s adultery. His intent is not to describe but to ‘note’, and his account is accordingly perfunctory; the full ekphrastic description is postponed to 2.4, for Posthumus’s benefit. ‘Such and such’, repeated twice, reflects this language of stock-taking: there is no specification of the number, genre or contents of the pictures. ‘Such’ may be a pointer, implying a nod of the head in the direction of the objects, or it may equally be a generic adjective calling for a mere tick of the pen. In either case, Iachomo’s inventory is sufficient for the audience to sketch out the contents of a recognizable upper-class domestic interior. What Iachimo’s inventory does not imply is the necessary stage presence of the pictures or, indeed, of any of the listed items, with the important exceptions of the bed and trunk, although the stage and iconographic history of the play has sometimes chosen to put them on show. The earliest illustration of the scene, the Kirkall-Boitard copperplate frontispiece to the text in Rowe’s 1709 edition of the plays (see Fig. 7), reflects the inventory fairly closely in its fully furnished interior and abundant meaner moveables, together with an oval picture, set in the tester of the four-poster bed, which possibly represents Lucrece. Although the plate bears a marked degree of theatricality – with its stagey draperies and heavy shadows, while the Roman-armour-clad Iachimo blatantly meets the eye of the beholder – it does not reflect contemporary theatrical practice, as Shakespeare’s play was not performed on the early eighteenth-century stage. Nineteenth-century productions sometimes yielded happily to the temptation to take Iachimo’s list and later description

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literally, as implicit stage directions. George Frederick Cooke’s prompt-book notes for the 1806 Covent Garden production, for example, describe the set as ‘a magnificent bedchamber’ (Jackson 1971: 46), while in Samuel Phelps’s 1864 Drury Lane production ‘The furniture of Imogen’s bed-chamber presented one of the most elegant and effective specimens of stage-upholstery which modern completeness in this respect has yet produced’ (Morning Post, qtd in Jackson 1971: 153). Victorian ‘pictorial’ Shakespeare by definition required a picture set, which in the Phelps production probably included ‘such and such pictures’ within the overall stage picture. Some recent Shakespearian criticism has yielded to the same temptation, imagining a full-scale realistic interior, complete with pictures, even on Shakespeare’s stage. Melissa Walter suggests ‘these furnishings [described in 2.4] may well have been on-stage in Act II, scene ii’ (2008: 69). Similarly, Peggy Muñoz Simonds argues that ‘Iachimo’s formal ekphrasis or description of Imogen’s bedchamber in 2.4 invites our careful reconsideration of what we have probably seen already in the stage setting but may not as yet have understood’ (1992: 95). The Globe or Blackfriars audience, in this view, was given a second chance to decipher the visual clues it had beheld two scenes earlier. This suggests greater mnemonic powers on the part of the spectator than of Iachimo himself, who needs notes. It also involves a form of rhetorical redundancy: all Iachimo does in 2.4 is remind us of what we have already seen. A realistic set cluttered with furniture and wall pictures, moreover, was improbable for practical reasons on the Jacobean stage: the scenery would have obstructed the view of many spectators (at least at the Globe) and would have required elaborate and lengthy scene-changes. Lois Potter is probably right in suggesting that ‘The vagueness [of the language in 2.2] is deliberate, since the spectator sees none of this, only a bare stage with a bed and the chest in which Iachimo has been hidden’ (2012: 372). One witness to a Globe performance in 1611, Simon Forman, wrote down some of the properties present onstage



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– rather like Iachimo himself; he notes the bed and chest, but makes no mention of pictures or arras: [Remember] howe the Italian that cam from her loue conveied him selfe into A Cheste, and said yt was a chest of plate sent from her loue & others, to be presented to the kinge. And in the depest of the night, she being aslepe, he opened the cheste, & cam forth of yt. And vewed her in her bed and the markes of her body, & toke awai her braslet, & after Accused her of adultery to her loue &c.3 Forman’s account suggests that the real picture offered to the audience’s attention is that of the sleeping Innogen reclining on her bed, exposed to Iachimo’s visual and tactile access. It is the movement from the opened chest to the occupied bed – a movement that Iachimo figures as a passage from tomb to tomb – that electrifies and eroticizes the scene, rather than any depicted scenario. Iachimo rises revenant fashion from his coffin-like chest and approaches Innogen’s passive body, which, in the scene’s one graphic description, he depicts in ambivalent mythological terms: Our Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened The chastity he wounded. Cytherea, How bravely thou becom’st thy bed, fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch! But kiss, one kiss! (12–17) Iachimo’s description, like his stage action, sets up a dialectic between activity and passivity, between vitality and mortality. If the allusion to Tarquin betrays his evident temptation to rape the defenceless Innogen, who is thereby associated with the similarly chaste Lucrece, the rhetorical apostrophe to ‘Cytherea’ (i.e. Aphrodite/Venus) attributes to her an active erotic complicity she does nothing to merit. The conventional Petrarchan eulogy to her complexion, on the contrary – ‘fresh lily, / And whiter than the sheets’ – invokes if anything the

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image of death. In watching Innogen, Iachimo superimposes, in Freudian terms, Eros and Thanatos, sexual desire and the death drive, with all the danger that this implies. It is indeed the statuary stillness and alabaster-like pallor of Innogen’s body that attracts his necrophiliac gaze, transforming the bed into a grave: O sleep, thou ape of death, lie dull upon her. And be her sense but as a monument, Thus in a chapel lying! (31–3) Innogen’s body becomes its own funeral monument. Iachino wants her – in all senses – dead. The defamatory ekphrasis he produces in 2.4 appears to achieve precisely this effect, since after her disgrace the disguised Innogen will ‘die’ from poisoning (‘the bird is dead!’, 4.2.197). Iachimo, therefore, projects onto the static icon of the quiescent Innogen a murderous desire for possession that reifies and mortifies her, transforming her into the inanimate prize item in his inventory. The presence of other, literal, pictures would be a distraction from the deadly trajectory of his gaze. The main action, as Forman suggests, is looking (‘And vewed her in her bed’). This creates a voyeuristic triangle in which the audience is involved in watching him watching her. The absence of the inventoried objects – especially ‘such and such pictures’ – is strategic to the performative rhetoric of the scene and of the play as a whole: Iachimo tries out on the audience what he will triumphantly achieve with Posthumus in 2.4, namely to get us to see what is not there. It is precisely because he recreates what we have not already seen – and by the same token insinuates what has not actually taken place (his sexual possession of Innogen) – that Iachimo’s description in 2.4 is so devastatingly effective. It is an extra­ ordinary example of the politics of ekphrasis reinterpreted as the expression of interpersonal power, not only in terms of gender but also, as Rebecca Olson argues, in the form of oratorical male rivalry: ‘In Cymbeline, ekphrasis is … represented as a strategy by which men describe the female body in



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order to hold their own, so to speak, in a verbal competition with other men’ (2008: 135). In his discursive reconstruction of the scene, Iachimo reverses the visual priorities of 2.2, focusing not on Innogen’s body but on the chamber and its artwork: iachimo First, her bedchamber – Where I confess I slept not, but profess Had that was well worth watching – it was hanged With tapesty of silk and silver; the story Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for The press of boats or pride: a piece of work So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive In workmanship and value; which I wondered Could be so rarely and exactly wrought, Since the true life on’t was – (2.4.66–76) The ekphrasis works by metonymic association, through a game of spatial contiguity and substitution. Here, unlike 2.2, Innogen is not directly described, but she is implicitly endowed with the qualities of Cleopatra portrayed on the adjacent tapestry (the ‘arras’ of 2.2). This allusion evokes Flemish tapestries (see Fig. 8) present in early seventeenth-century English households, which had the Egyptian queen as their ‘story’, i.e. as their image and narrative subject matter. Iachimo thus narrates having seen and admired, within Innogen’s chamber, a woman who was notoriously active sexually. In this context his parenthesis ‘I slept not’ becomes highly ambiguous (what did he do if he did not sleep, apart from ‘watching’?). In Cymbeline, in Peter Holland’s words, ‘ancient Britain merges with a modern Europe where Romans have become Italians like Iachimo’ (Penguin edn, 2000: xxxvii). Among other things, the episode reworks the geopolitics of Antony and Cleopatra: in the Roman Britain of Cymbeline, a ‘modern’ Italian villain observes the seductive scene of the Egyptian queen on her barge. Shakespeare recreates in Innogen’s bedchamber the triangular relationship set up in the earlier

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FIG. 8  Justus van Egmont, tapestry of The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: wool, silk, silver and silver-gilt thread, c. 1650

play between Alexandria, Rome and London. In his modernity, Iachimo also bears witness to the circulation of art objects and domestic items celebrating the cult of Cleopatra across Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, a cult to which Shakespeare’s Roman play contributes. There is a certain appropriateness in Cleopatra’s appearance as a picture seen by an Italian in an ancient British bedchamber. In Antony and Cleopatra, she presents herself precisely as a painted image in her successful bid to seduce Antony in the river Cydnus, the very scene figured in Iachimo’s tapestry (‘O’erpicturing that Venus …’, 2.2.207). Cleopatra’s conceit of becoming an erotic picture is literalized in Iachimo’s ekphrasis.4 Not all the items in Iachimo’s inventory reappear in the retrospective description of Innogen’s chamber. The phantom ‘such and such pictures’, in particular, seem to have been



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subsumed into the tapestry, or into other painted fixtures and moveables that make their first appearance here, such as the decorated chimney-piece, the description of which – as often occurs in Shakespeare (see Hamlet 3.4, but also the Induction to Shrew) – gives rise to a distinctly Ovidian performance: The chimney Is south the chamber, and the chimney-piece Chaste Dian bathing. Never saw I figures So likely to report themselves. The cutter Was as another nature, dumb; outwent her, Motion and breath left out. (2.2.80–5) Here the association with the bas-relief of the ‘chaste Dian’ – as opposed to the unchaste Cleopatra – might appear to reflect Innogen’s guiltlessness, but what it evokes, in the first instance, is her nakedness and Iachimo’s Acteon-like gazing upon it (see Muñoz Simonds 1992: 105), a transgression to which she is unwitting party. Such ambivalence between chastity and eroticism is confirmed by other iconic items. Iachimo’s act of looking is presided over by pictorial cherubs from above (in the position occupied, on the Globe stage, by the painted ‘heavens’) and, on the other hand, by sculpted cupids from below: The roof o’ th’ chamber With golden cherubins is fretted. Her andirons – I had forgot them – were two winking Cupids Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely Depending on their brands. (87–91) Iachimo’s pretence to forget the sculpted andirons (fire irons) by the chimney – not mentioned in 2.2, but presumably on his list – is the self-satisfied mimesis of spontaneity with which he concludes his successful ekphrasis. What matters in his performance is the overall graphic persuasiveness of the description, evoking for Posthumus a series of images that he, unlike the audience, knows only too well, thereby confirming

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the authenticity of the narration. Erotic energy translates into rhetorical enargeia (see p. 47), while the subjects of the described pictures in turn suggest Innogen’s sexual vitality by a process of transference. At the same time the ekphrasis confirms the speaker’s oratorical one-upmanship: in outpainting the pictures he proves his superior oratorical skills in the wager with Posthumus.

iv. The Falstaff guide to interior decorating Iachimo places himself in the position of voyeur–annotator of a household collection of visual objects. He has, however, a formidable rival as connoisseur of domestic art. Jack Falstaff, among his many roles, elects himself expert guide to Elizabethan interior decorating. In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff – called upon by the Chief Justice to pay his debts to Mistress Quickly, hostess of the Boar’s Head Tavern – proposes instead a way of saving money (strictly for his own benefit) by replacing the expensive household stuff and mural decorations in her chambers with cheaper ones: hostess By this heavenly ground I tread on, I must be fain to pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining chambers. falstaff Glasses, glasses is the only drinking. And for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the prodigal or the German hunting in waterwork is worth a thousand of these bed-hangers and these fly-bitten tapestries. Let it be ten pound, if thou canst. (2.1.139–46) Falstaff poses as a savant of domestic interior decoration, and to his credit he does display a degree of knowledge of the subject, even if he uses it mainly to mystify the hostess:



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his specious and self-serving argument is that cheap wall paintings are of greater artistic and social value than tapestry. If his main aim is to advance his own economic interests (‘ten pound’), he also wishes, perhaps, to impress the Chief Justice – and the audience – with his expertise. In doing so, he alludes to five distinct decorative forms or materials: the drollery, the story, the waterwork, the bed-hanger and the tapestry. The ‘pretty slight drollery’ that Falstaff recommends was a popular drawing, often in the form of a grotesque caricature in the Netherlandish mode. Falstaff implies that this is an appropriate genre for Mistress Quickly and her modest chamber walls, rather than more pretentious decoration. It is similarly appropriate to the droll tavern scenes themselves. In the dedication to Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet, The Seuen Deadly Sinnes of London (1606), the author compares his caricatural ‘picture’ of London to a visual drollery: Yet now I remember my selfe, they are not the Sinnes of a Citie, but onely the picture of them. And a Drollerie (or Dutch peece of Lantskop) may sometimes breed in the beholders eye, as much delectation, as the best and most curious master-peece excellent in that Art. (1606: 6) Feigning modesty in his comparison, Dekker in reality, like Falstaff, makes high aesthetic claims for the drollery and its ability to delectate or captivate ‘the beholders eye’. He also associates it with the Northern European mode, comparing it to Dutch landscape. The same association is made by John Evelyn in his first-hand account of popular Dutch art (Diary, 13 August 1641): ‘We arrived late at Roterdam, where was their annual marte or faire, so furnished with pictures (especially Landskips and Drolleries, as they call those clounish representations)’.5 What is clear from such English perceptions of the drollery is that it was viewed as a grotesquely comic (‘clounish’) and rustic popular genre. This is presumably one of the reasons why it appeals to Falstaff. Evelyn’s ‘clounish’ is not inappropriate to the fat man himself, who indeed is an exponent of drollery in its alternative sense

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of comic performance (OED 2a): he is, in the words of Sebastian in The Tempest, ‘a living drollery’ (3.3.21). As an alternative to the drollery, Falstaff suggests (in contrast to Dekker and Evelyn) a ‘story’ rather than a landscape. As Susan Foister, Tarnya Cooper and others have shown, ‘story’ is a versatile term, with meanings ranging from framed tables and pictures of human figures to narrative paintings of biblical or secular episodes. It is clearly in the latter sense that Falstaff uses the term, with specific reference to the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. This was a favourite subject for wall stories in inns and manor houses (Watt 1993: 200–4), such as the Knightsland Farm in South Mimms, Hertfordshire, whose walls paintings of the prodigal son story date to around 1600. It is also alluded to in other plays of the period. In Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1605) Sir Bounteous Progress promises Lord Owemuch – actually his nephew, Follywit, in disguise – luxurious lodgings, including curtains depicting the prodigal son story: sir bounteous And now I am like to bring your lordship to as mean a lodging, a hard down bed i’faith, my lord, poor cambric sheets, and a cloth o’ tissue canopy. The curtains indeed were wrought in Venice, with the story of the prodigal child in silk and gold. Only the swine are left out, my lord, for spoiling the curtains. (2.2.2–8, in Middleton 2007) Falstaff’s own choice of the prodigal son theme has a particular resonance in a play about the prodigal Prince Hal, who will return to the paternal fold later in the play on the model of Luke’s parable. Or perhaps, instead, the fat man fancies himself in the part: in The Merry Wives of Windsor the Host of another tavern, the Garter Inn in Windsor, describes Falstaff’s chamber, which is decorated with the very biblical wall story that he recommends to Mistress Quickly: host There’s his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing-bed,



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and truckle-bed; ’tis painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new. (4.5.5–7) The repeated association with the painted parable seems to depict Falstaff himself as an eternal and unrepentant prodigal.

Tavern stories Falstaff’s knowledge of wall painting derives from his frequentation not only of bedchambers but also of public houses, especially alehouses and inns: both the painted rooms associated with him are found in taverns (the Boar’s Head and the Garter). Doubtless the same can be said of Shakespeare and most his audience, since the use of ‘stories’ in English taverns and inns was widespread. A well-known example is a public house with direct Shakespearian connections, namely the King’s House tavern (now the White Swan), in Rother Market, Stratford-upon-Avon, with its spectacular sixteenthcentury murals depicting the biblical narrative of Tobias’s encounter with the Archangel Raphael, from the apocryphal book of Tobit. The Stratford paintings are also imagetexts, each of them headed by a black-letter inscription in the form of a painted scroll, thereby setting up a typically Elizabethan dialogue between image and word (see Fig. 9). The King’s House tavern had belonged to the puritan brewer Richard Perrot and the wall paintings were most probably commissioned by his brother, William, in around 1560. Richard Perrot’s granddaughter, Susanne Woodward, whom Shakespeare knew well, was disinherited by both her grandfather and her father, possibly for religious reasons or her unsanctioned marriage to Shakespeare’s friend, Richard Tyler (Pogue 2006: 21). Tyler was later also ‘disinherited’ by Shakespeare himself, who cancelled his name from his second will, replacing it instead with that of Hamnet Sadler. Despite this, it is possible that Susannah Woodward was godmother to Shakespeare’s daughter, Susannah (Weis 2007: 72). It is thus more than likely that Shakespeare knew the

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FIG. 9  Tobias and the Angel, White Swan Inn Stratford: sketch by Francis W. Reader

Perrot family’s tavern and its painted room, if only because, as René Weis suggests, ‘The tavern is so close to Henley Street that Shakespeare must have seen it; he probably drank an occasional ale or sack in that very room’ (2007: 72). The Stratford Tobias and Raphael series is analogous to Falstaff’s ‘story of the Prodigal’, since these two Biblical episodes were among the most popular subjects for Elizabethan wall narratives and painted cloths (Watt 1993: 202–11). There is a certain incongruity in the association between taverns and biblical narratives, as Donald Lupton pointed out in 1632: In these [ale-]houses you shall see the History of Judeth, Susanna, Daniel in the Lyons Den, or Dives and Lazarus painted upon the Wall. It may bee reckoned a wonder to see, or find the house empty, for either the Parson, Churchwarden, or Clark, or all; are doing some Church or Court-businesse usually in this place. (127–8; see Kastan, Arden 3, 2002: 290) Such incongruity is one of the unforeseen outcomes of Reformation ecclesiastical iconoclasm: as Hannibal Hamlin



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notes, ‘Ironically, … biblical images were more common outside of churches than inside them’ (2013: 22). In Stratford itself, the ‘Protestantizing’ of the Guild Chapel took the form of the defacing and limewashing of the extraordinary series of wall paintings – much later partially restored – depicting, among other ‘stories’, the Life of Adam and The Holy Cross cycle, as well as the Dance of Death; the iconoclastic workmanship involved was carried out in part in the 1560s under the supervision of Shakespeare’s father John, then chamberlain of the Corporation of Stratford (see Giles and Clark 2012: 62–6). The King’s House was left without ecclesiastical rivals for its biblical mural. Falstaff’s third alternative for the Hostess’s walls is another genre painting, ‘the German hunting in waterwork’. It is possible, but not probable, that he is referring to a specific scene, such as the legendary German hunter St Hubert (Weis, Oxford edn, 1998, at 2.1.142), subject for example of Breughel the Elder’s ‘The Vision of St Hubert’ in the Prado Museum. He is more likely to be alluding, instead, to the typical subject matter of a Northern European secular ‘story’, especially in the form of tapestry or, in his case, imitation tapestry. Hunting tapestries were imported into England, notably the four fifteenth-century Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, perhaps from Arras in France,6 that probably belonged to Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury: the 1601 Hardwick Hall inventory notes ‘In my Ladies Bed Chamber: too peeces of tapestrie hanginges with personages and forrest work Fyftene foot and a half deep’ (Levey and Thornton 2001: 53). Falstaff imagines an analogous scene in another lady’s chamber: for her, not an expensive Arras tapestry but a ‘waterwork’, an imitation tapestry painted on cloth, or perhaps directly onto the wall, in watercolour or distemper (as in the case of the distemper wall painting of Psyche at her toilet, possibly by Lucas d’Heere, c. 1575, in Sir Thomas Smith’s Hill Hall: see below, Fig. 14).

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The painted cloth The primary artistic mode that Falstaff has in mind for Mistress Quickly is probably the painted cloth – rather than the mural – since this was the cheapest and most popular form of domestic art in early modern England. As Tessa Watt notes, ‘The real poor man’s picture was the painted cloth. Almost none survive: like the clothing of the lower orders, they fell apart through use’ (1993: 197). In his 1604 pamphlet The Black Book, Thomas Middleton describes the painted cloth as a basic and short-lived way of hiding mere bare walls (with a pun on ‘hanging’): the bare privities of the stone-walls were hid with two pieces of painted Cloth; but so ragged and tottred, that one might have seene all neverthelesse, hanging for all the world like the two men in Chaynes between Mile-end & Hackney. (sig. Dr) First recorded in England in the mid-fourteenth century, the painted cloth would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences as the standard form of decoration in churches and in the homes of the middling sort (Ayres 2003: 130–8). William Harrison in 1577 notes its presence in English homes, as an alternative to more expensive wall hangings: ‘The walls of our houses on the inner sides in like sort be either hanged with tapestry, arras work, or painted cloths, wherein either divers histories, or herbs, beasts, knots, and suchlike are stained …’ (1968: 197). Shakespeare’s own grandfather, Robert Arden, left eleven painted cloths in his will. The best-preserved surviving painted cloths are the complete set by ‘John Painter’, Bess of Hardwick’s Clerk of Works, again at Hardwick Hall, depicting episodes from the story of St Paul (Ronayne 1997: 136). Falstaff further reveals his acquaintanceship with the painted cloth on his way to Coventry with his unpromising recruits in 1 Henry IV; here again it is synonymous with low-class art:



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and now my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies – slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores … (4.2.23–6) Falstaff’s vivid allusion invokes another biblical ‘story’ (in both the narrative and pictorial sense), namely the parable in Luke 16.19-31 of the sore-ridden beggar Lazarus and the rich man ‘Dives’, ‘clothed in purple’, whose dogs ‘came and licked his sores’: like the prodigal son a popular subject for wall paintings (Watt 1993: 200–4). Earlier in the same play Falstaff recalls the same painted episode, which he contaminates with other moralistic iconographic genres such as the memento mori: bardoll Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm. falstaff  No, I’ll be sworn, I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head, or a memento mori. I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that lived in purple: (1 Henry IV, 3.3.28–32) Falstaff’s evocation of painted cloth is one of a series of references to the genre in Shakespeare. During the pageant of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Costard upbraids Nathaniel for his public debacle as Alexander the Great: O sir, you have overthrown Alisander the Conqueror. You will be scraped out of the painted cloth for this (5.2.569–71) Alexander has lost his place in history, or at least in history painting. In As You Like It, Orlando, accused by Jaques of stealing his amorous verses from the rings of goldsmiths’ wives, responds with an equally sardonic pictorial put-down: ‘I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have studied your questions’ (3.2.266–7), as much as to say: you accuse me of thieving low-class poetry, I charge you

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with imitating low-class painting. At the end of Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus, addressing other supposed pimps in the audience, invites them to record his disgrace as a (cheap) moralistic image of the fall of man: ‘Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths’ (5.11.45–6). The painted cloth does not enjoy a good press in Shakespeare. At the same time, it features among the stage properties of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Henslowe’s inventory of properties used by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose theatre refers to at least three painted cloths, namely ‘the sittee of Rome’ (2002: 319), ‘the clothe of the Sone & Mone’ (320) and ‘Tasso’s Picter’ (for the lost play Tasso’s Melancholy, 320). The ‘arras’ on the Globe stage may likewise have been a painted cloth, in which case, although the audience could not see Falstaff’s ‘story’, they may have seen a painted scene at the back of the stage as he describes the offstage pictures. The association between painted cloth and the stage is underlined in the metatheatrical Interlude II of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (2014), in which a grocer’s wife watching the performance asks her husband about the painted hanging onstage: wife Now, sweet lamb, what story is that painted upon the cloth? The Confutation of St Paul? citizen No, lamb; that’s Ralph and Lucrece. wife Ralph and Lucrece! which Ralph? Our Ralph? citizen No, mouse; that was a Tartarian. (11–16) The painted cloth gives rise to a series of bawdy malapropisms: the wife mistakes ‘conversion’ for ‘confutation’ (with an unwitting pun on copulation [Hattaway edn, 2014]); the citizen replaces ‘Rape’ (of Lucrece) with Rafe, the name of their son, and ‘Tarquin’ (Lucrece’s rapist) with Tartarian (slang for thief [Hattaway edn, 2014]). In the end it is not



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clear what they are really looking at: a pious biblical story or an erotic classical scene, subject of Shakespeare’s poem and of a 1608 Heywood play, or something quite different. This may be a warning about the difficulties of decoding painted stories by the educationally disadvantaged: they see the wrong story.

v. The picture as frame One of Shakespeare’s more problematic plays opens not only with a picture but also with its painter. In Timon of Athens the presence of two artists in the opening scene, a painter and a poet – each carrying an example of his art – introduces in tangible form the issue of different and competing modes of mimesis.7 The painter, creator as well as bearer of the artwork, seems to guarantee both the material existence and the artistic status of the painting. The picture and the accompanying discourse on painting act as a framework for the ensuing play’s problematizing of visual objects, which in turn is part of a more general questioning of the truthfulness of forms, including the forms governing the poet’s domain, namely words. The rivalry between the two artists is also a way of guiding the audience’s double focus, at once visual and auditory, in a play in which both sight and hearing turn out to be sources of deception and illusion. Timon is a play that narrates a series of transformations: Timon’s transformation from munificent benefactor and patron into moneyless misanthrope, and the consequent transformation of his erstwhile friends into fierce creditors. This is in part a perspectival change: the same people, the same society and its values, come to be seen from a different perspective. The opening dialogue likewise enacts a smallerscale perspectival metamorphosis of the artists and their relationship. It begins with an exchange of courtesies (‘poet Good day, sir. / painter I am glad you’re well’, 1.1.1). Each artist expresses supposed interest in and admiration for the other’s work:

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poet What have you there? painter A picture sir. When comes your book forth? poet Upon the heels of my presentment, sir. Let’s see your piece. painter ’Tis a good piece. poet So ’tis; this comes off well and excellent. painter Indifferent. poet Admirable! How this grace Speaks his own standing! What a mental power This eye shoots forth! How big imagination Moves in the lip! To th’ dumbness of the gesture One might interpret. (26–35) The exchange seems to be a contest of courtesies, an attempt to outdo the other in hyperbolical compliments, introducing the adoption of eulogy (i.e. flattery) as one of the prime rhetorical modes of the first part of the tragedy. The painter has achieved the miracle of producing a likeness so complete – not only of the sitter’s features but even of his mind and, through the represented gesture of the moving mouth, of his voice – as to become an almost literal speaking picture. The painter returns the praise in his compliments towards the poet’s planned poem on Timon: ‘’Tis conceived to scope’ (74). Such praise, especially the poet’s, is likely to be viewed by the audience as suspect, given its fulsome excess. And indeed, the contest of courtesies turns rapidly into something other, something close to its opposite. The painter’s praise for the poet’s inventio for his new work is in reality a pretext for further self-promotion: the same subject ‘would be well expressed / In our condition’, i.e. in painting (78–9). The painter, moreover, is dissatisfied with the poet’s eulogy to his picture, demanding more closely observed praise that enters into technical detail:



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painter It is a pretty mocking of the life; Here is a touch – is’t good? poet I will say of it It tutors nature; artificial strife Lives in these touches livelier than life. (36–9) The painter’s term ‘mocking’ makes an explicit claim to mimetic success: the portrait is an efficacious (‘pretty’) simulacrum or counterfeiting of the original, namely Timon, whom we are yet to see onstage. The painter’s self-praise raises the stakes of the encomium contest, obliging the poet to elevate them even further in judging the painting ‘livelier’ – more lifelike – than life itself, thereby outdoing nature.8 At the end of the opening dialogue the painter’s initial politeness gives way to the aggressive competitiveness it has momentarily masked. When the poet dares to announce his planned composition on the inevitable fall of the great (including, presumably, Timon), the painter overtly affirms the superior capacities of his own art in expressing such a theme: ’Tis common: A thousand moral paintings I can show That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s More pregnantly than words. (91–4) Evidently, he has in mind an allegorical image in the medieval tradition, perhaps a wheel of fortune. What appeared to be a contest of courtesies, therefore, is revealed instead to be a contest of the arts, with the painter playing offence. As Anthony Blunt and John Dixon Hunt have observed, the scene is an echo of the paragone, the comparison between the arts of painting and poetry and their respective strengths and limits and a form of discourse first introduced by Leonardo da Vinci (see Ames-Lewis 2000: 141–62). Leonardo’s treatise is designed to demonstrate the absolute superiority of painting over poetry and the other arts:

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Poet, if you were to figure a narrative as if painting with your pen, the painter with his brush would more easily make it satisfying and less tedious to comprehend. … If the poet, like the painter, is free in his inventions, [the poet’s] fictions are not as satisfying to men as paintings [are]. For, while poetry extends to the figuration of forms, actions, and places in words, the painter is moved by the real similitudes of forms to counterfeit these forms. (Farago 1992: 209) Leonardo was writing at the end of the Quattrocento, a time in which Italian Renaissance painting was at its height. The same could scarcely be said of painting in early seventeenth-century England, where poetry and drama were unquestionably the prevailing arts. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s painter – from his privileged position within Timon’s classical Athens – adopts an orthodox Leonardian standpoint towards such comparison.

The paragone in England The discourse genre of the contest of the arts was familiar in early modern England. In the proem (preamble) to Book III of The Faerie Queene (2007), Spenser reverses Leonardo’s comparative evaluation in exalting his own art at the expense of painting: ‘Ne Poets witt, that passeth Painter farre / In picturing the parts of beauty daynt, / So hard a workemanship adventure darre, / For fear through want of words her excellence to marre’ (3). In Jacobean England, the most visible and audible competition between the arts arose in the context of the collaboration between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, beginning in 1605, in the preparation of court masques. The first expression of a competitive paragone between the two artists’ respective domains of poetry and scenic arts is Jonson’s preface to the masque Hymenaei (1606), in which he theorizes the division of the masque into two parts: the body, which appeals to the senses, and the soul, which addresses the understanding. The soul of the masque corresponds to poetry, which is thus the superior art:



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It is a noble and iust aduantage, that the things subjected to Understanding have of those which are objected to Sense, that the one sorte are but momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else the Glory of all these Solemnities had perish’d like a Blaze, and gone out, in the Beholders eyes. So short-liv’d are the Bodies of all Thinges, in comparison of their Soules. (1606: A3r) As D. J. Gordon first pointed out (1949), Jonson is echoing and elaborating Paolo Giovio’s well-known distinction between the body (image) and soul (motto) of the impresa in his Dialogo dell’Imprese Militari et Amorose (1555), translated by Samuel Daniel in 1586: ‘it [the Impresa] must haue a posie which is the soule of the body’ (sig. Biiiv). Shakespeare, as a collaborative practitioner of the impresa, may have been aware of this distinction, favourable to his own artistic contribution. Ironically, the dramatist himself was the posthumous object of an analogous binary opposition, adopted by Jonson in his brief poem ‘To the Reader’ on Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare prefixed to the First Folio (Fig. 10), in which the picture becomes the writer’s ‘figure’, while his ‘wit’ is expressed only in his ‘book’, i.e. the texts collected in the Folio:9 This Figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut, Wherein the Graver had a strife with Nature, to out-doo the life: O, could he but have drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face; the Print would then surpasse All, that was ever writ in brasse. But, since he cannot, Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke. The inadequacy of Droeshout’s mimetic skills is not in his capturing of Shakespeare’s likeness – indeed, the poem is testimony to the accuracy of the portrait – but in rendering

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FIG. 10 Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait of Shakespeare, together with Ben Jonson’s poem, from the First Folio, 1623



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the dramatist’s intelligence and vivacity. Unlike the Painter’s portrait of Timon, in which (according to the poet’s euology) the body of the portrait has captured the soul or wit of the subject (his ‘mental power’ and ‘imagination’), Droeshout’s engraving fails to become a literally speaking (and writing) picture of Shakespeare. It may be that Timon, most probably written a year after Hymenaei, reflects the incipient competition between Jonson and Jones, which was destined to deteriorate, over the years, into a public quarrel resulting in Jonson’s disdainful poem An Expostulation with Inigo Jones, in which he mocks the optical spectacle produced by his colleague-rival: ‘O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! / The Eloquence of Masques!’, and the scenery painting that was an integral part of it: ‘ye mere perspectiue of an Inch board’ (Gordon 1949; see also Schoch 1994). In Jacobean England, therefore, the paragone had been extended into the realm of the dramatic arts. Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612) takes this extension further by setting up a three-way contest between painting, verbal description and stage representation, electing the latter – pace both Leonardo and Jonson – as the only true and complete mode of mimesis: A Description is only a shadow receiued by the eare but not perceiued by the eye: so liuely portrature is meerely a forme seene by the eye, but can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture, to mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration … (B3v) Verbal description is but a shadow, painting a mere form (Heywood inverts the traditional vocabulary). Heywood’s is not a Sidneian defence of poetry – an art that is here found wanting – but a professional actor and dramatist’s defence of performance. Theatrical representation alone, by showing us the great figures of history and mythology in direct threedimensional bodily and spoken action, is able to create a mimetic narrative able to provoke powerful pathos in the beholder:

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but to see a souldier shap’d like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier: to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling vpon the bulkes of Kinges. A Troylus returning from the field in the sight of his father Priam, as if man and horse euen from the steeds rough fetlockes to the plume in the champions helmet had bene together plunged into a purple Ocean … Oh these were sights to make an Alexander. (B3v) Among other things, this might go to explain why, for example, it is Hamlet’s second version of The Mousetrap – the spoken and acted version – that captures the conscience of the King, whereas Claudius apparently fails to respond to the same events shown forth visually in the dumbshow (cf. Heywood’s ‘dumb oratory’). For Heywood, drama achieves its superiority over the other arts by cannibalizing them. Hence its capacity to bring simultaneously into play all forms of artistic expression – even if, or especially if, there is a relationship of attrition between them – in creating multidimensional narrative action. A similar claim may be implicit in Timon 1.1: the simultaneous presence of poet and painter pre-announces the necessary – albeit conflict-ridden – cooperation of the arts in persuasively showing forth Timon’s tragedy. At the same time, the scene acts out the treachery of all representations. The linguistic currency in the dialogue is false praise, whose chief exponent is the poet. It can be inferred from his eulogy, moreover, that the painter’s portrait of Timon is equally flattering, an idealization of its subject such as to render it more pleasing to the potential consumer, namely Timon himself. Both painting and poetry are placed at the service of sycophancy. The poet, meanwhile – adopting the painter’s mode of selfpraise – claims that his own work is the result of a natural and spontaneous process of inspiration: A thing slipped idly from me. Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes



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From whence ’tis nourished. … My free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax (21–48) The poet’s somewhat baroque conceits, however, make his work appear more a material artefact than a natural effusion, more like a picture than a poem. They reify poetry as substance (‘thing’): first ‘gum’, a material that brings poetry closer to the physicality of early modern painting, in which gum arabic was used – for example by Hilliard – as a binder for watercolour and also as a glue to stick the vellum of a miniature to its support (e.g. the playing card); and then ‘wax’, which here has the primary meaning of ‘growth’, but also invokes wax as artistic material, anticipating the play’s finale in which a soldier brings onstage a wax ‘insculpture’ on which Timon has inscribed his epitaph (5.565–9; see Dawson and Minton, Arden 3, 2008). The verb ‘oozes’, meanwhile, suggests the unguent quality of the poem, implying that it, like the picture, is the oily product of obsequiousness. The poet goes on to claim that he has written a moralistic social critique for the benefit of Timon, denouncing, among others, ‘the glass-faced flatterer’ (60), whereas in practice he himself is master of the art of flattery. It seems more than likely that picture and poem alike will be offered to Timon as an idealizing ‘glass’ or mirror, rather than as an imago veritatis. Each of the artists is in some way prisoner of the other’s art. Poetry aspires to the condition of painting, and the poet is obliged to adopt the ekphrastic mode in order to compete with the painter; the latter, meanwhile, is obliged to affirm his artistic superiority through words, in his best blank verse.

Shakespeare’s School of Athens The opening scene looks deceptively like a pictorial ‘conversation’ piece showing ancient Greek intellectuals in discussion, a genre whose iconographic archetype is the group of four

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frescoes by Raphael in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura, depicting wisdom (see Rowland 2005: 104–7). Each fresco represents a given intellectual or artistic domain: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and poetry, while the art of painting is represented by the achievement of the frescoes themselves. Parnassus (1511), dedicated to poetry, shows Apollo and the muses surrounded by poets both ancient and modern, from Homer and Virgil to Sannazzaro and Ariosto, their co-presence suggesting a cultural continuity between Mount Parnassus and the contemporary Vatican Hill under Pope Julius II. Of particular interest in the present context is the so-called School of Athens fresco, dedicated to philosophy (1509–11: see Fig. 11), which depicts a number of Greek sages arranged at different levels on a four-step staircase. At the top centre are Plato and Aristotle, each carrying one of his books, in animated debate as Plato points upwards and Aristotle seems to gesture towards the viewer, while other celebrated philosophers and intellectuals – notably Socrates, Diogenes and Pythagoras – watch them or engage in parallel discussions or meditations. Some of the philosophers bear the likeness of contemporary Italian painters: Leonardo (Plato), Michelangelo (Heraclitus),

FIG. 11  Raphael, The School of Athens: engraved by Giorgio Ghisi, 1550



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and Raphael himself. Plato and Aristotle, although most distant on the perspective axis, are the central figures thanks to the receding series of arches which, together with the gaze of other philosophers, direct the viewer’s focus towards them. Shakespeare’s School of Athens shares with Raphael’s fresco the grouping of figures with the two debaters at its focal centre, even if not necessarily in the foreground. It similarly stages the act of watching (by the artists and of the artists). And it has a philosophizing ‘Greek’ painter who, at least from a doctrinal point of view, recalls Leonardo. In the Raphael painting, moreover, ancient Greece serves as an alibi for the representation of contemporary Rome: Thus, from the sublime heights of Platonic theology to the personal foibles of ancient philosophers and contemporary artists, Raphael’s School of Athens presents a portrait of Rome in the time of Julius II. (Rowland 2005: 107) Something of the kind occurs likewise in Timon, whose ‘Greek’ social and cultural politics – not least in the opening scene – reflect the London of James I.

Two artists in search of a patron The affinities, however, between fresco and play are deceptive. Raphael allegorizes the compatibility of different philosophical and cultural traditions in an illuminated humanist civitas. Shakespeare represents, instead, the feigned compatibility of rival artistic enterprises, in the name of the individual quest for advancement. Painter and poet proffer their work to Timon in the expectation of a place at court or, at least, a pecuniary reward. As Dixon Hunt notes, Leonardo’s paragone ‘envisages a poet and a painter presenting examples of their art to a Renaissance patron, King Matthias of Hungary’ (1988: 48), as Shakespeare’s rival artists will do to the wealthy Athenian. Leonardo himself defends patronage as the only incentive to the production of paintings:

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If you say [painting] is mechanical because it is done for a price, who falls into this error more than you do, if it can be called an error? When you read in studios do you not go to whoever awards you the greatest prize? Do you ever work without some reward? (Farago 1992: 213) The Timon picture scene can be seen among other things as a satire on the patronage system: both artists seek financial support at court, much like poets and painters at the court of James I, known for the munificence, if not profligacy, of his investments in the arts. The only guarantee of financial support is the gratification of the patron. As John Jowett argues, ‘The opening debate about art is therefore cryptically poised between an intellectual exchange of ideas and a vying for place at Timon’s court’ (2004: 82; on patronage in Timon, see Kahn 1987). The strictly commercial dimension of the artists’ selfpromotion and rivalry is foregrounded by an inset episode that almost immediately interrupts their dialogue (ll. 5–19). They witness an exchange between a merchant and a jeweller, in which the latter – like the painter – shows his work to his interlocutor: jeweller I have a jewel here. merchant O, pray let’s see’t. For the Lord Timon, sir? jeweller If he will touch the estimate. … merchant ’Tis a good form. (13–17) The jewel is both theatrically and commercially equivalent to the painting: a handheld object, shown physically and deictically (here), and praised aesthetically by the maker’s colleague (‘good form’), on offer to the patron Timon at the right price (‘estimate’). The brief inset dialogue sets up an unmistakable parallelism between the three commodities on offer (painting, poem and jewel), with the figure of



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the merchant acting as representative of the market laws governing all three transactions. The inset jeweller episode has its own ‘painterly’ qualities, setting up an optical perspective effect – like a Renaissance Italian or Netherlandish rather than early modern English painting – as the audience watches the artists in the foreground watching the other pair in the background: we are instantly involved in a perspectival situation to which our attention is drawn by the dialogue between Jeweller and Merchant set, so to speak, behind that of the Poet and Painter. This is a fundamental theatrical device that Shakespeare often uses and it surely derives from the widespread Renaissance fascination with optics and in particular with perspective. (Dixon Hunt 1988: 50) The painter scene acts as optical frame for the inset jeweller scene, although it is the latter than serves as ideological commentary on the former. Such perspectival framing and mirroring may have been more fully achieved on the Blackfriars stage, with the relatively central and stable focal point it afforded the audience, than at the Globe. An analogous perspectival effect is created with the entry of ‘certain senators’, who cross the stage in silence and are indicated, observed and commented on by the artists: painter Look, more! poet You see this confluence, this great flood of visitors … (42–3) This is a brief pageant-like episode that brings into play the question of social hierarchy, the Senators’ entry preceding that of Timon in a crescendo of rank. It also further foregrounds the act of watching. As Dawson and Minton note (Arden 3, 2008, note at 1.1.39.1), this calls for a balancing of optical

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focus between the marginal observers and the higher-ranked observed: From a staging perspective, it is important that a general milling about should share the focus with at least the first part of the ensuing conversation between the Poet and Painter, who occasionally observe the others. The observers may be socially marginal and physically upstage with regard to the senatorial group, but it is their perspective that guides audience perception of the scene.

Painting is welcome Later in the opening scene, the dominant perspective changes quite radically with the entrance of Timon. Timon is the object of the gaze of all present, not to mention of the suppli­ cations of the throng of suitors surrounding him. The artists are part of this crowd of aspirants, no longer observers but objects of Timon’s momentary attention. Having temporarily dismissed the poet, Timon’s gaze is attracted to the painting, which he indicates deictically and gesturally: timon What have you there? painter A piece of painting, which I do beseech Your lordship to accept. (159–60) The painter offers his portrait as commodity: ‘piece’ suggests work (as in masterpiece) but also a small thing, a miniature fragment. Timon, in his role as munificent patron, praises the piece and the art of portraiture in general: timon Painting is welcome. The painting is almost the natural man, Or since dishonour traffics with man’s nature, He is but outside; these pencilled figures are Even such as they give out. I like your work,



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And you shall find I like it – wait attendance Till you hear further from me. (160–6) Timon expounds an original version of pictorial mimesis and, in particular, of the body/soul relationship between portrait and sitter: the limit of painting in capturing only the ‘outside’ of the subject (his facial and/or bodily characteristics) becomes a moral advantage in saving it from contamination by his inner ‘nature’, corrupted by ‘dishonour’. The pencilled (i.e. painted) figures are no more than what they ‘give out’ or show forth, and make no pretence to going beyond the surface. Timon therefore reverses the values of Giovio and Jonson by praising the formal purity of art which remains extraneous to the trafficking of the soul or mind. Timon’s incipient misanthropy leads him to prefer the representation to the represented: the picture is almost ‘natural’ – originary, unspoiled, perhaps Adamic – whereas human subjects have been de-natured by dishonourable trading with each other. Timon’s praise may be read in two ways: either as a eulogy to the idealizing power of the portrait (designed – with apparent success – to flatter him); or as a disguised critique of the superficiality of the painter’s art. Either way there are several ironies in his speech. First, the praised painting is itself the object of trade (the portrait in exchange for his patronage), and the painter is precisely the kind of trafficking individual that Timon scorns. Moreover, the subject whose ‘outside’ has been faithfully rendered without any corrupting contact with his dishonoured inner ‘nature’ is Timon himself, as much as to say that, unlike his portrait, he has lost his own nature from his dealings with the world, including the present suitors. In a harsh antiphon to Timon’s encomium, the churlish philosopher Apemantus, accompanying him, pretends to prefer the painter to the portrait, although neither is spared his undisguised contempt: timon How lik’st thou this picture, Apemantus?

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apemantus The best for the innocence. timon Wrought he not well that painted it? apemantus  He wrought better that made the painter, and yet he’s but a filthy piece of work. (198–204) While Apemantus’s epithet ‘innocence’ appears to echo Timon’s ‘natural man’, it actually implies mere foolishness or lack of skill. Like Timon, he relates the picture to the human subject, in his case the artist rather than the sitter, and finds one the expression of the moral luridness of the other. For him the painting does not escape contamination by the corrupt nature of man. This is a view that Timon will come to share in 5.1. Onstage, Timon’s act of examining his portrait is a literally iconic moment that dramatizes both his narcissistic vulnerability to (self-)deception and his nascent refusal of social intercourse. As such the picture is a frame for all that follows. Some productions highlight the importance of the episode by multiplying the iconographic effects. A notable case in point is Nicholas Hytner’s 2012 National Theatre production, set in contemporary Mayfair and Canary Wharf, which located the opening at a posh reception in the so-called ‘Timon Room’ of the National Gallery, where the gallery’s sponsor, Simon Russell Beale’s Timon, dispensed favours. The picture metaphor was thus amplified into an entire interior setting, in the postmodern mode, and a recognizably fashionable social milieu: ‘We are manifestly in a world of Damien Hirst and his exorbitant art’ (Cavendish 2012). Tim Hatley’s set was dominated by another early modern picture, not the painter’s portrait but El Greco’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple projected larger than life by way of a backdrop (see Fig. 12). As Timon complacently admired the portrait that Penny Layden’s Painter had offered him – as if gazing into a mirror, rendering literal the poet’s phrase ‘glass-faced



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FIG. 12  Simon Russell Beale as Timon in Nicholas Hytner’s 2012 National Theatre production of Timon of Athens

flatterer’ – what the audience saw was an altogether different image. El Greco’s rendering of the New Testament episode became in part a visual gloss on ‘dishonour traffics with man’s nature’ in Timon’s current speech, but it also looked prophetically ahead to his own driving of his suitors and creditors – including the painter – from his refuge in the later stages of the play. The physical vicinity of the party crowd to the El Greco suggested that they were doomed to share the fate of the money changers. The relationship between the two pictures, one a small handheld portrait turned away from the audience, the other a huge blow-up in full frontal view, dwarfing the actors onstage, had a number of dramaturgic implications. It set up a double dramatic time scheme (present/future); it established and a double hermeneutic grid: the psychological (Timon’s narcissistic engagement with his likeness) versus the theological, expressed by the New Testament vision of the painting. The gallery’s Timon Room, meanwhile, post-modernized and anglicized Timon’s Greece, while the El Greco Christianized

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it and at the same time rendered it contemporary with early modern Europe and its iconographic conventions. Hytner’s staging paid appropriate attention to the use of perspective in the scene: Timon was in the foreground, object of the gaze of the woman painter, stage left, anxiously awaiting his verdict; the party crowd stood upstage under the El Greco, watching in turn the interaction of painter and patron: this created a centrally focused stage ‘picture’, containing two other pictures, a perceptual effect made possible for the National audience by the Olivier Theatre’s panoramic fan-shaped auditorium and converging sightlines.

There’s payment The picture frame in Timon – unlike the ‘wanton pictures’ episode in the Induction to Shrew – is taken up again towards the end of the play. In 5.1 painter and poet reappear before the transformed Timon at his cave, hoping for further rewards (‘he’s so full of gold’, 4). They come empty-handed: the poet has no poem and the painter has only the empty ‘promise [of] an excellent piece’ (18–19). His art has been definitively reduced to vain and literally non-performative speech acts, a condition that he unashamedly theorizes: Promising is the very air o’th’time; it opens the eyes of expectation. Performance is ever the duller for his act … To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgement that makes it. (22–8) Painting has become a purely virtual entity, a knowingly infelicitous promise whose actual performance (i.e. the physical act of painting) has become both uncouth and counter-productive. Timon from his cave overhears the last part of the painter’s discourse, and in response reverses his earlier theory about the purity of painting, adopting instead Apemantus’s association of bad artists and bad painting:



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timon [aside] Excellent workman, thou canst not paint a man so bad as thyself. (29–30) The painter becomes for Timon author and subject of his own self-portrait, which – however morally bad in itself – can never represent his true (bad) likeness because of the artist’s lack of sufficient skill (his ‘innocence’ as Apemantus put it): he is in all senses a bad painter, left with only himself as subject. Timon finally – belatedly – recognizes the true purpose of their artistic mission (‘What a god’s gold’, 46). First feigning his former admiration for their work (‘[To painter] Thou draw’st a counterfeit / Best in all Athens’, 78–9), he soon drops his mask and drives them, money-changer like, from his cave: Hence, pack! [throws stones] There’s gold – you came for gold, ye slaves! [to one] You have work for me, there’s payment, hence! [to the other] You are an alchemist, make gold of that. Out, rascal dogs! (110–13) The identity of the ‘other’ mentioned in the second stage direction here – and compared by Timon to an alchemist – is not specified. Jowett argues that the allusion is to the poet, who ‘transmutes his subject into something finer’ (note at 649–50). The same might well be said, however, of the painter, who transforms ‘base’ materials into something other and supposedly better than themselves: including the colour gold, or gold leaf, that represents the precious metal that abounds in portraits of the rich and powerful (‘make gold of that’), a colour much in use in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits (for example by Hilliard, trained as a goldsmith; see p. 287). In the end, however, as Karl Marx affirms in his reflections on Timon in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the truly ‘creative’ force at work in Timon’s Athens – and, for Marx, in the modern capitalist economy – is not painting or poetry but money, which, like alchemy, transforms

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the base into the aureate, the imaginary into the real, desire into possession: Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money. … [Money] converts my wishes from something in the realm of the imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence – from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power. (137–40) The final value of creative endeavour in the play is – in the jeweller’s words – its ‘estimate’.

vi. Paint a doleful cry Timon 1.1 (and later, 5.1) is not the only Shakespearian scene to present a painter. If, as computer-assisted research has persuasively shown,10 Shakespeare is the author of the 1602 additions – and of one in particular – to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, he is by the same token the creator of the Spanish painter Bazardo. The episode in question, the so-called ‘painter scene’, is the fourth and longest of the additions, and is explicitly mentioned on the title page of the 1602 quarto edition of Kyd’s tragedy: ‘Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been diuers times acted’. In the extraordinarily eloquent and pathos-ridden added scene, Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain, crazed with grief for Horatio, his murdered son, commissions from Bazardo a portrait depicting the family as it was five years earlier, when Horatio was still alive. The painter, also the father of a murdered son, accepts the commission: hieronimo Was thy son murdered?



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painter Ay, sir. hieronimo  So was mine. How dost take it? Art thou not sometimes mad? Is there no tricks that comes before thine eyes? painter Oh Lord, yes sir. hieronimo Art a Painter? canst paint me a tear, or a wound, a groan or a sigh? Canst paint me such a tree as this? painter Sir, I am sure you have heard of my painting, my name’s Bazardo. hieronimo  Bazardo! afore-god, an excellent fellow. Look you, sir, do you see, I’d have you paint me in my Gallery, in your oil colours matted, and draw me five years younger than I am. Do ye see sir, let five years go, let them go, like the Marshal of Spain. My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking look to my son Horatio, which should intend to this or some such-like purpose: ‘God bless thee, my sweet son’: and my hand leaning upon his head, thus, sir, do you see? may it be done? painter Very well, sir. (Kyd 2014: ll. 106–23) The gesture of the father’s hand upon the head of the son (usually kneeling) – depicted on some contemporary funeral monuments – is the textual icon for his ‘blessing’, representing familial devotion and piety, as well as paternal authority (on this gesture in Shakespeare and early modern England, see Tromly 2010: 24–5). Hieronimo’s request regarding the painting echoes the affirmation of the great Renaissance humanist and theorist of perspective Leon Battista Alberti, namely that the portrait is able to bring the dead back to life:

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In fact, painting certainly has in itself a truly divine power, not only because … a painting lets the absent be present, but also because it shows [to] the living, after long centuries, the dead. (2011: 44) His request literalizes Alberti’s claim: the painting should recreate lost family history, bringing Hieronimo’s murdered son back to life and reproducing a family history complete with an affectionate maternal gaze and protective paternal gesture. The result would be an idealized version of what Alberti calls historia (istoria), namely a narrative painting capable of moving the beholder to tears or laughter through the arrangement of its figures, and through their showing gestures that guide our gaze through the different moments of the story: The very great achievement of a painter is not a colossus, but the historia. … Parts of a historia [are] the bodies; part of a body is a member; part of a member is the surface. … It seems opportune then that in the historia there is someone who informs the spectators of the things that unfold; or invites the hand to show; … Or indicates a danger or another [attribute] over there to observe; or invites you with his own gestures to laugh together or cry in company. It is necessary, in the end, that all [the occurrences] that these painted [characters] made with the spectators and with themselves, concur to realise and explain the historia. (2001: 55–63) The showing gestures in Hieronimo’s commissioned narrative picture would thus guide the beholder’s eyes and emotions to the family group and its miraculously recomposed affections. Like other early seventeenth-century European (and English) nobility or gentry, Hieronimo has a ‘gallery’, presumably of portraits representing the family dynasty over time and, indeed, the commissioned portrait is designed to fill a gap precisely in historical time, as it were recreating a moment in family history which the gallery fails to represent, in the



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hope that the added portrait might restore the integrity and harmony of the family destroyed by the murder. Hieronimo demands not a representation, but a recreation of the original. Likewise, his question ‘canst paint me a tear, or a wound, a groan or a sigh?’ (recalling the painted tear in Lucrece; see p. 49) implies the ability of the painter not merely to evoke the experience of pain but also to incarnate it fully in his work. The painting should become one of the hallucinatory ‘tricks’ that appear in the mad vision of patron and painter alike. Hieronimo thus invests the art of portraiture with magical animistic qualities and, in this case, the painter, another grieving father, has no hesitation in accepting such an arduous challenge. The commission is by far Shakespeare’s most detailed and ‘technical’ discourse on painting. It is also quite specific with regard to technique: ‘in your oil colours matted’, i.e. their shine made dull and opaque, but possibly also ‘tangled’ through the use of thick layers of paint, lending it a ‘mad’ unkempt quality (like matted hair). Hieronimo dictates further the contents of the picture. His historia should reconstruct the very scene of the murder and even portray the murderer himself; in so doing, it should become a literally moving and speaking picture, incorporating the actions and voice of Hieronimo himself (see the poet on Timon’s portrait for comparison, p. 92): hieronimo Nay, I pray mark me, sir. Then, sir, would I have you paint me this tree, this very tree. Canst paint a doleful cry? painter Seemingly, sir. hieronimo Nay, it should cry: but all is one. Well, sir, paint me a youth run through and through with villain’s swords, hanging upon this tree. Canst thou draw a murderer? painter  I’ll warrant you, sir; I have the pattern of the most notorious villains that ever lived in all Spain.

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hieronimo O, let them be worse, worse: stretch thine art, and let their beards be of Judas his own color, and let their eyebrows jutty over: in any case observe that. Then, sir, after some violent noise, bring me forth in my shin, and my gown under mine arm, with my torch in my hand and my sword reared up thus: and with these words: What noise is this? Who calls Hieronimo? May it be done? painter Yea, sir. (127–39) Hieronimo provides us with Shakespeare’s most extreme version of the agency of the picture. Like the inner play in Hamlet – possibly written around the time of the painter scene – the moving-and-speaking-narrative portrait should serve the purpose of reproducing the action and revealing the culprits. Hieronimo gives a detailed pre-ekphrasis of the painting, especially the facial features of the murderers, although they turn out to correspond to the theatrical and iconographic stereotype of the red-bearded Judas, rather than specific individual, precisely because Hieronimo does not know the identities of his son’s murderers. The form and content of the commissioned picture change continually in Hieronimo’s mind, coming to embrace not only all known and even unknown artistic genres (family portrait, historical narrative painting, landscape, biblical allegory, with kinetic and acoustic special effects), but also an infinitely expandable subject matter that includes, in the end, the whole of created nature participating in the represented event: hieronimo Well sir, then bring me forth, bring me through alley and alley, still with a distracted countenance going along, and let my hair heave up my night-cap. Let the clouds scowl, make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the Winds blowing, the Bells tolling, the owl shrieking, the toads



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croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock striking twelve. … Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying ‘The house is a-fire, the house is a-fire as the torch over my head!’ Make me curse, make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance; and so forth. painter: And is this the end? hieronimo Oh no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! … At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers, were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and drown. He beats the painter in, then comes out again with a book in his hand. (141–62) This highly gothic scene is full of Shakespearian echoes and anticipations, from Hamlet (Priam of Troy, the clock striking twelve) and Macbeth (the dark landscape, the toads) to Lear (the old man raving in the elements and the apocalyptic vision of universal death and madness to come). The overall theme of the painting, however, remains the movement of time (‘the minutes jarring’), the dimension that painting is least equipped to represent, together with the ‘live’ recording of Hieronimo’s vocal rage. As Richard Meek notes, ‘the more Hieronimo describes, the less his description resembles any conceivable piece of visual art’ (2009: 19). He uses the ekphrasis of an imaginary and magical, not to say unpaintable painting to re-tell the story of the murder and to figure his own enduring passions. The painter Bazardo seems at last to express some perplexity at the task when he asks: ‘And is this the end?’. Bazardo’s maltreatment at the hands of Hieronimo – who seems to identify him with the very murderers he has been commissioned to recreate – underlines the unlikelihood of the painting’s ever being carried out.

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Paint me ‘uh’ The painter scene must have made a strong impression on the play’s audience. Not only was it explicitly advertized on the title page of the printed text and, therefore, considered worthy of special notice, but it was also subject to parody by one of Shakespeare’s leading contemporaries, John Marston. In Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1965; also published in 1602), the foolish Balurdo, a gentleman at the court of the Duke of Venice, commissions an impresa from a professional painter: balurdo Approach, good sir. I did send for you to draw me a device, an impresa, by synecdoche, a mott. By Phoebus’ crimson taffeta mantle, I think I speak as melodiously – look you, sir, how think you on’t? I would have you paint me for my device a good fat leg of ewe mutton swimming in stew’d broth of plums … and the word shall be: ‘Hold my dish whilst I spill my pottage’. Sure, in my conscience, ’twould be the most sweet device, now. painter ’Twould scent of kitchen-stuff too much. balurdo Gods neaks, now I remember me, I ha’ the rarest device in my head that ever breathed. Can you paint me a driveling reeling song, and let the word be, ‘Uh’. painter A belch? balurdo O, no, no: ‘uh’; paint me ‘uh’ or nothing. painter It cannot be done, sir, but by a seeming kind of drunkenness. (5.1.16–31) Balurdo, like Hieronimo, changes artistic genres and content as he goes along: his first device of a leg of mutton is transformed into a drunken song, and his first ‘kitchen-stuff’ motto into a belch or grunt (‘uh’). The request to paint sound



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effects clearly alludes to Hieronimo’s commissioning of a talking and weeping portrait. There may also be a stab here at Shakespeare and his own pretensions in inventing a device for his family coat of arms (the ‘ewe mutton’ replacing, in this case, the noble falcon that appears in Shakespeare’s device; see p. 39). Unlike Bazardo, however, Marston’s painter is aware of the limits of his art and declines the commission. Marston’s scene begins with the artist entering holding two portraits – like Hamlet or, later, Emilia, in The Two Noble Kinsmen – which he duly shows to Balurdo. Here, too, as with his impresa, Balurdo confuses the relationship between image and word: he is unable to decipher the conventional inscriptions of portraiture: balurdo And are you a painter, sir? Can you draw, can you draw? painter Yes, sir. balurdo Indeed la! Now so can my father’s fore-horse. And are these the workmanship of your hands? painter I did limn them. balurdo ‘Limn them’? A good word, ‘limn them’. Whose picture is this? [Reads.] ‘Anno Domini 1599’. Believe me, master Anno Domini was of a good settled age when you limn’d him; 1599 years old! Let’s see the other. [Reads.] ‘Aetatis suae 24’. By’r Lady, he is somewhat younger. Belike Master Aetatis suae was Anno Domini’s son. (1–11) Balurdo misreads the traditional indications of the date of the painting (Anno Domini) and the age of the sitter (aetatis suae), which usually went together and which were particularly evident in English portraits (see Cooper 2012: 3–4; see also p. 287), taking them instead to be the names of the two sitters. Among other things, this is a caricature of the representation of time in painting, namely the temporal distance between

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the moment of composition and the moment of reception of the portraits. At the same time, it parodies the father–son relationship central to Shakespeare’s painter scene. Balurdo, for all his sublime ignorance, is attentive to fashion, including fashionable language, as his self-praise for his ‘melodious’ use of the term ‘impresa’ suggests. He represents modish Italianate pretentiousness: not least, from an English perspective, in his very desire to commission a painting. Such modishness reappears in his encounter with another technical term: the verb ‘limn’ was a traditional synonym for ‘paint’, but had returned to fashion towards the end of the sixteenth century, especially in the context of miniature portraits (see Hilliard 1983; also p. 317). Balurdo, even if he quite fails to understand it, promptly seizes it as a new trophy in his verbal armoury, one to be shown off at the ‘Venetian’ court. Like some of Shakespeare’s own picture episodes, Marston’s painter scene thus turns – in the words of Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.1.35–6) – into a great feast of languages.

2 Wanton pictures: Intermedial intercourse in The Taming of the Shrew

FIG. 13  Robert Smirke, ‘Taming of the Shrew – Induction, Scene II, a Room in the Lord’s House’: engraved by Robert Thew for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Folio, 1794

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Notable things can be done with pictures even when they are only imaginary or located in some undefined ‘elsewhere’. This chapter concerns the comic and dramatic mileage that Shakespeare obtains in The Taming of the Shrew from a joke played by a wealthy aristocrat (the Lord) on a drunken vagrant, Christopher Sly: a joke that involves a whimsical pictorial fantasy. It also intends to illustrate how this fantasy is itself the result of a visual–verbal cultural transmission that took place over several centuries and across different nations, a formidable process of intermedial intercourse that has as its final protagonist the drunk and illiterate country bumpkin Sly.

i. Dost thou love pictures? In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, among the practical jokes played on Christopher Sly lies the promise of aesthetic and erotic pleasure of a kind he is unlikely to appreciate in his role of supposed ‘lord’ (this is the joke). In addition to the unfulfilled prospect of nights spent lying with his newly discovered ‘wife’ (a cross-dressed boy), the naive rustic is offered the more refined delight of a private viewing of the Lord’s collection of erotic art. lord Carry him gently to my fairest chamber, And hang it round with all my wanton pictures; … 2 servant Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight Adonis painted by a running brook … (Ind. 1.45–6; Ind. 2.47–8) Precisely what is being offered to Sly is a question of interpretation, since both the adjective ‘wanton’ and the substantive ‘pictures’ in the passage above appear somewhat ambiguous. Barbara Hodgdon (Arden 3, 2010) explains ‘wanton pictures’ as ‘paintings or tapestries (hung in chambers)



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woven with biblical or mythological scenes; wanton = gay, lively in colour, but also lewd, lascivious’: an exhaustive gloss. In the context of the play, however, the pictures are more likely to be paintings than tapestries – not least because the second servant promises to ‘fetch’ them – and the primary meaning of ‘wanton’ here is more likely to be ‘lascivious’ than ‘gay’ or ‘lively’, given the comic game of false sexual expectation being played at Sly’s expense. The most plausible paraphrase of the noun phrase, therefore, is ‘lascivious paintings’. In the event, both promises, the wife and the paintings, turn out to be illusory. Sly has no wife and he is shown – or at least we, the audience, are shown – no pictures. What he is offered instead is a ‘comonty’ as he calls it (132), namely a comedy (Shakespeare’s) which, if not unduly ‘wanton’ or lascivious in itself, is certainly a play about desire and marriage and, if not exactly a picture gallery, does take the form of a series of stage images. This aesthetic experience, on a par with the promised pictures, fails to arouse Sly’s enthusiasm: ‘’Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam lady. Would ’twere done!’ (1.1.243). In performance, unlike the ‘comonty’, the Lord’s art collection is not usually shown onstage. This is because the audience’s never seeing it is, together with Sly’s failure to consummate his ‘marriage’, part of the joke involving the tempting and frustrating of the foolish peasant. Instead, the audience is invited to imagine the pictures’ contents based on both the Lord’s and his servants’ descriptions. The only literally visual representations of the wanton pictures occur in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of the play, as part of the more general tendency to visualize every line in Shakespeare, including verbal allusions to what is strategically invisible in the plays (from Queen Mab to ‘Patience on a monument’). An example of this is Robert Smirke’s engraved illustration for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and Folio (published 1794), which shows the Lord’s chamber adorned with what appear to be erotic paintings discreetly half-hidden behind curtains and screens (Fig. 13). Even here, we cannot really see them; thus again they prove to be somewhat illusory.

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Sly’s pictures and Shakespeare’s Padua Why does Shakespeare introduce invisible erotic pictures into the episode framing the main comedy? There are immediate ‘tactical’ motives regarding the Lord’s practical joke: the pictures represent the kinds of amorous act that Sly is supposedly invited to carry out with the cross-dressed boy playing his ‘wife’ and, as such might have an aphrodisiac or pedagogic Kama Sutra function. They also further stake out the social and cultural distance between the rich and cultivated Lord and the poor and unschooled Sly, who does not possess the intellectual tools necessary to understand any kind of representation: pictures, a fictional wife, or a Shakespearian ‘comonty’. There are also significant thematic and dramaturgic connections between the pictures and the main play, as Jeanne Addison Roberts notes in her influential essay on the comedy: ‘The fair chamber hung round with wanton pictures prepares, of course, for sexual themes. But even more important, it is a landmark on the road to romance’ (2002: 60). The road to romance is a road leading not only to stories of love but to the Italianate world of the novellas of Bandello, with which the Sly scene, although set in England, has a certain burlesque affinity. The Induction and its pictures also lead us, in an oblique and ironical fashion, into what Lucentio, in the opening lines of the play proper, describes as the ‘nursery of arts’ (1.1.2) in ‘fruitful Lombardy’, represented as the space of cultivation of Renaissance humanist scholarly and artistic endeavour (‘learning and ingenious studies’, 1.1.9). There are also iconographic links between the wanton pictures and Shakespeare’s comedy. Shrew has no further picture scenes, but it does have a collector of pictures, rich furnishings, refined cloths and rare household stuff in the person of the wealthy old ‘pantaloon’ Gremio, suitor to Bianca, who inventories his collection by way of a promised ‘dowry’: First, as you know, my house within the city Is richly furnished with plate and gold,



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Basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands; My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry; In ivory coffers I have stuffed my crowns; In cypress chests my arras counterpoints, Costly apparel, tents, and canopies, Fine linen, Turkey cushions bossed with pearl, Valance of Venice gold in needlework, Pewter and brass and all things that belong To house or housekeeping; (2.1.350–60) Gremio’s detailed inventory includes expensive iconographic representations in the form of tapestries from Tyre and figured bedcovers, probably used as wall hangings (Hodgdon, Arden 3, 2010), from Arras. The subtext here is that the old man intends to add Bianca as one more precious item to his variegated assemblage of objects. This reflects the misogynistic reification of women that dominates much of the comedy – not least in Petruccio’s strategic mistreatment of Katherina – and that is in some ways anticipated in Sly’s brutish attitude to his ‘wife’ (‘Madam, undress you and come now to bed’, Ind. 2, 114). The Lord’s collection of erotic pictures described in lengthy ekphrases (see pp. 146–8) likewise reduces women to the role of victims of male sexual aggression (‘Io as she was a maid … beguiled and surprised’, Ind. 2.52–3). Gremio’s inventory raises the question of the cultural and national provenance of the Lord’s pictures. Gremio is represented as a foolish member of the privileged class of Italian connoisseurs of the decorative arts, a minor acolyte of Paolo Giovio, inventor of the art museum. Closer to home, his list also resembles the inventories of late sixteenth-century English aristocratic houses such as Hardwick Hall, whose pictures, wall hangings and other household stuff gathered by Bess of Hardwick were meticulously itemized in 1601: ‘Fyve peeces of hanginges of Cloth of golde velvett and other like stuffe imbrodered with pictures of the vertues’ (47; see p. 88). The Lord, instead, is supposedly a member of the Elizabethan English upper classes, but his collection of erotic art has a distinctly Italianate flavour, an anglicized version of the

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Gonzagas’ collection of Ovidian erotica by Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te in Mantua (see p. 150). Erotic domestic paintings were relatively rare in early modern England, although it is true that as early as the 1570s the biblical and mythological wall paintings commissioned at Hill Hall in Essex by Sir Thomas Smith – Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Paris – included an allusive distemper picture of the naked Psyche at her toilet, possibly after Michiel Coxie the elder (Fig. 14; see Curteis 1998). Otherwise, the Sly episode anticipates by a couple of decades the first English collection of erotic wall

FIG. 14  Lucas d’Heere (attrib.) after Michiel Coxie the elder (attrib.), Psyche at her Toilet: distemper on plaster, c. 1575, Hill Hall, Essex



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paintings in the ‘Little Castle’ created from 1608 onwards by Ben Jonson’s patron William Cavendish at Bolsover Castle. The Induction therefore brings about a contamination between English and Italian iconographic cultures. This may be hinted at in the Italianization to which Sly himself is reluctantly subjected, as he implicitly acknowledges in his mock-Italian (unless it is mock-Spanish) self-naming at the very moment he rebels against his change of class status: ‘I am Christophero Sly – call not me “honour” nor “lordship”’ (2.5–6). This chapter argues that the images promised to Christophero Sly are likewise a mode of Anglo-Italian contamination, and that they are in turn part of a long and complex story of intertextual and intermedial relations across time and cultural space. Indeed, this story involves a considerable part of the history of erotic art and literature from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy and thence to Sly’s early modern England (on the iconographic affiliations of the Induction, see Sokol 1994: 99–106).

‘To paint in words’: The Shrew and A Shrew Where do the Lord’s wanton pictures come from? They are not present in the other version of the Sly episode, namely the Induction to the anonymous comedy The Taming of a Shrew (which may or may not be directly related to Shakespeare’s play), in which the Lord invites his servants to furnish his chamber with more practical comforts: And in my fairest chamber make a fire, And set a sumptuous banquet on the boord. And put my richest garmentes on his backe; Then set him at the Table in a chaire. (sig. A2r) The Induction to A Shrew, meanwhile, does contain a passing mention of the visual arts, in the form of a metaphorical reference to the art of painting by Sly’s ‘wife’ in her complaint about her husband’s long sleep:

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boy O that my louelie Lord would once vouchsafe To looke on me, and leaue these frantike fits, Or were I now but halfe so eloquent, To paint in words what Ile performe in deedes, I know your honour then would pittie me. (sig. A4v) The ‘painting’ here is strictly verbal, part of the boy actor’s ironical promise to ‘perform in deeds’ what he cannot paint in words, namely his present role as Sly’s wife (with an accompanying innuendo on sexual performance). No other pictures are mentioned. In both versions, the only form of artistic pleasure offered Sly – apart from the main comedy – is music: A Shrew: ‘When that is doone against he shall awake, / Let heauenly musicke play about him still’ (A2r); The Shrew: ‘lord Procure me music ready when he wakes / To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound’, 1.49–50. These promises, unlike the promised pictures in The Shrew, are duly fulfilled. Unlike large-scale works of art – wall paintings or tapestries – music could and often was produced on the early modern English stage, and in the second scene of Shakespeare’s Induction, as the Folio stage direction indicates, it is duly performed for Sly – probably much to his displeasure – and for the audience: lord Wilt thou have music? (Music) Hark, Apollo plays … (2.33) The material presence of music in Shakespeare’s play only underlines even further the material absence of pictures.

ii. Wanton supposes There are likewise no pictures – and indeed no Sly – in George Gascoigne’s Supposes (1573), a translation and adaptation of Ariosto’s I suppositi and immediate source of Shakespeare’s



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secondary (Bianca) plot. There is, however, the adjective ‘wanton’ – without the accompanying substantive – in the play’s own equivalent to Shakespeare’s Induction, namely the Prologue, which warns its audience not to expect illicit pleasures in the course of the performance: and some I see smyling as though they supposed we would trouble you with the vaine suppose of some wanton Suppose. (in Gascoigne 1573: sig. Biiv) A ‘wanton Suppose’, or lascivious fantasy, is precisely the kind of erotic anticipation that Sly is induced to entertain in Shakespeare’s comedy. Gascoigne’s disclaimer translates Ariosto’s analogous reassurance, in the Prologue to the original 1507 prose version of I suppositi, that there will be no untoward business in the comedy’s supposes: Benign auditors, do not interpret this supposing in the wrong way: not in the quite different manner which it is supposed Elephantis left illustrated in her lascivious books.1 In Ariosto’s original comedy, therefore, but not in Gascoigne’s translation, we do, indeed, find wanton pictures: the legendary Greek poetess Elephantis is ‘supposed’ to have composed a guide to sexual positions that circulated in first-century Greece and Rome in illustrated manuscripts adorned with highly explicit drawings (see Plant 2004: 5, 118). None of Ariosto’s benign auditors had seen the pictures, which had not survived, but their renown evidently remained intact in early sixteenth-century Ferrara. Perhaps they were less well known in England in 1566, since Gascoigne omits the reference altogether, translating only the adjective ‘lascivi’ (‘wanton’), unaccompanied by books or illustrations. It is intriguing, therefore, that Shakespeare should have taken up Gascoigne’s adjective, but at the same time should have reintroduced Ariosto’s substantive, namely his allusion to pictures, even if they are no longer book illustrations but large-scale paintings. If Shakespeare – as seems likely – is echoing Ariosto in his

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Induction, he must have read I suppositi in the original Italian, as well as in Gascoigne’s translation. Among other changes, Gascoigne strategically mistranslates Ariosto’s title, which has two main and concurrent meanings, neither of them being ‘Supposes’. One of the meanings is in effect untranslatable in the title of a play destined for a polite audience, namely ‘Sodomies’. In a letter to the Duke of Ferrara, the ambassador Alfonso Paolucci notes the amusement of Pope Leo X and his circle regarding the allusive title during the 1519 Vatican performance (see Raphael’s set design, pp. 296–7): ‘The announcer came onstage and recited the play’s argument [i.e. Prologue] […] and quibbled over the title of the comedy which is the Suppositi; in such a way that the Pope laughed very heartily together with the other spectators, and as far as I could tell the French were somewhat scandalized regarding these Suppositi’.2 This equivocal meaning places in doubt Ariosto’s protestations of chaste intent: conversely, it invokes one of the sexual practices probably illustrated precisely in the lascivious books attributed to Elephantis. The other, less dangerous meaning is ‘Substitutions (of identity)’, or what Gascoigne paraphrases as ‘nothing else but a mistaking or imagination of one thing for another’. Ariosto himself explains the semantic and comic principle in play: ‘in the past, and sometimes still today, children have been exchanged [suppositi] … the old mistaken [suppositi] for the young … the slave for the free man’.3 His play, therefore, is a comedy of errors, or mistaken identity. This game of identity substitution comes to involve, among other things, the wanton pictures themselves. In the Prologue to his own verse adaptation of I suppositi,4 Ariosto elaborates on the Elephantis allusion, adding a new and more topical reference: ‘My supposes [or substitutions] do not resemble, however, the ancient variety, that Elephantis got painted in various acts and forms and modes [modi], and that have been renewed in our own time in Holy Rome, and have been printed on fine and more than honest paper, so that the whole world might have a copy of them.’5 Ariosto’s vertiginous temporal leap of some 1,500 years brings him and his



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audience to the contemporary Italian literary and artistic scene in its erotic guise, and alludes to a scandal that had taken place in the twenty-five years between the two versions of the play. In 1524, Marcantonio Raimondi published sixteen erotic engravings from drawings by Giulio Romano, under the title of I modi (‘Positions’). The highly explicit drawings show heterosexual couples in a wide variety of amorous poses. The publication provoked the outrage of Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) and the Catholic Curia, who promptly ordered the arrest of Raimondi and the destruction of all copies of the book, an order that was carried out efficiently, so much so that only one copy of the modi, a derivative edition with woodcut prints, and a few scattered fragments have survived (see Fig. 15), although other clandestine copies, or copies of copies, circulated in Europe (on the modi, see Tavacchia 1999; Waddington 2000, 2004; Orgel 2003: 112–19).

FIG. 15 Fragments of Marcantonio Raimondi’s engravings from I modi, 1524

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Giulio Romano, meanwhile, avoided trouble by transferring to Mantua, where he enjoyed the protection of Duke Federico II. The scandal fired the anger and fervid imagination of Ariosto’s colleague Pietro Aretino, who reacted to the papal edict with a characteristically audacious response, namely his sixteen lascivious sonnets (Sonetti lussuriosi), written to accompany a new edition of the engravings and published in 1527. It is the Aretino–Raimondi volume that Ariosto attacks in his 1532 Prologue, thus transforming his original antiquarian reference into a highly topical and controversial allusion bringing into play a rival poet and comic dramatist. The illustrated volume is further hinted at in Ariosto’s word choice: modi varii alludes to Raimondi’s original title, I modi, and his sixteen erotic variations, while più che oneste implies that the women portrayed in the engravings are by contrast disoneste or wanton, probably simple prostitutes.

Wanton pictures in Shakespeare’s England The European notoriety of Aretino’s lascivious sonnets and associated prints – whether direct, through the circulation of clandestine copies, or through hearsay – became so great during the course of the sixteenth century as to justify a posteriori Ariosto’s claim that all the world (tutto il mondo) knew them, or at least knew of them. In Bette Tavacchia’s words, ‘[Aretino’s] name became a password for obscene art and literature’ (1999: 66). Even if Gascoigne does not mention them, references to the poems and illustrations abound in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literary texts (for a wide-ranging survey of references, see Saad El-Gabalawy 1976). In The Black Book’s Messenger (1592), for example, Robert Greene refers to the sonnets and pictures as bait in the cony-catching of Englishmen (compare the tempting of Sly): ‘If he bee lasciuiously addicted, they haue Aretines Tables at their fingers endes, to feed him on with new kind of filthines’ (sig. C3v). Thomas Nashe, erstwhile stout defender of Aretino’s satires (see Frantz 1989: 186–207),



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nonetheless refers with equal severity to the Modi (‘Positions’) – viewed as a diabolical sex manual – in Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem (1593): We have not English words enough to unfold it. Positions & instructions haue they [the Italians], to make theyr whores a hundred times more whorish and treacherous then theyr owne wicked affects (resigned to the deuils disposing,) can make them. (80r) In The Newe Metamorphosis by J. M., gent (c. 1600), Hermes gives Apollo a fuller account of texts and pictures in the Aretino–Raimondi volume, which the author, like Nashe, describes as an exercise in pornographic pedagogy: And Aretyne a booke of Bawdery writ wth many pictures wch belong’d to it where many severall wayes he teacheth howe one may p[er]forme that acte, wth shame enough that it is true the Stationers can tell I’ve seene the pictures publiquely to sell. (Qtd in Lyon 1966: 211) This implies that the book was on sale in London, presumably in a derivative woodcut edition analogous to the one surviving copy, although there is little further evidence for this. In any event, Gent’s scorn towards the book, and especially the pictures, is shared by other Protestant writers, such as John Donne, whose anti-Jesuit satire Ignatius His Conclave (1611) not only pours scorn on Aretino’s ‘licentious pictures’ (rather than his licentious sonnets), but also accuses him of lack of originality and adequacy with regard to the classical tradition: ‘I was sorry to see him [Ignatius Loyola] use Peter Aretine so ill as he did: For though Ignatius told him true when he boasted of his licentious pictures, that because he was not much learned, hee had left out many things of that kind, with which the ancient histories and poëmes abound; and that therefore Aretine had […] not added any new inuention’ (1611: 93–4).

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Of particular interest with regard to Shakespeare’s Induction are several allusions to the Aretino–Raimondi book on the early modern English stage, even if the plays concerned are later than Shrew. Especially pertinent to the Sly episode is the scene in Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) – again in an anti-Jesuitical context – in which a fit punishment is decreed for The White Virgin. As a result of her alleged slander of the Black Bishop’s Pawn who tried to seduce her, she must kneel twelve hours a day for four days in a room filled with the Modi images: And in a room filled all with Aretine’s pictures, More than the twice twelve labours of luxury. Thou shalt not see so much as the chaste pommel Of Lucrece’ dagger peeping; (3.1.248–51, in Middleton 2007) Like Donne, Middleton attributes Raimondi’s pictures metonymically to Aretino himself, although his phrase ‘labours of luxury’ may echo the adjective lussuriosi in the Italian poet’s title (Sonetti lussuriosi). What is noteworthy in the chosen punishment is that it projects the virtual image not of an illustrated volume but – as in Shrew – of large-scale works of art displayed on walls. The room filled with erotic images, moreover, is a threat rather than an actual staged scene. The fullest and best-informed references to ‘Aretine’s pictures’ in the English drama are found, not surprisingly, in the work of Ben Jonson. During her eulogistic panorama of Italian letters in Volpone (1606), Lady Politic Would-Be warns: Dante is hard, and few can understand him. But for a desperate wit, there’s Aretine; Only his pictures are a little obscene. (3.4.95–7, in Jonson 2012) Here again Aretino is elected not only as famous Italian man of letters – he is named immediately after Dante – but also as notorious author of obscene pictures. Later in the same play,



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Corvino underlines the point by referring again to this double authorship: Should I offer this To some young Frenchman, or hot Tuscan blood, That had read Aretine, conned all his prints, And were professed critic in lechery; And I would look upon him, and applaud him, This were a sin … (3.7.58–66) Despite Jonson’s elision of Romano–Raimondi as authors of the pictures, the association of text (‘That had read Aretine’) and ‘prints’ suggests that the dramatist is fully cognizant of the object of Corvino’s praise: an illustrated book rather than an art gallery. Nevertheless, a scene in The Alchemist (1610) invokes a Middleton-like fantasy of a room adorned with obscene pictures, in the form of Sir Epicure Mammon’s vivid erotic reverie, set in his own chamber: I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed; Down is too hard. And then mine oval room Filled with such pictures as Tiberius tooke From Elephantis, and dull Aretine But coldly imitated. (2.2.41–5) Jonson learnedly but succinctly evokes the entire history of erotic art and poetry from Ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy (‘Elephantis … and dull Aretine’). His knowledge of the classical erotic art tradition goes further and deeper than this, however. As Sir Epicure Mammon’s explicit naming of Tiberius implies, his fantasy of an oval room recalls – here in Philemon Holland’s 1606 translation of Suetonius – the multiform vices of the Emperor, great patron of the erotic arts: But during the time of his private abode in Caprea, he devised a roome with seates and benches in it, even a place of purpose for his secret wanton lusts. To furnish it there were sought out and gathered from all parts, a number of

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younge drabbes and stale Catamites, sorted together: such also invented monstrous kinds of libidinous filthinesse, whom he termed Spintriae […] Hee had bed chambers besides, in many places, which he adorned with tables and petie puppets: representing in the one sort, most lascivious pictures, and in the other as wanton shapes and figures. He stored them likewise with the bookes of Elephantis: that none might be to seeke for a pattern of the semblable forme and fashion, in that beastly businesse performed in everie kind. (Suetonius 1606: 99) Tiberius’s ‘secret wanton lusts’, therefore, include having his bedchambers adorned with pictures (‘tables’), which inevitably come to constitute a classical auctoritas for later collections of erotic art and for later fantasies regarding such collections. Jonson’s knowledgeable engagement with the history of pornographic representations is insistent and crosses dramatic genres. In his tragedy Sejanus His Fall (1603), Jonson has Arruntius retell Suetonius’s account of Tiberius’s multiple sexual vices, in particular his use of specially trained spintriae or sexual athletes (originally the term signified medals depicting sexual acts, possibly used as tokens for entry into pornographic spectacles: another form of wanton pictures; see Tavacchia 1999: 56–64): Thither, too, He hath his boys, and beauteous girls ta’en up Out of our noblest houses, the best formed, Best nurtured, and most modest. What’s their good Serves to provoke his bad. Some are allured, Some threatened; others, by their friends detained, Are ravished hence like captives, and, in sight Of their most grievèd parents, dealt away Unto his spintries, sellaries, and slaves, Masters of strange and new-commented lusts, For which wise nature hath not left a name. (4.391–401, in Jonson 2012)



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Suetonius’s (and Jonson’s) account of Tiberius’s hyperbolic vices combines the aesthetic, the athletic and the erotic: the Emperor’s use of the books of Elephantis as a stimulus and reminder for sexual practices ‘in everie kind’, and at the same time his adorning of his bedchamber with ‘most lascivious pictures’, not to mention his live spintriae. This becomes the model for much later erotic art, including the Modi and the Sonetti lussuriosi themselves, as Ariosto’s verse prologue associating Elephantis and Aretino implies. Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius probably also lies behind those English allusions to Aretino (Jonson, Middleton) that similarly superimpose Raimondi’s engravings and erotic paintings on walls. The recurrent references in the English drama to the Sonetti and Modi and their classical models confirm the fact that knowledge of their existence was widespread not only among dramatists and poets but also among their audiences, since nothing falls flatter onstage than a learned reference to an unknown text or art work. At the centre of this early modern English tradition of citations are not the sonnets, but rather the ‘pictures’, as they are almost invariably called, often attributed directly, as we have seen, to Aretino. Doubtless, there is a degree of reciprocal contamination among the English authors in question, suggesting that knowledge of ‘Aretine’s pictures’ may not always have been first hand, and it may not have been clear to all the writers exactly what form they took. The one certainty is that they were, in Lady Politic Would-Be’s words, ‘obscene’. Given both the Ariostan pedigree of Shakespeare’s reference to erotic art, therefore, and the context of contemporary English allusion, especially onstage, to Aretino, there can be little doubt that the model for the promised wanton pictures in the Lord’s chamber is the art of Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi, transmitted throughout Europe thanks to Aretino’s literary sponsorship. The Lord’s ‘enlarging’ of the pictures to fill his chamber may be, instead, a reminiscence of Suetonius. If Shakespeare’s Lord and servants – unlike Lady Politic Would-Be, Corvino and the Black Knight – refrain from associating the pictures explicitly with Aretino, or – unlike

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Corvino – with Tiberius, this is probably due to the fact that such associations would be altogether lost on the play’s internal auditor Sly. They may not have been equally lost on the external auditors in the playhouse, who, nonetheless (or at least the more educated among them), may have been able to identify the main sources of the reference without further assistance.

iii. Modes of visual–verbal intercourse The Modi/Sonetti lussuriosi episode and its European fallout constitute the most conspicuous instance of strategic interaction between the visual and the verbal arts in the early modern era, even if it is the pictures that came to prevail in the literary and popular imagination. Aretino’s republishing of the modi with accompanying sonnets is a deliberate exercise in the art of the imagetext, a composite art work whose interpretation depends on an intimate dialectic between visual and discursive signs. In a famous letter, which may have been composed as a dedication to the 1527 edition of his Sonetti lussuriosi, Aretino, after boasting of his (dubious) role in securing Raimondi’s liberation from prison, goes on to recount the genesis of his sonnets in relation to the engravings that inspired them: When I obtained from Pope Clement the liberty of Marcantonio Bolognese, who was in prison for having engraved on copper plates the Sixteen Positions et cetera, I felt a desire to see the figures that were the cause of Giberti’s6 complaints, who demanded that such a fine virtuoso should be crucified. And having seen them, I was touched by the spirit that moved Giulio Romano to design them. And because the ancient, as well as modern poets and sculptors, sometimes engaged in writing and sculpting lascivious works as a pastime for their genius – as attested by the marble satyr in the Chigi Palace who attempts to



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violate a young boy – I exhibit them above the Sonnets that stand below, whose lewd memory I dedicate to you, pace all hypocrites. I despair of the bad judgments and damnable habits that forbid the eyes what delights them most. (Tavacchia 1999: 12–13) Aretino claims to have been directly inspired by the spirit of Giulio Romano in composing his sonnets. This rhetorical move implies that the poems are, as it were, recreations of the original pictures rather than mere descriptions of the derivative engravings, so that the texts are not in a position of parasitical subordination with regard to the images (Aretino intended to place the sonnets symbolically above the illustrations in the book, although in the surviving copy the reverse is true), but rather complement them and compete with them as original expressions of the same erotic experiences on show. Aretino endeavours, in this way, to re-establish the customary hierarchy between text and illustration: it is legitimate – given his direct inspiration by Giulio – to view the engravings as illustrations of his sonnets, rather than vice versa, or at most as companion pieces of equal status. His reference to ‘the ancient, as well as modern poets and sculptors’ underlines this point. The first historical model for the interplay of the arts was, as we have seen, Elephantis’s illustrated poetic guide to sexual positions, where the pictures depended unequivocally on the text. Later poems dedicated to amorous modi, notably Ovid’s Ars Amatoria – another significant and accessible model for Aretino – were not known for accompanying pictures, except for later modern, illustrations. Aretino’s book of sonnets is presented as an heir to this tradition, which grants primacy to text over image, whatever the actual chronology of their respective composition. Probably the only surviving classical model of verse interpreting erotic pictures, rather than vice versa, was to be found in the Priapeia (Panofsky 1988), a corpus – certainly known to Aretino – of Latin votive offerings to Priapus, the Roman god of fertility, which are sometimes directly inspired by phallic images. Of particular pertinence is the

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Priapic Fragment IV, a verse offering by the prostitute Lalage which explicitly claims to be inspired by the illustrations of Elephantis’s poems: These obscene pictures, drawn from Elephantis’s books, Lalage offers to the erect god, and in return she prays that he should try to carry out on her the actions they depict.7 The offering is thus a poem inspired by pictures inspired by poems, and the resulting text dialogues with the simultaneously donated images, not by describing them but by ‘translating’ them into a first-person prayer for the kind of sexual gratification shown in the tabellae. It is probable that Aretino’s sonnets owe something to the Priapic corpus, not only in their obsessive phallocentrism but also in their form, notably the adoption of a first-person voice. Unlike Lalage’s votive offering, the sonnets do not openly admit their dependence on the pictures – maintaining their own artistic autonomy and strategically camouflaging their derivation from images – but they do nonetheless engage in an analogous ‘conversational’ relationship with Raimondi’s engravings. Indeed, they are doubly dialogical: rather than being presented as traditional exercises in ekphrasis, they take the form of a dramatic dialogue between the lovers or (as in the Priapic fragment quoted above) with an external interlocutor. Since the relationship between the visual and the verbal in these imagetexts has important implications for the drama, especially Shakespeare’s, it is perhaps worth examining Aretino’s dialogic compositional mode. Sonnet 11, for example, presents a three-way dialogue in which the male lover addresses the female lover, the watching Procuress addresses both, while the female lover, finally, addresses the Procuress (see Fig. 16): ‘Open your thighs so I can get a good look Of your fine ass, with your cunt well in view: An ass that makes paradise perfection,



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FIG. 16  Marcantonio Raimondi, from Giulio Romano, engraved illustration to Aretino, Sonnet 11

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A cunt that melts hearts with passion; As I gaze longingly upon you, a sudden urge Comes over me to kiss you, And I seem to myself more beautiful than Narcissus, In the mirror that keeps my prick erect’; ‘Oh shameless she, oh shameless he, on the ground and in bed. I can see you, whore: get ready to defend yourself, I’m going to break you a rib or two’; ‘Shit on you, pox-ridden old hag; To enjoy this pluperfect pleasure I would jump in a well without a bucket. And you won’t find a bee hungrier for flowers Than I am for a noble prick: And without even trying it, I come from just looking’.8 Aretino translates ekphrasis into polyphonic exchange: giving voice to the three figures represented in the engraving, he disguises description as contextual reference (‘your fine ass’, ‘on the ground and in bed’) within a ‘civil’ conversation of hyperbolic compliment and violent vituperation. While successfully translating into vigorous speech acts the sheer sexual energy of the depicted coupling, he does not attempt to render verbally the improbable acrobatic tour de force that it involves. The voyeurism that is so prominent in the picture is a recurrent feature of Giulio Romano’s erotic art, as in the Hermitage Lovers in which an old procuress similarly looks on, or the Louvre Amorous Scene drawing where an attendant procuress-spectator holds open a curtain to allow us to see the bed (Tavacchia 1999: 43–4). Aretino attributes the procuress’s participation as spectator to her rage – presumably because of the prostitute’s unprofessional libidinous investment in the sexual act – rather than to



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the old woman’s curiosity or vicarious involvement. The voyeuristic procuress is an unflattering mirror image of the position (or, as it were modo) of the book’s reader–spectator, invited to indulge in the scopophiliac pleasure offered by image and text, only then to be vituperated in turn in Aretino’s highly uncomplimentary Epilogue: ‘These sonnets of yours dedicated to pricks in the service of asses and cunts, and that are made of asses, pricks and cunts, resemble you dickheads’.9 In his sonnets, Aretino draws on his ability and experience as satirical prose writer and especially as comic dramatist: as David O. Frantz observes, ‘The sonnets are dramatic poems in which one or both of the figures in the print speak about how they are enjoying sexual intercourse’ (1989: 51). If the poems bear a thematic and lexical family resemblance to the Ragionamenti and Discorsi, they also display a formal and discursive resemblance to comedies such as Il marescalco and La cortegiana. In addition to first-person dramatic dialogue, Aretino exploits characteristic dramatic strategies such as deictic reference to the ongoing scene and its moving bodies or body parts (‘Questo cazzo voglio io’, ‘This prick is what I want’, Sonnet 3). His dramatization of the imagetexts extends to the characterization of some of his speakers as traditional comic character types, notably the libidinous senex: ‘Put a finger up my ass, dear old man’ (‘Mettimi un dito in cul caro vecchione’, Sonnet 2). Elsewhere the speakers take on a more precise referential identity. In Sonnet 12 the female lover addresses her partner as a Roman divinity: ‘Mars, you damned sluggard’ (‘Marte malatestissimo poltrone’), but the putative god rapidly disabuses the reader: ‘I am not Mars, I am Ercole Rangone [a Bolognese cardinal] and I am fucking you, Angela Greca [a Roman courtesan]’ (‘Io non sono Marte, io son Ercol Rangone, / e fotto voi, che sete Angela Greca’). The result is a characteristic Aretinian mix of anticlerical satire and personal calumny. The gender economy of the sonnets is knowingly contradictory. They concede an apparently limitless sexual agency to women, who, indeed, seem to be the primary subjects

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rather than objects of hyperbolic desire, but who are on closer inspection thinly disguised projections of male pornographic fantasy, especially the literally phallocentric notion that what women want is, as it were, unlimited male membership (‘Questo cazzo voglio io’). The women in the pictures are essentially faceless and voiceless, but endowed with highly eloquent and spectacularly moving body parts. In endowing them with a decidedly uninhibited voice, Aretino translates their corporeal athleticism into equally striking discursive libido, but at the same time transforms them into what are in effect trans-gendered men, speaking ventriloquistically the language of male desire, an impression confirmed by the explicit narcissism of the male sexual experience in the poems (‘e mi par esser più bel che Narciso’). The male voice in the sonnets, adopting a radically and ironically anti-Petrarchan mode of praise for women (see Frantz 1989: 55–8; Waddington 2004: 20–30), is nevertheless unmistakably misogynistic, reifying the female body as a multi-orificed vehicle for the expense of spirit and the display of masculine power. Male desire in the poems fetishizes both potta and culo, but gives undisputed pride of place, as Raymond B. Waddington notes, to the culo: ‘‘In the world of these sonnets, the culo is the focal point, the centre of gravity. In Sonnet 11 it becomes a paradise and, again, a mirror in which the man’s desire is stimulated by seeing himself as more handsome than Narcissus. […] In one sense Aretino is carrying on a dispute with the ‘high’ humanist pornography and with the supporting cultures of court and Church, all of which privilege male homosexuality’ (2004: 28–9). This introduces another aspect of the gender ambivalence of the poems: if the women are really men in naked drag, and if the recurrent choice of sexual modo is sodomy (‘If I were a man’, exclaims the woman in the closing line of Sonnet 8, ‘I wouldn’t want cunt’),10 it follows that Aretino transforms the aggressive heterosexuality of the images into a primarily homoerotic literary event (see Borris 2004: 342).



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Practical jokes in Mantua This game of gender disguise centred on the erotic primacy of the culo brings us back to the drama, and specifically to Aretino’s own comic dramaturgy. The disguising of homoerotic as heterosexual coupling, with particular reference to a marked predilection for sodomy, is the central theme of Aretino’s comic masterpiece, Il marescalco (The Stablemaster, 1533). The play, set in the Ducal court of Mantua, concerns the tormenting of the eponymous protagonist, a misogynistic and homosexual courtier, by means of a practical crossdressing joke devised by the Duke himself. Aretino gives his own plot summary in the Prologue: The magnanimous Duke of Mantua, paragon of goodness and generosity in our terrible century, having in his service a stablemaster who is as averse to women as usurers are to spending, orders a joke to be played on him, through which the stablemaster is made to take a wife with a dowry of four thousand scudi, and having been dragged to the home of the noble Count Nicola, a place of virtue and of refuge for the virtuous, is forced to marry a boy disguised as a girl. When the deception is revealed, the worthy man is happier in finding a male than he would have been wretched in finding a woman.11 The Duke’s carnevalesque burla, or practical joke, is a ‘punishment’ for the excessive violence of the Marescalco’s misogyny and misogamy, rather than for his homosexuality. As Ian Frederick Moulton points out, almost everyone in the play (except for the Duke, who does not appear directly) shares his sexual predilections: ‘The court world of Il marescalco is an almost exclusively homosocial one. The revelation that the “bride” is in fact male removes from the play the only female character represented as an object of sexual desire. As far as the play itself is concerned, there are no young women in Mantua to marry – all the sexual relations represented onstage are between men’

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(2000: 213). Above all the comedy presents a number of variations on pederastic adult–boy relationships of which the protagonist’s ‘marriage’ to a page is a fitting conclusion: the stablemaster and his boy (‘Ragazzo’); the Pedant and the young Giannicco; the stablemaster and the page Carlo. Punning allusions to these couplings, and specifically to sodomy, abound, as in the grotesque dialogue of the deaf in Act 1 Scene 11: giannicco What were you talking about with my master? Tell me, if it’s decent. pedant About matrimonial couplings [copule]. giannicco What, sir, about whores? [scrofule] pedant I said ‘couplings’ [copule]. iannicco What are buggeries? [pocule]. pedant They are conjugal embraces.12 In this exclusively homosocial and blatantly homoerotic context, the play’s finale, with its highly physical mode of agnition, is more a reward than a humiliation for the relieved Marescalco: count Come on, kiss her. giannicco Here comes the surprise. stablemaster With her tongue? I’m really in for trouble […] [Inspecting the bride] Don’t move, keep still, over here, more, more; ah, that’s good. bride Ha ha ha!



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stablemaster What a castrated calf I am, what an ox, what a buffalo, what a fool – it’s Carlo the page, ha ha ha!13 Aretino’s play, like his sonnets, was well-known in England and is one of the main sources for Jonson’s Epicoene (1609). In Jonson’s finale, the protagonist, Morose, makes an analogous discovery (‘You have married a boy’, 5.54.204–5, in Jonson 2012), although in his case the trick has a decidedly more punitive function (on homoerotic and sodomitic themes in Epicoene, see Turner 2000: 60–1). Il marescalco is not usually included among the sources of The Taming of the Shrew, and more specifically of its Induction. It has often been noted that the episode of the fooling of a humble citizen, making him believe upon waking that he is an aristocrat, is found in the Arabian Nights and, more generally, in the oral folk tradition. The Lord’s trick of presenting Sly with a cross-dressed boy who pretends to be his wife, however, bears a distinct family resemblance to the Duke of Mantua’s joke at the expense of his stablemaster.14 In Sly’s case, there is no agnition scene, since the framing episode comes to an end once the comedy proper is under way, so that for the purposes of Shakespeare’s play Sly remains ‘married’ to his boy-wife: his last words, interrupting the action at the end of 1.1, are addressed to his ‘madam lady’ (251). Sly, moreover, is punished, if anything, for his plain ignorance and foolishness, rather than for homoeroticism, misogyny, misogamy or (in the case of Jonson’s Morose) for humoural excess: unlike his fellow victims, he actually takes a fancy to his illusory wife (‘Madam, undress you and come now to bed’, 2.114) rather than the boy acting the part, even if the distinction is a subtle one. Nonetheless, Sly is subjected to the same mode of deception as the Marescalco, and similarly at the initiative of a wealthy and playful nobleman. I would argue, therefore, that the Induction has a double Aretinian pedigree, deriving at once (even if indirectly) from the Italian master’s ‘pictures’ and (perhaps more directly) from his comic drama. There is a certain irony in the play’s simultaneous affinities with Aretino on the one hand, and, on the other his colleague

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and rival Ariosto, who attacks his compatriot’s sonnets in the very Prologue that is echoed in Shakespeare’s Induction, which in turn derives from Aretinian comedy, opening up the prospect of an infinite intertextual regress. This multiple contamination is an uneasy synthesis of often hostile dramatic, poetic and pictorial relations in Italian Renaissance culture. One point of encounter between Aretino and Ariosto is the theme of suppositi in its less polite sense (namely, sodomies; see p. 128), although Ariosto’s comedy, unlike Aretino’s, is dedicated to heterosexual desire, as, indeed, is Shakespeare’s comedy. It may be, however, that the sexual ambiguities of Shakespeare’s Induction, with its seductive boy actor Bartholomew, not only reflect its Italian source but in turn cast a somewhat problematic light on the main play in which the somewhat misogynistic Petruccio is rewarded with an unruly lady played by a boy actor (possibly the same boy actor playing Bartholomew, unless the latter played the part of Bianca in the comedy’s Ariostan secondary plot). These, however, may be mere wanton supposes.

iv. Ovidian metamorphoses and Shakespearian ekphrases In Shrew, as in Aretino’s sonnets, the wanton pictures are presented discursively. In the second scene of the Induction the Lord and his servants describe the gallery awaiting Sly, supposedly in order to whet his dull appetite. What they depict verbally, however, seems to have little to do with Aretinian sexual acrobatics: 2

servant Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight Adonis painted by a running brook And Cytherea all in sedges hid, Which seem to move and wanton with her breath Even as the waving sedges play with wind.



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lord We’ll show thee Io as she was a maid, And how she was beguiled and surprised, As lively painted as the deed was done. 3 servant Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood, Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds, And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep, So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn. (2.47–58) The amorous mythological scenes described for Sly’s benefit allude to three episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the infatuation of Venus (‘Cytherea’) for Adonis (10.520–739); Jove’s rape of Io (1.701–943); and Daphne’s escape from rape by Apollo through her transformation into a laurel tree (4.347–481). The subject matter of the pictures is erotic in a broad sense, but apparently innocuous compared to the crude physicality of the Modi. The imaginary pictures, meanwhile, are described explicitly as paintings, presumably large-scale, rather than drawings or illustrations. The form of discursive engagement with the pictures is likewise far removed from the intimate dialogic interactions devised by Aretino. The descriptions are among the purest examples in Shakespeare of ekphrasis in its literal sense of the verbal rendition of an offstage pictorial image. Indeed, they adopt the graphic descriptive mode of Ovid himself, praised by Arthur Golding in the preface to his celebrated translation of the Metamorphoses: The Authors purpose is to paint and set before our eyes The lyuely Image of the thoughts that in our stomackes ryse. (1567: 151–2) Prominent examples of Ovid’s ‘lively’ (in the sense of lifelike) pictorial mode include precisely the vivid description of the terrified Daphne fleeing from the infatuated Apollo, to which Shakespeare alludes directly:

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And as she ran the meeting windes hir garments backewarde blue, So that hir naked skinne apearde behinde hir as she flue, Hir goodly yellowe golden haire that hanged loose and slacke, With every puffe of ayre did wave and tosse behinde hir backe. Hir running made hir seeme more fayre. (1.641–5) Shakespeare’s lively verbal metamorphoses of painted Ovidian images place a marked focus on the bucolic settings of the events rather than on the amorous encounters as such: running brooks, waving sedges, thorny woods and the like. If Aretino’s dialogues are synecdochic, reducing his subjects to cazzo and culo, Shakespeare’s descriptions are metonymic, delegating the corporeal objects and events to their pastoral surroundings, as in the case of Daphne’s scratching of her legs on the thorns, which transfers Apollo’s violence to the natural scene in a sort of pantheistic eroticization of the landscape. The Second Servant’s description of the Venus and Adonis picture, meanwhile, contains the comedy’s second use of the word ‘wanton’, here in the form of a verb.15 The association of the word with the wind moving the sedges behind which Venus is hidden underlines the eroticism of the scene: as Alison Findlay suggests, ‘Wantonness is exposed by the operation of the wind, something invisible that suggests a woman’s carelessness about her reputation rather than something intrinsically lascivious about her. […] The movement of wind in rushes or hair is a common trope [in Shakespeare] for female wantonness’ (2010: 427). Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a major source for Renaissance narrative painting of the kind described by Shakespeare’s Lord and servants and alluded to by Otter in Jonson’s Epicoene: ‘I will have these stories painted in the Bear-garden, ex Ovidii metamorphosi’ (3.3.100–1, in Jonson 2012; see Allen 2002). They were likewise an authoritative pretext for the representation of what was otherwise untellable and unshowable in public. The most conspicuous example of recourse to



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Ovid as artistic display and as erotic stimulation is, as Ann Thompson notes,16 Marlowe’s Edward II (1995: 1.1.50–70), where Gaveston proposes to seduce the King by having his men act out episodes from the Metamorphoses: gaveston These are not men for me. I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians, that with touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please: Music and poetry is his delight; Therefore I’ll have Italian masks by night, Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows; And in the day, when he shall walk abroad, Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad; My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay. Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring, and there hard by One like Actæon peeping through the grove Shall by the angry goddess be transformed, And running in the likeness of an hart By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die. Such things as these best please his majesty, My lord. (Marlowe 1995: 1.1.49–72) What Gaveston has in mind are not static pictures but ‘pleasing shows’, the theatrical acting out of amorous Ovidian scenes (Diana, Actæon) in a series of tableaux vivants, so much so that the games to be played by his imaginary performers recall the ludic activities of Tiberius’s spintriae. Of particular interest here is the somewhat paradoxical image of unclothed crossdressing, namely the naked boy playing the part of Diana, whose floating hair has the same ‘wanton’ connotations as

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Venus in Shakespeare’s imaginary picture in Shrew. At the same time, Marlowe’s references to wanton poets and Italian masques evoke a distinctly Italianate and perhaps Aretinian context.17

From Romano’s Mantua to Shakespeare’s England Indeed, representations of erotic scenes from Ovid bring us back to Aretino’s Mantua and to Giulio Romano, although not, in this case, to his modi. Among the painter’s more celebrated creations is the Palazzo Te, built by Giulio as a suburban pleasure (or leisure) palace for Federico II Gonzaga, Marques (later Duke) of Mantua, protector of Aretino and absent deus ex machina of Il marescalco. Work on the building began in 1524, the year of the publication of the modi and also of Giulio’s timely departure from Rome. Romano was also responsible for the frescoes, notably those adorning the Chamber of Eros and Psyche (1526–8), ‘built’, as the inscription on the ceiling declares, ‘for [Federico’s] honest leisure to regain his strength in peace after hard work’.18 The ‘honest leisure’ in question was evidently of a specific and active kind, as the Chamber’s art work suggests. The main frescoes narrate the mythological love story between Eros and Psyche from Apuleius (the subject of the allusive wall painting in Sir Thomas Smith’s Hill Hall: see above, Fig. 14). On the walls of the Chamber, however, together with two banquets featuring naked satyrs and nymphs, are also a series of erotic episodes in the form of Ovidian or pseudo-Ovidian metamorphoses: among them, Venus and Mars bathing nude (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.167–89); Bacchus and Ariadne in love (8.174–82); the triangular relationship between Polyphemus, Acis and Galatea (13.750–68); Mars chasing the naked Adonis from Venus’s garden; and – in a composition reminiscent of the image dramatized in Aretino’s Sonnet 11 – the tumescent Jove, in the form of a snake, about to possess Olympia, while



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her voyeuristic husband, Philip II of Macedon, is struck in the eye by lightning. To return to Shrew though, the Lord’s description of his ‘fairest chamber’ hung round ‘with all my wanton pictures’, Ovidian pictures to boot, has therefore direct historical precedents not only in Tiberius’s Capri (see above, p. 134), but also in Aretino’s Mantua, in the wall decorations of the painter notoriously alluded to in The Winter’s Tale (‘that rare Italian master Giulio Romano’, 5.2.94–5; see p. 308; on the Palazzo Te see Gombrich 1999; Belluzzi 2006). There are thus intriguing intermedial relations between Shakespeare’s Shrew, Ariosto’s Suppositi¸ Giulio Romano’s modi and his Palazzo Te paintings, Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi and his comedy Il marescalco, not to mention Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the illustrated poems of Elephantis. These relations are governed by an enduring dialectic between word and image. Their precise genealogy is probably impossible to establish, and it is not necessary to suppose a direct line of descent from Elephantis’s poems (or from Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te frescoes) to Shakespeare’s Induction. What is certain, however, is that the cultural humus giving birth to the joke played on the unsuspecting Christopher Sly goes decidedly well beyond the confines of his rustic English world.

3 Pictures in boxes: Containers and contained in The Merchant of Venice

i. Sightseeing in Venice Shakespeare’s Venice is the republic of the gaze. In The Merchant of Venice, visitors come to Venice and Belmont to look or, indeed, stare at beautiful subjects and fascinating objects: ‘For princes to come view fair Portia’, affirms the prince of Morocco (2.7.43), and ‘I would o’erstare the sternest eyes that look’ (2.1.27). Strangers come to the republic to see and also to be seen. The presence of Morocco and his fellow strangers, including Aragon and Shylock, makes up the very spectacle of ethnic and cultural alterity that was itself one of the main ‘sights’ in the Serenissima, as famously represented in the large panoramic paintings of Carpaccio and others (see p. 160) – just as it is, similarly, in Shakespeare’s comedy. Another ‘stranger’ in Venice, the Jew Jessica, is seen making a romantic and highly Venetian spectacle of herself with her beloved Christian Lorenzo: ‘in a gondola [they] were seen together’ (2.8.8). At the same time, Lorenzo educates Jessica in the Venetian art of the gaze, while looking on beauty: ‘Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold’ (5.1.58–9); while the clown Launcelot

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instructs her to ‘look out at window’ in order to catch sight of a Christian “worth a Jewess” eye’ (2.5.39–41). She learns to look and be looked at, in return. Venetians also come to gaze. ‘Look on beauty’ Bassanio tells himself when visiting Belmont (3.2.88), although later, Portia, the prime object of his admiring gaze, scorns him, after he has broken his oath by giving away her ring, by implying that he is really gazing narcissistically at his own double reflection in her eyes: Mark you but that! In both my eyes he doubly sees himself, In each eye one: swear by your double self, And there’s an oath of credit! (5.1.243–6) Looking in Venice and Belmont, therefore, is an aesthetic activity (looking on beauty), but it is also a highly ideological and ethnic, indeed ethnographic one, as Portia’s rebuke suggests. It is in this context of the ideologically and anthropologically charged gaze that Shakespeare presents the play’s picture scenes. The Merchant of Venice is the only one of his plays in which as many as four pictures – or at least four handheld visual objects – are taken out before the audience’s eyes. It is also the only play in which such pictorial objects are at the narrative centre of one of the two main plots, determining the destinies of the principal characters. This chapter is concerned with looking at pictures in Shakespeare’s Venice and Belmont, an activity informed by the early modern English perception of Venice itself as the privileged site of the gaze. The discussion begins from the historical perspective of English sightseers looking at visual objects in Venice.

Public pictures on display Shakespeare himself identifies sightseeing – especially ‘Venetian’ sightseeing – as a specific tourist activity. When Sebastian is shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast in Twelfth



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Night, the first thing he wants to do, despite the unfavourable circumstances, is see the cultural sights of the ‘city’: I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials and the things of fame That do renown this city. (3.3.22–4) It seems improbable that Illyria has much to offer in the way of urban memorials: the ‘city’ that Sebastian refers to is in part London, but perhaps also Venice, given the fact that in Shakespeare’s day Illyria was under Venetian dominion. The Serenissima, with its ‘memorials and the things of fame’, was an unmatchable sight for English eyes, a veritable Illyria of the gaze. As early as 1549, William Thomas in his Historie of Italie – in which he expresses admiration for the Venetian administrative and judicial systems – is no less impressed by the visual splendours of the republic: Of the meruailouse site. Whan I consider what thinges necessitee causeth (hauyng an earnest proufe for my parte therof) I nothing meruaile, to see the wonders that it worketh. … it is … excedyng full of people, and riche of treasure and buildinges … (73; marginal note) The orthography of Thomas’s marginal note is fruitfully ambiguous: Venice is a marvellous urban site in which to ‘see the wonders’, yet at the same time is itself a marvellous sight for a stranger’s gaze. In particular, after four years in exile, Thomas turns his well-trained eye to Venetian architecture, which he observes attentively (‘marke well’) from the privileged viewpoint of a Canal Grande gondola: For he that would rowe through the Canale grande, and marke well the frontes of the houses of bothe sydes, shall sei theim, more lyke the doynges of princes than priuate men. (74)

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Thomas was an extraordinary pioneer in the knowledge and description of Italy. When, some sixty years later, in the summer of 1608, the more occasional and highly eccentric English tourist Thomas Coryat visited the Serenissima Repubblica – doubtless having read Thomas and other commentators – he went systematically about his business of viewing all the marvellous sites and sights he could access and of annotating his ‘Observations of the most glorious, peerelesse, and mayden Citie of Venice’ (1611: 158). His panoramic gaze – like Thomas’s – took in with admiration the Venetian town plan, divided into six ‘parts’; its seventy-two vein-like canals. He notes: ‘The channels … are very singular ornaments to the citie, through the which they runne even as the veynes doe through the body of a man’, 170); its imposing bridges, notably ‘the lofty Rialto … the fairest bridge by many degrees for one arch that euer I saw, read, or heard of’ (166); grand squares such as the ‘peerelesse place’ of St Mark’s, with ‘the variety of the curious objects which it exhibiteth to the spectator’ (170); the ‘sumptuous Palaces’ (184), and other architectural marvels. Coryat directed his inquisitive eye towards countless individual structures, such as the mercantile ‘Exchange of Venice’ and the Venetian playhouse, both of which he compares unfavourably with their London counterparts. He looked untiringly, moreover, at the ‘singular shew’ of the ethnic and national varieties on display: There you may see many Polonians, Slavonians, Persians, Grecians, Turks, Jewes, Christians of all the famousest regions of Christendome, and each nation distinguished from another by their proper and peculiar habits. A singular shew. (175–6) Coryat investigated with scrupulous attention the countless Venetian courtesans, including close-up the bare-breasted Margarita Emiliana, a meeting depicted in a somewhat spicy illustration included in his book, Coryat’s Crudities (262). Finally, and perhaps more unusually, he gazed long and hard at Venetian paintings. Coryat’s book, published in 1611, is,



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in fact, the first English traveller’s account to include pictures among the sights of Venice worthy of detailed attention and description.

An English guide to Venetian art Coryat found in Venice what he called ‘a notable guide’ to the visual arts in the person of Sir Henry Wotton, James I’s ambassador to the republic since 1604. Wotton was the greatest English connoisseur of Italian and, in particular, Venetian art and the first English collector of Italian pictures, for the benefit of the King (to whom he left ‘four Pictures at large of those Dukes of Venice, in whose time I was there employed’) (Pearsall Smith 1907: vol. 1, 216) and the Dukes of Salisbury and Buckingham. To the latter he sent, among other pictures, two Venetian masterpieces: so as now the one piece is the work of Titian, wherein the least figure (namely the child in the Virgin’s lap playing with a bird) is alone worth the price of your expense for all four, being so round, that I know not whether I shall call it a piece of sculpture, or picture, and so lively, that a man would be tempted to doubt whether nature or art had made it. The other is of Palma, and this I call the speaking piece, as your Lordship will say it may well be termed. For except the damsel brought to David, whom a silent modesty did best become, all the other figures are in discourse and in action. (Pearsall Smith 1907: vol. 2, 257) Wotton’s brief ekphrastic description of the [Giovane] Palma’s ‘speaking piece’, representing King David in his old age, presents it as a ‘story’ (with strong shades of Alberti’s ‘historia’: see p. 112). The ‘work of Titian’, instead, is probably a Madonna and Child and St Dorothy produced by Titian’s workshop (Hill 2011: 5), endowed with such mimetic three-dimensionality as to make it seem a sculpture. Wotton theorized the dialectic between painting and sculpture in his

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free translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura (The Elements of Architecture, 1624), in which he introduces a paragone comparing the painter’s art favourably with the sculptor’s, thanks to the effects achieved by perspective of the kind practised by the Venetian masters: An excellent Piece of Painting, is, to my judgment, the more admirable Object, because it comes neer an Artificiall Miracle, to make diverse distinct Eminences appear on a Flat by force of Shadowes, and yet the Shadowes themselves not to appear: which I conceive to be the uttermost value and virtue of a Painter … For the Opticks teach us: That a Plaine will appear prominent, and (as it were) embossed, if the Parts farthest from the Axeltree, or middle Beam of the Eye, shall be the most shadowed … (1651: 272–6) Almost paradoxically, the best painting for Wotton is that closest to sculpture (‘for Picture is best when it standeth off, as if it were carved’), and vice versa (‘and Sculpture is best when it appeareth so tender, as if it were painted’, 273). The Venetian painting–sculpture relationship reappears in Coryats Crudities. Coryat relates an episode in which, having been rescued by Wotton from a crowd of threatening Jews, angered by his attempts to preach Christianity to their rabbi, he is taken by his rescuer, in the latter’s ambassadorial gondola, along the ‘goodly faire channel’ of the Canal Grande (this recalls William Thomas’s narration). Wotton, his ‘notable guide’, points to the group of porphyry figures set into the angle of the San Marco treasury, supposedly representing four Albanian ‘unnatural brethren’ who poisoned each other for possession of the cargo their ship was carrying. Coryat, according to Wotton, describes this group ‘as if it were painted’: The pourtraitures of foure Noble Gentlemen of Albania … Whereupon the Signiory of Venice … in memoriall of that uncharitable and unbrotherly conspiracy, hath erected the pourtraitures of them in porphyrie as I said before in



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two severall couples consulting together. … And Sir Henry Wotton himselfe our Kings most Honourable, learned, and thrise-worthy Ambassador in Venice counselled me once when he admitted me to passe with him in his Gondola … to take speciall observation of those two couples of men with fawchons or curtleaxes by their sides, pourtrayed in the gate wall of the Dukes Palace, as being a thing most worthy to be considered. (1651: 188–90) The illusionistic effect of the kind praised by Wotton makes paintings look like sculptures and sculptures like paintings, especially to an untrained English eye, so much so that Coryat classifies the statues as ‘pourtraitures’. Wotton teaches his guest to look and take note. In England, Venice had long been celebrated as the home of contemporary visual arts. Prints of Venetian paintings, from Titian and Veronese to Tintoretto and others, circulated in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, so that looking at Venetian art works, albeit from a distance, was in a sense possible even at home, in London or Lancaster, for example. Early modern English references to Venetian art can be seen in Ben Jonson’s epigram ‘To the right Honourable, the Lord Treasurer of England’, which mentions two Venetian painters, ‘Tintaret / Titian’ among those Italian artists that ‘Have left in fame to equall, or out-goe / The old Greek-hands in picture, or in stone’; and also in his Timber, or Discoveries, which includes Titian among the ‘six famous painters in Italy … who were excellent and emulous of the ancients’ (51).

Looking for and at Venetian pictures What this meant was that English visitors came to Venice expecting to see not just St Mark’s and the Rialto, but also celebrated pictures. They looked first for them and then at them. One of the best-known characteristics of Venetian art was its public character, celebrating the republic itself: its history, its victories, its people, together with the multi-ethnic

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traders and visitors that made it a veritable window to the East, as seen in the large-scale panoramic paintings of Venetian crowd scenes, from Vittore Carpaccio’s ‘The Triumph of Saint George’ (c. 1506, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice) – set in an idealized Renaissance Italian square with groups of theatrically turbaned and caftaned Middle Eastern bystanders witnessing the slaying of the dragon – to Paolo Veronese’s highly scenographic Wedding at Cana (1563, Louvre) with its colourful intercultural mix of contemporary social and ethnic types. Perhaps due in part to Wotton’s advice, Coryat seems to have known where to go to find the best pictures, and, aware of his role as English sightseer and eyewitness for those back home, he provides the reader with his own detailed ekphrases of the paintings he has the fortune to see, especially the great public art on display in institutional sites. What emerges from his account is the fact that Venice is a place not just of visual representations, but of self-representations, in particular. The paintings he witnessed represent, above all, the history and the ethnology of the Serenissima itself. The high point in Coryat’s sight-seeing and picture-gazing was without doubt his visit to the Doge’s Palace, which he describes as both the seat of government and justice and as the site, par excellence, of the self-representation of Venice. William Thomas had also singled it out for special mention: ‘The Dukes palaice is a veire sumptuouse buildyng, and yet not finished’ (74). Coryat finds it not only quite finished, but incomparably beautiful: The Palace of the Duke … is absolutely the fairest building that ever I saw, exceeding all the King of Frances Palaces that I could see, yea his most delectable Paradise at Fountaine Beleau. (192) He represents the Palace, moreover, as a sight full of other sights, as he leads us through its rooms, annotating their artistic contents, including The Collegio, where Wotton had made his ambassadorial debut in September 1604, when he



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gave a speech in Italian before the Doge and Cabinet. He writes: the Colledge or the Senate house, is a very magnificent and beautifull place, having a faire roofe sumptuously gilt, and beautified with many singular pictures that represent divers notable histories. At the higher end of this roome is the Dukes throne, and the picture of Venice made in the forme of a royal Queene, wearing a crowne upon her head, and crowning the Duke: This is the place where the Duke with his noble Peeres treateth about affaires of state, and heareth the Ambassadors both of forraine Nations, and of them that are sent from the cities subject to the Signiory of Venice. (198) The picture of Venice as a royal Queen is an allusion to Paolo Veronese’s Venice Enthroned between Justice and Peace (c. 1582), while the walls of the Collegio were adorned with other works by Veronese and Tintoretto, doubtless much appreciated by Wotton (Pearsall Smith 1907: 52). Coryat stops longest and most admiringly, however, in the sight of all sights, the Great Council Hall (Sala del Maggior Consiglio), which Thomas identified as the centre of Venetian political and judicial power, and described as ‘surely … a verie notable thyng’ (75). Coryat is more hyperbolic, in his customary enthusiastic style: the sumptuousest [roome] of all, exceeding spacious, and the fairest that euer I saw in my life, either in mine owne countrey, or France, or any city of Italy … Neither do I thinke that any roome of all Christendome doth excel it in beauty. (199) The Council Hall is ‘sumptuousest’ because of the other sights or treasures it contains, above all the frescoes and wall paintings: Likewise in a great multitude of prety plots besides, that are adorned with those gilt workes, are many singular beautifull pictures drawne. (200)

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By the end of the sixteenth century, the Doge’s Palace was well-known to visitors, including English gentlemen sightseers, as an art gallery. In 1587, Girolamo Bardi published a visitors’ guide to the pictorial decorations in the Palace and, in particular, to the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. It appears that Coryat failed either to read or understand the guide, as his misinterpretations of some of the pictures suggest. For example, he takes Tintoretto’s personification of Venice on the ceiling of the Great Council Chamber to be the Virgin Mary (see Rosand 2005: 39–46). He has fewer interpretative problems, however, with Tintoretto’s great canvas of Paradise (Fig. 17): All this East wall where the Dukes throne standeth, is most admirably painted. For there is presented paradise, with Christ and the Virgin Mary at the top thereof, and the soules of the righteous on both sides. This workemanship, which is most curious and very delectable to behold, was done by a rare painter called Tinctoretus. (201) Tintoretto is one of the first Italian painters to be named (albeit in Latinized form) in a published English text, along with Giulio Romano, who is named by Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale, first performed in 1611, the year of the publication of Crudities, and characterized by the same

FIG. 17  Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradiso: oil on canvas, 1594, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Ducal Palace



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Venice

Doge’s Palace Great Council Chamber Pictures “Venice” Pictures Great Council Chamber Doge’s Palace

Venice

FIG. 18  Sights within sights

adjective that Coryat uses, ‘that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano’ (see p. 308).1 The pictures, ‘very delectable to behold’, are the true culmination of the sightseer’s treasure hunt, the treasures or sights to which he dedicates most space and eloquence. Indeed, in describing the pictures in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Coryat’s account sets up a kind of mise en abyme structure of sights embedded within sights within sights, treasures contained in other treasures – the extraordinary Doge’s Palace within the spectacular urban framework of Venice; among the rooms of the Palace ‘the sumptuousest [roome] of all’, the Sala or Great Council Chamber; and within that room, the delectable pictures (see Fig. 18). The final discovery, however, is the way in which these inmost treasures, the embedded pictures, reflect the outmost

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treasure containing them, as in a heraldic impresa. What the pictures primarily reveal is a representation of Venice itself: Palma Vecchio’s allegorical Venice Victorious Enthroned on Earth with its ‘armed men supporting a Queene on their shoulders, whereby is signified Venice’ (200), described in sumptuous detail, to Andrea Vicentino’s epic Battle of Lepanto, ‘most artificially done’ in the Sala dello Scrutinio (203). Coryat rightly reads these paintings in historical terms (as istorie): These pictures upon the wals are nothing else but Historicall descriptions of many auncient matters. (200–1) Such painting of historical subjects was rare at the time in England, where the representation of history was largely delegated to books and the stage. Coryat also dedicates attention to the Council Chamber’s gallery of public and political portraits, a more familiar genre for a Jacobean Englishman. The portraits again reflect Venetian history and Venetian power, as the formidable dogi portrayed by Domenico Tintoretto (son of ‘Tintorectus’: Fig. 19) and others, holding their authoritative institutional scrolls, disdainfully avoid meeting the Englishman’s respectful gaze: Round about the wals are drawen the pictures of the Dukes in their Ducall ornaments, according to their degrees successiuely one after another. (201) Perhaps these portrait sets reminded Coryat of the collections of English kings in the long galleries of the Elizabethan and Jacobean nobility. In any case, together with the allegorical and historical paintings, they embody – rather like a vanitas picture – the past glories of a Venice now in decline. Indeed, one of the implicit themes of Coryat’s descriptions of the Palace and its art is the passage of time and the ravages of history. The prowess and the government of the republic are no longer what they were. Venetians and foreign visitors come and go, but the Venetian art that testifies to past glories



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FIG. 19 Domenico Tintoretto, Il Doge Marco Barbarigo: oil on canvas, 1592, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Ducal Palace, Venice

remains triumphantly intact for the benefit of the discerning English gaze. The theme of death is recurrent in Coryat’s explorations of public spaces: he is impressed by Sansovino’s monumental statue of Mercury in the Loggetta of Piazza San Marco, ‘with a dead mans skull under his feete’ (186), and, in an episode of macabre realism, by ‘A certaine Porphyrie stone’ at the South corner of St Mark’s where the heads of traitors were put on display (187).

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Public sights in The Merchant Early modern English commentaries on Venice and its sights, especially the Ducal palace, introduce several themes that are pertinent to The Merchant of Venice. First, the Great Council Hall itself has been a traditional setting for the trial scene in stage productions of the play2 and may have been imagined by Shakespeare as an ideal political and judicial – as opposed to specific architectonic – space. Looking at, describing and interpreting pictures in Venice – especially portraits, but also symbolic skulls and other visual objects – is a central activity in the comedy. Shakespeare, like Coryat, creates an intermedial dialogue between the visual image and word on which a good part of the comedy’s dramatic dialectic is founded. The play also stages, like Crudities, the mediation between two cultures, and especially between two visual cultures, the Venetian and the English. The topics of representation and of self-representation are likewise an important part of the play’s thematic texture, as, indeed, is the theme of treasures contained within other treasures, sights within other sights. Both texts rely on a kind of verbal optical illusion, using ekphrastic description to create the image of a picture that the audience cannot actually see, although Coryat’s ekphrases are unproblematically enthusiastic, while Shakespeare’s turn out to be highly ambivalent (see pp. 193–5). Finally, the association between the unchanging pictures on the one hand and the passage of time on the other, warning us of the decline and mortality even of the great – memento mori – is essential to the role of visual objects in The Merchant. In its Venetian scenes, the play offers a continuous discourse of public spectacle, associated above all with water: the network of canals making up what the Prince of Morocco calls ‘The watery kingdom’ (2.7.44); the scene – à la William Thomas or Thomas Coryat – of gondolas moving on the canals (2.8.8–9); the legendary Rialto bridge over the Canal grande alluded to four times by Shylock as site of merchants’ and usurers’ exchanges (compare Thomas: ‘The Rialto is a goodly place in the hert of the citee, where the merchauntes



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twyse a date assemble’ [74]), and where news arrives from the outside world of mercantile expeditions over the seas east and west (‘He hath an argosy bound to Tripoli, another to the Indies; I understand moreover upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico’, 1.3.16–19); the celebrated Venetian waterborne ‘pageants’ or naval spectacles, to which Salarino compares Antonio’s anthropomorphized ships (1.1.10; see p. 198). Another notorious Venetian public sight described by Coryat and other English visitors was the carnival masquerade, which in Merchant acts as a highly theatrical and ideological context to the waterborne elopement of the cross-dressed and Christianized Jessica in 2.6, and which Launcelot implicitly predicts to Shylock: ‘I will not say you shall see a masque, but, if you do’ (2.5.22–3), while his master puritanically disdains Carnival disguise as an improper sight for Jewish eyes (‘To gaze on Christian fools with varnished faces’, 2.5.32). Indeed, it is primarily the play’s ‘strangers’ – especially Shylock and Morocco – who give us snippets of descriptive information on Venice, as if viewed from without, providing us cumulatively with a ‘picture’ of the republic. We are allowed glimpses of its different and well-defined social, professional and ethnic communities: the mercantile bourgeoisie (‘Twenty merchants’, 3.2.278; ‘Even there where merchants most do congregate’, 1.3.45); the social and political elite (‘The Duke himself and the magnificoes / Of greatest port’, 3.2.279–80, who are present in the trial scene [4.1, entry stage direction]); the Jewish community, or what Shylock calls ‘our sacred nation’ (1.3.44). There are, however, significant literary, iconographic and ideological differences between the English travelogue and Shakespeare’s play. The Merchant stages an imaginary Venice on the English stage, without any pretence to mimetic realism. The descriptions of the pictures in the comedy often seem to allude more to English than to Italian artistic conventions. Shakespeare, moreover, was more ambivalent than Coryat about the value of pictures in general: at times they appear, in Coryat’s words, ‘delectable’ and capable of miraculous

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representational powers. At other times, or even at the same time, they are perceived as false, deceptive and shallow.

ii. Private Venetian portraiture Moreover, whereas Coryat’s Venice is dominated by big public paintings, or official representations of the dogi, Shakespeare’s Venice – and especially Shakespeare’s Belmont – is the domain of the smaller and more intimate portrait. Coryat makes no mention of private portraits, because by definition they were not on public display for the benefit of curious visitors. In early modern England, however, Venice was also and above all celebrated as the home of portraiture. In contrast to the public art were Titian’s altogether more intimate portraits of the great and also of Venetian citizens, anonymous ladies and courtesans. In Tom Nichols’s words: Despite its popularity with local clientele, Titian’s more psychologized and intimate style of portraiture ran against the grain of the public visual culture of Venice and its associated political values. … Perhaps [his portraiture] encapsulates not Titian’s connection with Venice but rather with the world beyond, one increasingly dominated by the major Italian and international courts. Titian’s creation of a new type of imagery, which was destined to stand as a kind of template for aristocratic portraiture in Europe for more than three centuries, owed less to republican Venice than to the tastes and requirements of court patrons … These high-ranking clients looked down on the caste-like community of merchant-patricians in Venice, with their fleets of galleys, trading interests and relative lack of feudal estates or soldiering skills. (2013: 85–6) Titian’s most productive period of portrait-painting, 1537–53, in which he painted 115 portraits (Freedman 1995) coincided in part with the period of William Thomas’s sojourn in Venice.



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During this period, as Freedman notes (12), Titian created a veritable gallery of eminent personages of sixteenth-century Europe, from the Gonzagas and the Farneses to the Habsburgs, and from the ambassadors of the Venetian republic to notable humanists and writers of the time, including Pietro Bembo, Benedetto Varchi, and, especially, Pietro Aretino. It is mainly thanks to his association with Aretino that Titian’s portraits – including the celebrated portrait of Aretino himself included as an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi in editions of his sonnets (see Fig. 20) – became celebrated throughout Europe, long before Wotton began collecting his paintings and sending them to England. Several of Aretino’s sonnets are ekphrastic and euologistic descriptions of the portraits, such as the celebrated Uffizi portrayal of Eleanora Gonzaga (1537): Modesty and beauty, eternal enemies, move on her countenance, and between her eyebrows,

FIG. 20 Titian, Portrait of Aretino: engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, c. 1527

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one discerns the throne of the Graces. (Land 1994: 89) Aretino provides literary depictions of the persons portrayed and their pictorial representations, and – perhaps for the first time – uses ekphrasis to ‘advertise’ actual portraits, making them known as verbal objects throughout Europe (Freedman 1995: 22). Among other things, it is Aretino who first put into circulation the idea that a portrait, unlike other genres, is primarily a work of art full of colour and light. This notion recurs in the first English-language appreciation of Titian’s art, in Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo: considering with themselues that the light falling uppon the flesh, caused these and such like effectes: in which kinde Titian excelled the rest; who as well to shewe his greate skill therein, as to merit commendation, used to cosen and deceaue mens eies. … Againe Titian to make his arte in light and shaddowes, when he would expresse the lightest part of the bodie, used to adde a little too much white … a little too much shaddow, in resemblance of the decay of the light in that part of the bodie: and so his woke seemeth to bee much raysed, and deceaue the sight. (1598: 20) Coryat does not mention Titian, but Wotton collects Titian’s portraits, rightly supposing that they would be of particular interest to his aristocratic English patrons. It is the private portrait figuring – as with Titian’s portraiture – courtly and aristocratic subjects that is present onstage in Shakespeare’s play. There is thus a double focus on visual representation in the comedy: on the one hand, the public sights and sites described by English visitors are incorporated into the action of the Venice plot, with its highly visual public spectacle, culminating in the trial scene before the Doge; on the other hand, private visual objects of the kind collected by Wotton dominate the Belmont plot. Above all, it is the portrait of Portia, the prize at stake in the casket challenge, which constitutes the main object of desire and the chief focus of the action in Belmont.



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The caskets and their contents The Merchant of Venice is a comedy explicitly concerned with paintings and visual images in general, as its language suggests. The word ‘picture’ occurs three times; the play has the only occurrence in Shakespeare of the word ‘portrait’ (2.9.53). It also has a ‘figure … Stamped’ and ‘insculped’ (2.7.56–7). It has five uses of the noun ‘show’ in the sense of visual representation, five ‘masques’, one ‘dumb-show’ as well as ‘pageant’ in the sense of dramatic or civic performance. Shakespeare’s Venice, like Coryat’s, is a place of the gaze. The picture is an important hermeneutic key in The Merchant, perhaps not the key to open up the winning critical casket, but nevertheless a significant and largely overlooked factor in the dramatic and semiotic economy of the play. Commentators from Freud onwards have focused almost exclusively on the caskets containing the pictures and on the interpretation of their respective metals, rather than on the pictures themselves. Here is Freud’s account in the essay ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’: The first of these scenes [under discussion] is the suitors’ choice between the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her father’s bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favour of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. (1958: 290) Freud mentions Bassanio’s choice of the ‘right’ casket containing Portia’s portrait, but ignores the contents of the other two caskets and dismisses the unsuccessful suitors, Morocco and Arragon, who evidently fail to fit in his picture.

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This is rather curious, since, for example, the gold casket contains a death’s head, which would seem to be relevant to Freud’s interpretation regarding Bassanio’s choice of death (Thanatos), in order to embrace life and love (Eros). Later commentators have tended to follow Freud’s lead, virtually eliminating from their analyses the pictures along with the unlucky suitors. This chapter will endeavour in part to redress this balance.

iii. An English portrait in Italy The play’s first picture scene does not directly involve the caskets, but does act as a kind of prelude to the three casket episodes. In 1.2, Portia in Belmont surveys the six ‘princely suitors that are already come’ (33), all of them strangers (i.e. non-Venetian). She provides a verbal portrait of each, as in a kind of discursive long gallery, expressing her ineffable sense of Venetian cultural superiority towards all the foreign pretenders. Of particular interest is her maltreatment of her aristocratic English suitor, Falconbridge: nerissa What say you, then, to Falconbridge, the young baron of England? portia You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me, nor I him. … He is a proper man’s picture, but, alas, who can converse with a dumb-show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany and his behaviour everywhere. (1.2.62–71) The play’s awareness of its English audience becomes the source of a complex game of the gaze, which we could call the look-at-me-looking-at-you game. Portia returns the gaze of the English audience engaged in looking at Belmont/Venice,



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of which she herself is the supreme expression, and finds them, the English, culturally lacking. The English spectator, meantime, is invited to smile at his own cultural inadequacies compared to the Venetians, not least in dress sense and what she calls ‘behaviour’, i.e. gestural and postural savoir faire, or lack of it. Portia reifies Falconbridge as a picture, because of his silence due to his typically English ignorance of languages: ‘He hath neither Latin, French nor Italian’ (65–6), implying that Portia has all three (but only ‘a poor pennyworth in the English’, 67). The Englishman’s monolingualism is varied in the metaphor of the ‘dumb-show’, an English theatrical mode. Falconbridge is also, however, a suitable subject for a portrait: ‘a proper man’s picture’, namely the picture of a handsome man, but perhaps also a proper picture, i.e. only a picture. This may imply that baron Falconbridge sent Portia his portrait as part of his courtship, even if he himself is present (unseen) in Belmont. Indeed, as John Drakakis acutely argues, ‘The specific detail of this description suggests that Portia may be describing an actual portrait that she has in her hand’ (note to 1.2.69). This is an altogether plausible reading of the passage, which thereby becomes the first picture episode in the comedy. The presence of a handheld picture, presumably a portrait miniature, anticipates the specular scene in which Bassanio – not Falconbridge – looks at and describes Portia’s portrait (3.2.114–29). It introduces the miniature as a specifically English genre: a stranger, like the baron himself, in Renaissance Venice, home of the large-scale portrait. It also confirms the play’s abiding concern with visual objects which, as in the case of Portia’s picture in the casket, act as surrogates for their sitters or (as in the case of Morocco and Arragon) for their beholders. The passage also implies that there is actually little difference between the painting and the original in terms of liveliness: both are dumb. Despite the passing compliment to the English gentleman – dumb but at least good-looking (‘proper’) – her rejection of him through his portrait is in fact a definitive and devastating dismissal: the prize of Portia’s picture cannot be won by another picture. Falconbridge is doomed to failure

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and to silence, and we later learn that he withdraws from the competition without risking the casket challenge (95–100). Portia’s description, which, if Drakakis is right, becomes a literal ekphrasis, has a venerable and exquisitely English intertextual pedigree. In his widely read Description of England (1577), William Harrison derides his compatriots’ aping of continental modes, with the result that English fashion, like its cultural identity in general, is an unstable, composite and patchwork affair made up of hand-me-downs from different European nations: such is our mutability that to-day there is none to the Spanish guise, to-morrow the French toys are most fine and delectable, ere long no apparel as that which is after the high Almaine fashion, by-and-by the Turkish manner is generally best liked of, otherwise the Morisco gowns, the Barbarian fleeces … and the short French breeches make such a comely vesture that, except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England. (1968: 154–6; see Elam 2004: 27) Like Falconbridge, Harrison’s would-be fashionable Englishman overcompensates for his sense of cultural inadequacy by putting together a congeries of borrowed styles. This becomes a literary topos, taken up for example in the Italian episode in Thoms Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594): ‘At my first cumming to Rome, I … imitated foure or fiue sundry nations in my attire at once’ (sig. Iivv). Portia’s description also has a pictorial pedigree. Falconbridge portrayed as a proud Englishman Italianate, who ‘bought his doublet in Italy’, recalls the celebrated portrait, by an unknown Italian painter, of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (one of the earliest translators and adaptors of the Italian sonnet form as well as importer of Italian fashions), shown in his elaborate Italianate doublet and hose (Fig. 21). Ironically, Falconbridge likewise imitates Italianate fashions and has his portrait painted, but – unlike Surrey – has no



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knowledge of the Italian tongue or culture, and altogether lacks the Italian sprezzatura and the sophisticated Venetian civitas required to compete. There may be a suggestion that the self-admiring Falconbridge, instead of finding the prize of Portia’s portrait in the winning casket, has to make do with his own (his ‘proper’ picture, in the sense of belonging to him), and so with himself: presumably his portrait is returned to him, his only trophy from Belmont.

FIG. 21  ‘A proper man’s picture’: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, by unknown Italian artist: oil on canvas, 1546

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iv. Looking at pictures in Belmont From this point on, the portrait – as in Hamlet and other plays – becomes the dominant pictorial paradigm in the comedy. In The Merchant, the portrait takes on special magical or talismanic powers. It is Portia’s portrait, rather than Portia herself that is the target of a kind of global quest, at least in the first instance; the subject of considerable financial investment; the repository of faith, hope and trepidation; the object of a solemn pledge entailing the renunciation of future marriage in the case of defeat. In the case of victory, instead, it is endowed with extraordinary redemptive powers. It is also – not a secondary detail – a guarantee of lifetime riches, so much so that Bassanio in the opening scene paints Portia’s image verbally for the benefit of Antonio, anticipating the actual portrait he will discover in the lead casket, by comparing her to the mythical prize of Jason’s quest: ‘and her sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece’ (1.1.169–70). The representation of Portia’s golden hair, even if it is not to be found in the gold casket, turns into real gold for the fortunate suitor. From a ‘technical’ point of view, Portia’s portrait, like Falconbridge’s and like the picture found by the Prince of Arragon in the silver casket, is probably a miniature. The portrait miniature is an artistic genre that Wotton and Coryat did not encounter in Venice, but that flourished, instead, in Shakespeare’s England. The presence of the genre onstage – both here and, probably, in 1.2 – involves a kind of cultural hybridism, since what the audience sees in the Venetian setting is actually a recognizable English form of art. Or at least, what the audience thinks it sees. The diminutive size of the portrait was such as to make it easy to fit into even a relatively small casket and thence into the hand of the actor, but at the same time difficult for the spectator to discern in any detail (see p. 17), which at least solved the problem of producing a work of art worthy of Portia and of all the verbal effusions poured over it. It also, in a sense, increases the mystique surrounding the portrait, which we can see only through Bassanio’s eyes.



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The miniature gives the winning suitor the idea of absolute possession of the sitter: Portia is a handheld stage property who becomes, or so the suitors hope, the personal and financial property of the holder.

Portia contained In the three casket scenes, prior to the choice of container, each suitor reads the words inscribed on them, which, in turn, provoke in them a series of iconographic fantasies. This is part of the dialectic between image and word that is so crucial to the play. The suitors are guided in their choice not only by the metals, but also by the verbal riddles that they endeavour to associate with the contents of the casket. What takes place, therefore, is not only a ‘blind’ choice of metal, but also a meditation on the text, an interpretation of the inscription as a clue to the object contained. In the first casket scene, 2.7, Morocco, prompted by the inscriptions, meditates on the relationship between container and contained, casket and picture. One of these three contains her heavenly picture. Is’t like that lead contains her? ‘Twere damnation To think so base a thought; it were too gross To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave. (2.7.48–51) Morocco not only synecdochically transfers the qualities of the container to the contained,3 but identifies the ‘heavenly picture’ with Portia’s own person (‘lead contains her’). This identification suggests a kind of cultural primitivism, that hypostatizes the portrait as a magical appropriation of its sitter, according to what Frazer in The Golden Bough (1922) calls the Law of Similarity governing ‘imitative’ magic (see Gell 1998: 9): From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any

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effect he desires merely by imitating it … Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homoeopathic or Imitative Magic. (Frazer 1990: 11) Early modern portrait miniatures owed their great success to just such a conception: as Graham Reynolds points out, the miniature was ‘a representation of the beloved akin to the religious tokens of saints, but also redolent of an even more primeval form of magic and witchcraft’ (1964: 282). Portia has been closed in the casket by means of a homeopathic magical charm that has literally captured her likeness, and so her self, in the box. The discovery of the winning casket therefore depends, in Morocco’s view, on an analogous law of similarity between the lady herself and the metal containing her: the box must resemble her. This is not to suggest that Morocco is portrayed as an unschooled barbarian: on the contrary, with his classical (hyperbolic) rhetoric and his Ovidian intertextual allusions he is in many ways the most eloquent of Portia’s suitors, anticipating the oratorical grandeur of Othello. Like Othello, however, he is irredeemably a stranger in Venice, subject to a mode of reasoning that is literally alien to Venetian cultural sophistication. In practice, he is not the only character in the play to express a ‘magical’ attitude towards pictures: Portia herself affirms to Bassanio ‘I am locked in one of them’ (3.2.40; see p. 188). Morocco ‘reads’ each casket in the double light of its metal and its inscription, as will the other suitors. Starting from lead and the inscribed promise to ‘gain what many men desire’ (2.7.5), he thinks (somewhat Freudianly) of death: transferring to Portia’s person the qualities of the box, he imagines her as a corpse wrapped in a funeral shroud (‘cerecloth’) within a coffin. He thus superimposes Portia’s picture in the casket with her body in the grave, within a lead coffin of the kind used, for example, to contain the embalmed bodies of English nobles and monarchs (including, some years later, Elizabeth I). Only a cadaver ‘resembles’ lead. Portia is thus transformed into a death’s head – a memento mori – of the kind actually contained in the gold casket, as Morocco will discover to his



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great consternation. He is ‘magically’ picturing the outcome of his quest and at the same time imagining his own civic and sexual death as losing contender, doomed to celibacy. The verb ‘rib’, meaning wrap, also puns on the exposed skeletal rib of the corpse. This can be read, among other things, as a proleptic or prophetic glance towards Antonio’s exposed ribs ready for Shylock’s cut. Imagining Portia, instead, contained within the second, silver casket, with its promise to ‘get as much as he deserves’ (23), Morocco figures her picture, and so her person, as a jewel, but again constrained (‘immured’) within a prison, or perhaps in this case a luxurious silver-lined coffin: Or shall I think in silver she’s immured, Being ten times undervalued to tried gold? O sinful thought! Never so rich a gem Was set in worse than gold. (2.7.52–5) It is Morocco who introduces the pervasive association between pictures and death in the play. In reflecting, finally, on the gold casket and the offered prospect of gaining ‘what many men desire’ (37), Morocco again brings about a corporeal and iconographic transfer, imagining Portia’s likeness, and thus her body, created directly out of the desirable precious metal of the container: They have in England A coin that bears the figure of an angel Stamped in gold: but that’s insculped upon; But here an angel in a golden bed Lies all within. Deliver me the key: Here do I choose, and thrive I as I may! But here an angel in a golden bed Lies all within. (55–9) By a process of alchemical metamorphosis, Portia’s bed – her erstwhile death bed – has been transformed from lead, via silver, to gold, just as her person, no longer a leaden

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cadaver or silvered prisoner, reappears as a golden angel. There are esoteric and pseudo-religious implications to this transformation, as if Portia’s soul – following her ‘death’ in lead and silver coffins – had taken its rightful place in heaven.

Portia as coin On a more material level, Morocco finds Portia’s aureate likeness to resemble the familiar image on an English coin – not the silver coinage that Bassanio disdains as ‘pale and common drudge / ’Tween man and man’ (3.2.103–4) but the more precious and ornate 10-shilling gold coin (Fig. 22). The allusion to English coinage is another version of Portia’s look-at-me-looking-at-you game. We, the English audience, are engaged in watching an exotic character in glamorous Venice when suddenly – and somewhat improbably – he in turn glances towards a popular English icon (‘They have in England’). There are several ironies in this anglo-iconographic reference. The first is that, as Gustav Ungerer has observed (2003), the English coin was probably made from Moroccan gold. The second is that the Angel coin supposedly bears the image and perhaps the name of the angelic Portia, whereas, in fact – as Shakespeare’s wealthier spectators knew – it bore the name of Elizabeth I: this may be intended as a homage to both ladies, but comparing Portia to a coin is in any case a dubious compliment, underlining the literally monetary motives of the suitors’ casket quest. Finally, the image itself is not that

FIG. 22 ‘A coin that bears the figure of an angel’: Elizabethan 10-shilling gold coin



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of a benign female angel but of the vengeful Archangel Saint Michael slaying a dragon: if the angel is Portia, this does not bode well for Morocco, who may be cast as the dragon and is thus about to be eliminated. Morocco, however, immediately sets aside his own simile. Portia is not, after all, the image on the coin, because the angel is merely engraved (‘insculped’), while Portia is not carved on a flat surface but is three-dimensionally present in her golden bed, the casket itself. Not only does this complete the magical homeopathic appropriation of Portia’s person, that emphatically ‘lies all within’, identified in toto with the supposed portrait, but it eroticizes her depicted body and the casket itself. Portia is waiting for Morocco in her golden bed. The conceit is somewhat baroque, since it implies that Morocco must himself enter the casket in order to possess his prize, and there is still a lingering suggestion that Portia’s body lies all within only to the extent that it is, in fact, lifeless in its golden container, as Morocco’s own body must become in order to enjoy union with her.

Portia as memento mori Portia is imagined, here and elsewhere, as a femme fatale associated with death. This may be in part a legacy of the play’s probable Italian source, Il Pecorone, in which the lady of Belmont is something of a sorceress, who deceives and drugs her suitors, including the protagonist, Ansaldo, and relieves them of their wealth. However, it also has to do with the play’s central dialectic between salvation and damnation: in order to win redemption through Portia’s picture, the suitors have to be willing to risk total loss. Memento mori pictures’ were intimately linked to the question of salvation: the pagan Morocco, instead, is a priori beyond redemption. Morocco at this point, having just associated the image of Portia with death, finally opens the casket and discovers precisely an image of death, an unmistakable memento mori (see Fig. 23):

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FIG. 23  Andrea Andreani, Memento mori: chiaroscuro woodcut, 1586–1610. The inscription reads ‘Memorare novissima tua, et in aeternitate non peccabis. Eccle[siastes] vii’(‘Remember the end that awaits you and you will never sin. Ecclesiastes vii’)

O hell! what have we here? A carrion death, within whose empty eye There is a written scroll! I’ll read the writing. (62–4) What he finds is presumably not a picture or sculpture of a skull – like Sansovinus’s in the Loggetta – but an actual skull, akin to those found by Coryat on the porphyry stone, or by Hamlet in the graveyard scene. This seems to validate Morocco’s reading of the casket as coffin, except that the skull points not towards Portia, but rather to Morocco himself as a mirror reflection. It is he who turns out to be immured within a golden grave. The image of Morocco holding the skull is a perfect vanitas picture. The wealthy and powerful prince holds up a death’s head, reminding us that even the privileged



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are destined to die like all of us, and his riches and title cannot save him. The choice of wealthy sitters for memento mori portraits, often including skulls, were an early modern convention, notably in England, for example in Tudor portraits of successful merchants (see Cooper 2012: 88–101). One such

FIG. 24  British school, Portrait of Gawen Goodman of Ruthin: oil on panel, 1582

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portrait is the 1582 oil on panel painting of Gawen Goodman of Ruthin (Fig. 24), seen accompanied by a death’s head and admonitory inscriptions (‘Deum timete’ [fear God]; ‘Cogita mori’ [Ponder on death]; Cooper 2012: 101). Morocco’s death’s head itself becomes another container – as it were, a container within a container – as its empty eye (symbolic of the suitor’s blindness) contains an inscribed scroll. There is an abundance of textuality in the casket scenes, since not only the caskets but also their contents are accompanied by a verbal gloss. This intermedial relationship sets up an imagetext (Mitchell 1994), an image that can be read as a text or actually includes a text. Explanatory inscriptions were again a characteristic convention of English art, as if the image alone were not to be trusted without the authoritative support of the word. In a sense, The Merchant is itself an imagetext, in which picture and word continually interpenetrate, sometimes in contradictory fashion. The final line of the inscription – ‘Fare you well, your suit is cold’ – again evokes death and, indeed, is a kind of death sentence. The Prince of Arragon informs us in 2.9 that the condition for participation in the contest is the pledge never to tell, never to woo again and never to return: in other words, silence, celibacy and banishment, a triple punishment that is tantamount to civil death and in some ways parallels the threefold humiliation of Shylock at the end of the play: losing his bond, his goods and his ethnic and religious identity. The cause of this maltreatment is doubtless to be found in the suitors’ (like Shylock’s) ethnic alterity. If Morocco judges by colour (gold) so does Portia (black): her devastating parting couplet, another sentence, is: ‘A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go. / Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (78–9). The repudiated Morocco exits, with or without his death’s head.

The portrait of a blinking idiot The same considerations regarding ethnic, or at least national alterity, apply to the Prince of Arragon, who, in 2.9, chooses



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the silver casket and is thus similarly sentenced to a triple punishment. As with Morocco, Arragon has two texts to interpret, the inscription and the scroll. Guided by the inscription telling him he will get what he deserves (as much as to say that the contents of the casket will reflect his true value), he proudly ‘assume[s] desert’ (50) and opts for silver, the metal of lesser coinage than the angel. Arragon finds not a skull but a picture, the picture of another head – alas not Portia’s: What’s here? the portrait of a blinking idiot, Presenting me a schedule! I will read it. (2.9.53–4) Shakespeare’s use of the relatively technical term ‘portrait’, a word that he adopts only here, is surely ironical? The term would more properly apply to the winning painting of Portia, not to the fool’s head he discovers (Fig. 25). Yet in adopting it, Arragon – probably accustomed to having his portrait painted – implicitly admits that the picture has captured his likeness: it is, indeed, a portrait, namely his own. Looking at the fool’s head, he sees his own reflected image, as Portia’s caustic comment confirms: ‘O, these deliberate fools!’ (79). Arragon’s portrait, or perhaps self-portrait, is again presumably a miniature, another handheld prop like the skull. And, indeed, the fool’s head is a variant of the death’s head as a vanitas image, since only fools are unaware of the vanity of human ambition and avarice in the face of death. The portrait presents Arragon a ‘schedule’ or scroll, an essential part of the memento mori iconographic convention, presumably in this case an inscription within the picture, transforming it into another imagetext. The scroll confirms the role of the picture as mirror image: ‘There be fools alive iwis, / Silvered o’er, and so was this’ (67–8); the past tense here may be ominous for the Prince. Arragon, like Morocco, chooses a form of death, not in the Freudian paradox of embracing death in order to overcome it, but on the contrary going philosophically towards it (‘Sweet adieu’). On exiting, Arragon has at least the honesty to admit his own role as buffoon:

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FIG. 25  Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (attrib.), Laughing Fool: oil on panel, c. 1500



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With one fool’s head I came to woo, But I go away with two. (74–5) Here, he is evoking the traditional popular English and Northern European iconography of two loggerheads, often figured as a fool holding another fool’s head on a stick. This is varied in Twelfth Night in Feste’s ‘picture of we three’ (2.3.15–16), a representation of two loggerheads accompanied again by the ‘schedule’ or inscription ‘we three’, the third fool being the beholder (see p. 276). Arragon is confronted by the specular picture of ‘we two’, being shown, as he recognizes, his own singular likeness. Shakespeare’s Venice turns out again to be the venue of English art, in this case ‘low’ art. A final consideration on Arragon’s portrait regards another of the scroll’s rhyming couplets: Some there be that shadows kiss; Such have but a shadow’s bliss. (65–6) These two verses underline the vanitas motif, namely the illusory nature of human wishes, but at the same time evoke Plato’s parable of the cave (see pp. 207–10). Arragon pursues a shadow, the hope of success, but he himself – with his title, his riches and his ambition – is a mere shadow, like the portrait he finds in the silver casket.

v. Fair Portia’s counterfeit As for Bassanio, his choice of the lead casket in 3.2 takes place in a context that powerfully foregrounds – verbally, musically and iconographically – the theme of mortality. First Portia, prior to his choice, offers metaphorically her own eye not as organ of perception or as object of the gaze but as Bassanio’s final resting place, recalling Morocco’s image of the golden bed:

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my eye shall be the stream And wat’ry death-bed for him. (3.2.46–7) Portia creates a memento mori image in which her eye, again like the eye of Morocco’s death’s head, becomes a container, the coffin of Bassanio, should he – like Morocco and Arragon – lose the challenge. The theme of dying in the eye is further underlined in the song accompanying Bassanio’s decision: It [fancy] is engendered in the eye, With gazing fed, and fancy dies in the cradle where it lies. (66–8) In this case, fancy, or superficial desire, born in the gaze (of the lover or of the beloved) dies in infancy in its own cradle, which thus becomes yet another mortuary container. Such moralistic reflections are sometimes read as clues to aid Bassanio in his choice, since the coffin–lead association is conventional. At the same time, they constitute an explicit Platonic discourse on the gaze, not only warning Bassanio not to exercise his vision on objects of immediate desire, such as precious metals, but to avoid the mortal error of exchanging the container for the contained, and thus to look beyond the casket for the true object of the quest, Portia. Which, as Portia herself underlines, signifies finding her picture: Away, then! I am locked in one of them: If you do love me, you will find me out. (40–1) Portia, once again echoing Morocco, identifies her person with her portrait (‘I am locked’), as if to say not only her likeness but her very self has been ‘captured’ in the winning container. The casket, meanwhile, becomes the prison in which she is constrained: perhaps the prison of uncertainty and anxiety, the prison of a desire that she dare not express and also of a knowledge – namely in which casket her picture is to be found – that she is forbidden to divulge. True love will direct Bassano’s gaze beyond the container to the contained,



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according to the Platonic principle whereby the truth is always hidden from superficial view. After such considerations, the least Bassanio can do is reflect on the deceptiveness of outward representations (‘So may the outward shows be least themselves, / The world is still deceived with ornament’, 73–4). Before choosing, he, in turn, develops the vanitas theme into a full-blown, baroque and somewhat macabre conceit on beauty as the object of the gaze: Look on beauty, And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight, Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it: So are those crisped snaky golden locks, Which maketh such wanton gambols with the wind Upon supposed fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulchre. (88–96) Bassanio’s rather grotesque allegory on false beauty acquired through cosmetics and a golden-coloured wig made up of Gorgon-like snakes, is somewhat dangerous in the circumstances, first because it recalls his earlier description of Portia in 1.1 (‘her sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece’, 169–70), and then because on the Elizabethan stage Portia was played precisely by a male actor wearing heavy make-up and golden-coloured wig. Bassanio associates the wig with death, its original owner being in the grave, again linking Portia with the memento mori theme. The problem is to distinguish the false Portia, a mere bewigged death’s head, from the true Portia, whose portrait, however, lies hidden in a coffin-like container: a literally mortal choice between death disguised as beauty and beauty disguised as death. Perhaps not surprisingly, given these premises, he opts for deathly lead. On opening the lead casket, Bassanio discovers, or so he believes, not a representation but the thing itself – as Morocco had predicted – namely another and altogether identical

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version of Portia, confirming her claim that she herself is locked in the container. bassanio [Opens the leaden casket.] What find I here? Fair Portia’s counterfeit! (3.2.114–15) The word ‘counterfeit’ here is highly ambiguous. Initially it has the sense of perfect copy or duplicate, a miraculous appropriation of Portia’s person (compare Hamlet’s ‘The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’, 3.4.52). The perception of more than human skill in literally reproducing Portia is confirmed by Bassanio’s ekphrasis, which is initially Shakespeare’s most eulogistic appreciation of a painter’s abilities in portrayal: What demi-god Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes? Or whether riding on the balls of mine Seem they in motion? Here are severed lips Parted with sugar breath; so sweet a bar Should sunder such sweet friends. (115–20) The focus on the eyes as chief locus of the illusionistic life of the portrait is in keeping with the canons of miniature painting; in his ‘Art of limning’ (c. 1600), the royal miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard underlines this point: So Chiefly the drawer should observe the eyes in his pictures … for the eye is the life of the picture. (Hilliard 1983: 24) The eye, subject and object of the gaze, is at once the true test of the portraitist’s skill and the place of the beholder’s enchantment.



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The portraitist as miracle worker Bassanio’s description is a literary as well as iconographic performance, recalling Petrarch’s much imitated Sonnet 77 on a (possibly imaginary) portrait of the beloved Laura by the fourteenth-century Sienese artist Simone Martini:4 But certainly my Simon was in Paradise, whence comes this noble lady; there he saw her and portrayed her on paper, to attest down here to her lovely face. The work is one of those which can be imagined only in Heaven, not here among us, where the body is a veil to the soul. (1979: 176) Petrarch’s invention of the ekphrastic sonnet that compliments the sitter Laura by hyperbolically praising the painter Martini created a metapictorial poetic genre that was destined to enjoy a long cultural life, especially in Italy and above all in Renaissance Venice. The Petrarchan trope of deifying the portraitist for his uncanny ability to capture the lady’s heavenly beauty and pure soul is taken up in several sonnets by Aretino on Titian’s portraits, for example the lost painting of Venetian aristocrat Elisabetta Querini Massola (c. 1540): Titian immortal man, has portrayed [the] semblance [of her mind and soul] in her proud brow; such a painting is no less true than truth. (Land 1994: 90) Bassanio’s praise is located securely within this ekphrastic and eulogistic poetic tradition. Like Petrarch, he idolatrizes the sitter by deifying the portraitist. He too focuses on the impossible achievement of a perfect figuration of her facial features, which he lists in a poetic blazon. He devotes his initial praise to the portrayal of Portia’s golden hair, a recurrent object of attention and desire in the play:

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Here, in her hairs, The painter plays the spider and hath woven A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men, Faster than gnats in cobwebs. (120–3) The portrait’s marvellous mimetic powers are all the more surprising because accomplished (unlike Martini’s and Titian’s portraits) within the confines of a portrait miniature. Shakespeare is probably endeavouring here to render verbally the extraordinary attention to fine detail that contemporary English miniaturists, notably Nicholas Hilliard, managed to achieve in the very limited space at their disposal, a skill expressed typically in their representation of hair, as in Hilliard’s portraits of Elizabeth I (see Fig. 26). There is again a certain danger in this description. The golden mesh strongly suggests the golden fleece, recalling Bassanio’s description at 1.1.169–70, and reminding us that Portia is also a monetary prize, just as she was for Morocco. At the same time, the image is uncomfortably close to Bassanio’s earlier metaphor of the Gorgon snakes, especially since her hair’s ability to trap men suggests a fatal Medusa-like power. And if the painted hair is an attraction for men, it may not be so different from the meretricious bewigged beauty that he condemned earlier. The picture begins to assume different connotations from the miraculous duplicate it first appeared to embody. Bassanio then goes back to the subject of Portia’s eyes, which in the original possess a blinding power – another Gorgon-like quality – making the painter’s achievement still more miraculous, again within the Petrarchan trope of the pictorial sublime: But her eyes! How could he see to do them? Having made one, Methinks it should have power to steal both his And leave itself unfurnished. (123–6) The problem for the painter, as for the beholder, is to survive the encounter with the sitter’s gaze.



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FIG. 26 Nicholas Hilliard, Elizabeth I: watercolour on vellum pasted on card, 1572

The limits of limning At this point, however, at the apex of Bassanio’s complimentary Petrarchan mode, he suddenly and radically changes tone and attitude towards the painting. Far from being, as it has so far

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seemed to be, a magical homeopathic appropriation of the sitter, the portrait now becomes a false simulacrum, a counterfeit in the more modern sense of ‘spurious imitation’ (OED): Yet look how far The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow In underprizing it, so far this shadow Doth limp behind the substance. (126–9) The language here is once again Platonic: the picture is no longer a replica but a mere shadow, a simulacrum that falsifies the truth. The speech – albeit still in the Petrarchan mode – no longer resembles Aretino’s eulogies of Titian, but rather recalls Torquato Tasso’s critique of the Florentine artist Filippo Paladini in three poems on a portrait of Marfisa d’Este, in which the poet complains of the painter’s inability to portray adequately the sitter’s dazzling outer and inner beauty: the good painter has attempted in vain to enclose a great light in a small canvas and overcome by her sovereign beauty, which both wounds and cures, has depicted only her sweet air and beautiful coloring. (Land 1994: 92) Paladini, unlike Simone Martini, has not accomplished the divine task of mimesis of the heavenly, or – unlike Portia’s portraitist in the first part of Bassanio’s discourse – the miracle of withstanding her ‘wounding’ gaze, with the result that he is able to capture only her external appearance. Bassanio, changing his mind, finds the portrait similarly superficial in its mimesis. Bassanio’s self-contradictory ekphrasis reflects in part – from the fictional and cultural ‘elsewhere’ of Shakespeare’s Belmont – early modern English ambivalence towards the image, veering between the opposite ideological poles of idolatry and iconoclasm. On the one hand, the picture was sacrilegious in daring to appropriate the likeness of the holy, such as the face of Christ: in Bassanio’s case the artist has dared to achieve a perfect reproduction of the sacred face of



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Portia, thereby becoming himself a ‘demigod’. On the other hand, the image was capable merely of surface imitation, of capturing the appearance but not, as Tasso says of Paladini and as Ben Jonson says of Shakespeare’s picture in the Folio, the subject’s wit. There is here an implicit paragone between the art of painting and the written text, in which the word seems to come out on top (see pp. 93–4). As if to underline the point, Bassanio now turns precisely to the written word, the scroll, which again has the function of verbal interpretation of the image: Here’s the scroll, The continent and summary of my fortune. (129–30) The scroll is another container (‘continent’) that will explain his destiny, perhaps superfluously in his case. Here, as elsewhere in the play’s many texts, from the will of Portia’s father to Shylock’s merry bond, the written document has literally the last word. The image acquires definitive significance only when glossed by the accompanying text.

Ecce mulier Following Bassanio’s self-deconstructing speech, Portia diverts his gaze and his thoughts from the portrait to her own person: You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, Such as I am. (149–50) Portia may appear to be a speaking version of the portrait, but, in reality, she speaks directly for herself (‘You see me’ [my emphasis]), reclaiming Bassanio’s visual attention. Where Aretino claimed that his sonnets replaced utterance on behalf of Titian’s sitters, who – although so realistically portrayed as to appear alive – would otherwise have remained forever silent (Freedman 1995: 26), Portia bestows utterance on her

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own picture by taking over from it visually and verbally. She offers her person (I–me) as its own true representation, a kind of corporeal self-portrait composed in the present without the mediation of the painter (compare Olivia’s ‘portrait’ in Twelfth Night, pp. 283–8). This reverses the proxy process whereby the portrait becomes surrogate of the sitter. Portia, proxy of a surrogate of herself, is at once sitter, body, voice, person, visual representation and poetry, rendering the picture itself – which has fulfilled its temporary substitutive role – quite redundant. Portia’s self-presentation sounds like a kind of ecce homo, or rather ecce mulier: ‘this is the woman’, to paraphrase St John’s Gospel, in her full humanity.5 This possible echo of the Gospel takes up but reverses the earlier pseudo-religious and Petrarchan discourse of deification. Portia – still in complimentary Petrarchan mode – denies her attributed divinity, and thus her right to idolatry, and professes instead her inadequacy as object and prize of Bassanio’s quest: Though for myself alone I would not be ambitious in my wish, To wish myself much better, yet, for you I would be trebled twenty times myself; A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich … (3.2.150–4) In presenting her ‘standing’ person as its own representation, moreover, Portia carries out a conceptual and cultural passage from the typically English miniature (in the casket) to the full-size free-standing portrait, of the kind practised by Titian and other Italian portraitists. Historically, this passage also mirrors what took place in English painting during the 1590s, when portrait miniatures began to give way to large-scale portraits (Cooper 2012: 92). What we see onstage is a kind of full-size blow-up of what Bassanio claims to perceive in the miniature (Fig. 27):



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FIG. 27  ‘You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand’: Titian, ‘La Bella’, 1536: engraved by Antonio Muzzi

The optics of this passage involve an imaginary double focus with a two-way process of miniaturization and magnification respectively, while the subject of the image remains stable. This is the only scene in Shakespeare in which the ekphrasis regards the picture of one of the dramatis personae present onstage and in which the ‘picture’ gets to answer back. Portia’s demand to represent – and be – herself suggests another paragone, this time between the picture and the player acting the female protagonist. Shakespeare’s audience knows that the ‘real’ Portia onstage is another counterfeit, an illusion created by the male actor wearing a ‘golden’ wig, but implicit in the passage from portrait to person is the claim that only theatre is able to offer a true representation of the subject in the round and in the flesh,

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quite distant from the constrained and silent stasis of the painted image.

vi. Memento mori in the Ghetto The play’s rich discourse of painting, and especially the iconographic genre of the vanitas or memento mori picture, contaminates the other plot of the comedy, the Antonio– Shylock ‘merry bond’ narrative. In the first scene, in response to Antonio’s inexplicable melancholy, Salarino produces a long and decidedly baroque allegory in two parts, in which the merchant’s ships are figured as a series of pictures or shows. First they are theatrical representations (‘pageants’) of Jason-like argosies, akin to the boats or floats used in processions on the canals in Venetian waterborne festivals, which, as Evelyn Korsch notes, ‘were of crucial importance for Venetian festival culture as media of political iconography’ (2013: 94):6 Your mind is tossing on the ocean, There where your argosies with portly sail Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea, Do overpeer the petty traffickers That curtsy to them, do them reverence As they fly by them with their woven wings. (1.1.7–13) The pageant ships are anthropomorphized, seen behaving like enriched citizens of the middling sort (‘burghers’) such as merchants going about their twice-daily business in the Rialto. The merchant Antonio, like Bassanio, has embarked with his argosies on a quest for the golden fleece, in his case commercial riches, but it may prove to be a staged illusion. The anthropomorphized ships then turn out to be the subject of a vanitas picture, complete with hour glass, like Tudor portraits of English merchants shown with memento mori symbols (see above, Fig. 24):



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I should not see the sandy hour-glass run But I should think of shallows and of flats, And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand, Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs To kiss her burial. (24–8) The somewhat gruesome allusion to the doomed and be-ribbed skeletal body of the ship anticipates Morocco’s ‘rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave’ (2.7.51), and is again prophetic of Antonio’s possible destiny at the hands of Shylock. This anatomical image is further developed in Salarino’s conceit of the cargo oozing from the side of the vessel: dangerous rocks Which, touching but my gentle vessel’s side, Would scatter all her spices on the stream, Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks … (30–3) This image, as Line Cottegnies has noted (2014), recalls illustrations of the corpse losing its entrails in Renaissance medical treatises.7 The upshot of Salarino’s maritime and mercantile iconography is that all worldly goods, including Antonio’s fleet in which all his wealth is ventured, are mere vanitas: And, in a word, but even now worth this, And now worth nothing? (33–4) This less than comforting parable is supposedly designed to console the anxious Antonio by reminding him not only of the futility of human riches, but also of the Christian doctrine whereby worldly success is no guarantee of salvation, perhaps the contrary. Salarino’s language is echoed by Shylock in his puritanical repudiation of false representations such as masques and of the varnished faces of Carnival. Not by chance there is a distinct parallelism between Portia’s caskets and Shylock’s casket of gold, which his daughter Jessica takes with her

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when she elopes: ‘Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains’ she tells Lorenzo (2.6.34) – worth thy pains because of what it contains, i.e. gold. Shylock’s reaction to his daughter’s elopement is to imagine Jessica herself as a bejeweled death’s head in a casket-like container: I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! (80–1) The image of Jessica’s skull containing a jewel evokes contemporary memento mori jewellery in which the death’s head, set in gold, was endowed with precious stones for eyes (rather than ears, as in Shylock’s grim fantasy). In the end, however, it is Shylock himself rather than Jessica who turns into a vanitas emblem: stripped of half his jewels and his gold, and obliged to leave the other half to Jessica and Lorenzo, in addition to losing his ethnic and religious identity, he suffers material and social death. ‘I am not well’, he tells the Doge (4.1.392) as he makes his final exit.

Beholder beware Looking at pictures and describing visual objects are activities that involve many of the main characters in Shakespeare’s Venice. Pictures, and especially portraits, play a central role in the casket plot, but also contaminate the bond plot. In the main, what we are shown are English pictures in Venetian guise, but they nonetheless derive their authority from the prestige of Renaissance Venetian painting. Endowed with talismanic powers, they are signs of destiny, fatal pointers towards success or failure, salvation or damnation, love or death. They are also the most powerful expressions of the memento mori theme in a play dominated by the shadow of death. Venetians and strangers alike look at them or ignore them, at their peril.

4 Hamlet as portrait: A shadow’s shadow

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. PLATO, THE REPUBLIC, 515 (IN PLATO 1991)

it is but a shadow’s shadow HAMLET, 2.2.260 [F]

i. Shakespeare’s achievements, Hamlet’s properties Among the relics that Mary Hornby – custodian of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in the early nineteenth century – exhibited to the public were: the sword with which Shakespeare played Hamlet [sic]; a piece of carving representing David slaying Goliath; and a gold embroidered box supposedly presented to Shakespeare by the King of Spain in return for a goblet of considerable worth (Schoenbaum 1991: 47). Hornby’s apparently ramshackle gathering of Shakespearian knickknacks had its own associative logic: together they denoted the Bard as a collector of art or at least of artefacts, including his old stage props, and they identified him, as author, actor and collector, with Hamlet.

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The Birthplace relics may have been a distant echo of the commemorative funeral ‘achievements’ traditionally hung over the tombs of great English warriors. Shakespeare himself and his contemporaries could visit such achievements, notably those of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral and of Henry V in Westminster Abbey. Hamlet’s sword, in particular, may have recalled Henry V’s battle-scarred weapon on display in the Abbey since 1422, and to which Shakespeare himself refers directly in his history play: ‘His bruised helmet and his bended sword’ (Henry V, 5.0.18). In the light of the heroic English ‘achievement’ tradition, it is perhaps ironical that Shakespeare should have been remembered through Hamlet’s sword, which the Prince of Denmark (unlike Henry V) fails to put to effective use until the final scene, ‘achieving’ only death. In reality, however, by Shakespeare’s day funeral achievements were created even for men who had never wielded a sword during their entire lifetime.1 Mary Hornby’s fragment of a carving representing David and Goliath is another achievement, analogous to such iconic mementos as the decorative silk-lined shield of Henry V (see Bate and Thornton 2012: 108), and perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare’s own supposed artistic achievements as designer precisely of tournament shields (see p. 39). The Birthplace souvenirs were all presumably false, but were taken by paying visitors to be the real thing, or perhaps it made little difference. They elected Shakespeare not only as national treasure but as collector of treasures in his own right, authorizing Hornby as custodian and continuator of the Bard’s own gallery. The identification of Shakespeare the collector with Hamlet is not altogether arbitrary. Indeed, the Prince of Denmark himself might well have appreciated Hornby’s display of his sword and other mementos, being himself something of a collector of artefacts, props and relics. The most iconic moments in Hamlet all show the protagonist putting things on public display: the above-mentioned sword, on which he swears before the ghost and with which he kills Polonius, fails to kill Claudius and duels with Laertes; the book that he reads or pretends to read before Polonius; the



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skull given to him by the gravedigger; and the two pictures – representing not David and Goliath but Hamlet senior and Claudius – that he shows Gertrude. Two of Hamlet’s letters, moreover, are shown and read onstage in his absence (whereas Mary Hornby could not display her autograph Shakespeare letter, because, she claimed, it had been stolen: see Thomas 2012: 102).

Hamlet as portrait The association of Shakespeare/Hamlet with pictures and other iconic objects reflects the early nineteenth-century perception of the tragedy. Hornby’s illustrious contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge viewed Hamlet as a primarily pictorial enterprise, and in particular as an embodiment of the art of portraiture: What did Shakespeare mean when he drew the character of Hamlet? … My belief is that he always regarded his story, before he began to write, much in the same light as a painter regards his canvas, before he begins to paint – as a mere vehicle for his thoughts – as the ground upon which he was to work. What then was the point to which Shakespeare directed himself in Hamlet? He intended to portray a person. (2004: 124) Hamlet, for Coleridge, is above all a portrait of Hamlet. This painterly reading throws light on, among other things, the contemporary taste for iconography depicting both Hamlet and Shakespeare. The early nineteenth century saw a steep increase in portraits of famous actors playing Hamlet, from Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Kemble to Daniel Maclise’s Kean and in depictions of the Prince in illustrated editions of the play (Sillars 2008). At the same time, Mary Hornby’s Regency England saw new ways of associating the memory of Shakespeare himself with graphic objects and artefacts, especially the veritable flood of popular images of the Bard

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reproduced in the form of paintings, etchings, crockery, embroidery and even furniture. In this respect, the tragedy anticipates ironically its own iconographic afterlife: the popularizing of the icons of Hamlet and his creator finds a direct parallel in the Prince’s own sardonic allusion to the flourishing market for miniature portraits of Claudius in 2.2 (‘his picture in little’, 304; see p. 216). Coleridge, Hornby and their contemporaries were not mistaken in the prominence they gave to the iconic aspects of Hamlet. In addition to lending itself readily to popular iconography, it is itself the most consistently pictorial of Shakespeare’s tragedies, both in its stage action and in its verbal discourse. Not only are Hamlet and Hamlet almost obsessively preoccupied with visual objects, but pictures, especially portraits, are their primary paradigm for representation at large. Hamlet’s destiny in the play is strictly bound up with paintings and other visual images, of himself and of others. The Prince of Denmark is especially concerned with the question that Mary Hornby’s relics prefer not to pose, namely the veracity of visual representations: portraits, dumb-shows and the rest. Iconography, particularly commemorative iconography, fatally conditions Hamlet’s choices in the tragedy. This chapter investigates the pervasive presence of pictures in Hamlet, and enquires into the issue that proves to be of literally vital significance to its protagonist, namely the truth of images.

ii. I know not ‘seems’: Hamlet and the simulacrum Hamlet is suspicious of signifiers. In his celebrated reprimand to his mother in 1.2, he categorically refutes all outward modes of representation: ‘Seems’, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’ ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, cold mother,



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Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (76–86) Hamlet is sceptical of forms, moods and shapes in general, but especially of visual representations, the kinds of ‘show’ that deceive the eye and the mind. All visible forms may prove to be only shows, mere simulacra: they ‘seem’, but they are not what they seem. They signify (for example, grief) but they do not – to use Hamlet’s own somewhat technical term – denote, as in the case of Claudius and perhaps even Gertrude, where there is no actual grief to denote, only the empty sign of grief. As such, visual representations are like stage objects (swords and the rest) or like dramatic actions that a man might play. One might object that Hamlet’s iconoclastic argument is self-contradictory, not just because he himself is a character that a man might play, but also and especially because in his tragedy – and indeed in this very scene – he puts on ‘show’ the very visual signifying forms he denounces: he is evidently wearing the inky cloak that he says fails to denote him, just as his own visage in this scene is presumably subject to the kind of ‘dejected haviour’ he disdains. But Hamlet, who is nothing if not self-critical, claims no exemption from the general condition he denounces: on the contrary, he is himself visible form, possibly a sign, possibly a mere simulacrum (for example, of his father’s son or of what a father’s son should be: ‘I, the son of a dear father murdered’, 2.2.518ff.). As Jean Baudrillard observes of simulacra in general, ‘The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point’ (1994: 6). The tragedy of Hamlet unfolds along the borderline between signs of something and signs of nothing.

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The central object of this aporia between visual signs and empty simulacra, between signs of something and signs of nothing, is the ghost. Later, in 1.2, Hamlet claims to have seen the ghost, but only ‘in my mind’s eye’ (1.2.184): an interiorized image without external (im)material form. The audience, on the other hand, has already seen the outward form of the ghost, while the issue of the relationship between this external form and the ghost’s actual identity has already been posed by Marcellus and Horatio in the opening scene: marcellus Is it not like the king? horatio As thou art to thyself. (1.1.57–8) What does it mean to be ‘like’ oneself? Similar to oneself? Identical to oneself? Marcellus is like himself because he is identical both outwardly and – so he and Horatio firmly believe – ontologically to himself. The ghost on the other hand may be like the king, indeed outwardly identical to the king, but for now it is ontologically identical only to itself. Or perhaps to nothing at all (‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy’, 1.1.22). Being identical is not equivalent to identity, or even to having an identity. To be ‘like’ may be merely to seem. When, in his first actual encounter with the ghost, Hamlet tells it ‘Thou com’st in such a questionable shape’ (1.4.43), he uses the same noun as in his reprimand to Gertrude (‘shapes of grief’). The ghost’s visible shape is ‘questionable’ both because Hamlet earnestly desires to question it but also because its outward form, like all perceived forms, is of dubious identity. To what extent is it like itself, or indeed is itself? Is it a sign of something (his father), a sign of something other (a diabolical counterfeit or ‘goblin damned’, 1.4.40), or a sign of nothing? This is the founding question in the tragedy. As Derrida puts it in The Spectres of Marx, ‘What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the



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thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up?’ (2006: 10). Hamlet’s problems with simulacra re-emerge in his encounter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 2.2 (at least in the Folio text). Hamlet tells his old classmates of his ‘bad dreams’, prompting Guildenstern to reflect in somewhat malignant philosophical mode – shades of their university days – that ‘the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream’ (256–7 [F]).2 As much as to say that any aspirations to power Hamlet may have are purely illusory, given the current political status quo in Denmark. Hamlet, sidestepping the personal and political implications of this, extends the reflection to the more general consideration that, ‘A dream itself is but a shadow’ (258 [F]), i.e. it is one of the many forms that simulacra may take. Rosencrantz, insisting instead on his political discourse, adds that ambition is ‘but a shadow’s shadow’ (260 [F]). Hamlet concludes drastically, with all-levelling philosophical and political ferocity: ‘Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows’ (261–2 [F]). All is vanity: it is not merely ambition that is a shadow, but power itself, social status and all worldly forms and aspirations.

Hamlet’s cave Hamlet’s exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 2.2 strongly recalls another classic dialogue on shadows. In Book VII of Plato’s The Republic, Socrates tells the young Glaucon a parable regarding prisoners in a cave, chained and unable to move, who can see only shadows projected onto the wall by flames (see Fig. 28): [Socrates] Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

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[Glaucon] I see. [Socrates] And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. [Glaucon] You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. [Socrates] Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? ... To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. (Plato 1991, 514) Socrates’s allegory of the cave is designed to illustrate ‘how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened’. The unenlightened – i.e. nearly all of us (‘like ourselves’) – take the shadows of images to be the truth.

FIG. 28 Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, The Cave of Plato: engraving by Jan Saenredam, c. 1603



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Hamlet shares Socrates’s belief that the phenomenal world is made up merely of shadows, not to be confused with the truth. He also adopts Plato’s metaphor of the world as a prison in which we are unable to see beyond the walls within which we are confined: hamlet Denmark’s a prison. rosencrantz Then is the world one. hamlet A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons – Denmark being one o’ the worst. (2.2.242–6) Plato returns to the theme of shadows in Book IX, in a political discourse highly relevant to Hamlet’s dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on ambition and power, and indeed to the politics of Hamlet in general. Socrates contrasts the positions of king and tyrant: [T]he desires of the ambitious soul, as well as of the covetous, have an inferior satisfaction. … The desires of love and tyranny are the farthest from law, and those of the king are nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two spurious ones: the tyrant goes beyond even the latter; he has run away altogether from law and reason. Nor can the measure of his inferiority be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the third removed from the oligarch, and has therefore, not a shadow of his pleasure, but the shadow of a shadow only. (587) The tyrant’s satisfaction in his power is the simulacrum of a simulacrum; true pleasure and true power are reserved only to the legitimate king. This is a good summary of the political situation in Hamlet, in which the tyrant Claudius fails to achieve either the satisfaction or the legal authority of a true king (such as Hamlet senior). It is striking, moreover, that Rosencrantz’s discourse on ambition echoes Plato verbatim

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– ‘a shadow’s shadow’ (Plato: σκευαστῶν σκιάς) – although it is Hamlet and not the opportunistic Rosencrantz who makes an intellectual and emotional investment in the notion of the simulacrum. From this point of view, indeed, Hamlet can be read as a dramatization of the allegory of the cave, even if Shakespeare had probably never read Plato. The tragedy interrogates the truthfulness of images, the signs and simulacra of power, and more specifically the visual representation of tyranny (the ‘painted tyrant’, see pp. 224–6).

Hamlet’s idols Historically closer to Shakespeare and Hamlet, in early seventeenth century England, Francis Bacon also warned – from a quite different, empirical perspective – of the deceptiveness of images. Bacon’s concept of the idols of the mind, i.e. unfounded beliefs that cloud or confuse our knowledge of external reality, was first introduced in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and developed in The New Organon (1620): ‘The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein … so beset men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance’ (New Organon, xxxviii). The idol, from the Greek eidolon, ‘image’, is in the first instance a false visual representation: ‘The idols … are either images, or notions derived from images, of individual things’ (see Corneanu and Vermeir 2012). Of Bacon’s various kinds of idol, particularly pertinent to Hamlet and his simulacra are the so-called idols of the cave (shades of Plato), namely ‘the idols of the individual man. For everyone … has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires’ (xlii). This category of false images might be applied to Hamlet, in his errors of interpretation of the world around him, but equally to others in their vain attempts to interpret Hamlet himself.



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Of equal interest in the context of Hamlet’s problems with representation are the so-called idols of the theatre: ‘Lastly, there are Idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater, because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion’ (xliv). Such philosophical idols are, as Hamlet would put it, actions that a man might play rather than truths, being based on false systems of belief. There are, as Hamlet says to Horatio, more things – but also less things – in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in his philosophy. At the same time, the play itself is literally an idol of the theatre, a fiction, which has at its centre other fictions: the First Player’s performance, the dumbshow, the Mousetrap – ‘but so many stage plays’.

Fantasticall pictures A probable source for Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet’s cognitive and semiotic scepticism are Montaigne’s Essays, first published in 1580 and made available in English, through John Florio’s great English translation, in 1603. Montaigne’s radical deconstruction of the sign-referent relationship regards above all words (words, words), as in his celebratory essay on Glory, with its fierce dismissal of empty names and empty name-givers: There is both the name, and the thing: the name, is a voyce which noteth, and signifieth the thing: the name, is neither part of the thing nor of substance: it is a strangerpiece ioyned to the thing, and from it. God who in and by himself is all fulnesse, and the tipe of all perfection, cannot inwardly be augmented, or encreased: yet by his name be encreased and augmented, by the blessing and praise which we give unto exteriour workes. … We are all hollow and

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emptie, and it is not with breath and words that we should fill our selves. We have neede of a more solide substance to repaire our selves. (359) Montaigne extends his critique of the sign, however, to all modes both of representation and of interpretation, as in his essay ‘Of Experience’, where the interpretation of ‘things’ is shown to be merely the interpretation of other interpretations: ‘There’s more adoe to interpret interpretations, than to interpret things … We doe but enter-glose ourselves’ (636) (on Shakespeare in relation to Montaigne’s semiotic scepticism, see Elam 1984: 171–2; on Shakespeare and Montaigne in general, see Greenblatt and Platt 2014). Montaigne addresses directly the question of visual representation, in the form of painting, in his essay ‘Of Friendship’, in which he expresses a Hamlet-like ambivalence towards the visual object: he appears initially to appreciate the skill of the painter, so much so that he wishes to imitate his art, but only, it emerges, as a way of filling a metaphorical space on the wall. Painting becomes a trope for the space-filling ‘monstrosity’ of his own art as essayist: Considering the proceeding of a Painters worke I have, a desire hath possessed mee to imitate him: He maketh choice of the most convenient place and middle of everie wall, there to place a picture, laboured with all his skill and sufficiencie; and all void places about it he filleth up with antike Boscage or Crotesko works; which are fantasticall pictures, having no grace, but in the variety and strangenesse of them. And what are these my compositions in truth, other than antike works and monstrous bodies, patched and hudled up together of divers members without any certaine or well ordered figure, having neither order, dependencie, or proportion, but casual and framed by chance? (89–90) Images are another way, like words, in which man disguises the vacuity of his own nature.



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The thing Hamlet’s problem, however, is that for all his semiotic scepticism he is obliged to entrust his self and his destiny to inauthentic signifiers, to the shoddy simulacra he refutes. Not only does he deploy a range of visually defined objects – skulls, swords, books, pictures – but he repeatedly draws our attention to them and to other dubious visual forms, too, especially through variations on the verb ‘look’: ‘Look here, upon this picture’; ‘Look you now, what follows’; ‘Look you, how pale he glares’; ‘Why, look you there! look, how it steals away!’. He may be disdainful of painting and paintings – both in the pictorial and in the cosmetic sense, as signs of falsity and immorality (‘I have heard of your paintings well enough’, 3.1.141; ‘her [Gertrude’s] paint an inch thick’, 5.1.183) – but he nevertheless attributes great importance to the portraits he shows his mother. And even if he rejects outward ‘haviour’, he necessarily and insistently relies on visual bodily and behavioural signals in interpreting people and events: ‘there is a kind of confession in your looks’ (of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 2.2.245); ‘I’ll observe his looks’ (of Claudius, 2.2.531); ‘Observe my uncle’ (3.2.76); ‘for, look you, how cheerfully my mother looks’ (3.2.119–20). At the same time Hamlet’s appearance, attitude and behaviour are, in turn, the objects of observation and interpretation throughout the play, something of which Hamlet – ‘The observed of all observers’ (3.1.153) – is fully aware and which he strategically exploits: ‘with a look so piteous in purport’ (2.1.79); ‘But, look, where sadly the poor wretch comes reading’ (2.2.165); ‘you do bend your eye on vacancy … Whereon do you look?’ (3.4.113–20). Hamlet equally depends on other kinds of signifier that are similarly untrustworthy. He is especially dependent on words (words, words), while expressing deep distrust towards the authenticity of verbal signifiers (‘[I] Must like a whore unpack my heart with words’, 2.2.520). Hamlet is simultaneously the most eloquent and the most logoclastic, as well as iconoclastic, of Shakespeare’s protagonists, a masterly deconstructor of the very verbal medium he exploits to such devastating effect.

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More paradoxically still, Hamlet chooses to verify the truth of the Ghost’s potentially deceptive form and words, and thus the justness of his own supposed revenge, by means of stage ‘actions’, of a mere theatrical ‘show’. Nowhere is Hamlet’s dilemma regarding the falsity and, on the contrary, inevitability of simulacra more striking than in his attitude to dramatic performance. His admiration for the player’s moving performance in 2.2 is proportionate to the fact that it is all for ‘nothing’, a mere ‘fiction’, a ‘dream of passion’ (and hence, in Hamlet’s terms, the shadow of passion). The player’s acting ability is, in Hamlet’s words, ‘monstrous’ (2.2.486), both because it is a show (Latin monstrāre, to show) and because it creates a ‘monster’ (monstrum), a chimera made out of nothing. Yet it is to this monstrous show that Hamlet turns in order to disclose the truth of his father’s murder. The play, as he famously affirms, is the thing. Unlike other kinds of activity or behaviour the stage performance is not an empty form or shape but the real ‘thing’, precisely because it is made out of nothing, the sign of an empty sign rather than the false simulacrum of a real object, and is thus only and truly itself. As Philip Sidney asserts in his Apology for Poetry (1595) with reference to dramatic poetry, ‘Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; … And therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true he lieth not’ (103). In the event, Hamlet produces not one but two versions of the ‘thing’. The first version of his play, the dumbshow, relies exclusively on visual signs, while the second draws on the mixed media of full dramatic performance. The dumbshow turns out to be semantically opaque, at least to one spectator: ophelia What means this, my lord? … Will ’a tell us what this show meant? (3.2.129–36) Ophelia’s bewilderment suggests that visual representation alone is not immediately readable, and requires the hermeneutic



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support of words, although Hamlet’s verbal gloss is not very helpful: hamlet Marry, this is munching mallico! It means mischief. (130–1) As Ophelia intuits, it is the second, mixed-media version of the Mousetrap that gives retrospective meaning to the visual business of the dumbshow: ophelia Belike this show imports the argument of the play. (132–3) Ophelia is not the only member of the audience to get the message only when the dialogue is added: Claudius, for whose benefit the play is performed, reacts only to the second version, although ironically he is specifically offended by the silent action of poison being poured through the king’s ear that had already been performed in the mute version. The staging of the plays seems to show that performance, a literal ‘idol of the theatre’, can instead be a powerful vehicle of truth, but that this truth emerges only from the dialogue between eidolon, the image, and logos, the word that sustains, glosses or undercuts the visual sign. Which is precisely what happens in the main tragedy of Hamlet.

iii. The politics of portraiture In addition to producing two dramatic performances, Hamlet also produces two pictures, for the benefit of his mother in the closet scene (3.4). The stage presence of the paintings, supposedly portraits of the two kings, renders literally visible the play’s abiding concern with images. The protagonist first introduces the play’s recurrent discourse of pictures in his scathing reference to the portraits of Claudius:

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my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little. (2.2.300–3) Hamlet is alluding to power politics in Denmark, but also to the cultural politics of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Portraits ‘in little’ of Elizabeth I – presumably like those of Hamlet senior – were highly popular, especially in the latter years of her reign. When, in 1603, the sovereign changed (James I [James VI of Scotland], the first Stuart king, ascending the English throne following Elizabeth’s death) so, in consequence, did the object of royal portraits. Miniaturists such as Nicholas Hilliard rapidly adapted their art to accommodate the new royal face to be limned in little,3 Hilliard, so much so, that in the latter part of his career, he produced mainly ‘run-of-the-mill multiple images of James I and Anne of Denmark’, the King and Queen (Hearn 1995: 141). This is not to suggest that through Hamlet – either in the 1604 second Quarto or the 1623 Folio texts – Shakespeare is denigrating James or comparing him with either Claudius or (unfavourably) with his predecessor, Elizabeth I, especially since the tragedy was originally composed earlier than 1603. It simply notes that the role of royal miniatures and their potentially changeable sitters was a matter of public consciousness at the turn of the seventeenth century. There are two further issues involved in the ‘picture in little’ passage. The first is the ‘market’ value of the miniature as object of exchange and as token of status. As Roy Strong argues, the purpose of Elizabethan pictures was ‘not aesthetic but dynastic … For Bess of Hardwick, as for most other Elizabethans, the idea of a painting as a work of art perhaps never existed; for her it was primarily an expression of rank and class’ (1969: 44). The miniature was a precious object not so much on account of its artistic value but on account of the social rank of the sitter. The problem for Hamlet is that the King’s status is usurped, so that his portrait is false coinage



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– a ‘counterfeit’ – grotesquely overvalued on the artistic and monetary exchange market. The second issue has to do with the sheer size of the painting in relation to the demands of theatrical performance. The paradox for Hamlet is that ‘miniature’ players – child actors – can compete with fully grown actors in representing adult characters; this is clearer in the First Folio text, where Hamlet’s ‘in little’ comment is immediately preceded by an exchange with Rosencrantz: rosencrantz But there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases … hamlet What? Are they children? … Do the boys carry it away? rosencrantz Ay, that they do, my lord – Hercules and his load too. (2.2.337–60 [F]) The reference to portraiture in the context of a dialogue on the Jacobean theatrical scene suggests Hamlet’s political paragone of the arts of portraiture and performance: the child companies, actors in little, have taken the place of their elders, just as Claudius has usurped the position of his elder (and better) brother. Hamlet sees a world of portraiture. In the final scene, in expressing his repentance for his earlier mistreatment of Laertes, Hamlet belatedly sees the similarity between them – both of them young men intent on avenging dead fathers – through the trope of the portrait: But I am very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself, For by the image of my cause I see The portraiture of his. (5.2.75–8 [F]) The specular relationship between the two avenging sons raises the question of who is similar to (the image of) whom, or of which of the two is the other’s portrait. René Girard argues

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that ‘Like all victims of mimetic suggestion, Hamlet reverses the true hierarchy between the other and himself. He should say: “by the image of his cause I see the portraiture of mine”’ (2000: 279). Perhaps he should say it, but only according to a linear logic that is not his: for Hamlet the hierarchy between the image and its object, between the portrait and its subject, is decidedly problematic. He sees Laertes’s cause portrayed in his own, but also vice versa. Laertes may be the original, but he may equally be a copy, and the same is true for Hamlet himself. Or more properly, perhaps neither is the original: each is the image of a portrait, each the portrait of an image, simulacrum of a simulacrum.

iv. The painting of a sorrow It is one of the play’s several paradoxes that its chief iconoclast, apart from Hamlet himself, is Claudius, master of the counterfeit, and himself subject of ‘counterfeit’ portraits. On two occasions Claudius denounces, in a manner not unlike that of his nephew, the emptiness of outward forms, and he does so specifically through metaphors of painting. In 4.7, goading Laertes towards revenge on Hamlet, he pretends to place in doubt the sincerity of the young man’s grief (by analogy with his own false show of grief in 1.2): Laertes, was your father dear to you? Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart? (4.7.105–7) Claudius’s ‘painting’ allusion, appropriately enough in the context, is to funerary art. As Roland Mushat Frye argues, ‘[Claudius] is here referring to those crude and unconvincing figures of widows and children in stereotyped postures of mourning which adorned tombs in Tudor and early Stuart England. Beneath the stiff recumbent figure of the dead parent were ranged the equally stiff heirs as “weepers” or “sorrows”’



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(2014: 138). Such conventional weepers are ‘paintings’ both in the literal sense, because the carved or sculpted funerary figures were often painted in order to emphasize the living quality of their grief for the deceased, but also because they are false representations: they do not denote truly, as Hamlet would say. Claudius’s reference to insincere funerary art throws retrospective light on the earlier scene (3.1) of his own abortive effort to pray. His conscience pricked by the ‘thingness’ of Hamlet’s play, Claudius goes painstakingly through the motions of penitent prayer, commanding his reluctant body to carry out the appropriate ritualistic gestures (‘Bow, stubborn knees’, 3.3.70). He is obliged, however, to confess the emptiness of his pious pose and words, again through a painting metaphor: How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot’s cheek beautied with plastering art Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! (3.1.49–52) Here the adjective ‘painted’ has the primary Elizabethan meaning of ‘made up’ in the cosmetic sense, but his ‘word’ is also painted because it is an admittedly false representation, another mere simulacrum. It is ironical that Claudius experiences the very non-correspondence between outward behaviour and inner sentiment, the painting of a sorrow, that he later feigns to attribute to Laertes in 4.7. What the audience sees in this scene is a guilty man trying and failing to pray for forgiveness. What Hamlet comes across on his way to his mother’s closet is the image of a man at prayer. It is a further and more tragic irony in the scene that despite his scepticism towards signifiers, Hamlet falls straight into the trap of taking the outward form and shape of the praying Claudius (of all people) for the real thing. The ethical and perceptual structure of the episode is quite intricate. In the one scene in which Claudius is sincere (towards the audience), Hamlet accepts at face value the gesture that his

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uncle has already declared to be insincere. Hamlet’s timing, as usual, is unfortunate, since his perception of the image takes place during a hiatus of statuesque silence between Claudius’s opening confession and his final admission of the lack of referentiality of his prayers (‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go’, 97–8). What lends credibility to his uncle’s pose in Hamlet’s eyes – a final irony of the scene – is probably the very iconographic convention that Claudius himself disdains, the painting of a sorrow. Claudius’s posture visually echoes the tradition of paintings of men at prayer, notably in the Northern Renaissance. The best known of these pictures are the series of donor portraits by Hans Memling in the late fifteenth century, which show the sitters/commissioners in pious attitudes, their hands held prayerfully together as they gaze pensively into the distance. These portraits do not depict so much the act of prayer as the religious attitude of the sitter, as it were his predisposition to prayerfulness. There is no suggestion of actual hypocrisy in the portraits, but the pose, repeated over a series of paintings, takes on a polite ritual character to which Claudius is heir. In sixteenth-century England, the most significant graphic representation of a praying man is found in the Black Book of the Garter (1534),4 which includes an illumination of Henry VIII at prayer in his closet, kneeling (Claudius-like, but possibly with greater sincerity) before an altar on a cushioned prie-dieu under a canopy of blue and gold (Weir 2011: 134). Chronologically and culturally closer to Claudius and to the experience of Shakespeare’s first spectators were the very carved funeral effigies of kneeling figures at prayer to which Hamlet’s uncle alludes, which were common throughout early modern Europe, including England. The most impressive of these priant effigies were to be found in Catholic Southern Europe, for example the highly theatrical funerary sculpture of John I of Castile in Toledo Cathedral, or the ghostly alabaster figure of Peter the Cruel (1504) now in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. In England, despite the fact that many funeral effigies had been destroyed, others survived, albeit sometimes damaged, and they were in any



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case part of the cultural memory of Shakespeare’s audience. Indeed, despite Protestant reformist iconoclasm, the kneeling figure was a relatively recent aspect of funerary sculpture in England. As Nigel Llewellyn observes in his seminal study of English funeral monuments, Kneeling mourning figures were traditional figurations of the prayers said for the soul of the deceased; however, subject effigies did not kneel on medieval monuments, although contemporary kneeling figures keeping a vigil around the body of the deceased did appear elsewhere in Europe. Gradually, even tomb-subjects were shown kneeling and well before 1600 English monuments showed kneeling combinations of subjects, children, mourners and supporters set on, before, above, below and behind tomb chests and arches. (2000: 105) The English fashion for priant effigies was more or less contemporary with Shakespeare’s main career, in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth. Fine early seventeenth-century English examples of kneeling effigies include the monument to Richard Kingsmill (1602) in St Michael Church, Highclere, Hampshire5 (Llewellyn 2000: 66); the monument to Richard Cave (1606) in Stanford on Avon;6 and the canopied tomb of Lady Elizabeth Russell in the Church of All Saints, Bisham, Berkshire (c. 1609) – designed by the commemorated Lady herself and carved by members of the Cure family – showing her kneeling together with the sons and daughters of her two marriages (see Laoutaris 2014: 519). Particularly pertinent to matters Shakespearian is the somewhat earlier marble and alabaster sculpture (Fig. 29) of Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, shown kneeling in prayer by the tomb of his father in St Peter’s Church, Titchfield, Hampshire. The so-called Titchfield monument was erected in 1594, when Wriothesley was twenty-two. It has two specific if indirect Shakespearian connections. The first is that the same year, 1594, saw the publication of Shakespeare’s Venus and

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FIG. 29 Gerard Johnson, sculpture of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, kneeling in prayer by the tomb of his father, St Peter’s Church, Titchfield: marble and alabaster, 1594

Adonis dedicated precisely ‘To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield’. The second is that the monument was carved by the Dutch sculptor Gerard Johnson (Geraert Janssen), who several years later created Shakespeare’s own funeral monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Wriothesley is seen kneeling on a cushion before an open book (presumably a prayer book) placed on a lectern, while to his right appears the Wriothesley coat of arms depicting four silver falcons under a crown.7 Represented in the act of praying for the soul of his father (who had died in 1581), he is the perfect icon of filial devotion as well as of legitimate aristocratic descent, as the coat of arms confirms. Indeed, the two virtues go together, since the death of the mourned second earl signified Henry’s accession as third titleholder of the earldom, so much so that the monument’s inscription reads ‘Heere lyethe ye bodye of ye right Honorable Henry



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Wryothesly Baron of Titchfield and Earle of Southampton who took to wife Marye Browne … by wch Mary he had issue ye right honorable Henrie Earle of Southampton now livinge’. The monument thus figures the ‘now living’ praying for his dead namesake. Such priant effigies have several possible, perhaps contradictory, implications for Hamlet. The first regards his position as spectator to the scene of Claudius at prayer. Given the contemporary and highly recognizable ecclesiastical icono­ graphy of mourning, Hamlet can perhaps be forgiven for taking the kneeling Claudius as the real thing (‘now a is a-praying’, 3.3.73). As Llewellyn points out, ‘The pose of many carved effigies reminds us that despite the challenges of some reformers, the standard act of piety was a kneeling prayer’ (5–6). The codification of the gesture could not fail to influence the early modern beholders of kneeling figures, carved or otherwise. William Hardwick, curate of Reigate, narrates the experience of coming upon such a kneeling figure: For my part, when I come into a Church and there behold a poor sinner kneeling upon his knees, weeping with his eyes, and with a humble and lowly reverence, both petytoning and hearing his God, my charity bids me think the best, as how that these shews are not without substance.8 Hardwick’s benevolent attitude towards the kneeling sinner, giving him the benefit of the doubt, corresponds fairly precisely to Hamlet’s perception of Claudius. For Hamlet likewise – despite his general distrust of ‘shows’ in general – these shows are not without substance. A further implication concerns Hamlet’s relationship with his deceased father. Claudius’s kneeling position is typical of prayers not so much for the kneeler himself as for the souls of the deceased, and is thus a visual reminder of Hamlet’s own filial duties towards his dead father. He should avenge the king, but also pray for him, à la Wriothesley: ‘Hamlet, remember me’ (1.5.91 [F]), or as Hamlet puts it sardonically to Ophelia,

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‘in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered’ (3.1.88–9). Indeed, not by chance the sight of Claudius priant causes him to think immediately of the soul of Hamlet senior: ‘A villain kills my father, and for that, / I, his sole son, do this same villain send / To heaven’ (76–8). Instead of helping his father’s soul go to heaven, he fears sending Claudius’s there: a second act of usurpation. The theme of usurpation also regards Hamlet himself: Claudius has taken his place not only as successor to his father, but also as mourner, or at least as gestural representation of mourning. Thus, there may be here a three-way short circuit between Hamlet fils, Hamlet père and Claudius: Hamlet cannot kill a man whose kneeling pose reminds him of his own failed duties towards the soul of his father. Hamlet, as Sigmund Freud (Intepretation of Dreams, 1953) and Ernest Jones (1949) taught us in quite different terms,9 fails to murder Claudius because he identifies with him, in this case in the visual field.

v. Hamlet’s picture: A painted tyrant Claudius may not be the only ‘painted’ image in the scene of his failed prayer. Hovering over his uncle with his raised sword (‘Now might I do it pat’, 3.3.73 [F]), Hamlet himself becomes the momentary and illusory icon of the determined avenger, the sword-bearing Archangel Michael of Medieval and Renaissance iconography.10 Alternatively, he becomes for an instant a visual echo of the ruthless Pyrrhus about to murder King Priamus in the First Player’s monologue: For lo, his sword Which was declining on the milky head Of reverend Priam, seemed i’th’ air to stick. So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood, Like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. (2.2.415–20) Pyrrhus, in hesitating to kill the tyrant Priamus by way of revenge for the assassination of his father Achilles, becomes



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himself like a tyrant, ‘painted’ because he is about to be bloodcoloured (‘total gules’, 395; see pp. 44–5), but also because his sword-wielding posture is ‘stuck’ or frozen in time, as in a painting (and indeed his gesture is represented in many a Greek vase).11 The Player’s epic narration, inspired by Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid, thus turns into the ekphrasis of a static image. The passage is prophetic of Hamlet’s failure to kill Claudius, likewise by way of revenge for the assassination of his father: like Pyrrhus, Hamlet, by hesitating to ‘do it pat’, ends up doing ‘nothing’ since his sword likewise ‘sticks’ in the air, suspended in a fruitless pictorial gesture. The difference, however, is that for Pyrrhus the suspension is a brief pause in an action brought to inexorable fruition (‘Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword / Now falls on Priam’, 429–30), whereas for Hamlet all that remains is the frozen image of a posture. Hamlet, in other words, reprises the painting rather than the deed: instead of killing his tyrant uncle, he himself becomes – in Plato’s terms – the representation of a representation of a tyrant, the simulacrum of a simulacrum. The episode, moreover, finds Hamlet again confusing himself with his enemy: as Jerry Brotton notes, ‘such an identification with the “tyrant” Pyrrhus dispatching the “unnerved father”, uncomfortably conflates Hamlet with Claudius himself, the tyrant who murderously dispatches his kin, and the play’s controlling paternal authority, Hamlet senior’ (2002: 173). Hamlet is defeated by his identification not only with Pyrrhus but, once again, with Claudius. A further risk for Hamlet in being ‘painted’ in an unproductive sword-wielding pose is that of becoming a less heroic and less auspicious kind of picture, namely one of those English portraits of fashionable gentlemen bearing or wearing their swords as decorative props, symbolic of virility and of the active life, but in historical reality tragically prophetic of their own violent deaths. Perhaps the best known of these was the portrait, by an unknown Italian painter (c. 1546: see above, Fig. 21), of the nobleman and poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, shown around a year before his execution, framed by classical statuary and decked out in hyperbolic Italianate

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garb and white-plumed hat, his long sword and dagger both prominently present. Likewise Marcus Gheeraerts’s portrait of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1596/1601)12 painted not long before his rebellion and execution, has him with his hand posed conspicuously on his gold-hilted sword. Hamlet’s ‘painted’ pose is similarly prophetic of his end, not least because his death is brought about precisely by a poisoned sword in his duel with Laertes. The painted Pyrrhus is a visual archetype not just for the prayer scene, but also for Hamlet and Hamlet in general. The narrated avenger displaying a handheld object, a narrative and pictorial prop put (for now) to symbolic, rather than pragmatic use, is a model for the would-be dramatic avenger Hamlet and his series of equally symbolic handheld props. Hamlet is discovered in a range of ‘painted’ poses, involving a number of exhibited objects: in addition to the sword, a skull, a book and two portraits. Each of the attitudes he assumes, with the help of his props, has a venerable iconographic pedigree.

Portrait of young man with old skull The icon of Hamlet holding aloft the skull of the clown Yorick has become the tritest visual cliché in theatrical history, and perhaps in English cultural history tout court. This is not exclusively the result of post-Shakespearian recycling of the image, since the gesture was already a highly recognizable commonplace at its début on the Elizabethan stage. Encounters with skulls and skeletons abound in medieval literature and drama, especially through the theme of the Dance of Death, that often inspired cycles of paintings. Jean le Fèvre’s 1376 poem Le respit de la mort inspired a wellknown wall painting in Paris (1424–5), while John Lydgate’s adaptation of the French poem in his Dance of Death (c. 1426), likewise gave rise to a painted cycle (c. 1430) at Old St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Skulls and skeletons were also plentiful in relatively cheap and popular art forms such as



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the woodcut, especially in emblem books. One of the most influential expressions of the literary and visual theme was Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of 41 Dance of Death woodcuts, first published in book form under the title of Les Simulachres & Historiées faces de la Mort (The Simulacra and Stories in the Face of Death) (1538), which circulated widely in Europe, including England (see Oosterwijk 2004). The term ‘simulacra’ in the title suggests that human existence itself is illusory in the face of death, a mere shadow that cancels all difference between kings, knights, clergy, peasants and beggars (‘our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows’, 2.2.261–2 [F]), as the sequence of woodcuts illustrates. The woodcut Dance of Death image also had dramatic connections: the frontispiece illustration to John Skot’s edition (c. 1530) of the morality play Everyman juxtaposes a carefree youth (Everyman) on the left, and a skeleton (Death) on the right, evoking the analogous danse macabre encounter central to the play itself and its performance. In the field of portraiture, the image of a young man with a skull had likewise been a familiar Northern Renaissance vanitas allegory, at least since the celebrated engraving (probably a self-portrait) by the Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden (c. 1519: Fig. 30).13 Here the subject is discovered pointing with his right index finger to a handheld skull, half-hidden beneath his gown, by way of a literally pointed memento mori. The rude nakedness of the skull contrasts with the young man’s elaborate garb, notably his multi-plumed hat, by way of a reminder of the vanity of all human riches and worldly aspirations (‘vanitas, vanitatis, et omnia vanitas’, Ecclesiastes 1–2). Later variations on the same theme include the self-portrait with skull by the Netherlandish painter Aelbrecht Bouts (c. 1520:14 see Henderiks 2011), in which the artist holds a cranium, again half-covered, in his right hand while pointing to it with his left; and the portrait by the Dutch artist Dirck Jacobsz of the prosperous ermine-collared Augsburg banker and humanist Pompeius Occo (1531),15 holding in his right hand a pink carnation (probably a symbol of humility) while his left rests on the skull, ‘a sign of meditation and a symbol

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FIG. 30 Lucas van Leyden, A Young Man Holding a Skull: engraving in black on ivory laid paper, c. 1519

of mortality’ (Cheney 2013: 884; see also Adams 2013: 83–4). The topos was much visited in Dutch painting of the early seventeenth century, culminating in Franz Hals’s celebrated Young Man Holding a Skull (vanitas) (1626–8,16 possibly representing an actor (Cheney 2013: 887), that reprises



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van Leyden’s plumed hat and gesticulating hand. The male portrait convention was varied by the northern Netherlandish painter Adrian van Cronenburgh in his portrait of the Welsh noblewoman Katheryn of Berain (c. 1560),17 mother of John Salusbury, who was in turn the dedicatee of Robert Chester’s 1601 volume Love’s Martyr, which included Shakespeare’s own allegorical poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. The portrait shows the sitter, dressed in severe black but with elegant gold flourishes, holding a small book (a Bible?) in her right hand while her left rests on a skull.18 Two recurrent features of this pictorial tradition are of particular interest in the context of the iconography of Hamlet. The first is the studied theatricality of the subject’s pedagogic pointing gesture, which in some cases contradicts the halfhidden appearance of the skull, as if to invite the onlooker literally to face an unpleasant truth that he or she might prefer not to see. Hamlet’s version of what Brecht (1964: 54) calls the gestus of showing translates into the insistent deictic ‘this’ and ‘that’ of the dialogue with the gravedigger, in which Hamlet explicitly asks to ‘see’ the buried cranium in order to meditate upon it: gravedigger This same skull, sir – this same skull sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester. hamlet This? gravedigger E’en that. hamlet Let me see. (5.1.177–82 [F]) This exchange, with its shift in demonstrative pronouns, introduces a temporal sequence that is missing or elided in the vanitas portraits: in the space of three lines the skull passes from the hand of the gravedigger (the repeated ‘this’) to the hand of the young man (‘that’), where it stops for the length of the ensuing meditation. Disinterred, it leaves

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its customary habitat – presumably forever, since it is to be replaced by the remains of Ophelia – to become literally a property of the living, a process that may be hinted at it the van Leyden cranium half-buried (or half-unburied) under the young man’s gown. In stage production, some celebrated Hamlets, among them E. H. Sothern in 1900, John Gielgud in 1944 and Jude Law in 2009, have underlined the ‘thisness’ of the handheld skull by pointing to it, à la van Leyden or Bouts, while in Stanislavsky’s 1912 Moscow Arts production, Vasily Kachalov recreated the hidden quality of iconographic tradition by enveloping it in his cloak (Rosenberg 1992: 843). The second pertinent feature of the topos is the aristocratic or affluent status of the sitter. The prince of Denmark, from this point of view, is a fit subject for a Northern vanitas portrait, even if he is a relatively unworldly and melancholy prince, perhaps still dressed in black, closer in style to the austere Katheryn of Berain than to a showy and be-feathered Osric-like youth. Hamlet, predisposed – as his soliloquies show – to meditations on mortality, is in all senses the subject of his own vanitas contrast (young man/old skull), since it is he who deliberately stages the scene for his own demonstrative purposes. In this sense, Hamlet’s picture, like van Leyden’s or Bouts’, is a self-portrait, allowing him to use his own staged body as a moral parable, as much an allegorical extension of the cranium – whose unenviable destiny he will (quite shortly) share – as its temporary living proprietor. In his subsequent deliberation on the upheld skull, Hamlet, in addition to alluding to general vanitas themes such as the levelling force of mortality – ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay’ (202) – translates the doctrine of the transitoriness of human achievement into a nostalgic contemplation of the lost vitality of the clown Yorick: Where be your gibes now – your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning, quite chap-fallen. (5.1.179–82)



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In his moralizing of Yorick’s earthly remains, Hamlet introduces at least two novelties with regard to the vanitas tradition. The first is that while in the woodcuts and portraits we sometimes know the identity of the sitter, never that of the skull, here the latter is given a name and a history. This history, moreover, more or less coincides with Hamlet’s own biographical timeline, since he knew the clown intimately in his infancy (‘I knew him, Horatio. … he hath bore me on his back a thousand times’, 174–6). Another lost father, closely associated, moreover, with the first lost father, the clown’s patron King Hamlet. Hamlet thus sees himself reflected in Yorick’s cranium not merely as a generic memento mori but as part of his own subjective and affective formation: ‘Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft’ (178–9). The skull becomes another portrait or self-portrait of the prince. The second novelty is that Hamlet underlines the illusory character not merely of the clown’s irresistible energy – and thus of man’s terrestrial life – but more specifically of his exuberant performative skills. The 1545 edition of Holbein’s Simulachres includes a woodcut of a fool holding a bauble – symbol of the court jester’s office – being pulled away by the bagpipe-playing Death: one performer taking away another (Fig. 31). The accompanying text moralizes the spectacle by electing the fool as representative of ignorant sheep-like Man, who ‘lives in joy … unaware that it is going to die’ (35). Yorick, likewise a court jester, is instead elected by Hamlet not as a representative of foolish humanity but as the embodiment of evanescent performativity. An official fool but far from being foolish, the old king’s jester was, like the players, a prodigiously skilled professional entertainer. Once master of the performing arts, he is now reduced to the smirking parody of his own comic routines. Hamlet’s vanitas poses the question not only of the worth of human endeavour but, more specifically, of the value of performative endeavour, of stage ‘shows’. What does it mean to set the table on a roar when one’s final destiny is grinning but decidedly uncomic muteness (the rest is silence)? Such considerations naturally apply to the performance of Hamlet itself and indeed of the very graveyard

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Le Fol vit en ioye, & deduict San scavoir qu’il s’en va mourant, Tant qu’à sa fin il est conduict Ainsi que l’agneau ignorant.19 FIG. 31  Hans Holbein, The Fool: woodcut, 1545



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scene, in which the part of the first gravedigger was played by the company’s official clown (presumably Robert Armin: see Hunt 2007: 72). There is of course no certain answer. What remains unresolvable in Hamlet’s parable is whether it is the clown’s naked pate that shows forth the true denotation of the subject – behind the illusory simulachre of his once living, moving and singing form (as Holbein would have it) – or whether, on the contrary, the smiling skull is a cruel and deforming caricature of his ‘true’ former self. Which is the shadow of which?

Portrait of a young man with book Immediately prior to his encounter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in 2.2, Hamlet is discovered by Polonius reading, or apparently reading, a book. There is a certain associative affiliation between skull and book, beyond the fact that they are both handheld props in paintings and performance alike. In van Cronenburgh’s above-mentioned portrait of Katheryn of Berain, the hand-touched skull is associated and contrasted with the book in the sitter’s other hand. This association is quite frequent in the vanitas tradition, and finds its most striking expression in Holbein’s Vanitas (1543, private collection), which portrays a skeleton reading a book, placed on a lectern next to a vase of flowers and an apple (symbols of the transience of life). The book (especially the Bible) may reinforce the symbolism of the skull by denoting the renunciation of worldliness, or it may contrast with it in representing the vanity of human aspirations to learning. The book is likewise a recurrent feature of priant funeral effigies: the kneeling figure, as in the Wriotheseley effigy, is often seen praying over an open (prayer) book. The figure of a young man holding a book was no less an iconographic commonplace in its own right in early modern portraiture. There are two distinct traditions of book-holding subjects, that we might term the Northern and the Southern respectively. In Northern Renaissance painting, the dominant

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connotation of the handheld book in portraits of young men was piety. Rogier van der Weyden’s portrait (c. 1440s),20 possibly of Bishop Guillaume Fillastre, shows the pious sitter ‘looking up from an open book, as if he had been disturbed while reading’ (Campbell 2004: 96). The book similarly expresses piety in devotional portraits such as those by Petrus Christus (1450–60),21 showing a young man holding an open prayer book with inserted metal marker, and behind him an illuminated scroll with the face of Christ and a prayer to Saint Veronica, so that, as Martin Kemp suggests, ‘We may assume that the youthful sitter has already invested regularly in the days he would not need to expend in Purgatory’ (2011: 32). The portrait is structured on a relationship between the open and marked pages in the book and the quoted text of the prayer in the background,22 becoming literally an iconotext or textualized icon. Similarly the portrait by the Master of the View of Sainte Gudule (c. 1485)23 has the young man pointing to the text of a small heart-shaped book, again probably a prayer book, against the background of the church of Sainte Gudule in Brussels, where mass is being performed. Here the subject’s pointing gesture again sets up a direct dialogue with the sacred text contained, albeit hidden, within the book, and that presumably corresponds to the prayers being simultaneously said in the background. The handheld book takes on quite different semantic connotations in the second, Southern Renaissance tradition, where it is generally associated less with religious than with secular humanist culture. Above all the depicted book represents the very relationship between literature and the visual arts that was at the heart of the Renaissance cultural debate. The book features in more than one of the paintings by the Florentine mannerist master Pontormo, notably his portrait of the young Cosimo I de’ Medici (c. 1538),24 represented in a fashionable Spanish-style black slashed doublet and plumed hat against the background of a classical architectural interior, holding a half-closed book in which his right index finger keeps a place in the text, as if – as in the van der Weyden portrait – he has just been surprised (like Hamlet) in the



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act of reading. The portrait, painted shortly after the sitter’s accession to the title of Duke of Florence in 1537, balances the sturdy and powerful physique of the young potentate, who gazes confidently but quizzically towards the viewer, with the intellectual prowess suggested by the interrupted reading. The book here is a sign of humanist culture associated with aristocratic wealth and power, an association that makes Cosimo the ideal Renaissance prince. In his Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530),25 Pontormo’s pupil Bronzino, likewise court painter to the Medici, represents the young sitter dressed in solid black garb, sporting a gold ring and glittering golden aglets in his rakish hat (see McConnell 1991: 42), and holding a closed book in which his finger keeps the place, while he gazes aloofly, full of aristocratic sprezzatura, towards the onlooker.26 As Elizabeth Cropper suggests, he is ‘presented as belonging to the literary and visual culture of the camera, in which poetry was speaking painting and painting silent poetry’ (2004: 24). In Bronzino’s later Portrait of a Young Man (1550–5),27 the subject, a youth in his late teens (possibly a member of the Medici family), again dressed in black but with a dainty white lace collar, is discovered with a book open before him, against the backcloth of a stagey pink curtain, behind which is revealed ‘a hidden theatre of desire’ (Jones 2001) namely a sculpture of Bacchus with satyr, a sign of cultural prestige – since it is presumably an object from the young man’s collection of classical art – but also of hedonism. The pink drapery, matching the youth’s rosy cheeks, suggests sensuality and possibly sexual ambiguity. The book’s open pages are blank, hinting perhaps at the sitter’s literary aspirations. Here we are at the opposite pole from the pious Northern subjects. Hamlet’s book, which is presumably open, is unlikely to be either the Bible or a prayer book, since it is supposedly written by a ‘satirical rogue’ (2.2.193), possibly Juvenal (see Burrow 2013: 29; another candidate is the ‘satirical’ or irreverent Montaigne: Scott 2007: 142), and thus seems to belong to the humanist literary tradition, unless it is a commonplace book containing choice quotations and is thus to be written in, like

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the empty book of Bronzino’s young Medici (see Hamlet’s ‘My tables! Meet it is I set it down’, 1.5.107). In this regard, the image of Hamlet holding a volume – despite his supposed German academic allegiances – is closer to the Southern humanist than the Northern pietist tradition. Hamlet does not share the zeal of the pious young men in the Northern portraits, although he does, perhaps, preserve something of the severity of the sitters and their refusal of worldliness. Nor does he share, however, the pride in cultural possessions and political power of the Medici or other ‘Southern’ bookholders. What he expresses, instead, is a disenchantment with the text and its verbal forms (words, words, words), as well as with the triteness of its contents. Hamlet has perhaps read too much. In early modern England, the two traditions, Northern and Southern, come together in portraits of the book-holding Elizabeth I, beginning with the large-scale painting, attributed to William Scrots, which shows her as a thirteen-year-old princess (c. 1546),28 holding a closed book, in which, as in the Pontormo painting of Cosimo, her left index finger keeps her place: a sign not just of the princess’s precocious literacy, but also of her devotion, since the volume is most probably a bible or prayer book. Both Elizabeth’s culture and religious devotion are emphasized by the doubling of the book in the form of a larger volume (again devotional) seen open on a lectern to her right. The princess is shown in her adolescent individuality, in contrast to the mask of later icon-like portraits. Elizabeth herself, in a letter sent with the portrait to her brother, Edward VI, for whom it was a gift, insists on the merely external quality of the likeness: ‘I shall most humbly beseech your majesty that when you shall look on my picture you will witsafe to think that as you have but the outward shadow of the body afore you, so my inward mind wisheth that the body itself were oftener in your presence.’29 Elizabeth adopts the Platonic language of shadows, but perhaps as a polite rhetorical gesture: the portrait may be an outward shadow, but it is a nevertheless a shadow fit to represent the princess’s person in the eyes of her brother, the King.



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The ‘Clopton Portrait’ (c. 1558),30 painted some twelve years later, shortly after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, revisits the association between portraiture, the book and power, displaying the new Queen’s social and political status by showing her in a fine ermine collar, golden ruff and cuffs and a double gold chain with large pendant jewel. At the same time, it suggests a continuity in her Protestant devotion, since again it is a prayer book or bible that she holds in her right hand and a glove in her left, suggesting a wise balance between the godly and the worldly. These portraits of the Queen certainly constitute a significant iconographic precedent in early modern England for the image of a bookbearing heir apparent and sovereign, although Hamlet signally fails to achieve the later political status of Elizabeth, being destined to remain the ‘portrait’ of prince and heir to a throne he will never achieve. The closest this pictorial tradition comes to Hamlet – in national, chronological and thematic terms, as well as in the age and gender of the subject – is in two portraits of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland. Rowland Lockey’s portrait miniature (c. 1595),31 shows Percy at the age of thirty in the languorous pose of melancholy lover. Percy is, in the words of the melancholy Don John in Much Ado, ‘born under Saturn’, the god of melancholy (1.3.11), and is thus seen suitably reclining on the grass in the style of the melancholic deity (see Mandel 2013: 586), with his head propped on his hand, an open book beside him and nearby a carelessly abandoned glove. One of the more significant and innovative features of the portrait lies precisely in the fact that Percy is not holding the book but has set it aside. The book–glove association, which in the ‘Clopton Portrait’ suggests the balance between Elizabeth’s social and intellectual prowess, here becomes a sign of world- and word-weariness: he has discarded both. Closely related to Lockey’s portrait is Hilliard’s enigmatic cabinet miniature from the same period (Fig. 32). Hilliard has Percy, here full-length, but again dressed in black, in analogous melancholy reclining pose, framed by a cultivated and geometrically ordered, but optically tilted, garden, set against a

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FIG. 32  Nicholas Hilliard, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland: table miniature on parchment, c. 1594–5



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landscape background, with a discarded book (closed), gloves and black hat close by. The portrait explicitly invites an interpretative reading by including a riddling impresa, comprising an Archimedean scale suspended from a tree and holding in paradoxical balance a globe and a feather, with the motto ‘TANTI’ ‘so many (afflictions?)’, transforming the portrait into a possibly alchemical imagetext.32 In Percy’s case the book is not merely a conventional iconological accessory. Percy, known as the Wizard Earl because of his scientific and alchemical experiments, spent much of his time in his library of between 1,500 and 2,000 volumes. He was, in Roy Strong’s words, ‘naturally a kind of inward and reserved man’ whose interests included alchemy, mysticism and the occult: The programme for the miniature would have been specified by the Earl to show him as a student of deep philosophical and mathematical studies but imbued with Renaissance occultism and hermeticism. (1983: 108–10) There is probably a direct causal relationship between the book and Percy’s pose, which is designed to express what Jaques in As You Like It calls ‘the scholar’s melancholy’ (4.1.10), a particularly fashionable form of ‘madness’ in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England since its causes were nobilitating rather than degrading. The abandoned book can be read, as it were, as both cause and symptom of the Earl’s elevated folly (see Leslie 2008). Percy has several personal and pictorial qualities in common with Hamlet: his aristocratic status; his humanistic learning; his unkempt appearance (see Ophelia’s description of the dishevelled Hamlet at 2.1.74–81); his black attire; his worldand word-weariness; his penchant for verbal–visual enigma; and of course his book, even if Percy has theatrically discarded his tome, while Hamlet pretends strategically to be reading his. Hamlet also shares the afflictions apparently attributed to Percy in the Hilliard portrait (‘tanti’: compare Hamlet’s ‘a sea of troubles’, 3.1.58). Finally, and above all, Hamlet

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shares Percy’s exhibited melancholy, the scholar’s variety, as his disenchantment with the volume itself suggests: his melancholic ‘antic disposition’ (1.5.170), as Douglas Trevor notes, is ‘a studied performance in which the Prince uses books as props’ (2004: 85).33 It may be, as Trevor suggests, that Hamlet’s Montaigne-like distrust of outward forms is itself one of the symptoms of his humoral disposition, since melancholics were ‘prone towards a habit of thought known as skepticism, which encouraged its followers to doubt their capacity to trust their own perceptions’ (66). The book is strategic to Hamlet’s self-defence. As in the Percy miniatures, body and book interact to throw down a hermeneutic gauntlet to the viewer: allowing himself to be discovered by Polonius with open volume in hand, Hamlet creates an image – another ‘self-portrait’ – that irresistibly invites interrogation by the old man, as well as by the audience: ‘What do you read, my lord?’ (2.2.188).34 In this regard the book stands metonymically for Hamlet himself, challenging Polonius, Claudius and us to ‘read’ him and his enigmatic behaviour. The question offers Hamlet the opportunity for a sarcastically redundant and at the same time elusive response that confirms the enigma (‘Words, words, words’, 189). The old man, impervious, insists with his interrogation, rephrasing the question: ‘What is the matter, my lord?’ (189), thereby ingenuously invoking the Baconian issue of referential ‘matter’ (having himself been admonished earlier in the same scene: ‘More matter with less art’, 2.2.95). The question is in any case superfluous, since Hamlet’s earlier response has already suggested that there is no ‘matter’, only empty signifiers. It does, however, give Hamlet a further occasion for a semantic diversion, this time in the form of a scathing antanaclasis (or what Puttenham calls ‘the rebound’ [2007 (1589): 292]): ‘Between who?’ (191), a response that reinterprets ‘matter’ in the conflictive sense of argument or diatribe, underlining the hostility implicit in the present exchange. Polonius’s third pedestrian attempt, ‘I mean, the matter that you read, my lord’ (192), provides Hamlet with a final opportunity for a satirical counter-attack in which he deploys the



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book, by way of a weapon, in its textual and tactile materiality. Like the pious sitters of the Northern portraits, Hamlet indicates the text, touching it or pointing to it gesturally and pronominally (as he does later to the skull) – ‘the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards’ (193–4) – even if neither Polonius nor the audience have access to the text to verify the paraphrased contents. He thereby transforms the book from pictorial prop to deforming mirror held up to Polonius, the text supposedly delineating the ekphrasis of a decrepit old man (‘their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams’, 194–6). Hamlet turns the fashionable image of a young man with book into the unflattering reflection of a senex, with neither book nor wit, akin to the Holbein woodcut of the decrepit old man being led away to his tomb (proleptically anticipating Hamlet’s own sending of Polonius to his grave). What Hamlets do with the book onstage has varied widely over the centuries: ‘Hamlet has hidden the book, has pushed the book in Polonius’s face, has clapped together the open pages on Polonius’s nose, has torn out a page or pages (Kemble was first), throwing them at Polonius, has blown his nose on a page, has thrown the whole book’ (Rosenberg 1992: 402). Physical violence towards the book, such as Kemble’s, literalizes the prince’s aggression towards Polonius and towards the world, including the world of knowledge and, perhaps, the world of signifiers. In less extreme versions of the episode, one of the key performance variants has been the degree of inclusion or exclusion of Polonius. Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) actually showed Polonius the text with deceptive courtesy. Elsewhere Polonius has tried to look over Hamlet’s shoulder, without success. In Sarah Bernhardt’s 1899 Stratford performance, Hamlet, lying on a bench, ‘“cocked up her feet” in his face to keep him away’ (Rosenberg 1992: 401). More ironical solutions include Doran’s 2008 RSC production, in which David Tennant’s Hamlet was found, in Percy-like abandon, lying on his back, his book open but placed text-down on his face, thus making a mockery both of Polonius’s question and of Hamlet’s claim to be reading.

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Like Hamlet with the skull, the image of Hamlet with his book has been literally pictorialized in the play’s extratheatrical afterlife. A series of famous nineteenth-century Hamlets – including Edmund Kean, Charles Kean, Charles Kemble, Henry Irving and Edwin Booth – were portrayed holding the book, thereby restoring it, as it were, to its rich iconographic tradition. In his portrait, Edmund Kean points to the text like a Northern Renaissance sitter, although his staring gaze and enigmatic half-smile suggest an antic rather than a religious disposition (Fig. 33). In the visual and narrative economy of the play, the book enters into a relationship of affinity and contrast with Hamlet’s other stage properties, not only Yorick’s skull and, later, the portraits of the two kings, but also Hamlet’s sword. In a sense, the book substitutes the sword within the first part of the play’s plot, as a conventional sign of the choice of contemplation rather than direct action. The book–sword dialectic is another consolidated feature of Renaissance iconography. In Pontormo’s portrait of Cosimo, the book is contiguous to the sword, suggesting the harmonious balance between the two.

FIG. 33 Thomas Woolnoth, Edmund Kean as Hamlet: stipple engraving, 1818



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Elsewhere, book and sword are in direct ideological opposition. In an anecdote told by Vasari, Michelangelo, commissioned by Pope Julius II to create a statue celebrating His Holiness’s liberating of the city of Bologna, is uncertain what to put in the Pope’s hand: ‘when [Michelangelo] asked His Holiness if he thought he should place a book in the left hand, the pope said: “Put a sword there, I know nothing about literature!”’ (Vasari 1998: 438). In his poem ‘On Ambition’, Machiavelli alludes to this episode in his mocking reference to the Venetians’ images of their patron saint, San Marco, shown holding a book in hand: ‘San Marco to his cost and perhaps in vain / learns late that one has / to hold the sword and not the book in hand’.35 Machiavelli might have said much the same for Hamlet, who likewise learns late, and ill, that one has to hold the sword and not the book in hand, at least in a revenge tragedy. The book–sword opposition takes on particular poignancy within the tragedy’s narrative sequence: Hamlet shows Polonius the book, by way of a symbolic attack (2.2); he inopportunely refrains from using the sword against Claudius (3.3), postponing its use to a better occasion (‘Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent’, 88); the more horrid hent arrives, when, mistaking him for Claudius, he equally inopportunely attacks Polonius, no longer with his book but with his sword (3.4). In an unhappy series of exchanges, the book first replaces the sword, and is then in turn replaced by it, just as Polonius replaces Claudius as victim first of book and then of sword.

vi. Upon this picture, and on this Two further objects enter into the play’s series of symbolic substitutions. Immediately after killing Polonius in the closet scene, Hamlet sheathes his sword again and produces, equally dramatically, two pictures for his mother’s benefit: Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers … (3.4.51–2)

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It is highly probable, in the context of the tragedy’s serial exhibition of props, that the pictures shown to Gertrude are held up to her view by her son (see pp. 255–7). The pictures thus join skull, book and sword in Hamlet’s gallery of handheld objects, while Gertrude joins her husband and Polonius as their targets. Like the skull, they supposedly represent the human form, and in particular the heads and faces of Hamlet senior and Claudius. On the visual plane the pictures have an evident affinity with the book: they are probably of a size comparable with a small volume, and similarly do not allow the audience to see ‘inside’ in order to verify their contents. Hamlet uses them, as he does his book, as symbolic and material weapons towards his interlocutor. Pictures and books also have a cultural vicinity, since books and pamphlets were among the main sources of images in early modern England (see p. 36). Both kinds of object have a performative potential as acts of accusation: the book as an accusation of ignorance or foolishness (I read, you do not; what I read is about foolish old men like you) and the picture as an accusation of perceptual and moral blindness (I see, you do not; what I see proves the grossness of your choice). The pictures act as ocular proof in Hamlet’s accusatory harangue, silent witnesses to his mother’s tragic error. The image of a young aristocrat holding a picture (or two) dialogues with early modern portraits of sitters holding another portrait. The mise en abyme of the portrait-in-theportrait has a doubly specular role, as ‘authorization’ of the genre, underlining the painter’s artistry, and at the same time as element of realism, mirroring the beholder’s subject position. Often the internal portrait is not viewed by the sitter, but is shown directly to the observer in an act of invitation and inclusion. As Jodi Cranston notes, ‘The minimal interaction of the sitters with the portraits is almost exclusively directed … toward making the portraits within the portraits as available to the beholder as they are to the sitters who hold them’ (82). The availability of the inner portrait is strongly marked, for example, in Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Medal of Cosimo de’ Medici (c. 1465),36 in which attention is drawn



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FIG. 34 Nicholas Hilliard, An Unknown Man: watercolour on vellum pasted onto card, c. 1600

not to the young man but to the medal itself with Cosimo’s imposing features. The opposite process occurs in Hilliard’s miniature of an unknown young man (c. 1600: Fig. 34), who wears a pendant on a chain, a miniature within a miniature. The unshaved young man is seen in a Hamlet-like state of undress, his white shirt left open, showing his flesh beneath its white lace collar: compare Ophelia’s description ‘Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head … / Pale as his shirt’ (2.1.75–8). Behind the sitter are seen yellow and orange flames, suggesting his burning passion (‘flaming youth’, as Hamlet calls it, 3.4.82). The internal picture, hidden within a locket is not shown to the beholder, but rather directed towards the young man’s heart in a sign of devotion. Hamlet’s portraits partake of both traditions and both gestures, showing and hiding. He emphatically invites Gertrude to look, but by the same token excludes the

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theatrical spectator: the pictures are for her eyes only. Like Botticelli’s young sitter he directs attention away from himself and towards the portraits, but as with Hilliard’s flaming youth what attracts the beholder’s attention is above all his fiery passion, what Gertrude calls ‘the heat and flame of thy distemper’ (119). His mother fails to acknowledge the portraits themselves, provoking Hamlet to repeat his invitation and to question her sight: ‘Look you now … Have you eyes? … Ha! have you eyes?’ (61–5). Like the ghost later in the scene, the pictures are not ‘seen’ by Gertrude because they are deja vu – she already knows them – and because she fails to understand what she should be perceiving, not the painted figures but the moral status of the sitters themselves. Despite his general semiotic disenchantment, Hamlet invests an absolute and almost totemistic faith in the mimetic powers of the pictures, which become not merely proxies but actual embodiments of Gertrude’s two husbands. They are ‘The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (3.4.52) in the fullest sense: perfect copies that ‘present’ the brothers, in the sense of making them present. The phrase recalls Puttenham’s ‘counterfeit representation’, which is able to capture ‘The visage, speech and countenance of any person absent or dead’ (2007 [1589]: 324; see p. 47). They are not pictures but incarnations. In this sense the portraits are more functional to Hamlet’s father versus uncle trope than to the play’s pictorial discourse: forensic evidence of the physical and ethical abyss between the two, as if the portraits had also and above all captured their subjects’ souls. As Richard Levin points out, moreover, the comparison ‘closely corresponds to the Ghost’s description of the two kinds of love they offered Gertrude, according to the law that external, physical traits reflect and therefore reveal internal, mental traits’ (2009: 178).

Hamlet’s blind ekphrases As a result of his faith in their ability to incarnate their sitters’ bodies and souls, and despite his emotional and cognitive



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investment in the portraits, Hamlet does not tell the excluded audience much about the paintings themselves. His two ekphrases, one long and elaborate, one brief and summary, engage not with the representation but with the represented. Like Gertrude, we are invited to ‘see’ the men’s qualities, bypassing the artistic mediation. In this sense Hamlet’s descriptions confirm rather than compensate for the audience’s blindness. They reduce each of the two ‘fathers’ to a hyperbolic metaphor or simile: Hamlet senior is a perfect synthesis of numerous classical gods, Claudius a mere sickly grain of wheat. Hamlet’s ‘blind’ ekphrasis of his father is the narration of an untenable comparison, not only between his father and Claudius, but also and above all between Hamlet senior and the Prince himself: See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself An eye like Mars to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man; This was your husband. (53–61) Hamlet père is a syncretism of the pantheon of Roman gods. His son attributes each portrayed bodily feature to a different deity, thereby repeatedly and redundantly placing him in an Olympus that Hamlet himself will never be able to reach. This epic heroic mode recalls the Greek gods and heroes of the player’s speech at 2.2.387–456 (‘On Mars’s armour, forged for proof eterne’, 428) The choice of gods in his descriptive syncretism is not casual, but bears a strict relationship with, on the one hand, the narrative structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, on the other, with the narrative structure of the tragedy. Hamlet’s comparison of his father’s hair to that of the titan Hyperion has possible father–son as well as father–uncle

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implications. Hyperion was father to the sun god Helios, and in mythological sources – notably Ovid – is sometimes confused or conflated with him.37 As for Hyperion’s ‘curls’, as Thompson and Taylor note, ‘Presumably the sun-god would have golden tresses’, and, according to Thomas Bulfinch, ‘[he] is painted with the splendour and beauty which were afterwards bestowed on Apollo’ (2012: 4), but in iconographic tradition it is Helios rather than Hyperion who is often given Apollo-like tresses (see, for example, the bust of Alexander the Great as Helios in the Musei Capitolini, Rome), and this tradition is taken up by early modern neo-classicism.38 His role as heir, namesake and equivalent to a sun god father places Hamlet in a position of unsustainable responsibility, giving added semantic density, perhaps, to his complaint at 1.2.64 that he is too much in the sun (or son). Hamlet then attributes his father’s forehead (‘front’, seat of the intellect) to Jove, King of the gods, who shares with Hyperion the quality of sky deity. Jove’s relationship with the sun god, however, is to say the least problematic, since he overthrew him together with the other Titans: another story of violent succession. As for the description, it may again allude to Metamorphoses, III.374, where Ovid depicts Jove’s formidable vultus, his ‘awful brow’,39 represented in Roman painting (Pompeii) and sculpture (Vatican museum, Louvre, etc.) framed by Hyperion- or Helios-like curls. The choice of Mars for the description of his father’s eyes may have other implications for Hamlet himself, since the spear-bearing and helmeted god of war is another version of the armed avenger that Hamlet cannot match. Similarly pertinent to the Hamlet story is Mars’s relationship with Hyperion–Helios, since the sun god spies on Mars during the latter’s adulterous affair with Venus. Hamlet draws attention, instead, to Mars’s glaring warlike gaze (which features in such representations as the early fourth-century, life-size Roman sculpture in York):40 Hamlet’s father is watching him disapprovingly, as his appearance immediately afterwards confirms. Meanwhile, the comparison of Hamlet senior’s stance (‘station’) to that of Mercury – messenger to the gods and



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himself god of commerce, eloquence and poetry – involves his body and not his face alone. As Thompson and Taylor note: ‘This reference may indicate that Hamlet is describing (or imagining) a full-length portrait, not a head or bust as would have been more usual for a miniature’. Like the rest of the speech, however, this is a literary conceit rather than a literal reference, designed to evoke the athleticism and fleet-footed agility of King Hamlet senior in his heyday. The attribute ‘New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill’ underlines the fact that Mercury, like Jove and Hyperion, is a sky god, and recalls Golding’s Ovid: ‘So Mercurie with nimble wings doth keepe a lower gate / About Minervas loftie towres in round and wheeling rate’ (Met., 2.715). Mercury is invariably represented in painting and sculpture in dynamic pose, about to fly off or having just landed, as in Giambologna’s famous Florentine fountain (c. 1580),41 which shows him with winged feet and helmet, poised on one foot, bearing his caduceus or ‘charmed Rod’ (Met., 2.880) in one hand as he points skywards with his other arm. Mercury is another son of a prominent father, Jove himself (Met., 8.801: ‘The mightie Jove and Mercurie his sonne in shape of men’). Hamlet’s most literally pictorial speech turns out to be one of his more literary performances. It encodes a narrative of problematic father-son relations, adulterous affairs and violent overthrows. It may be that Hamlet finds portrayed in the picture not only his father’s story but also his own filial anxieties, his sense of inadequacy with regard to his assigned role (‘Why what an ass am I …’, 2.2.517ff.) Hamlet’s equally hyperbolic – and even less descriptive – account of Claudius dismisses him in two ferociously deprecatory lines: Look you now, what follows: Here is your husband like a mildewed ear Blasting his wholesome brother. (3.4.61–3) Gertrude’s new spouse is reduced to a parasitic growth on King Hamlet’s godlike person, and is given no autonomous

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attributes. At the same time, the earlier allusion to Hyperion’s curls recalls Hamlet’s first soliloquy in which he claims that his father is to Claudius as ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ (1.2.140). Gertrude prefers Claudius’s bestial sexuality (the satyr being synonymous with libido) to King Hamlet’s godlike beauty. This may be another Ovidian transformation, since in Ovid Jove appears ‘in shape of Satyr gaye’ (6.135–6) – King Hamlet’s brother is a bestial version of the king himself. As for Hamlet, he appears to be trapped in his own hyperboles, unable to describe or indeed visualize a real father or a real uncle, and thereby unable to confront either; as Jacques Lacan put it, ‘confronted on one hand with an eminent, idealized, exalted object – his father – and on the other with the degraded, despicable object Claudius, the criminal and adulterous brother, Hamlet does not choose’ (1977: 12).

Family portrait The pictures create a complex four-way family romance: the portrait of Hamlet senior represents the familial triangle that is recreated again with the entry of the ghost, but this is complicated by the pictorial presence of Claudius, who intervenes to disrupt the family symbolically just as he had done physically. The pictures also re-enact the pre-dramatic sequence of events of the tragedy, as if Hamlet wished to undo or reverse them by persuading his mother to choose, this time, her first husband in preference to her second. The portrait of his father, in bringing the latter back from the dead à la Alberti, anticipates the ghost’s second visitation. It thereby gives a nostalgic multitemporal dimension to the scene: ‘The portrayed, for whatever reason’, as Jodi Cranston observes, ‘could not be present in the same pictorial reality as their companions and thereby introduce a temporal dimension into the larger portrait … these portraits signify an anterior moment of presence and a present moment of absence’ (2000: 82–3). Ironically, the true ‘ekphrasis’ in the scene – unlike Hamlet’s, an authentically graphic ‘counterfait respresentation’ or



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hyptyposis – is Gertrude’s description of her son’s facial and bodily reactions to the reappearance of the ghost (‘Alas, how is’t with you, / That you do bend your eye on vacancy / And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse?’, 112–14). Gertrude out-paints Hamlet.42 Again she is blind to the image Hamlet points out to her, but she sees only too well, and allows us to see, his possibly hallucinatory gaze (just as her vivid description-narration in 4.7 will allows us to ‘see’ Ophelia’s drowning). If Hamlet wants a family portrait, Gertrude only wants to see and be seen with her son, confirming the fact that in Shakespearian drama what matters more than visible or invisible pictures is the spectacle of the beholder’s response to them.

vii. The portraits in performance: Hamlet’s pictures pictured When Hamlet shows Gertrude the two pictures, what mode or genre of art work is he showing her? Since at least the eighteenth century, this question has challenged editors, actors and directors. One of the more controversial aspects of this issue has to do with the stage appearance and dimensions of the two portraits. Choices have ranged from handheld medallion miniatures, table miniatures or coins, half- or full-length wall portraits or tapestries to photographs and newspapers. There is a considerable ideological, as well as aesthetic and practical, difference between large formal portraits or tapestries, presumably hung somewhere onstage and thus visible to the audience, and handheld miniatures or coins fully visible only to Hamlet and Gertrude. The choice of form and size raises issues of revelation versus secrecy (and thus inclusion or exclusion of the audience in the ‘look here’ dialectic); of vicinity versus distance; of intimacy versus formality; of contact versus detachment; of materiality versus ideality (on the portraits in performance, see Young 2002 and Clary 2002).

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It is possible to identify five main picturing strategies in performance, which are discussed in the following sections.

Large-scale (full- and half-length) portraits onstage With this solution Hamlet points to images already present in his mother’s closet, making his contrast between his two ‘fathers’ at least partially verifiable through the audience’s visual comparison of portraits and actors, even if Hamlet’s father is no longer what he was. Eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literalism demanded a full-body view (ironically, with reference to a scene in which Gertrude and sometimes the audience cannot see the ghost). George Steevens claimed, in 1778, that the portraits ‘were meant for whole lengths, being part of the furniture of the Queen’s closet’, thus relegating them to the realm of female domesticity. Edmund Malone in 1790 likewise objected to the modern use of miniatures that had replaced the ‘original’ large-scale portraits, although there was no historical evidence for this. The argument against small pictures was made in 1832 by Thomas Caldecott, who complained that ‘the audience are not permitted to judge of what they hear, to make any estimate of the comparative defects and excellencies even of the features: and as to the “station” or imposing attitude, “the combination and the form”, it is impossible, in so confined a space, that these could be presented to each other’ (1832: 99). This might surely be an argument in favour of, rather than against, miniatures, which avoid, for example, invidious enquiries into the descriptive accuracy of Hamlet’s hyperbolic ekphrases. The most celebrated graphic representation of large-scale wall portraits is the Boitard–Kirkall design43 for the frontispiece of Rowe’s 1714 edition, although the pictures are half-length rather than full-length (Malone protests: ‘To halflengths, however, the same objection lies, as to miniatures’). The illustration is generally taken to allude to the restoration production by Thomas Betterton and figures the moment



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subsequent to the entry of the ghost. We see only one picture hung high up on the backdrop, presumably of Hamlet senior, bearing in his right hand the same prop (a sceptre?) as the ghost. Hamlet and Gertrude are seen with their arms raised: Hamlet in response to the sight of the ghost, Gertrude in response to the sight of Hamlet. The sense of shared shock is underlined by an overthrown chair, a convention of eighteenth-century stage practice (see Bate 2000). Here the one visible portrait is a marginal presence with the function of doubling the figure of King Hamlet and thereby creating a before-and-after trope. The most extreme version of the full-length picture, more than justifying Hamlet’s faith in its lifelikeness, was the animated portrait used in 1840 by William Macready, who, having turned the Queen’s closet into ‘a Royal Picture Gallery’ (Sprague 1945: 168) by including portraits not only of the two kings but also of Gertrude and of Hamlet himself, had the picture of Hamlet senior come to life, with the actor entering from, and returning to, the portrait (Fig. 35; see Schoch 2005: 238). A similar device was adopted by Sarah Bernhardt at the end of the century.

Tapestry Tapestry portraits are an alternative possible mode of representing full-length figures onstage. Thomas Davies averred in 1784 that ‘In our author’s time they made use of tapestry; and the figures in tapestry might be of service to the action of the player in the scene between Hamlet and the Queen’ (1784: 106–7). Recent commentators have taken up and developed this line of argument by making the figurative tapestry coincide, on Shakespeare’s stage, with the arras behind which Polonius hides. Rebecca Olson suggests that the tapestry arras may have represented ‘a classical scene, so that Hamlet’s references to “Jove” or “Mercury” could be taken literally’, or alternatively that it may recall late sixteenth-century Danish tapestries, depicting Kings of Denmark (2008: 180). Jerry

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FIG. 35  William Macready as Hamlet in the closet scene: engraving, 1845

Brotton, analogously, hypothesizes ‘that the tapestry that hangs in Gertrude’s closet portrays the fall of Troy, and that it retains the trace of sexual violence and death that permeates the hanging in The Rape of Lucrece’ (2002: 172). To suppose a large-scale embroidered, or pseudo-embroidered, depiction of the two Kings or their historical or mythological counterparts (a satyr for Claudius?) is historically speculative and perhaps overly literalistic. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that the arras, whatever it depicted, may have



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constituted a third pictorial presence in the Globe Theatre closet scene. It is also true that the arras functions in the scene as what Rebecca Olson calls a ‘threshold space’ and that in penetrating it, Hamlet undermines distinctions ‘between one body and another, the real and the imaginary, even life and death’ (91). Tapestry portraits of the two kings were adopted in productions with Johnston Forbes-Robertson in 1897 (Rosenberg 1992: 676) and Derek Jacobi in 1980, and in the 1964 film of the play by the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev.

Small handheld pictures Medallion or miniature portraits have been the option most frequently adopted in production over the centuries, and may well have been the choice of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or King’s Men. There are several factors in favour of small pictures. They were inexpensive to produce and nevertheless could achieve material ‘authenticity’, in that Hilliard’s miniatures, for example, were often painted on the back of mere playing cards (see p. 99). A framed card in the actor’s hand constituted a particular mode of realism, no longer pictorial but objectual. Hamlet, moreover, is able to produce the miniatures (from his pockets or from his or his mother’s neck) at a strategic moment in the action and use them as symbolic and material ‘weapons’ to wield towards his mother, with whom they permitted him to create a relationship of vicinity and intimacy in the act of showing them. They could be brought together for the purposes of comparison.44 They are coherent with the other handheld objects that Hamlet displays in the tragedy. Hamlet’s scathing allusion to Claudius’s ‘picture in little’ in 2.2, the play’s only explicit reference to a genre of painting, adds further weight to the hypothesis that Hamlet’s pictures in 3.4 are likewise in little. The earlier episode is sometimes brought directly into play to establish a narrative and material link between the two scenes: Albert Finney’s Hamlet (Old Vic,

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1975) took away Claudius’s portrait in 2.2 and produced it anew in the closet scene (Rosenberg 1992: 419). The earlier scene may also prepare dramaturgically for Hamlet’s behaviour in 3.4: Gielgud, in 2.2, seized the miniature borne by Rosencrantz and threw it to the ground, while Redgrave tossed Rosencrantz a coin bearing Claudius’s image. Many Hamlets have taken Claudius’s picture as a ready target for the prince’s wrath prior to the abortive stabbing: in Charles Fechter’s 1861 production, for example, Hamlet tore the miniature of Claudius from around Gertrude’s neck, and threw it to the floor (2005: 238). The Italian actor Ernesto Rossi bit it, tore it and trampled on it (Rosenberg 1992: 682). The miniature of King Hamlet, on the contrary, has been the object of adulation: John Phillip Kemble kissed it, while Edwin Booth bowed to it (Rosenberg 1992: 679). Recent productions have varied the miniature tradition by introducing photographic portraits or newspaper photos, thereby adding to stage realism while radically modernizing or post-modernizing the scene. Photographs suggest mimetic fidelity and possibly familial intimacy (they may have been taken by a member of the family or court). In Trevor Nunn’s 2004 Old Vic production, Ben Whishaw’s Hamlet showed Imogen Stubbs’s striking young Gertrude a framed photo of his father (see cover illustration to this volume). In Michael Kahn’s 2007 Shakespeare Theatre Company production, Jeffrey Carlson’s ‘emo boy’ Hamlet similarly displayed to Janet Zarish’s Gertrude two Polaroid-style snaps from the family album. In Gregory Doran’s 2008 RSC production, David Tennant shows Penny Downie a copy of a broadsheet, entitled ‘In Memoriam’, featuring Hamlet senior’s photograph under the headline ‘The nation mourns’. In modern performances, beginning with Olivier’s Freudian Old Vic production (1937; film version 1948) the handheld props have come to take on a powerful sexual symbolism, being associated with the main stage object, namely the marital bed on which the scene is frequently set. The form of the pictures reproduces ‘in little’ that of the bed, while their contents become metonymies for its male occupants, past and



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present. In this way Gertrude finds herself in bed simultaneously with the three men in her life.

A mixture of large-scale and small Edwin Booth, in the latter part of his career, had Gertrude wear a miniature of Claudius while his Hamlet pointed to a full-length wall portrait of his late father. Analogously, in Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 National Theatre production, Hamlet’s father appeared in a large half-length portrait (Fig. 36: one of several portraits hung on walls in Es Devlin’s two-floor set), while Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet presented Claudius’s miniature (from 2.2) on a dish.

Nothing In the late nineteenth century, both Henry Irving and Tommaso Salvini produced no pictures at all onstage: their Hamlets

FIG. 36 Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet in Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 National Theatre production

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merely pointed towards the audience, as if the portraits were hung on the imaginary ‘fourth wall’ of the stage (Rosenberg 1992: 677). The pictures thus become another possible object of Hamlet’s hallucinations, present only in his mind’s eye: mere shadows of shadows. The history of Hamlet’s portraits in performance replicates all the hermeneutic contradictions and aporias present in the text, especially the Folio text. What he actually perceives is of variable form and dimensions, from the imposingly life-size to the minuscule to the non-existent. It is likewise of mutable content, from the realistically mimetic to the literarily metaphorical. The Prince’s response to the pictures has ranged from the crazed to the knowingly ironical. His use of them in his dialogue with his mother has varied from the fiercely accusatory to the incestuously erotic to the tenderly filial – or all three at once. This is one of Hamlet’s main problems in the tragedy: namely, the paradoxical disproportion between the perception of visual objects as treacherous simulacra and the enormous emotional and cognitive investment he comes to make in them. In Hamlet, seeing a picture or, indeed, being a picture are acts fraught with unsuspected difficulty and danger.

5 ‘That is and is not’: The double life of images in Twelfth Night

FIG. 37  The duck–rabbit picture

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i. Double vision In the fourth act of Twelfth Night, Sebastian’s luck suddenly changes. Finding himself the unexpected object of Olivia’s declaration of love, he reacts by blaming his own eyesight: Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune So far exceed all instance, all discourse, That I am ready to distrust mine eyes … (4.3.11–13) Sebastian’s attribution of Olivia’s verbal effusion to the field of vision creates a comical paradox, akin to Bottom’s ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.211–12): if anything it is Sebastian’s ears that need testing, or better still Olivia’s eyes, since she takes him for Cesario and Cesario for a man (although he cannot know this). In the case of Twelfth Night, however, the ‘eye of man hath not heard’ paradox is at the heart of the play itself, since in this comedy everything, including ‘all discourse’, as Sebastian puts it, passes through the eye, and eyes are always to be distrusted. The problem for Olivia is that, unbeknown to her and to her beloved, there are two Sebastians, or two Cesarios. Diplopia, or double vision, is a condition shared by all in Twelfth Night, thanks especially to Viola’s disguise and the non-simultaneous presence of the twins until the final scene, but thanks also to the play’s abiding concern with visual enigmas, optical deceptions, recondite images and distorted reflections. Nothing is what it seems, or as Feste puts it, ‘Nothing that is so is so’ (4.1.8). Or rather, nothing is only what it seems, but is always also other. In the play the object of perception ‘is and is not’, in Orsino’s words (5.1.213). Images lead a double life: a public and manifest life and a secret and hidden one. In Sebastian’s case, his manifest or visible image is the sign of his survival and of his gender, while the hidden one is the literally twin image of his disguised sister. In other scenes, the relationship between these two images and the twin sibling narratives is



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reversed: it is the image of Cesario that is visible onstage, that of Sebastian hidden offstage. This doubling process applies to the visual dimension of other dramatis personae in the play, from the contrasting versions of Malvolio’s appearance (strait-laced steward versus cross-gartered lover) and the multiplication of identities assumed by Feste (Olivia’s fool, Orsino’s singer, the priest Sir Topas) to the double image of Olivia as veiled mourner and as bare-faced seductress. At the centre of this diplopic universe is the ‘picture’, a term that occurs a record four times in the text and that attracts a number of synonyms and cognates, from ‘image’ (which also recurs four times) to ‘impressure’ to ‘perspective’ to specific kinds of picture such as ‘map’. These references show forth a veritable picture gallery of visual objects, all of which have to do in different ways with the play’s central theme of deceiving the eye, not least because pictures and other images are always doubled. The play’s most explicit pictorial object is Olivia’s gift to Cesario in 3.4, which she proffers as a ‘jewel’ but which, in the act of giving, she describes as ‘my picture’ (187): it is her likeness in miniature but at the same time encased in a locket of precious metal and perhaps adorned with jewels, designed to be secreted on Cesario’s person (compare ‘A lady walled about with diamonds!’, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.3). Other pictures referred to in the play are likewise subject to double vision. Olivia reverses the secrecy/revelation trope in 1.5 when she presents her unveiled face as an uncurtained ‘picture’ (227), whereby she becomes at once attractive flesh and frozen self-representation. Sir Toby Belch alludes in 1.3 to an image that is and is not, namely the missing portrait of ‘Mistress Mall’ (116). Feste’s ‘picture of ‘we three’ (2.3.15–16) is a visible image – of the drunken Sir Toby and Sir Andrew – which has a hidden second life as the picture of two asses (with an implied and absent third ass). Pictures and other images in Twelfth Night have something of the irresolvable ambivalence of the duck–rabbit picture (see above, Fig. 37), which for Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations shows the difference between ‘seeing that’ and ‘seeing as’. The beholder is shown ‘that’, the picture of

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the duck–rabbit, but she or he may see it either ‘as’ a rabbit or ‘as’ a duck. If the beholder’s perception changes (‘now it’s a duck’), the picture does not change, but a new aspect is perceived: ‘The expression of a change of aspect is an expression of a new perception [seeing as] and, at the same time, an expression of an unchanged perception [seeing that]’ (2010: 206e). In Twelfth Night, seeing is nearly always seeing as, since all visual objects are subject to interpretation, always partial and often erroneous. This chapter explores the ways in which the perception and interpretation of visual objects generates the different narrative threads of the comedy, and at the same time impinges powerfully on its performance, calling continually into play what the audience perceives: seeing that or seeing as.

ii. Trumping the eye beholde here the trompe the paynted glosse of theyr malycyousnes … (Antoine de Marcourt, The Booke of Marchauntes, 1547: sig. Avii) If you be not trumped in the Blazonne of this Coate, I care not to what I put you. (John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie, 1586: 190) At the dramatic and performative centre of Twelfth Night is the trumping or deceiving of the eye: trompe l’oeil. As the epigraphs to this section show, the verb ‘trump’ – to deceive or cheat (from French tromper, OED v2) – enjoyed a brief currency in the sixteenth century, alongside the more familiar sense of playing a trump at cards (OED v3). Antoine de Marcourt’s denunciation of merchants for ‘tromping’ the beholder’s eye with their painted gloss, and John Ferne’s reference to a dazzling and eye-trumping blazon within a coat of arms, regard two kinds of trompe l’oeil – one negative and one positive – that take on social as well as visual



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connotations. In both cases the eye is cheated, but also socially and morally trumped or overridden, as in a societal game of cards. In Twelfth Night likewise the trumping of the eye is a pictorial phenomenon, associated with the comedy’s manifold painted or engraved or imaginary visual objects, but it is also a highly social and psychological matter, linked to the play’s dramatization of class, gender and identity relations. Both the play’s plots, the main Viola–Orsino plot and the secondary Malvolio plot, are centred on the trumping of the eye: in the former, first Viola and then her twin brother Sebastian confound the eyes of both Orsino and Olivia, as well as of other onlookers; in the latter, Malvolio is fatefully trumped by the sight of the false love letter, while the scene of his humiliation is itself spied on by the eavesdropping plotters, including Sir Andrew, another victim of trumping. If the main dramatic theme of Twelfth Night is the one announced in the titles of its Italian analogues Gli inganni and Gl’ingannati, namely deceptions and the deceived, there is little doubt that the primary form that deception takes in the play, as in the Italian plays, is that of optical illusion, trompe l’oeil: not only because the theatre is itself the domain of the optical – of spectatorship – but more specifically because the central role played in the comedy by disguise involving almost identical different-sex twins obliges its spectators, internal and external alike, to keep their eyes wide, if sometimes uncomprehendingly, open. One result of this prevalence of visual trumping is that Twelfth Night is extraordinarily rich not only in eye-deceiving optical illusions but also in self-interrogating optical allusions, namely its numerous verbal indications of problematic visual processes, often having to do with violence, especially selfviolence, dishonesty or suspicion. Thus if the play appears to begin on an optimistic, indeed ecstatic, ocular note with Orsino’s ‘O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first’ (1.1.18), this optimism is immediately put into question by his association of this vision first with the plague (‘Methought she purged the air of pestilence’, 1.1.19) and then with self-murder due to his transgressive gaze, like Acteon’s (‘my desires, like fell and cruel

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hounds’, 21). In the following scene, the Captain promises to deprive himself of vision should he reveal Cesario’s identity: ‘When my tongue blabs then let mine eyes not see’ (1.2.60). Viola implies a similar fate if she cannot obtain Orsino: ‘After him I love / More than I love these eyes’ (5.1.130–1). Sebastian distrusts his eyes, while Olivia confesses that Cesario’s charms begin furtively to ‘creep in at mine eyes’ (1.5.290). Such problematic perception recalls troubled ocular references in the Italian analogues: for example, the recurrent theme of blindness in the Accademia deli Intronati’s 1532 Gl’ingannati (from Lelia’s ‘Are you pretending not to see me?’ in the first act [51], to Flaminio’s ‘How can I have been so blind not to recognize her?’ and Crivello’s ‘who has been blinder than me?’ in the last [168–9]); or the theme of multiple spying, associated with multiple cross-dressing, in Curzio Gonzaga’s 1592 Gli inganni (‘filippa … I was spying through a keyhole … Cast your eye, and you will see that Lucretia has become a male’, 96–7). Shakespeare, however, extends the pathological perceptual field: in Twelfth Night the pains of vision are shared by all in a generalized oculopathy. No other Shakespeare play, moreover, points out so frequently the specific objects of such defective acts of vision. The dialogue is full of allusions to everyday material domestic and public things perceived or imagined as visual objects, from the buttery bar (1.3.68) to the bed of Ware (3.2.45), and from the (painted) sheriff’s post (1.5.144) to the communal parish top (1.3.40). The dramatis personae, despite their distrust of vision, actively seek out private or public visual objects, as in the case of Sebastian’s express desire to see the sights of Illyria: ‘I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes / With the memorials and the things of fame / That do renown this city’ (3.3.22–4), although it is not clear what sights there are to see.

iii. Living in my glass: Optics One of the primary thematic and cognitive domains of



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Twelfth Night is the field of optics (defined broadly as the study of light and by extension of vision). Twelfth Night was first performed in the most intense period of optical experimentation in Europe, half way between the invention of the compound optical microscope around 1595 and that of the refracting telescope in 1608. In early seventeenth-century England, optics remained poised in a precarious balance between science and magic. On the one hand, advances in the production and use of lenses and mirrors gave optical enquiry a new scientific standing, on the other optical instruments were still thought capable of producing magical effects, able to see across space, time and metaphysical boundaries and to make visible arcane realities inaccessible to the naked eye. Glass, in the form of both lenses and mirrors, enjoyed an unprecedented cultural prestige. However, it also highlighted the structural unreliability of sight: if optical instruments were able to change in radical fashion man’s vision of the created universe, this entailed not only that the eye can be easily deceived but, more disquietingly, that what we see unaided is actually a distortion of reality in need of correction. As the great mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler puts it – defining the term ‘image’ – in his seminal text Optics (1604), ‘Briefly, an image is the vision of some object conjoined with an error of the faculties contributing to the sense of vision. Thus, the image is practically nothing in itself, and should rather be called imagination’ (77). The visual perception of an object is the result of an error of the faculties, producing ‘nothing’.1 There are two references to glasses in Twelfth Night: Viola’s ‘I my brother know / Yet living in my glass’ (3.4.376–7), in which the term is synonymous with ‘mirror’; and Orsino’s ‘If this be so, as yet the glass seems true’ (5.1.261), where the term instead probably alludes to an optical instrument, the implied ‘perspective [glass]’ to which Orsino refers earlier in the scene. There are thus two kinds of glasses and two quite distinct optical functions at work in the play, which we might identify as reflection (Viola) and refraction (Orsino), which in turn correspond to the two branches of early modern optics:

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catoptrics (the study of mirrors and reflection) and dioptrics (the study of lenses and refraction).2 Twelfth Night is unusual in its twofold interest in optics. Elsewhere in Shakespeare ‘glass’ usually signifies hourglass or receptacle, in addition to mirror. Mary Thomas Crane has noted the reluctance of early modern English dramatists to dramatize, and especially stage, optics: ‘Early modern theatre evidently preferred to align itself with the conjuring of demons or with fraud rather than with experiments in optics’ (2013: 251). Shakespeare, in general, is no exception. The most significant ‘optical’ occurrence of the term ‘glass’ is in the scene of the apparitions in Macbeth (4.1): ‘And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass / Which shows me many more’ (4.1.118–9), preceded in the Folio by the stage direction ‘A show of eight kings, the last with a glass in his hand; …’ (110). The onstage ‘glass’ invoked by the witches may be a crystal able to show the future, a mirror reflecting the past, or even a perspective glass – somewhat akin to Orsino’s – reflecting the image of King James in the audience (Clark and Mason, Arden 3, 2015). A further allusion to glass, by Angelo in Measure for Measure, seems to lend strength to the hypothesis of a crystal used for purposes of divination: ‘and, like a prophet, / Looks in a glass, that shows what future evils  ... / Are now to have no successive degrees, /But, ere they live, to end.’ (2.2.95–100). In any case, the optical effects staged in Macbeth clearly fall under Crane’s heading of magical ‘conjuring’ rather than scientific ‘experiments’. Twelfth Night, instead, is the only play to refer to ‘glasses’ in the twin optical senses of mirror and lens, and even if it does not stage scientific experiments, it does refer to optical instruments that may be ‘scientific’ rather than magical, and it does show us their (albeit illusory) refractive effects onstage in the final scene, to which I will return later in this chapter (see pp. 289–91).

Reflection To begin, instead, with reflection (or catoptrics), Viola’s ‘glass’ – if indeed it be made of glass – was something of



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a luxury item in early modern ‘Illyria’. True glass mirrors from Murano, Venice, made of pure white ‘crystalline’ glass coated with a tin-mercury amalgam, were the only lookingglasses that guaranteed accurate reflectivity (Melchior-Bonnet 2002: 18). They were imported into England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but were highly expensive. The alternative was a small steel mirror, ‘an everyday object that could be bought at the fair or at the clothier’s’ (22). In the aristocratic and ‘Venetian’ context of Shakespeare’s Illyria, we might imagine a crystalline glass rather than a piece of steel, especially since it is in any case a discursive offstage item. The question arises only because Viola underlines the reflective power of the glass (‘true’), referring to it as a material as well as symbolic object. Twelfth Night is again unusual in this respect. As Debora Shuger has shown, mirrors in early modern texts are not properly speaking reflective, since they usually show something other than the face of the beholder: ‘First, the object viewed in the mirror is almost never the self. The viewer sees a great many things in Renaissance mirrors but not, as a rule, his or her own face’ (1999: 27). The ‘many things’ seen in early modern mirrors include, for example, the face of Christ, the viewer’s inner soul, skulls and other memento mori and biblical exemplars. Mirrors provided a religious or moral image rather than a subjective likeness. This is often the case in Shakespeare, as with Pericles’s vanitas glass trope: ‘For death remembered should be like a mirror, / Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error’ (1.1.46–7). As a result of the moral role of the glass – a vestige of medieval allegorical thought, despite early modern technological progress in mirror-making – it rarely fulfils the function of allowing the beholder to view herself and thus become aware of her individual subjectivity. As Shuger observes, One would be hard-pressed to find any early modern English instance of mirroring used as a paradigm for reflexive selfconsciousness. With the exception of Shakespeare’s Richard II, no one looks in a mirror to find out what he looks like,

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to view himself – and Richard finds the result so unsatisfactory that he throws the mirror down and breaks it. (1999: 31) In practice even in the case of Richard II that Shuger mentions as an exception, the glass reflects not so much the deposed monarch’s face as his moral and political state (‘Is this the face that faced so many follies …?’, 4.1.285). Twelfth Night is once again an exception. Viola’s perception is both reflective and reflexive: she sees her own image, which, however, is also a reminder of the features of her ‘dead’ brother. As Wittgenstein would say, she sees ‘that’, her reflection, but she also sees it ‘as’ a picture of Sebastian. In one sense the glass acts as a memento mori, but in this case as a reminder not of the inevitability of death in general but the supposed event of a single presumed death, that of her twin. The point of the reflection is not moralistic but intensely psychological. Viola actually sees, in addition to her own face, that of her brother, not dead but ‘yet living’: a projection of her desire and also, perhaps, a talismanic image that will hopefully bring him back to life. At the same time her own self is reflected in its assumed identity and adopted gender, a doubled subject position that causes her considerable discomfort: ‘Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness …’ (2.2.27). Aware of her role as double image, she muses on androgyny and its discontents: ‘As I am man, / My state is desperate for my master’s love; / As I am woman, now alas the day, …’ (2.2.36–8). This is a unique and exquisitely modern moment of self-awareness and self-interrogation in Shakespeare. Among other things Viola reflects on her role (including, implicitly, her theatrical role) as visual object of erroneous perception and as erotic object of mixed-gender desire (‘And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me’, 35). This is perhaps the only instance in Shakespeare in which one of the dramatis personae meditates on her crucial position as both subject and object of the gaze. Viola’s glass is one of the first truly reflecting mirrors in English literature and drama.



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iv. The secret self Shakespeare’s contemporaries often equated mirrors with portraits. As Debora Shuger points out: The mirrors depicted in Renaissance texts are, in fact, often paintings. The concepts frequently seem interchangeable … Renaissance practice, moreover, tends to elide mirrors and paintings: in the miroirs de mort, as we have seen, the skull is drawn on the glass’s lining. (1999: 30) Looking in a mirror meant looking at a picture, not least because Renaissance crystalline glasses were ‘set in precious frames made of beveled glass borders’ (Melchior-Bonnet 2002: 21). The early modern looking glass, moreover, was convex, and thus tended to scale down the image of the face, transforming the features ‘in great’ into a representation ‘in little’. The affinity between the looking glass and the portrait miniature was underlined, and indeed strategically exploited, by the manner in which early modern mirrors were made to look to all extents and purposes like small portraits: In fact, most Renaissance mirrors resemble miniatures: small, oval or circular, worn as an ornament – usually on a ribbon attached to one’s waist – often lavishly encased. (Shuger 1999: 21; see also Grabes 1982: 4–5, 43) Gazing at one’s reflection in a small oval convex mirror was almost exactly like scrutinizing one’s own miniaturized painted image. There is thus a close kinship between the glass in which Viola sees her own reflected image, together with the face of her brother, and the ‘jewel’ or portrait miniature that Olivia bestows upon her in 3.4: Here, wear this jewel for me: ’tis my picture. (3.4.203)

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In glossing her jewel as ‘my picture’, Olivia is, in effect, equating it with her mirror image (my picture) but is nevertheless distinguishing the small handheld object from a similarly shaped convex looking glass (my picture). Viola–Cesario receives it reluctantly, in part because it is clearly intended as a love token, but also, perhaps, because it is to some extent precisely a mirror turned towards her own self: in perusing Olivia’s gift, she perceives the image of a sitter of her own sex enamoured of her, and is therefore reminded of her ‘true’ gender and of the uncontrollable effects of her disguise. The material object that Olivia deictically proffers Cesario (‘this jewel’) denotes also a difference in social status: a gift of high monetary value made to a ‘servant’. The portrait miniature was often literally a jewel, not only in its ornamental setting but in the precious materials used to augment – both aesthetically and financially – the value of the picture itself: [Limning] excelleth all other Painting what so ever, in sundry points, in giving the true lustur to pearle and precious stone, and worketh the metals Gold or Silver with themselfes which so enricheth and innobleth the worke that it seemeth to be the tinge it se[l]fe even the worke of god and not of man, being fittest […] to put in ewells of gould. (Hilliard 1983: 16) This continuity between outer and inner gold and precious stones is underlined by Henry Constable’s punning compliment to the miniaturist in his sonnet: ‘To Mr Hilliard, upon occasion of a picture he made of my Lady Rich’: To diamonds, rubies, pearls, the worth of which Doth make the jewel which you paint seem rich. (Hilliard 1983: 12) Such material riches reflect the beauty and the moral and social worth of the subject, Penelope Rich – sister and political promoter of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the Stella of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella – made to ‘seem rich’,3 just as the wealthy Countess Olivia’s costly gift reflects, and is



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made even more precious by, the personal and social qualities of the sitter. Olivia’s jewel-miniature has caught and fixed her person in a precious love locket that she wishes Cesario to wear in close contact with his body. This is the nearest she comes to a tactile and corporeal relationship with Cesario (as opposed to Sebastian, with whom she may have a more direct encounter: ‘Go with me to my house’, 4.1.53). Her picture is her proxy, which however will lead its own independent amorous life with the object of her desire. It is her true secret self, able to perform what decorum prevents her from acting out directly. Olivia’s gift belongs to the early modern literature of the miniature as secret fetish object, hidden or disclosed according to beholder and occasion. The most celebrated text in this literature is the account by Sir James Melville, Ambassador to Mary, Queen of Scots, of his 1564 visit to Elizabeth I, whom he persuades to permit him a view of her most prized picture, secreted in her most private domestic space: She took me to her bed-chamber, and opened a little desk, wherein were divers little pictures wrapt within paper, and their names written with their own hand upon the papers. Upon the first that she took up was written, ‘My Lord’s picture.’ I held the candle and pressed to see the picture so named. She was loath to let me see it; at length my importunity prevailed for a sight thereof [and found it to be the Earl of Leicester’s picture]. I desired that I might have it to carry home to my queen; which she refused, alleging that she had but that one picture of his. I said again that she had the original; for he was at the farthest part of the chamber, speaking with secretary Cecil. (1969: 37) The two interlocutors disagree about the proxy role of the portrait: Melville ironically equates Leicester’s miniature with the ‘original’, as if it were a superfluous double, while Elizabeth, reluctant to part with either, distinguishes her beloved from his portrait. This is in part a political dispute,

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since Elizabeth is especially loath to concede her Lord’s image to her political rival. The evident subtext, however, regards the playfully erotic implications of ‘My Lord’s picture’ lying ‘wrapt within paper’ in her bedchamber. Elizabeth made considerable public play of the fetish function of miniatures: another anecdote recounts how she once insisted on acquiring a portrait of Robert Cecil that Lady Derby ‘wore about her neck and in her bosom’ (Salamon 1983: 97): in spite of the wearer’s attempts to conceal the miniature, the Queen snatched it away and recognized the sitter, promptly tying the picture to her shoe, then pinning it on her elbow (Reynolds 1964: 280). In another episode, in 1595, Elizabeth’s ambassador in France, Sir Henry Unton, reluctantly gave the Queen’s own portrait miniature to the French king Henry IV, who ‘beheald it with Passion and Admiration … protesting, that he never had seene the like; so, with great Reverence, he kissed it twice or thrice’ (State papers, qtd in Reynolds 1964: 280).4 The most explicit episode in the fetishism of limning, however, is found in the autobiography of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who relates how his own portrait, reduced ‘in little’ by the limnist Isaac Oliver from the original full-size painting by William Larkin, becomes for a doting female admirer a full-fledged erotic surrogate, again to be hidden/displayed first between her breasts and then in the privacy of her bedchamber: There was a lady also, wife to Sir John Ayres, Knight, who, finding some means to get a copy of my picture from Larkin, gave it to Mr. Isaac [Oliver] the painter in Blackfriars, and desired him to draw it in little after his manner; which being done, she caused it to be set in gold and enamelled, and so wore it about her neck so low that she hid it under her breasts … Coming one day into her chamber, I saw her through the curtains lying upon her bed with a wax candle in one hand, and the picture I formerly mentioned in the other. I coming thereupon somewhat boldly to her, she blew out the candle, and hid the picture from me; myself thereupon being curious to know what that was she held in her hand,



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got the candle to be lighted again, by means whereof I found it was my picture she looked upon with more earnestness and passion than I could have easily believed, especially since myself was not engaged. (1886: 69) Cherbury surprises Lady Ayres making love with his image, thus finding himself in the unusual and flattering position of being voyeur to his ‘own’ carnal embrace. Olivia perhaps hopes that Cesario will put her picture to analogous use, even if she is not there to watch.

v. Much like the character: Graphics In addition to optics, Twelfth Night is much taken up with the adjacent field of graphics (namely, a concern with graphic images or signs, including the written word): indeed, to the extent that it impinges on and conditions the field of vision, graphics is a sub-branch of optics. The interaction between optics and graphics is central to the comedy’s dramatic economy, bringing together as it does the respective emphases of the two plots: the Viola plot dominated by optics, the Malvolio plot by graphics. Thanks largely to Olivia’s steward, Twelfth Night is an unusually graphological, or indeed graphomaniacal, play. Not only does it contain three letters read out loud onstage (not a solitary record, since Hamlet also has three), it also, uniquely, draws the audience’s attention to letters both in the epistolary sense and, more particularly, in the graphic or calligraphic sense. Not by chance the specular relationship between the images of Viola and Olivia is also expressed in the near-anagrammatic mirroring between their written names (which are both also included in ‘Malvolio’). The Malvolio plot in turn also offers a series of imagetexts in which words serve as interpretants to pictures, but more often than not the verbal gloss only adds to the perceptual and hermeneutic chaos. The result is a chimera, a two-headed optical–graphic illusion.

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The multi-scene episode of Olivia’s false billet doux begins with an act of counterfeiting, in which the handwritten word, like so much else in the play, becomes a deceptive image of something else. ‘I can write very like my lady your niece’, boasts Maria (2.3.154–5). ‘Like’ suggests the principle of resemblance that governs portraits and other pictures: Maria produces a perfect simulacrum of Olivia’s hand able to take the place of the ‘original’. Malvolio is thereby induced into an amorous relationship with graphic signs which, supposedly deriving directly from Olivia’s hand – in the double sense of handwriting and of organ – evoke prohibited fantasies of her more secret body parts and functions: ‘By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s and her t’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand’ (2.5.85–8). There is a direct resemblance between calligraphic form and the evoked act of urination: ‘thus makes she’. Twelfth Night is the only Shakespearian play in which the shape of graphic signs determines a significant part of the action. The ‘fustian riddle’ at the centre of the letter hoax – ‘M. O. A. I. doth sway my life’ (2.5.106) – is a self-referential hermeneutic trap, since the point is again to find in the letters themselves a resemblance to the beholder, as in a mirror or portrait: ‘If I could make that resemble something in me!’, 117–18); the near anagram thus turns out to be a graphic representation of the interpreter (‘And yet to crush this a little it would bow to me’, 137–8). What gives added authority to the letter and its letters is the presence on the envelope of an image that confirms the ‘authenticity’ of the handwriting and its author: By your leave, wax. Soft – and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal. ’Tis my lady. (91–3) The wax ‘impressure’ of Olivia’s seal, unlike the handwriting, is not forged but purloined. The image is thus not a counterfeit but a form of piracy, an unauthorized performative sign that guarantees what J. L. Austin would call the ‘felicity’ of the letter as a document of the Countess. Seal impressures are highly



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individual but at the same time infinitely repeatable, which is what gives Maria the opportunity of ‘becoming’ Olivia as author of the text by appropriating her distinctive sign. As for the image itself, the choice of Lucrece is presumably designed to represent the owner’s chastity (alluding to the heroine’s stoic resistance of the assault of Tarquin and her later suicide), but it is inevitably also associated with the sexual violence famously recounted in Shakespeare’s own Rape of Lucrece. This association only further excites Malvolio’s already steaming erotic and social imagination, since it seems in a sense to authorize the steward’s amorous reverie. One of the immediate results of the hoax is the metamorphosis of Malvolio himself into a graphic image. Maria perceives the steward smiling’s face – in fulfilment of the letter’s request to smile – as a printed cartographic picture: maria He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies. (3.2.74–6) This is one of the comedy’s more verifiable pictorial allusions, namely to Edward Wright’s 1600 map of the East Indies, ‘augmented’ because of its inclusion for the first time of the island of Nova Zembla off the Arctic, a novelty made possible, ironically, by the disastrous 1596–7 expedition of the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, which came to a premature end in the icefields off the island. Wright’s map, implicitly representing Barentz’s tragic expedition, is offered as a parable for Malvolio’s own dangerous ambitions of vertical social travel, as Fabian’s later and more direct allusion to the event suggests: ‘you are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard’ (3.2.24–6). Both men are confounded by graphics: Barentzs was led astray by graphic navigational rhumb lines that should have guided him (and to which Malvolio’s face is compared), while the steward is in turn disoriented by epistolary lines and betrayed by his own smile lines. Malvolio’s map-face, moreover, is an icon of self-deception,

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of a delusional state of happiness destined to have a very brief life. Still within the ‘graphic’ plot in Olivia’s household, two other dramatis personae are seen as a painted or printed picture accompanied by verbal gloss, an interaction between optics and graphics that sets up another ‘fustian riddle’: Enter feste. sir andrew Here comes the fool, i’faith. feste How now, my hearts? Did you never see the picture of ‘we three’? sir toby Welcome, ass. (2.3.13–17) The clown’s perception of his companions as a well-known piece of popular iconography is another version of the duck–rabbit: on his entry he – like the audience – witnesses the interior scene of drunken gentlemen (worthy, perhaps, of a Dutch drollery), and promptly calls our attention to it, but he claims to see it as a recondite image of two asses or loggerheads. Feste’s allusion to low street art, typical of an inn sign (Fig. 38), poses a number of questions, the most obvious of which regards the ‘missing’ third ass or loggerhead. Feste’s own lines take the place of the impresa-like motto in the picture (‘We three …’), which is designed to entice the beholder into a hermeneutic trap, rather like Malvolio’s ‘M. O. A. I.’: here the trap consists in the arithmetical incongruity between image and gloss, two versus three. To pose the inevitable question ‘why three?’ is to provide the answer, identifying the questioner himself as ass number three. Sir Toby, who immediately gets the joke, tries to include Feste as the tertium quid (‘Welcome, ass’). The clown, however, implies his own extraneity through the use of ‘you’, as if the perception were not his own. He, unlike his cronies, is not (yet) drunk, and since, moreover, he is an official court fool, he cannot be perceived as if he were an ass. ‘You’, however,



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FIG. 38  ‘We three loggerheads’ inn sign, Tonbridge, Kent

cannot be addressed to either of the gentlemen who are already in the picture; the only remaining candidate is the audience: caveat spectator. The play has other references to offstage graphic-verbal hybrids, such as Cesario’s ‘She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief’ (2.4.114–15), which probably alludes to the engraved emblem in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) of a seated female figure accompanied by the altogether congruous motto ‘Pazienza’. What is significant about Feste’s joke, however, is the fact that it takes the ongoing stage configuration itself as a picture. This, among other things, looks back to an earlier scene in which the audience is invited to perceive the performance in progress as a painting: Olivia’s self-presentation as portrait in 1.5 (see pp. 283–8); and it looks forward to the play’s finale in which we are asked to take the stage composition as – among other possibilities – a Renaissance perspective painting (see pp. 291–3).

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vi. The phantom portrait: Mistress Mall One of the play’s more intriguing iconographic enigmas is Sir Toby’s allusion to a ‘missing’ offstage picture: Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before ‘em? Are they like to take dust, like Mistress Mall’s picture? (1.3.120–2). Mistress Mall’s picture is doubly invisible: first because it seems to have been removed from its place (a wall?) and is currently taking ‘dust’, perhaps in some deposit; and then because it is or was curtained, and was thus already inaccessible to public view even prior to its removal. Sir Toby is a reference without a referent, another instance of an image ‘that is and is not’. The only certain data he provides are the curtains and the dust, which are in any case somewhat contradictory details, since one of the primary purposes of curtains around pictures was precisely to protect them from dust, as well as to prevent the sun fading them. If the picture is taking dust, then it no longer has a curtain before it. This is the first of two allusions in the play to picture curtains (see p. 283), which therefore take on something of the status of a topos or running trope in the play (what Louise George Clubb would call a theatregram [1989: 16]). Curtains – often made of silk and usually coloured, sometimes striped – were a familiar early modern Elizabethan phenomenon, reserved especially for paintings of particular value or social importance in the galleries of the great. Most of Henry VIII’s pictures at the Palace of Westminster – according to a 1542 inventory – had a ‘curteyne of white and yellow sarcanet paned together’ (Simon 1996: 13). Curtains, rather than frames, are frequently mentioned in inventories: virtually all of Leicester’s paintings at Kenilworth were curtained (Goldring 2007: 171). What this suggests is that Mistress Mall’s picture is, or was, of considerable importance in the context of an aristocratic household, Olivia’s or otherwise.



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Sir Toby’s phantom picture has a named but unidentified sitter. His allusion may be purely ‘virtual’, without a precise referent. If not, the most immediate candidates as sitter are the play’s two internal ‘Mals’: Maria (for whose name ‘Mall’ was a common abbreviation) and Malvolio. Since, however – apart from the question of Malvolio’s gender – both characters are Olivia’s servants, the likelihood of a curtained portrait of either of them hanging in the Countess’s gallery is somewhat low. A number of external historical candidates have been proposed. George Steevens in his 1778 edition of Shakespeare suggested the notorious pickpocket Moll Cutpurse (alias Mary Frith), while John Dover Wilson, in his 1930 edition of the play, opted for the infamous prostitute Mary Newborough, involved in the so-called Bridewell scandal in 1602 (see also Ungerer 2004). The candidacy of a thief and a prostitute as potential subjects of a court portrait does not appear irresistible (not to mention the question of dates, since Twelfth Night was probably written in 1601). More promising is Leslie Hotson’s proposal (1954: 103–6) of another lady overcome by scandal, namely Mary Fitton, daughter of Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth, Cheshire, who in 1595, at the age of seventeen, was appointed as one of Elizabeth I’s maids of honour. Her courtly prominence is suggested by the fact that in June 1600 she led the dances in a masque before the Queen – whom she was charged to invite to join the other dancers – at the wedding of Henry Somerset, future Earl of Worcester, and Anne Russell (Laoutaris 2014: 345–6). A few months later, however, in March 1601, Fitton was disgraced for bearing the child of William Herbert – who in January of that year had become the third Earl of Pembroke – and was promptly banished from court. Any hopes she may have had of marrying Herbert were dashed, as the Earl was sent to the Fleet prison for his refusal to wed her and ‘utterly renounced all marriage’ (Lee 1889). He eventually married the dwarfish Lady Mary Talbot. Apart from the putative Shakespearian connections of Herbert (one of the candidates as ‘Mr. W.H.’, dedicatee of the Sonnets), not to mention Mary Fitton herself (erstwhile contender for the title of ‘dark lady’),

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such a narrative of social rise and fall would lend Sir Toby’s pictorial allusion a distinctly topical flavour, and would justify the sudden ‘disappearance’ from the gallery of the portrait of Mistress Mall. What gives the Fitton hypothesis added narrative and iconographic appeal is the actual existence of a fine portrait of Mary, attributed to the circle of George Gower, Serjeant Painter to Queen Elizabeth (Fig. 39). The half-length portrait in oils, dated around 1595 and now in the collection of Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, shows the young gentlewoman in a fashionable wheel farthingale dress, with a skirt of pale strawberry satin adorned with silver and cuttes and ‘embroidery of cross-bars of silver to suggest a basket, over which flowers and leaves are mingled with frogs, flies, beetles, butterflies, caterpillars, snails, and slugs, all in their natural colourings’ (Norris 1997: 638), together with stomacher and sleeves of white satin; her head is adorned with an elegant filigree attire of silver wires, spangles and pearls. Altogether, her costume ‘exemplifies the climax of late Elizabethan fashion and elaboration’ (638) and is fitting to her role as Cynthia’s Maid of Honour. It might also be noted that she wears suspended at her neck and pinned to her breast an accessory in the form of an unopened black enamel oval locket with gold rim, certainly containing a portrait miniature (perhaps of her lover), not unlike the ‘jewel’ that Olivia gives Cesario. It is more than likely that the painting, if it had hung in the royal gallery, was promptly removed: Mary suffered a loss of face, in all senses. The Fitton story is among other things a cautionary tale regarding the dangers of going beyond one’s station, especially in a rigidly hierarchical context such as the royal court. From a narrative point of view, Mary has affinities with both Maria and Malvolio, both of whom aspire – one successfully, one with humiliating consequences – to improve their lot through marriage to social superiors. Maria, herself a lady in waiting at the court of countess Olivia, commits a major transgression in forging a letter from her mistress, as she is obliged to confess, but is saved by her secret marriage to Sir Toby: no William Herbert, he, but nonetheless the Countess’s ‘cousin’. Malvolio,



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FIG. 39 Mary Fitton, attrib. to circle of George Gower: oil on canvas, c. 1595

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Mary Fitton

Maria ‘Mistress Mall’ Malvolio

[…} FIG. 40  The composite nature of ‘Mistress Mall’

instead, aspires to the hand of the Countess herself, and is led, as it were, to ‘cross-dress’ in ‘fashionable’ yellow stockings and cross garters. In a sense, he thus ‘becomes’ Mistress Mall, an effeminized Malvolio in yellow, and like Mary Fitton he is punished for his ill-advised attempt at social climbing. The possible referents of Sir Toby’s allusion may not, therefore, be mutually exclusive, since they share a virtual space of social transgression leading to potential disgrace. Mistress Mall may thus be a composite figure (Fig. 40). There is a final narrative sting in the Fitton tale that may suggest an affinity between Mary (and thus perhaps Mistress Mall) and Viola–Cesario. In her clandestine encounters with Herbert, Fitton disguised her identity and gender by presenting herself en travestie: During the time that the Earl of Pembroke favoured her she would put off her head-tire, and tuck up her clothes, and take a large white cloak and march as though she had been a man to meet the said earl out of the court. (State Papers, qtd in Lee 1889: 83)



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Viola–Cesario, a gentlewoman/gentleman en travestie enam­oured of a man well above her station – a duke and not a mere earl – is another figure in the play who runs the risk of being discovered and disgraced (and thereby banished from court and from all intercourse with her beloved), although her lot proves more benevolent than Fitton’s. There is a little of Mistress Mall in everyone.

vii. Show you the picture: Olivia as self-portrait Twelfth Night’s most elaborate pictorial trope occurs in Olivia’s first encounter with Cesario (1.5). On the latter’s entry, Olivia is veiled in mourning for her dead brother. Playfully but seductively unveiling, she figures the moment of her self-revelation as the opening of an art exhibition: olivia Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text. But we will draw the curtain and show you the picture. [Unveils.] Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done? viola Excellently done, if God did all. (1.5.224–9) Olivia’s surprising gesture has possible religious implications. Her unveiling is effectively a premature renunciation of the veiled and secluded monastic life she has vowed to follow for seven years. At the same time, her self-uncovering is one of several manifestations in the play – together, for example, with the final appearance of the two twins – of the theme of epiphany, which has its origins in the revelation of the infant Christ, and is thus appropriate to Twelfth Night (as indeed are the comedy’s many gifts, including Olivia’s ‘jewel’, since in early seventeenth-century England 6 January was the designated day for the exchange of Christmas presents).

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Olivia’s epiphanic gesture is also self-consciously theatrical, calling into play the theatregram of the picture curtain (see p. 278), but to the opposite effect of the Mistress Mall allusion: what is in play here is not a concealment but a disclosure (‘draw the curtain’). As Elizabeth Goldring notes: Curtains also lent a staged, theatrical quality to a picture gallery, for their colourful fabrics – set off against dark frames and dark panelling – could be drawn aside with a flourish to reveal previously hidden images. (2007: 171) Olivia’s curtain-opening therefore locates her in a picture gallery: her own. This is further suggested by her annotating of her facial features in an ‘inventory’ of the kind kept (for example by Bess of Hardwick: see p. 123) in order to quantify household goods, including pictures, in aristocratic houses: I will give out diverse schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will, as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin and so forth. (1.5.236–40) As an aristocratic and financially independent owner of the gallery and its collection, she is also proprietor of her own portrait (her face) and may dispose of it as she wishes, notwithstanding her oath. Her inventory, a parody of the literary blazon listing the beloved’s qualities, becomes a perfunctory ekphrasis, a diligent housekeeper’s description of a painting (compare Iachimo’s ‘inventory’ in Cymbeline: see pp. 73–82) At the same time the blatant theatricality of the gesture may allude – from the Globe stage, in which only the frons scaenae was curtained – to the drawing of the front curtain that signalled the beginning of the performance in classical and continental theatre (and very soon in the masques of Inigo Jones: see pp. 94–5). The theatrical self-consciousness of the dialogue is underlined by Cesario’s sarcastic risposte alluding to Olivia’s possible use of ‘painting’ in the sense of cosmetics,



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thus hinting at the fact that Olivia is played by a made-up male actor. On closer inspection, however, Viola is obliged to admit that the attractive hues of Olivia’s ‘portrait’ are not the result of make-up but are natural colours well-blended, like a portraitist’s oils: ’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on. (1.5.231–2) At the centre of the unveiling episode is the conceit of trompe l’oeil in reverse, whereby Olivia pretends to be a two-dimensional representation of herself. She transforms the natural depth of her features and the exuberant vitality of her person into a trick of the lines and shadows of perspective painting or, in the English context, of the miraculous mirage achieved by the portrait miniature in which, in the words of Hilliard, greatest of all is the grace in countenance, by which the afections apeare … and this princepall part of the beauty a good painter hath skill of and should diligently noet … howe then the curious drawer wach, and as it [were] catch thosse lovely graces wittye smilings, and those stolne glances which sudainely like light[n]ing passe and another Countenance taketh place except hee behould, and very well noate, and Conceyt to lyke, soe that he can hardly take them truly, and expresse them well, without an affectionate good Judgement, and without blasting his younge and simple hart. (23) Olivia’s ‘countenance’, in which her ‘affections apeare’ only too clearly, has been perfectly noted and well expressed by the most skilful of curious drawers, namely herself. Hers is a dazzling self-portrait, like Hilliard’s celebrated 1577 miniature, in which he portrays himself as a handsome, refined and rakishly fashionable thirty-year-old (Fig. 41), underlining his aspiration – like Shakespeare some years later – to the status of gentleman (hence his affirmation ‘Now therfor I wish it weare so that none should meddle with limning but gentlemen

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FIG. 41 Nicholas Hilliard, Self-portrait: watercolour on vellum pasted onto card, 1577

alone, for that it is a kind of gentill painting … and tendeth not to common mens use’, 16). The Countess’s indication of her own ‘gentle’ facial features – notably her ‘two grey eyes, with lids to them’ (239) (compare Hilliard’s ‘So Chiefly the drawer should observe the eyes in his pictures’: see p. 190) – again suggests the miniature mode. If Olivia’s putative portrait is, as it appears to be, a miniature – analogous to the portrait of Portia in The Merchant – she is deliberately playing on the in little/in great relationship, miniaturizing her full-size onstage body for the sake of Cesario’s private gaze. In this sense her later gift to Cesario is a literalizing of her pictorial conceit. There is some evidence for this miniaturizing process in the ‘graphic’



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component of Olivia’s self-portrait. The phrase ‘such a one I was this present’ plays on an intermedial contamination: ‘this present’ is an epistolary formula referring to the moment of writing, but here adapted to the moment of painting. As such it corresponds to the Latin phrases inscribed on many English portrait miniatures, ‘Anno domini’ and ‘Aetatis suae’, indicating the age of the sitter in the year of the picture (as in the Hilliard self-portrait where the expressions are inscribed in gold leaf, reflecting the picture’s gold frame and stressing Hilliard’s training as a goldsmith: the picture becomes another ‘jewel’; compare also Marston’s joke on the Latin phrases in Antonio and Mellida: see pp. 116–18). The inscription trope is further implied in the use of the past tense (‘I was’), which is to say, this was Olivia’s appearance at the age indicated in the portrait, i.e. the present moment. Olivia is therefore doubly located – as both sitter and painter of the portrait – in what Louis Marin calls ‘the present presence of the pictorial representation’ (1980: 306), since the composing and viewing of the picture coincide in the real time of performance. Olivia in this scene is an irrepressible speaking picture, unlike the miniature she later gives to Cesario which is, she assures him, mere dumb poesy: ‘Refuse it not, it hath no tongue to vex you’ (3.4.204). As in the later ‘jewel’ episode, however, her trope plays on the ambiguous status of limning as a more or less public art representing, at the same time, the private subjectivity of the sitter. As Patricia Fumerton notes of the picture in little, ‘Publication’ of the miniature, … while creating a sense of inwardness – and thus appearing to respond to a real need for expressing the private, inner self – could only be arrived at through outer, public rooms, whether political chambers or ornamental encasings. (1986: 62) Hence the power of Olivia’s gesture in ‘publicizing’ herself at the moment of greatest intimacy, the private bereavement that prompted her to adopt a veil. There is a certain poignancy to this, since she is exhibiting precisely the

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fact that she is still alive and able to speak in the ‘present presence’, whereas the image of her mourned brother is forever fixed in the past: Anno domini, aetatis suae. In this respect, again as in 3.4, she presents to Viola–Cesario a mirror image, since Viola has also ‘lost’ her brother and fears that his picture may be caught not in her glass but only in her memory. In the vital difference between being a picture and playing her own portrait lies the unbridgeable distance between the ‘liveliness’ of Hilliard’s art of limning and the living performance of the art of drama. One of the points of Olvia’s game is that the literally speaking picture of her face portrays itself through the words that issue from it in the dynamic present of theatrical performance, whereas, in Thomas Heywood’s words, ‘liuely portraiture … can neither shew action, passion, motion, or any other gesture’ (sig. Biiiv: see pp. 97–8). In a sense, by pretending to be a fixed image, she underlines precisely the fluidity of dramatic art, which, try as she may, she cannot suspend. She, or the actor who plays her, can never become a picture, only a moving and breathing body.

viii. Perspectives on ‘perspective’ The comedy’s long and busy finale registers a prodigious event within the field of vision, perceived quite differently by Olivia and Orsino. The onstage reunion of the twins seems to be seen by the Countess as a heaven-sent multiplication of her loved one, potentially doubling her pleasure: Most wonderful! (221) The Duke, instead, sees an inexplicable and self-contradictory replication of a single image: One face, one voice, one habit and two persons: A natural perspective, that is and is not. (5.2.212–13)



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For Olivia, the epiphanic vision is corporeal and emotional, for Orsino it is optical and paradoxical, inspiring him in turn to a double paradox: not only his riddling gloss ‘that is and is not’, but also the oxymoronic ‘a natural perspective’, since perspective, in its early modern sense, was by definition unnatural, the result of some form of man-made distortion. Precisely what form of trumping the Duke is alluding to has been the subject of considerable critical and editorial debate. Broadly speaking, there are three possible perspectives on Orsino’s ‘perspective’: the optical, the pictorial and the theatrical. These three angles of vision can be and indeed are – as this section will argue – superimposed in the play (on perspective in early modern literature, see Gilman 1978).

False glasses: Modes of refraction Competing interpretations of Orsino’s ‘natural perspective’ depend partly on how we read the grammar of the phrase. ‘Perspective’ is usually taken as a modifier with an elided noun, an abbreviation of the term ‘perspective glass’. This brings us back to the presence of optics and in particular of refraction (dioptrics) in the play (see pp. 265–6): if this reading is correct, what Orsino claims to see is the ‘natural’ equivalent of an illusory visual phenomenon produced by one of several kinds of optical device equipped with lenses designed to project a multiplied image from a single object, or, on the contrary, containing a faceted lens making multiple objects converge into a single image: one into two or two into one. The best gloss on this optical reading is George Puttenham’s comment on the illusionistic powers of ‘false glasses’: And this fantasy may be resembled to a glass, as hath been said, whereof there be many tempers and manner of makings, as the perspectives do acknowledge, for some be false glasses and show things otherwise than they be indeed, and others right as they be indeed, neither fairer nor fouler, nor greater nor smaller. There be again of these

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glasses that show things exceeding fair and comely, others that show figures very monstrous and ill-favored. (2007 [1589]: 110) Puttenham’s adjective ‘false’ does not necessarily have moral connotations: he is alluding to ‘scientific’ experiments in optics that distort vision. Likewise, the images produced are ‘monstrous’ in the etymological sense of deviating from the natural order. Late sixteenth-century England witnessed many such optical experiments, notably those of John Dee and his associates Leonard Digges and Thomas Digges. In his ‘Mathematicall Preface’ to the translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570), Dee, having defined perspective as ‘an Art Mathemticall, which demonstrateth the maner, and properties, of all radiations, Direct, Broken and Reflected’ (sig. Bir), goes on to describe ‘A marueilous Glasse’: [when you] proffer, with dagger or sword, to foyne at the glasse, you shall suddenly be moued to giue backe (in maner) by reason of an Image, appearing in the ayre, betwene you & the glasse, with like hand, sword or dagger, & with like quicknes, foyning at your very eye, likewise as you do at the Glasse. (sig. Biv; see Crane 2013: 254) The confines between science and ‘natural’ magic, however, were precarious, especially in the case of Dee, notorious for his cultivation of the occult arts. Optical ‘glasses’ were therefore suspected – often quite rightly – of being employed in esoteric operations. Dee showed Queen Elizabeth his ‘magical mirror’, the polished oval black stone into which he supposedly called his Spirits. In The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) Reginald Scot denounces the pseudo-magical effects of optical glasses (his marginal note reads ‘Strange things to be doone by perspective glasses’): But the woonderous devises, and miraculous sights and conceipts made and conteined in glasse, doo farre exceed all other; whereto the art perspective is verie necessarie.



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For it sheweth the illusions of them, whose experiments be seene in diverse sorts of glasses. (316) The doubled image of Cesario, therefore, may be indifferently the result of the new technology of optics or of pseudomagical chicanery, or of both.

Never a natural body The ambiguous grammar of Orsino’s oxymoron leaves open other interpretative options. ‘Perspective’ can be read not as a modifier implying an abbreviation but as a selfsufficient substantive, a grammatical function that the word fulfils in its other appearances in Shakespearian drama. In this reading the term takes on pictorial rather than optical connotations. The theory and practice of perspective painting had been introduced into England shortly before the composition of Twelfth Night, through Richard Haydock’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge carving & buldinge. ‘A Painter without the Perspectiues’, affirms Lomazzo in his preface, ‘[i]s like a Doctor without Grammer’ (8). In his fifth book, entitled ‘Of perspective’, Lomazzo praises the ‘virtue’ or efficacy of perspective in terms of its powers of deception (inganno): Such is the virtue of Perspectiue, that whiles it imitateth the life, it causeth a man to oversee and bee deceaved, by shewing a small quantity in steed of a great; the onely reason wherof is, because the eye is never offended with seeing a naturall body in anie place, whether aboue, belowe or else where, because it is daily acquainted wherewith. (185) The virtue of perspective lies in its ability to create, in Orsino’s words, that ‘that is and is not’, something out of nothing: depth out of flatness, ‘life’ out of paper, optical effects (‘decietful sightes’, 207) out of graphic forms (‘a science of visible lines’,

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188), all of them strictly and strategically unnatural: ‘never … a naturall bodie’. In Shakespeare, the noun ‘perspective’ generally takes on a distinctly painterly sense. In All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram employs it metaphorically to represent the distorting psychological effects of his own ill-judged disdain, which has led him to project a perceptual monster, namely the unjustly deformed image of the virtuous Helena: Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me, Which warped the line of every other favour … (5.3.48–9) Bertram is alluding to the somewhat extreme mannerist device known precisely as ‘perspective’ or oblique anamorphosis, which presents a warped image requiring an unconventional angle of vision in order to ‘straighten’ its definition. Bertram’s vision is distorted by contempt and needs to be straightened by love. Ben Jonson applies this trope of the erroneous angle of vision to the reading of poetry in his epigram ‘In Authorem’ prefaced to Nicholas Breton’s collection Melancholike Humors (1600): For, as one comming with a laterall viewe, Unto a cunning piece wrought perspectiue, Wants facultie to make a censure true: So with this Authors Readers will it thriue … (sig. Aivv) The same metaphorical allusion to a distorted image occurs in Richard II 2.2, where the term ‘perspective’, again a self-contained noun, appears at the centre of an elaborate simile in Bushy’s philosophical discourse designed to console the melancholy Queen, grief-stricken at her husband’s departure for Ireland: bushy Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shows like grief itself, but is not so; … Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon,



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Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry, Distinguish form. (2.2.14–20) The Queen’s grief warps her perception of all that she sees, and must be straightened by philosophy and patience.5 Again the iconographic context of these tropes may be primarily Italian, since Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with the first known example of perspective anamorphosis in his experimental 1485 drawing of an eye, although what were probably more directly known to Shakespeare and at least part of his audience, instead, were such ‘indigenous’ anamorphoses as Hans Holbein’s celebrated The Ambassadors with its anamorphic skull, painted at the court of Henry VIII in 1533,6 or the spectacularly distorted portrait of Edward VI by Holbein’s successor as Henry’s court painter, the Dutchman William Scrots, painted in London in 1546,7 and originally displayed at Whitehall (where Shakespeare would certainly have seen it since his company performed in the Palace: see Shapiro 2005: 29). In the light of this familiar iconographic and specifically Shakespearian tradition, Orsino may perceive the twins as a ‘naturally’ distorted anamorphic-perspective picture rather than as a mechanically doubled image.

Perspectively, the cities Shakespeare offers, however, a final grammatical and hermeneutic variation on ‘perspective’. In the finale of Henry V the word appears in an unequivocally adverbial use, and seems to refer not to optical glasses or anamorphic paintings, but to three-dimensional urban space: king henry v It is so: and you may some of you thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way. french king  Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities

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turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered. (5.2.313–18) Henry, conqueror of France, magnanimously compliments both French cities and the French Princess or ‘maid’, his bride Katherine, prompting the defeated French King’s polite and erudite visual metaphor. Henry’s ‘blindness’ is architectonic rather than pictorial: he fails to perceive clearly the French cities because they are in the background of the urban scene, whose foreground is entirely occupied by the female protagonist of the historical moment – and of the play itself – the fair French maid Katherine. The word ‘perspective’ in its artistic sense appears to have been introduced into the English language by the artist John Shute in his introduction to The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563; OED 3a), and specifically in the context of his discussion of the perspective scenery designs of Sebastiano Serlio, which had powerfully influenced the develop­ment of stage sets in Italy and Europe: Opticke sheweth us how and by what meanes the lightes should be set into the House, And howe they should be brought from place to place, as to serue the hole house, and euery place therin, whiche Optica, is properly called perspectiue, and is a furder speculacion then therin can or nedeth to be exprest: which of Sebastian Serlius, in his second booke first second and thirde Chapiter is partely declared. (sig. Fiir–iiiv) It is curious that the earliest recorded use of the term should have been theatrical, suggesting a precocious interest in the scenographic uses of perspective painting, even if the latter would receive its actual stage application in England only half a century later. The kinds of ‘Optica’ or ‘perspective’ that Shute has in mind are probably Serlio’s recommendations, in his Second Book of Architecture (1545, tr. 1611), for the representation respectively of tragic, comical, and pastoral stage scenes: the Italian architect prescribes a forest for



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pastoral, a formal street of classical palaces and monuments for the tragic scene, while the comical set (see Fig. 42) should show forth a city street comprising more private buildings, not all of them respectable: This first [scene] shall be Comicall, whereas the houses must be slight for Citizens, but specially there must not want a brawthell or bawdy house, and a great Inne, and a Church; such things are of necessitie to be therein. (Serlio 1611, ‘The Third Chapter: A Treatise of Scenes, or Places to Play in’, fol. 25r). There may be unsuspected Shakespearian implications in Serlio’s scenographic prescriptions and in Shute’s ‘Optica’. It

FIG. 42 Sebastiano Serlio, comical scene: engraving (the ‘bawdy house’ is downstage left: ‘RUFIA’)

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FIG. 43  Raphael, design for perspective flat for Ariosto’s I suppositi, 1518–19 Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence



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is possibly just such a comical (French) urban landscape that the King of France has in mind in the politically ‘happy’ finale to Henry V (‘you see them perspectively, the cities …’). In other words, what seems to be called metaphorically into play here is the perspective scenery that had been employed for decades on the continental, and especially Italian, Renaissance stage, in which an apparently three-dimensional, but in reality painted, city serves as the setting for the foregrounded human figure (see also Raphael’s design for a perspective flat for the 1519 Vatican performance of Ariosto’s I suppositi, Fig. 43; on Ariosto’s play, see pp. 126–30). There is a certain irony in this, since the prologue to Henry V itself famously asks the spectators to overlook the absence of scenic effects and to compensate with their ‘imaginary forces’ (18) the lack of mimetic stage realism (‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls …’, 19). The audience is politely requested to see ‘perspectively’ what appears to be an ‘unworthy scaffold’ (10). It was almost certainly in ‘comical’ Serlian perspective sets that the earliest pre-Shakespearian stage versions of the ‘Twelfth Night’ story were performed. In the original Sienese staging of Gl’ingannati, as the comedy’s most recent editor, Marzia Pieri, has observed, it is probable that on the wooden stage erected in the Great Council Hall [of the Municipal Palace in Siena], which had been turned into a theatre, … a perspective set of city scenes had be created, comprising a painted canvas and movable booths, akin to the mansiones of medieval religious drama. … The characters enter and exit from their respective houses, they meet, they hide from each other’s sight, they monologue without being heard, they spy each other in a relatively restricted space, which alludes to a street of the city of Modena where the action is set. (Accademici degli Intronati di Siena 2009: 24–5) The presence of a perspective set lends a particular optical angle to the agnition scene of 5.3, equivalent to Twelfth Night 5.2, in which the discovery of the true gender of the

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female protagonist Lelia (disguised as Fabio) takes the form of the unveiling of a picture within the overall stage picture, directing the audience’s (like Henry V’s) gaze towards the female protagonist in the foreground: clemenzia This, Master Flamminio, is your Fabio. Look at him carefully: do you recognize him? Are you amazed? […] flamminio I don’t believe there has ever been in the whole world a finer deception than this. How can I have been so blind not to recognize her? (168–9) Likewise, the first edition of Curzio Gonzaga’s Gli inganni (published in Venice in 1592, but probably written and performed in Rome around 1570) includes woodcut illustrations of characters onstage defined within a Serlian cityscape representing contemporary Rome, as in the episode in Act

FIG. 44  Scene from Curzio Gonzaga’s Gli inganni, 1592: woodcut



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4 in which the protagonist Ginevra (disguised as Cesare) encounters the spying governess Filippa and the ingenious servant Guindolo (Fig. 44), and risks the premature unmasking of her gender identity under Filippa’s penetrating gaze (‘I am undone: she has discovered that I am female!’, 47): Here again the somewhat baroque disguises and deceptions of the plot (in which both different-sex twins cross-dress) are intimately linked to the trumping of the spectator’s eye through scenographic perspective trickery. At the time of the composition of Twelfth Night (c. 1601), the century-long use of perspective sets on the Italian and European stage was becoming known in England, especially after the first Italian sojourn (c. 1598) of Inigo Jones, who in the opening years of the seventeenth century began to introduce perspective scenery into English court and private theatres (see Peacock 1995). One of the earliest and most eloquent descriptions of a perspective set on the English stage is Ben Jonson’s scenographic ekphrasis of Jones’s set for The Masque of Blackness, performed in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace on Twelfth Night 1605: First, for the Scene, was drawne a Landtschape [landscape], consisting of small woods, and here and there a voide place filled with huntings; which falling, an artificiall Sea was seene to shoote forth, as if it flowed to the land, raised with waues which seemed to mooue, and in some places the billow to breake, as imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature. … These thus presented, the Scene behind, seemed a vast Sea (and united with this that flowed forth) from the termination, or horizon of which (being the leuell of the State, which was placed in the upper end of the Hall) was drawne, by the lines of Prospective, the whole worke shooting downewards, from the eye; which decorum made it more conspicuous, and caught the eye afar of with a wandring beauty. To which was added an obscure and cloudy night-piece, that made the whole set off. So much for the bodily part. Which was of Maister ynigo iones his designe, and act. (sig. Aiii)

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Jonson’s praise for the ‘Prospective’ of Jones’s ‘bodily part’ is quite different from his later critique of the architect and his claim for the superiority of the text (see p. 97). What he evokes so vividly is an unnatural ‘natural perspective’, the ‘orderly disorder’ of nature created by the set designer. When applied to the stage, therefore, Lomazzo’s ‘science of visible lines’ achieved its most spectacular inganno, namely apparent three-dimensional space made from a flat painted surface, thereby creating the illusion of depth and distance to frame and expand the visual field of the stage action. This science was put to good use especially in the indoor rooms or halls in which Italian comedies such as Gl’ingannati and English masques were performed. At the same time, however, the Serlian picture set imposed severe limits on the movements of the actor themselves: The perspective illusion allowed for little interaction between actor and scenery. … Until [the introduction of multipoint perspective in 1703] all perspective scenery had a single vanishing point – for a spectator seated in an ideal position, the scenery seemed to disappear at a single point in the distance. (Banham 1995: 1093) The fixed-focus vanishing point of early perspective scenery meant that the actor playing, say, Lelia or Ginevra or indeed Jonson’s Euphoris (played by Queen Anne) could not move along the perspective axis, up and down the depth of the stage, without destroying the optical illusion by revealing the true size and the two-dimensional character of the scenery itself, especially its lack of real depth. The final scene of Gl’ingannati, with its simple foreground unmasking of the heroine, or likewise the somewhat static finale of Gli inganni, with its intricate narrative disclosures, posed little threat to the pictorial stage illusion of which they were part. The final scene of Twelfth Night, conversely, with its crowded stage and the hectic movement of actors across the width and along the depth of the platform, allowing each of them to witness the reunion of the twins from a different



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visual and psychological perspective, could hardly have been achieved in an Italian picture box set, where, instead of creating the ‘natural perspective’ of the twins’ identical appearance, the entire episode would have risked destroying the unnatural perspective of the illusionistic stage picture, even in an indoor space such as the Middle Temple Hall, where the first known performance of the comedy was staged. In any case, such internal spaces were unequipped with scenographic equipment until Inigo Jones adapted the Whitehall banqueting house in 1622 (Peacock 1995: 90). In outdoor ‘public’ theatres, such as the Globe, the Italianate perspective picture set was still less achievable, even if Shakespeare’s company had wished to do so. Instead of the more or less fixed frontal focus and distance on which the illusion of depth depended on the scenographic stage, the Elizabethan amphitheatre was characterized by multiple points of view along a 270-degree axis, with no orchestra dividing audience from stage. The visible lines of the pictorial set, moreover, would have been all too visible on the Elizabethan stage, obstructing the sight lines for most of the audience. Unlike the 1532 performance of Gl’ingannati in the great hall of the Sienese Municipal Palace, therefore, the 1602 performance of Twelfth Night in the great hall of the Middle Temple very probably offered no perspective illusion, no painted canvas and no movable booths, just actor-characters who entered and exited from the play’s two houses (Orsino’s and Olivia) by means of the stage doors, thereby allowing the decidedly non-urban space of Illyria to be rapidly and fluidly transformed from one domestic interior to the other, and from interior scene to open air scene (‘This is the air, that is the glorious sun’, affirms Sebastian at the beginning of 4.3, leading us outdoors after the domestic interior of 4.2, set in Olivia’s house). This brings us back to Orsino’s natural perspective, seen, as it were, from a theatrical viewpoint. The finale of Twelfth Night is the only episode in Shakespeare in which the term ‘perspective’ is used not metaphorically or symbolically to refer to an imaginary or offstage event or object (such as

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the cities of France or the absent Helena) or to an abstract concept (the Queen’s grief), but literally, and indeed with reference to the onstage spectacle simultaneously perceived by the theatre audience. Orsino’s underlining of the ‘naturalness’ of this scene and its participants – in direct contrast to Lomazzo’s proud exclusion of the ‘naturall body’ – can be read as a vindication of the characteristics and of the mimetic ‘virtue’ of the non-perspective English stage. The optical process at work is the opposite to the perspectivism of the Italianate stage: what looks like a painted perspective trick turns out instead to be three dimensional, made up not of visible graphic lines but of real bodies with little or no scenographic support. The inganno achieved in Shakespeare’s finale, therefore, is not only optical and pictorial but proudly actorial, whereby two male actors, one playing a young man and the other playing a young woman disguised as a young man, succeed in appearing identical to the discriminating gaze of the Globe or Middle Temple audience. Evidently the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were confident of being able to pull off such a demanding illusionary effect, despite Jonson’s complaint, in 1618, ‘that he could never find two so like others that he could persuade the spectators they were one’ (reported by William Drummond of Hawthornden, 1923: 37). The illusion is difficult to achieve on the modern stage, but was more feasible with the use of two boy actors, as Tim Carroll’s 2002 Middle Temple/Globe production – revived in 2012 – has shown. Here is a trompe l’oeil brought about not by new-fangled, two-dimensional Italian optics or graphics, but by traditional three-dimensional English theatrics. The doubling of vision in Twelfth Night is a process that comes to involve all the comedy’s dramatis personae as subjects and/or objects of optical focus. It is diplopia that governs the play’s twin plots, its episodes of high farce and of melancholy introspection, its riddles, enigmas and practical jokes, its characters’ investment of desire and of social ambition, its intensely iconographic discourse, and finally its stage performance with the vertiginously alternating entrances



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and exits, and final spectacular coming together, of the twins. ‘If this were played upon a stage now’, avers Fabian in the letter scene, ‘I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (3.4.123–4). So, of course, could Shakespeare’s audience, but his double visual–verbal art of the inganno keeps us all watching and listening till the end, willingly deceived.

Afterimage: The queen’s picture

FIG. 45  Angelika Kauffman, Elizabeth Hartley as Hermione: oil on canvas, c. 1775

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The multi-perspective ending to Twelfth Night is not Shakespeare’s final word – or, indeed, final image – on the idea of the stage performance as pictorial or optical effect. The dramatist composed his last and most spectacular onstage ‘picture’ some ten years later, in the finale to The Winter’s Tale.1 Hermione’s return from the dead in the form of a living statue is an illusion that does not involve any supposed perspectival trickery. Her three-dimensionality is not in question, but it does, as in the final scene of Twelfth Night, draw on the player’s ability to make the ‘natural magic’ work, in this case by persuasively playing dead (see ‘her dead likeness’, 5.3.15) prior to coming back to life. For this reason, the episode has always offered an intense performative moment to the actor or actress and has even become a ‘star vehicle’, as in the case of Elizabeth Hartley, whose 1774 Hermione-as-statue at Covent Garden – probably her most famous role, which she revived in 1779 – was celebrated in Angelika Kauffman’s sensuous Garrick Club portrait (Fig. 45). This captures the lithely statuesque Hartley ‘posed in pseudo-aristocratic mode in a white neoclassical robe, with her elbow resting languorously on a classical pedestal … [as she] gazes thoughtfully to one side, as if perhaps quietly reciting her lines, rather than engaging the viewer’s look’ (Perry 2007: 32). Hermione’s statue is referred to once in the play as an ‘image’ (5.3.58) and twice as a ‘picture’: Paulina – in whose country house ‘gallery’ (5.3.10) the ‘inauguration’ of the art work takes place – suggests that Leontes may remarry if he finds ‘another / As like Hermione as is her picture’ (5.1.73–4), i.e. the statue itself; the Clown, meanwhile, invites Autolycus and the audience to Paulina’s house in order to behold the visual event for themselves: ‘Hark, the kings and the princes, our kindred, are going to see the queen’s picture. Come, follow us. We’ll be thy masters’ (5.2.170–2). These uses of the term confirm the fact that in Shakespeare, and in early modern England at large, ‘picture’ was a hold-all term applicable to any artistic genre, including sculpture. One is reminded of Henry Wotton’s uncertainty before Titian’s Madonna: ‘I know not whether I shall call it a piece of sculpture, or picture’ (Pearsall



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Smith 1907: vol. II, 257; see pp. 158–9 in this volume). At the same time, the living statue is presented by Paulina as a picture in the more specific sense of a hybrid work, a painted polychrome sculpture, so as to justify Hermione’s lively flesh colour: The statue is but newly fixed; the colour’s Not dry. … The ruddiness upon her lip is wet. You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own With oily painting. (5.3.47–82) The statue scene also sees the reappearance of the picture curtain, and a dramatic unveiling ceremony in Paulina’s gallery that recalls Olivia’s trope in Twelfth Night 1.5 (see p. 283): ‘Behold, and say ’tis well’, invites Paulina, drawing the curtain to reveal the hidden sculpture (20), while Leontes protests at her offer to close it again: ‘Do not draw the curtain’ (59). The theatricality implicit in Olivia’s allusion becomes quite literal here: this is the only material stage picture curtain in Shakespeare, and may have been represented in the Globe Theatre performance by the curtain hung across the tiring-house door (Pitcher, Arden 3, 2010). The revelation of Hermione thus occupies the liminal space between onstage and offstage – the space where shortly afterwards the actors will make their final exit – as if to underline the statue’s uncertain status between actorial representation and optical hallucination, or between the symbolic and the imaginary, life (here) and death (elsewhere). Hermione’s revealed ‘image’ is both a funeral effigy – like the painted sculptures popular in early seventeenth-century English churches2 – and a full-length portrait ‘from life’ uncannily close to the original. Like Olivia’s ‘aetatis suae’ game, the statue episode also plays on the temporality of portraiture. The painted sculpture recreates Hermione’s ‘natural posture’ (23) and facial features, not as they were at the time of her supposed death (anno domini), but as she would have been sixteen years later, appropriately ‘wrinkled’

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(28), thereby demonstrating ‘our carver’s excellence, / Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her / As she lived now’ (30–2). Hermione’s image thus becomes a projection from the past into a virtual future that coincides with the fictional present, all three temporal levels coming together in the real time of the performance. The entire episode is in part a homage to mannerist mimetic realism. Not by chance The Winter’s Tale, as is well known, is the only Shakespeare play to name an actual artist, the Roman mannerist painter Giulio Romano. Paulina’s steward describes the work as, a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. (5.2.93–7) The Steward’s eulogy reprises the long Renaissance debate on artistic mimesis (see pp. 91–9 and 327–8, n. 7), of which Romano is taken as an authoritative representative. The contradictions regarding the time taken to compose the ‘piece’ – many years, but newly performed or completed – leaves open the question of historical chronology, since in 1611 Romano was long (and, unlike Hermione, not ‘fictionally’) dead: but then we have no historical coordinates for the action. As for the much-debated question of Shakespeare’s attribution of a sculpture to an artist known exclusively as painter and draughtsman (see p. 129), this may be a sort of auditory illusion and the name Romano simply a synonym for ‘Italian Renaissance artist’. It is true, however, that Romano’s extreme mannerist exploitation of perspective in his paintings, notably in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, is so powerful as to create a disconcerting three-dimensionality, as in the case of the fall of Icarus graphically described by Vasari: And then Icarus can be seen hurtling headlong through the air, almost as if he is going to fall on the spectator, his face



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pale with the colour of death. This invention was carefully conceived and thought out by Giulio, for it truly appears real: in it, one sees the burning heat of the sun scorch the wings of the wretched young man, as the blazing fire smokes, and one can almost hear the crackling of the burning feathers, while death can be seen sculpted on the face of Icarus, and on that of Daedalus his emotion and sharp pain. (1998: 370) Romano’s ‘invention’ (invenzione) of the pallid foreshortened figure coming alarmingly towards us succeeds in depicting, like Hermione’s statue but in reverse, the moment of passage between life and death, ‘sculpted’ (scolpita) on his face. Romano’s painting is in effect a two-dimensional sculpture. In reality Vasari’s viewing of Romano’s painting in the Palazzo Te is itself a trompe l’oeil, since what he is really describing is a drawing of Icarus given to him by Romano, while the painting (actually of the fall of Phaethon, now attributed to Romano’s follower Luca da Faenza) is in the Ducal Palace (see Pierguidi 2014). Vasari’s Romano, like Shakespeare’s, seems caught between the real and the hallucinatory.

Antimasque The Winter’s Tale was first performed in 1611, at a time when Jonson’s masques with Inigo Jones’s perspective sets were a well-established performative genre. Shakespeare, however, continues to opt for the ‘natural perspective’ of the player and the special dramaturgic effects the latter is able to achieve. From this point of view, the final scene is an ‘antimasque’: a further and penultimate – prior to the theatrical magic of The Tempest – affirmation of faith in the actor and his ability to create stage pictures. Simon Forman saw the play performed at the Globe in 1611, but fails to mention the statue scene in his account of the performance: perhaps he had already left or it did not create a lasting impression on him. The episode is, nevertheless, an afterimage: an afterimage of Shakespeare’s investment in the

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visual capacities of the Globe and Blackfriars stages, and of his career-long use of pictures as a central part of the dramatic action. It may also be the afterimage of a past historical age: the clown’s invitation to come and see ‘the queen’s picture’ inevitably evokes the countless public images of Queen Elizabeth, as if the final scene were about to enact the miraculous resurrection of Gloriana on the Globe or Blackfriars stage. This was beyond even Shakespeare’s scope, but the conceit may have conditioned the audience’s perception of the spectacle. Hermione’s statue is, finally, an apt afterimage for this book, which has endeavoured to explore the dramaturgic and theatrical presence of the picture in Shakespearian drama. In Shakespeare, every picture tells a story, but at the same time every story can become a picture.

ABBREVIATIONS

AWW All’s Well That Ends Well AC

Antony And Cleopatra

AYLI As You Like It Cym Cymbeline Ham Hamlet JC

Julius Caesar

1H4

King Henry IV Part I

2H4

King Henry IV Part 2

1H6

King Henry VI Part I

2H6

King Henry VI Part 2

3H6

King Henry VI Part 3

H8

King Henry VIII

KJ

King John

KL

King Lear

R2

King Richard II

LC

A Lover’s Complaint

LLL

Love’s Labour’s Lost

MM

Measure For Measure

MV

The Merchant Of Venice

MWW The Merry Wives Of Windsor

312 Abbreviations

MND A Midsummer Night’s Dream MA

Much Ado About Nothing

Oth Othello Per Pericles RL

The Rape of Lucrece

Son

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

TS

The Taming Of The Shrew

Tim

Timon Of Athens

Tit

Titus Andronicus

TC

Troilus And Cressida

TN

Twelfth Night

TG

The Two Gentlemen Of Verona

VA

Venus and Adonis

WT

The Winter’s Tale

Appendix: Shakespeare’s iconographic lexicon

Alabaster (n.) White ornamental stone suitable for carving: ‘smooth as monumental alabaster’, Oth 5.2.5. Cf. MV 1.1.84, under ‘Cut’. Arras (n.) Tapestry fabric woven with figures and scenes; or tapestry screen or curtain: Iachimo, Cym 2.2.26, ‘the arras, figures’. Art (n.) Practical application of knowledge: HV 1.1.52; in Per 2.3.14, Simonides’s ‘In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed’ alludes to visual arts as well as to the knights’ skill. Artist (n.) Person skilled in a craft or practical art; person skilled in a visual art (OED 8): see Per 2.3.14 under ‘Art’. Azure (adj.) Blue (heraldry): Iachimo’s ‘these windows, white and azure laced / With blue of heaven’s own tinct’, Cym 2.2.22–3. Badge (n.) Heraldic symbol worn by a knight, or distinctive device indicating rank or office: Warwick’s ‘my father’s badge, old Neville’s crest, / The rampant bear chained to the ragged staff’, 2H6 5.1.202, echoing the title page of the second part of Whitney’s Emblems, which is followed by a poem in praise of Warwick and Leicester (Knowles, Arden 3, 1999: see Fig. 46). Blazon (n.) 1) Armorial bearings or coat of arms: Mistress Quickly alludes to ‘Each fair instalment, coat and several crest, / With loyal blazon’ in Windsor Castle, MWW 5.5.63–4. 2) Verbal depiction of a coat of arms (OED 3), or more generally, a graphic description, as in the ghost’s ‘eternal blazon’ of his purgatorial punishment, Ham 1.5.21.

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FIG. 46 Title-page from Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems, second part, 1586 (see 2H6, 5.1.202–3, under ‘Badge’)

Blend (v.) To mix colours in a painting: ‘’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white / Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on’, TN 1.5.231–2. Carve (v.) 1) To cut or engrave figures on a surface (OED 6a): ‘The carved-bone face on a flask’, LLL 5.2.610. 2) To shape artistically by cutting (OED 5a): ‘My subjects for a pair of carved saints’, R2 3.3.152. Carver Sculptor: ‘So much the more our carver’s excellence’, WT 5.3.30. Character 1) (n.) Symbolic sign or expression (OED 2): the weeping woman in LC has a napkin ‘Which on it had conceited characters, / Laund’ring the silken figures in the brine’, 16–17. 2) (v.) To represent or portray; to engrave: Julia’s thoughts are ‘visibly charactered and engraved’ in Lucetta’s ‘table’ or mind, TG, 2.7.4.

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Compose (v.) To fashion, form: Marina ‘with her nee’le composes / Nature’s own shape’, Per 5.0.5–6. Counterfeit (n., adj.) 1) Portrait or image (OED 3a): ‘Fair Portia’s counterfeit’, MV 3.2.115. 2) False image, simulacrum: ‘Much liker than your painted counterfeit’, Son 16. Counterpoint (n.) A quilted cover for a bed, usually adorned with figures (OED 2): Gremio, ‘my arras counterpoints’, TS 2.1.355. Crest (n.) In heraldry, a device worn by a knight on his helmet, or placed above the shield and helmet in a coat of arms. Katherina asks Petruccio ‘What is your crest, a coxcomb?’, TS 2.1.227. Cf. 2H6 5.1.202–3, under ‘Badge’. Curtain (n.) Used to protect paintings from dust and light: ‘Come, draw this curtain, and let’s see your picture’, TC 3.2.45. Cut (v.) To sculpt, carve (OED 23): ‘Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster’, MV 1.1.84 . (Stone)cutter (n.) Carver, sculptor or engraver (OED cutter 2b): Kent on Oswald, ‘A stonecutter or a painter could not have made him so ill’, KL 2.2, 56–7. Death’s head Representation of the human skull as personification of death: Falstaff, ‘Do not speak like a death’s-head; do not bid me remember mine end’, 2H4, 2.4.237–8. See memento mori. Device (n.) Emblematic figure such as a heraldic design or impresa, usually accompanied by a motto (OED 9a): Thaisa is asked by her father ‘to entertain / The labour of each knight in his device’, Per 2.1.14–15. Draw (v.) Delineate, depict: Ophelia of Hamlet, ‘He falls to such perusal of my face / As a would draw it.’, Ham 2.1.87–8. Drollery (n.) A comic picture or drawing; a caricature (OED 2b): Falstaff, ‘for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery’, 2H4 2.1.142–3.

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Effigy (n.) Likeness or portrait, as in Duke Senior’s ‘And as mine eye doth his effigies witness’, AYLI 2.7.197. Emblem (n.) A picture symbolically representing an abstract or moral quality (OED 3a): Parolles’s ‘one Captain Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his sinister cheek’, AWW 2.1.41–3. Embroider (v.) To ornament with needlework: Henry VI alludes to the ‘rich embroidered canopy’ carried above a monarch or possibly over a four-poster bed, 3H6 2.5.44. Embroidery (n.) The art of ornamenting fabric with figures of needlework; or the embroidered material itself: Mistress Quickly, ‘sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery / Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee’, MWW 5.5.71–2. Engrave (v.) 1) To represent by sculpture (OED 1): Talbot intends to erect a funeral monument to Shrewsbury, ‘Upon the which, that every one may read, / Shall be engraved the sack of Orleans’, 1H6 2.2.15.2. 2) To carve figures upon a surface (OED 3a): see ‘Character’ (v.). Fashion (n.) 1) Workmanship (OED 1): ‘The fineness of the gold and chargeful fashion’, CE 4.1.31. 2) (v.) To shape, put into figurative form: ‘sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reeky painting’, MA 3.3.129–3. Figure (n.) 1) Representation of human form (OED 10b): Iachimo, ‘Never saw I figures / So likely to report themselves’, Cym 2.4.82–3. 2) Representation of architectural form, as in Lord Bardolph’s ‘And when we see the figure of the house, / Then must we rate the cost of the erection’, 2H4 1.3.43–4; cf. ‘Model’. Form Image or likeness (of a body) (OED 2): King John on his own body, ‘I am a scribbled form drawn with a pen / Upon a parchment’, KJ 5.7.34–5. Frame (n.) Structure in which a picture is set (OED 8): ‘My body is the frame wherein [the table’s] held’, Son 24. Fret (v.) To adorn with gold or silver (OED v2 1a): ‘This majestical roof fretted with golden fire’, MV 2.2.267.

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Gallery Room or other space dedicated to the exhibition of works of art. OED gives as first citation the Countess of Auvergne: ‘Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me, / For in my gallery thy picture hangs’, 1H4 2.3.36. Gild (v.) To cover with a thin layer of gold or gold-leaf, as in Salisbury’s redundant ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily’, KJ 4.2.11. Gold (n.) The metal as employed 1) as a surface for engraving (OED 3c): ‘Let’s see once more this saying graved in gold’, MV 2.7.36. 2) as thread for the ornamentation of textile fabrics (OED 4): TS 2.1.358, under ‘Needlework’. Graven (adj., ppt.) Sculpted, engraved: ‘If Time have any wrinkle graven there’, Son 100. Ground (n.) In heraldry, main surface or background serving as support for other colours or designs (OED 6b): ‘My sable ground of sin I will not paint’, RL 1074. Gules (n.) Red, as one of the heraldic colours. Shakespeare uses it metaphorically of blood: ‘Now is he total gules, horridly tricked’, Ham 2.2.395. Heraldry (n.) 1) The art of creating armorial bearings together with the rules governing the right to bear arms: ‘Well ratified by law and heraldry’, Ham 1.1.86. 2) Actual heraldic practice (OED 1b): ‘Two lovely berries … like coats in heraldry’, MND 3.2.211–13. 3) Heraldic device or colours: ‘This heraldry in Lucrece’s face was seen’, RL 64. Idol (n.) 1) Image or effigy (OED 1a). 2) metaphorically, an inert inactive person (OED 4). These two meanings come together in VA 232, ‘Well-painted idol, image dun and dead’. 3) Object of excessive devotion, usurping the place of God (OED 2): ‘Why, thou … idol of idiot worshippers’, TC 5.1.6–7. Idolatry (n.) The worship of idols or images (OED 1a): Julia to Silvia’s portrait, ‘And, were there sense in his idolatry / My substance should be statue in thy stead’, TG 4.4.198–9.

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Image (n.) The visual representation of an object or person. Shakespeare has eight main meanings: 1) Picture, especially portrait (OED 1): ‘To find where your true image pictured lies’, Son 24. 2) Statue: ‘Even like a stony image, cold and numb’, Tit 3.1.259. 3) The likeness of a person: ‘An image like thyself’, VA 664. 4) A perfect copy or imitation. 5) A false image or simulacrum. Meanings 4 and 5 both appear in Falstaff’s ‘But to counterfeit dying when a man liveth is to be no counterfeit but the true and perfect image of life indeed’, 1H4 5.4.116–18. 6) Outward appearance or apparition: ‘Our last King, / Whose image even but now appeared to us’, Ham 1.1.79–80. 6) Reflection: ‘Look in a glass, and call thy image so’, 2H6 5.1.142. 7) Mental representation of an object (OED 5a): ‘Save in the constant image of the creature / That is beloved’, TN 2.4.19–20. 8) Stage representation: ‘This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna’, Ham 3.2.231–2. Imagery (n.) Visual representation of object in carving, painting, etc. (OED 1a): ‘all the walls / With painted imagery’, R2 5.2.15–16. Impressure (n.) Mark made by pressure, e.g. from a seal, as in Malvolio’s ‘The impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal’, TN 2.5.91. Inkle (n.) Linen thread or yarn used in embroidery: ‘Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry’, Per 5.0.8. In little In miniature, as in Hamlet’s ‘[They] give twenty, forty, fifty, an hundred ducats a piece, for his picture in little’, 2.2.302–3. Compare LC 90–1, ‘For on his visage was in little drawn / What largeness thinks in paradise was sawn’. Inscribe (v.) To write or mark words, characters, etc., as on a monument or tablet (OED 1a): Norfolk’s ‘ego et rex meus’ / Was still inscribed’, H8 3.2.314–15. Inscription (n.) Set of characters or words written or engraved upon a surface (OED 2): Morocco’s ‘The first of gold, who this inscription bears’, MV 2.7.4. Insculp(ture) 1) (v.) To carve, engrave, or sculpt (OED 1),

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as in Morocco’s ‘A coin that bears the figure of an angel / Stamped in gold: but that’s insculped upon’, MV 2.7.56–7. 2) (n.) Engraving or inscription: ‘And on his grave-stone this insculpture’, Tim 5.5.67, Inventory (n.) Detailed list of goods or possessions, including works of art: Iachimo notes all Innogen’s pictures and furnishings, which ‘Would testify t’enrich mine inventory’, Cym 2.2.30. Jewel (n.) Miniature set in frame or case adorned with precious stones: ‘Here, wear this jewel for me: ’tis my picture’, TN 3.4.203. Limn (v.) Paint or portray: OED cites as first example in this sense VA 289–90, ‘Look, when a Painter would surpass the life / In limning out a well-proportioned steed’. Duke Senior sees in Orlando his father, ‘Most truly limned and living in your face’, AYLI 2.7.198. Line (n.) Mark made with pen or pencil in a drawing, especially the contour or outline of a figure. Cloten claims ‘the lines of my body are as well drawn as his’, Cym 4.1.9–10. Marble (n.) Polished stone used for monuments, sculpture, etc.: ‘A marble monument’, MM 5.1.232. Master (n.) A skilled artist or craftsman: ‘that rare Italian master Giulio Romano’, WT 5.2.94–5. Matt (v.) To dull the glossy appearance of paint (OED 1): ‘in your oil colours matted’, Addition 4 to The Spanish Tragedy. Memento mori Representation of a skull or other symbolic object as a warning of mortality: Falstaff’s ‘I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a death’s head or a memento mori’, 1H4 3.3.29–30. Model (n.) 1) Design for a projected building or other structure (OED 1a), as in Lord Bardolph’s ‘We first survey the plot, then draw the model’, 2H4 1.3.42. 2) Prototype for a design or device: ‘I had my father’s signet in my

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purse – / Which was the model of that Danish seal –’, Ham 5.2.49–50. Monument (n.) Tomb, statue or other structure commemorating person or event (OED 1, 2a): ‘Her monument is almost finished, and her epitaphs / In glittering golden characters …’, Per 4.3.42–3. Moral (n.) Symbolic figure (OED 6a), or the symbolic meaning of an image: Fluellen affirms ‘Fortune is painted blind … to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation’, HV 3.6.29–36. Motto (n.) Word or phrase expounding the meaning of an impresa or emblem, as in Per 2.2.38, ‘The motto thus: Sic spectanda fides’. Needle (n.) Instrument used in the art of needlework or embroidery: Marina ‘with her nee’le composes / Nature’s own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry, / That even her art sisters the natural roses’, Per 5.0.5–6. Needlework (n.) The art or practice of sewing or embroidery, or one of its products: Gremio’s ‘Valance of Venice gold in needlework’, TS 2.1.358. Oil (n.) Paint made by mixing pigment with oil (OED 3a): see under ‘Matt’. Paint (v.) 1) To represent or portray on a surface, using paint (OED 1a): Timon on his portrait, ‘Wrought he not well that painted it?’, Tim 1.1.200. 2) To decorate (a wall, etc.) with a painted subject (OED 1b): Falstaff’s chamber is ‘painted about with the story of the Prodigal’, MWW 4.5.6–7. 3) To adorn as with colours, to ornament (OED 2c): ‘And cuckoobuds of yellow hue / Do paint the meadows with delight’, LLL 5.2.884–5. 4) To use cosmetics: ‘let her paint an inch thick’, Ham 5.1.183. 5) To flatter: LLL 4.1.16, ‘Nay, never paint me now’. Painted cloth (n.p.) Wall hanging painted with figures (OED cloth 5), less expensive than tapestry: Falstaff on his recruits,

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‘slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth’, 1H4 4.2.24–5. Painter An artist who paints pictures: LLL 5.2.638, ‘He’s a god or a painter; for he makes faces’. Painting (n.) 1) The art of representing a subject by the application of paint. 2) A painted picture or likeness (OED 1a: Cf. LLL 3.1.19). Both meanings are respectively present in Timon’s ‘Painting is welcome. The painting is almost the natural man’, Tim 1.1.160–1. Pencil 1) (n.) Paintbrush suitable for delicate work (OED 1b): LLL 5.2.43–4 ‘’Ware pencils, ho! Let me not die your debtor, / My red dominical, my golden letter’. 2) (v.) To paint or colour with a brush: ‘these pencilled figures are / Even such as they give out’, Tim 1.1.163. Perspective (n.) 1) Perspective glass: AWW 5.3.49–50 ‘Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me, / Which warped the line of every other favour’. 2) Anamorphosis: R2 2.2.18, ‘Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form’. 3) The art of representing three-dimensional objects on a plane surface: ‘And perspective it is the painter’s art’, Son 24. 4) The three-dimensional representation of an urban landscape, as in stage scenery: ‘Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid’, HV 5.2.313–15. Picture (n.) 1) A painting, drawing, or other visual representation on a surface (OED 1a) ‘And hang it round with all my wanton pictures’, TS Ind. 1.46. 2) A portrait (OED 1c): ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’, Ham 3.4.51–2. 3) A statue, sculpture or other three-dimensional representation (OED 1d) ‘Hark, the kings and the princes, our kindred, are going to see the queen’s picture’, WT 5.2.170–1. 4) A counterfeit or poor imitation of someone or something else (OED 3a): ‘Why, thou picture of what thou seemest, and idol of idiot worshippers’, TC 5.1.6–7. 5) Emblem or personification: ‘While she, the picture of pure piety’, RL 519. 6) A vivid or graphic verbal

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description, ekphrasis: ‘O he hath drawn my picture in his letter’, LLL 5.2.38. Picture (v.) To represent visually, portray: ‘I have not seen [death] so pictured’, Cym 5.4.149–50. Piece Artistic creation (OED 1c): ‘her mother’s statue … a piece many years in doing’, WT 5.2.92–4. Portrait Drawing or painting of a person, especially of the face or head and shoulders (OED 1b): ‘What’s here? The portrait of a blinking idiot’, MV 2.9.53. Portraiture Visible form or representation: ‘For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his’, Ham [F] 5.2.77–8. Present Presented image (in an impresa): ‘his present is / A withered branch’, Per 2.2.41–2. Presentment The representation of an object by a picture, image, or graphic description (OED 4a): see Hamlet at ‘counterfeit’. Sable (adj.) 1) Black, as one of the heraldic colours (OED 1): ‘His banners sable, trimmed with rich expense’, Per 5.0.19. 2. Of black colour ‘The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, / Black as his purpose’, Ham 2.2.390–1. Scroll (n.) Strip or ribbon-shaped slip of paper inscribed with a legend, sometimes represented in paintings (OED 6a): ‘A carrion death, within whose empty eye / There is a written scroll’, MV 2.7.63–4. Seal (n.) 1) Heraldic or emblematic design or device impressed on wax as evidence of authenticity (OED n2 1a): Son 11, ‘She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’. 2) (v.) To mark with a distinctive seal on wax on a letter or document: ‘By your leave, wax. Soft – and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal’, TN 2.5.91–3. Semblable (n.) Like, double: ‘his semblable is his mirror’, Ham 5.2.104.

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Semblance (n.) False outward appearance, simulacrum: OED 4a cites as first example HV 2.2.116–7, ‘with forms being fetched / From glistering semblances of piety’. Shadow (n.) 1) Delusive semblance or simulacrum (OED 6a): ‘the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream’, Ham [F] 2.2.256–7. 2) Portrait: ‘to your shadow will I make true love’, TG 4.2.122. Shop (n.) An artist’s workshop (OED 3c): ‘To find where your true image pictured lies; / Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still’, Son 24. Sign (n.) 1) Distinctive emblem worn as an identifying device, or as an indication of status (OED 3a): ‘The ladies did change favours: and then we, / Following the signs, wooed but the sign of she’, LLL 5.2.468–9. 2) A banner, standard, etc., bearing a distinctive device (OED 3b): ‘Their bloody sign of battle is hung out’, JC 5.1.14. 3) A feigned show or representation of some quality, emotion, etc. (OED 1c): ‘I must show out a flag and sign of love, / Which is indeed but sign’, Oth 1.1.154–5. 4) Board attached to or placed in front of an inn, alehouse, etc. often with emblematic picture and inscription (OED 7a): ‘And make my image but an alehouse sign’, 2H6 5.2.81. Silk (n.) Silken thread or filament used in tapestry and embroidery: ‘it was hanged / With tapesty of silk and silver’, Cym 2.4.68–9; see also Per 5.0.8. Cf. Inkle Silver (n.) The metal as used for the ornamentation of textile fabrics, silver thread: Cym 2.4.68–9, under Silk. Statue (n.) 1) Carved or cast three-dimensional figure of a person, etc., often life-size or larger: ‘we came / To see the statue of our queen’, WT 5.3.9–19. 2) Funeral effigy: ‘tells him of trophies, statues, tombs’, VA 1013. 3) Idol: ‘And, were there sense in his idolatry, / My substance should be statue in thy stead’, TG 4.4.198–9. Stell (v.) To portray, delineate (OED 3): ‘Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled [Q steeld] / Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart’, Son 24.

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Story (n.) Picture representing a historical or legendary subject; more generally, a work of art depicting human figures (OED 2a): Iachimo notes ‘the contents o’th’story [i.e. picture]’ on Innogen’s wall, Cym 2.2.27, but at 2.4.69–70 he reports ‘the story [i.e. subject] / Proud Cleopatra’. Table (n.) A board or other flat surface on which a picture is painted; the picture itself (OED 3): ‘to sit and draw … / In our heart’s table’, AWW 1.1.94–6. Tapestry (n.) Textile fabric decorated with embroidered or painted designs, used as wall hanging, curtain or furnishing (OED 1a): ‘like the shaven Hercules in the smirched wormeaten tapestry’, MA 3.3.131–2. Waterwork (n.) Mural painted in distemper in imitation of a tapestry (OED 3): Falstaff’s ‘For thy walls … the story of the German hunting in waterwork’, 2H4 2.1.143–4. Wax (n.) Beeswax used to receive the design of a seal (OED 4a): ‘wax … / Wherein is stamped the semblance of a devil’, RL 1245–6. Waxen (adj.) Made of wax (of image): ‘Which like a waxen image ’gainst a fire / Bears no impression of the thing it was’, TG 2.4.19–20. Word (n.) The motto of a device or emblem (OED 8b): ‘The word, ‘Lux tua vita mihi’, Per 2.2.21.

NOTES

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

On Protestant critiques of illustrations of the Bible – as, for example, in the 1572 Puritan Admonition to Parliament, see Davis (2016: 172–3). In this volume, I adopt the term ‘picture’ with the general meaning ‘a visual representation’ (OED 1). The main reason for this word choice is that it is Shakespeare’s own term for visual objects in general: see Appendix, p. 319. Newall’s definition of a picture is inspired by that of the philosopher and semiotic theorist C. S. Peirce (1960: vol. 2, 135). On the function of the miniature within the miniature, see Reynolds (1964). Yasmin Arshad (2011) discusses an intriguing early modern example of a miniature within a portrait in the painting (c. 1610) of Lady Anne Clifford as the bare-breasted Cleopatra, wearing a portrait in little of ‘Antony’ in Roman garb (i.e. her first husband, Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset). A case in point is Hilliard’s 1572 portrait miniature of Elizabeth I in its unframed state: see Fig. 26; see also Williams (2010: 248). The first of these paintings, entitled ‘The Treachery of Images’ (La Trahison des images), is from 1929, and is currently in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (http://collections. lacma.org/node/239578 [accessed 18 April 2017]); the second, entitled ‘The Two Mysteries’ (Les Deux Mystères), is from 1966 and is in a private collection (https://ecole-durkheim.org/ emile1.0/travaux/tableaux/magritte/magritte.htm [accessed 18 April 2017]). Laoutaris (2014: 57, 78–9, 207, 349, 390, 395–6, 409, 509–19). Important women patrons of the arts in Shakespeare’s time included two other countesses: Bess of

326 Notes

Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury (see pp. 123, 284) and Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (see Snook 2005: 1–4; Arshad 2011). 8 Since ‘luces’ were the heraldic symbol of Sir Thomas Lucy – traditionally thought to have had bad relations with Shakespeare and his family – the ‘louses’ gag may have personal and political connotations, see Laoutaris (2014: 294–6). 9 For a more recent approach to Shakespeare and emblem tradition, see Sillars (2015: 190–233). 10 These include Laoutaris’s discussions of Shakespeare in relation to early modern anatomical iconography (2008); of the iconographic prefatory material to the First Folio (2016); and of the dramatist’s conflicted dealings with the formidable radical Protestant and patron of the arts, not to mention designer of funeral monuments, Lady Elizabeth Russell (2014) 11 I was unable to consult, for purposes of this study, two recent volumes: Armelle Sabatier, Shakespeare and the Visual Arts: A Dictionary (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016); and Michele Marrapodi, ed., Shakespeare and the Visual Arts: The Italian Influence (London: Routledge, 2017). 12 Relevant to this discourse are also Tom Lutz’s Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999) and Peter Schwenger’s The Tears of Things (2006), on the melancholy associated with physical objects. 13 See C. S. Peirce (1960: vol. 2, 303). 14 Progymnasmata, 68, ll. 9–10, quoted and translated by Ruth Webb (2009: 71). In his discussion of enargeia in Book 8 of his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian affirms that ‘we must place among ornaments that enargeia which I mentioned … because vivid illustration, or, as some prefer to call it, representation, is something more than mere clearness, since the latter merely lets itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice’, VIII.III.61, 245. 15 Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, 45, ll. 9–22: see Webb (2009: 77).

Chapter 1: Doing things with pictures 1

Compare the confusion between visual object and person in the mechanicals’ performance in MND, in which Starveling

Notes

2

3 4

5 6

7

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is to ‘say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine’ (3.1.56–7). Celebrated early modern examples include Hans Holbein’s portrait of the merchant George Gisze (1532, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_ Georg_Gisze,_by_Hans_Holbein_the_Younger.jpg [accessed 17 April 2017]); various portraits by Giovanni Batttista Moroni, including the ‘Portrait of a Man holding a Letter’ in the National Gallery (c. 1570), http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/giovanni-battista-moroni-portrait-of-a-man-holdinga-letter-lavvocato [accessed 17 April 2017]), and in England, the portrait of the constitutionalist John Hooker by unknown English artist (1601, Royal Albert Memorial Museum: see Cooper [2012: 163]). Quoted by Valerie Wayne, Arden 3, 2017: 31. For a historical example of an early seventeenth-century English picture of Cleopatra, namely the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford in the part of the Egyptian queen, which may also portray an actual private performance of Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra, see Arshad (2011). Quoted by A. R. Humphreys, Arden 2, 1967. Victoria and Albert Museum, http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/ thira/collection_images/2006BF/2006BF7014.jpg (accessed 17 April 2017). In his discussion of ‘mimesis’ (μίμησις, imitation) in the opening section of his Poetics, Aristotle compares the mimetic powers of poetry (in particular dramatic poetry) with those of the visual arts: ‘Just as people … use colours and shapes to render mimetic images of many things, while others again use the voice, so too all the poetic arts mentioned produce mimesis in rhythm, language, and melody, whether separately or in combinations’ (29–30). This, however, is part of a more complex conception of mimesis in Aristotle that includes the direct imitation of human action, as in dramatic performance (‘mimetic artists represent people in action … by direct enactment of all roles’, 33–5), but also narration (‘For in the same media one can represent the same objects by combining narrative with direct personation, as Homer does; or in an invariable narrative voice’, 35) and the way people ‘structure’ events. Aristotle’s conception is considerably simplified in later definitions of mimesis as a ‘pictorial’ quality shared by both the visual and the verbal arts: ‘ut pictura poesis’ (‘as is

328 Notes

painting so is poetry’), in Horace’s famous formulation in his Ars Poetica, which derives from Simonides of Cleos, via Plutarch’s De gloria Atheniensium: see Rensselaer (1967). Philip Sidney is heir to this narrower poetry-painting notion of mimesis in his Apology for Poetry (1595), with its celebrated metaphor of the ‘speaking picture’: ‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight’ (101). On speaking pictures and early modern drama, see Vaughan et al. (2010). 8 Compare Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra: ‘O’er-picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature’, Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.210–11. 9 On the prefatory material to the First Folio, especially in connection with the body/spirit dialectic of impresa and emblem theory, see Laoutaris (2016). 10 Shakespeare’s authorship of the added scene was first suggested by Coleridge, then advocated at greater length, on the basis of lexical analysis, by Warren Stevenson (1968). For the computer-assisted attribution, see Craig (2009), Vickers’s (2011) critique of Craig’s approach, and the response of Burrows (2012).

Chapter 2: Wanton pictures: Intermedial intercourse in The Taming of the Shrew 1 ‘Non pigliate, benigni auditori, questo supponere in mala parte: che bene in altra guisa si suppone che non lasciò ne li suoi lascivi libri Elefantide figurato’ (Ariosto 2007: 282; my translation). 2 ‘sopragionse el Nuncio in sena et recitò l’argomento […] et biscizò sopra il titolo de la comedia che è de Suppositi; de tal modo che il Papa ne rise assai gagliardamente con li astanti, et per quanto intendo se ni scandalizorno francesi sopra quelli Suppositi’ (qtd in Ariosto 2007: 279; my translation). 3 ‘Che li fanciulli per l’adrieto sieno stati suppositi e sieno

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qualche volta oggidì, […] li vecchi sieno da li gioveni suppositi, el servo per lo libero’ (Ariosto 2007: 282). 4 The adaptation was completed in 1532, but published only in 1551. Gascoigne appears not to have consulted it. 5 ‘Le mie supposizioni però simili / Non sono a quelle antique, che Elefantide / In diversi atti e forme e modi varii / Lasciò dipinte; e che poi rinovatesi / Sono al dì nostri in Roma santa, e fattesi / In carte belle, più che oneste, imprimere, / Acciò che tutto il mondo n’abbia copia’ (Ariosto 2007: 350; my translation). 6 Gian Matteo Giberti was datary to Pope Clement VII, a position of considerable power. 7 ‘Obscaenis rigido dio tabellas / ducat ex Elephantidos libellis / dat donum Lalage, rogatque temptes, / si pictas opus edat ad figures’ (Parker 1988: 72; my translation). 8 ‘Apri le coscie, acciò ch’io veggia bene / il tuo bel culo, e la tua potta in viso: / culo da compire un paradiso, / potta, ch’i cuori stilla per le rene; / mentre ch’io vagheggio, egli mi viene / capriccio di basciarvi a l’improviso, / e mi par esser più bel che Narciso / nel specchio ch’il mio cazzo allegro tiene’. / ‘Ahi ribalda, ahi ribaldo, in terra e in letto: / io ti veggio, puttana, e t’apparecchia / ch’io ti rompa due costole del petto’; / ‘Io te n’incaco franciosata vecchia, / che per questo piacere plusquamperfetto / entrarei in un pozzo senza secchia; / e non si trova pecchia / ghiotta d’i fior, com’io d’un nobil cazzo: / E no ’l provo anco, e per mirarlo sguazzo’ (Aretino 1992: 109–10; my translation). 9 ‘Questi vostri sonetti fatti a cazzi / sergenti de li culi, e de le potte, / e che son fatti a culi e cazzi a potte, / s’assomigliano a voi visi de cazzi’ (Aretino 1992: 114). 10 ‘che s’un uomo foss’io, non vorrei fica’ (Aretino 1992: 108). 11 ‘il magnanimo Duca di Mantova, esempio di bontà e di liberalità del nostro pessimo secolo, avendo un marescalco ritroso con le donne, come gli usurai con lo spendere, gli ordina una burla, per via de la quale gli fa tôr moglie con nome di quattro milia scudi di dota, e strascinatolo in casa del gentilissimo Conte Nicola, albergo di vertú e rifugio de i vertuosi, sposa per forza un fanciullo, che da fanciulla era vestito. E scopertosi lo inganno, il valente uomo ne ha piú allegrezza nel trovarlo maschio, che non ebbe dolore credendolo femina’ (Aretino 2010: 27).

330 Notes

12 ‘giannicco Di che parlavate voi con il mio padrone? Ditemelo, s’egli è onesto. / pedante De le copule matrimoniali. / giannicco Come, domine, de le scrofule? / pedante lo dico “copule”. / giannicco Che cosa sono pocule? / pedante Sono congiungimenti coniugali. / giannicco Mangiasene egli il sabbato, domine? / pedante Che sabbato o venere! Io ragionava con esso del copularsi con la femina, perché la copula carnale è il primo articulo de le divine leggi, imo de le umane, e perché la concupiscenza adultera e le umane leggi e le divine, la sua, volli dire la eccellentissima Eccellenzia de la eccellente sua Signoria, destina istasera a la incarnazione del matrimonio il tuo padrone’ (Aretino 2010: 42; my translation). For Giannicco’s allusive transformations of ‘copula’, see Sbrocchi and Campbell (Aretino 1992: 118 n.29). The pun on ‘pocule’ (cups/acts of sodomy) appears in Ovid’s account of Giove’s rape of Ganymede in Metamorphoses, Book 10, 159–61: ‘Abripit Iliaden qui nunc quoque pocula miscet, / Invitaque Jovi nectar, Junone ministrat’ (‘He carries off the youth of Ilium; who even now mingles his cups for him, and, much against the will of Juno, serves nectar to Jove’); cf. also Martial, Epi. 2. 13 ‘conte Basciala su. / giannicco Sassata. / marescalco La lingua, an? io son côncio per le feste. […] State salda, state ferma, fatevi in qua, più più; o, sta molto bene! / sposa. Ah, ah, ah! / marescalco O castrone, o bue, o bufalo, o scempio che io sono, egli è Carlo paggio, ah, ah, ah!’ (Aretino 2010: 99). 14 On Il marescalco as intertext for Shakespeare’s Shrew, see Marrapodi (2014). Alternative possible intertexts for the trick, such as Plautus’s Casina, itself one of Aretino’s sources, are considerably less close in their narrative form and content to Shakespeare’s Induction. 15 Compare Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 106: ‘To toy, to wanton, dally, smile, and jest’ (Poems 2007). 16 See Thompson’s Cambridge edition of Shrew, note to 1.1.45–56. 17 A further link between Aretino, the Romano–Raimondi modi and ‘mythological’ pornography can be found, as Chris Laoutaris points out (2008: 52–8), in the plates by Aretino’s friend Jacopo Caraglio, ‘Gli Amori Degli Dei’ (‘Loves of the Gods’, c. 1526). Inspired by the Raimondi prints, these plates

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were used in turn by Charles Estienne as the models for his illustrations of anatomical dissections in his De Dissectione Partium Corporis Humani (1545). 18 ‘Honesto ocio post labores ad reparandam virtutem quieti construi mandavit’.

Chapter 3: Pictures in boxes: Containers and contained in The Merchant of Venice 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Other Italian painters’ names are mentioned earlier, but in works translated from Italian, such as Haydocke’s Lomazzo, or in private correspondence, such as Wotton’s. This was especially the case in realistic ‘pictorial’ productions of the play, such as Charles Kean’s 1858 staging at the Princess’s Theatre, London and Edwin Booth’s 1888 production at the Chicago Opera House. In classical rhetoric the figure of synecdoche could take the form of a substitution of the container for the contained, or vice versa (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria [1996 (1921)], 8.6.19–21). Petrarch’s sonnets were composed and continually revised between 1336 and 1374, the year of his death. Petrarch got to know the Sienese artist Simone Martini in Avignon in the last years of the latter’s life. Sonnet 77 therefore probably dates before 1344, the year of Martini’s death. Among many other artists, Titian has a number of paintings of the Ecce homo episode depicting Christ being presented to the people: see, for example, the large-scale 1543 historia in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; the smaller group portrayed in the oil (c. 1570) in the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the more intimate oil of Christ alone (c. 1560) in the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI 75). Waterborne pageants were familiar to Shakespeare’s audience from analogous spectacles on the Thames and other English waters. See Anglo (2013). See, for example, the woodblock illustration – attributed to the workshop of Titian – on the title page of Andreas

332 Notes

Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1542), showing the dissected body of a condemned female criminal, her womb and entrails exposed to public view: Laoutaris (2008: 27–31); Giulio Cesare Casseri’s influential Tabulae anatomicae LXXVIII, published posthumously in Venice in 1627, includes copper-engraved illustrations from drawings by Odiardo Fialetti (a pupil of Tintoretto), of ‘living’ and self-dissecting bodies showing their own entrails (Riva et al. 2001). On entrails and ‘visceral knowledge’ in Shakespeare, see Hillman (2006).

Chapter 4: Hamlet as portrait: A shadow’s shadow 1

2

3

4 5 6 7

See the seventeenth-century achievements from the Church of St Mary the Virgin in the village of Fowlmere, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. References to the First Folio text ([F]) regard the Arden 3 edition of Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 2006: 173–360. Other references are to the Arden 3 revised edition of Hamlet, eds Thompson and Taylor, 2016, based on the Second Quarto text. Compare, for example, Hilliard’s miniatures respectively of Elizabeth (1595–c.1600, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O16578/queen-elizabeth-i-watercolour-hilliard-nicholas/ [accessed 17 April 2017)]) and James (1604–9, http:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O81998/james-i-portrait-miniaturehilliard-nicholas/ (both accessed 17 April 2017)]) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The image from the Black Book of the Garter (1534) is cited in Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court (2011: 134). See http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2606370 (accessed 17 April 2017). See http://churchmonumentssociety.org/Northants.html (accessed 17 April 2017). There may be a third Shakespearian connection with the monument, namely a possible allusion to the Wriothesley coat of arms in the silver falcon that forms the crest to Shakespeare’s own arms: see Duncan-Jones and Henry Woodhuysen, Poems, Arden 3, 28.

Notes

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15 16

17

18

19

20

333

William Hardwick, Conformity with the Piety Requisite in God’s Service, 1638 (qtd in Llewellyn 2000: 103). ‘Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of childhood realized,’ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1953: 265). See, for example, the paintings by Piero della Francesca (c. 1469, The National Gallery, London) and Raphael (c. 1505, Louvre). See, for example, the Attic black-figure amphora from Vulci, c. 520 bc, in the Louvre. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, http://www.nga. gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.34162.html (accessed 17 April 2017). An earlier treatment of the theme is Bernardino Licinio’s Portrait of a Young Man holding a Skull (c. 1515) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. On the vanitas tradition, see Cheney (1992), Roberts (2013) and Tapié (2010). National Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, https://www.google.com/ culturalinstitute/beta/asset/self-portrait-of-aelbrecht-bouts/ ywElGIYwqutSCw (accessed 17 April 2017). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/ collection/SK-A-3924 (accessed 17 April 2017). National Gallery London, http://www.nationalgallery.org. uk/paintings/frans-hals-young-man-holding-a-skull-vanitas (accessed 17 April 2017). National Museum of Wales, https://museum.wales/art/ online/?action=show_item&item=429 (accessed 17 April 2017). An alternative iconographic tradition regards St Jerome with skull, as in Joos van Cleve’s painting (c. 1525, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York), showing the saint pointing to the skull, which here becomes ‘a receptacle for life and thought’ (Cheney 2013: 884), and alludes to Jerome’s intellectual and penitential life. The Fool lives in joy, and leads his life unaware that he is going to die, until at the end he is led away just like the ignorant lamb. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, http://www.

334 Notes

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31 32

33

artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/gallery/da56e45e.html (accessed 17 April 2017). National Gallery London, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ paintings/petrus-christus-portrait-of-a-young-man (accessed 17 April 2017). Presumably Pope Innocent III’s 1216 prayer, with its appeal ‘that … while venerating, honouring and adoring your face, we may one day be able to see you without fear face to face when you come before us as judge’ (Hägele 2014: 83 n.83). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, http://www. metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/50.145.27 (accessed 17 April 2017). Private collection, http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/ jacopo-carucci-called-jacopo-pontormo-portrait-of-5766091details.aspx (accessed 17 April 2017). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, http://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435802 (accessed 17 April 2017). Earlier Italian portraits of young men holding books include those of Andrea del Sarto, (c. 1517–18, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Parmigianino (1523–4, York Art Gallery) and Lorenzo Lotto (1525–6, Milan, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte). Currently on loan to National Gallery London, https://www. nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/bronzino-portrait-of-ayoung-man (accessed 17 April 2017). Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, http://www.royalcollection. org.uk/collection/404444/elizabeth-i-when-a-princess (accessed 17 April 2017). Princess Elizabeth to King Edward VI, with a Present Of Her Portrait, 15 May 1549, in Marcus, Mueller and Rose (2002: 35). Private collection, http://www.historicalportraits.com/Gallery. asp?Page=Item&ItemID=451&Desc=Queen-Elizabeth-I-%7C-English-School (accessed 17 April 2017). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. According to Graham Reynolds, the feather/globe puzzle ‘may be unriddled as a tribute to the power of the pen against the world’ (1964: 283). On the psychoanalysis of melancholy, see Freud’s classic

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essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1957: 243–58); on early modern melancholy and memory, see Engel (1995). 34 One might compare and contrast the parallel scene (3.1) in which Hamlet himself discovers Ophelia (apparently) reading the book that Polonius has strategically given her: an image meant to attract his attention just as his book attracts the curiosity of Ophelia’s father. Hamlet immediately identifies Ophelia’s handheld volume as a prayer book, whereby the scene he perceives becomes a staged devotional icon, resembling images of the reading Virgin Mary and other female saints. Hamlet responds promptly and appropriately to the icon of a praying woman with his ‘in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered’ (3.1.88–9). Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s respective acts of reading are equally false. Hamlet’s response may be ironical: i.e. he may be aware that the devotional icon is staged, although in 3.3, as we have seen, he takes the image of the praying Claudius to be the real thing (see pp. 218–24). 35 ‘San Marco, a le sue spese, e forse invano, / Tardi conosce come li bisogna / Tener la spada e non il libro in mano’, see Barolsky (1994: 146–7). 36 Uffizi Galleries, http://www.palazzo-medici.it/mediateca/it/ Scheda_Ritratto_di_giovane_con_medaglia_di_Cosimo_il_ Vecchio,_di_Sandro_Botticelli (accessed 17 April 2017). 37 In Met, IV, 234, Ovid describes the sun as ‘Hyperion’s Son’, while in Fasti, 385, it is Hyperion himself who is the sun. 38 Compare the golden tresses of Helios in Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Helios and Phaeton with Saturn and the Four Seasons’, c. 1635, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin. 39 Dryden’s translation; Golding has ‘[his] looke full grim and stoure’, Book 3, 251. 40 The sculpture, rediscovered during nineteenth-century excavations in Blossom Street, York, is now in the Yorkshire Museum, https://archaeology-travel.com/friday-find/yorkshiremuseums-roman-statue-of-the-god-mars/ (accessed 17 April 2017). 41 Bargello, Florence. 42 Gertrude’s description becomes literally a painting in the tragedy’s pictorial afterlife: see Fuseli’s version of the closet scene (c. 1780), which faithfully translates her description. 43 The drawing for the illustration in Rowe is by François Boitard and the engraving by Elisha Kirkall, https://

336 Notes

scolarcardiff.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/rowe.jpg (accessed 18 April 2017). 44 Frank A. Marshall, A Study of ‘Hamlet’, 1875 (qtd in Rosenberg 1992: 677).

Chapter 5: ‘That is and is not’: The double life of images in Twelfth Night 1

On Shakespeare and the new science of optics, see Del Sapio Garbero (2016: 7–12). 2 Kepler’s Optics discusses reflection (catoptrics) in Ch. 3, 73–92, and refraction (dioptrics) in Ch. 4, 93–170. 3 For an interesting political reading of this miniature, see Laoutaris (2013). 4 In the extraordinary narrative portrait of Unton in the National Portrait Gallery (c. 1596, artist unknown: NPG 710), he is seen wearing a locket containing the portrait miniature of a male sitter, probably Henry IV of France. He may have received the portrait from the King in exchange for the miniature of Elizabeth, http://www.npg.org.uk/ research/programmes/making-art-in-tudor-britain/case-studies/ the-portrait-of-sir-henry-unton-c.-1558-1596.php (accessed 17 April 2017). 5 On the politics of perspective in Richard II, see Sillars (2015: 133–62). 6 National Gallery, NG 1314. 7 National Portrait Gallery, NPG 1132.

Afterimage: The queen’s picture 1

2

On this scene, and on art and illusion in The Winter’s Tale in general, see Sokol (1994); on the scene and its iconographic background, as well as its performance history, see also Orgel (2003: 122–43). Compare, in particular, Lady Elizabeth Russell’s self-designed, life-size and life-like polychrome funeral effigy in the Church of All Saints, Bisham: see Laoutaris (2014: 395–6).

REFERENCES

Editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems Act, scene and line references, unless otherwise indicated, are to the respective single-play Arden 3 Shakespeare editions. All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. G. K. Hunter. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1959 [Arden 2]. Antony And Cleopatra, ed. John Wilder. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995. As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Cymbeline, ed. Peter Holland. London: Penguin, 2000. Cymbeline, ed. Valerie Wayne. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2017. Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998. King Henry IV Part 2, ed. A. R. Humphreys. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1967 [Arden 2]. King Henry IV Part 2, ed. René Weis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. King Henry IV Part I, ed. David Scott Kastan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002. King Henry IV Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016. King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995. King Henry VI Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999. King Henry VI Part I, ed. Edward Burns. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. King Henry VI Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

338 References

King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1954 [Arden 2]. King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997. King Richard II, ed. Charles Forker, 2002. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002. King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2009. Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998. Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Measure for Measure, ed. J. W. Lever. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1964. The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. The Merry Wives of Windsor ed. Giorgio Melchiori. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1979 [Arden 2]. Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004. Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010 [includes A Lover’s Complaint, pp. 429–316]. The Taming of The Shrew, ed. Barbara Hodgdon. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. The Taming of The Shrew, ed. Ann Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Timon Of Athens, ed. John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Timon Of Athens, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Greichen E. Minton. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2008.

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Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995. Troilus And Cressida, ed. David Bevington, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2008. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. William C. Carroll. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004. The Two Noble Kinsmen ed. Eugene M. Waith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Robert Kean Turner and Patricia Tatspaugh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, rev. edn. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015. The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

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INDEX Accademici degli Intronati, Gl’ingannati 264, 297 achievements, funeral 201–2, 332 n.1 Adams, Ann Jensen 228 affective response to pictures 3, 8, 14, 20–2, 29, 31–5, 47, 49–50, 53, 60–2, 66, 69, 251, 258 agency of pictures 29, 31–5, 43–4, 50, 56–8, 114 Alberti, Leon Battista on historia 112, 157 on portraits 111–12, 250 Allen, Christopher 148 Altman, Joel 52 ambivalence (towards images) 2–3, 166, 193–5 Shakespeare’s 8, 28, 167 Ames-Lewis, Francis 93 anamorphosis 292–3, 321 anatomical iconography 199, 326 n.10, 330–1 n.17, 331–3 n.7 Andreani, Andrea: Memento mori 182 androgyny 68, 268 Anglo, Sydney 331 n.6 Anne, Queen 300 anthropological approaches to pictures 10, 31, 33–4, 60–1, 177–8

architecture 155, 158, 294, 319–20 Archangel Michael, images of 181, 224 Arden, Robert 88 Aretino, Pietro 11, 130, 151 Il marescalco (The Stablemaster) 143–6, 329–30 nn.11–14 Sonetti lussuriosi (Lascivious sonnets) 130–42, 147–50, 329 nn.8–10 Titian’s portrait of 169 on Titian’s portraits 170, 191–2, 194, 195 Ariosto, Ludovico 11, 100 I suppositi 126–30, 135, 146, 151, 296–7, 328–9 nn.1–5 aristocracy and the arts 37–8, 57, 73–5, 112, 120, 123, 145, 161, 164, 168, 170, 172–3, 178, 191, 222–3, 225–6, 229, 230, 235, 239, 244, 267, 278, 284, 306 Aristotle 100 Armin, Robert 233 Armstrong, Philip 27 arras 29, 42, 48, 73, 77, 79, 87, 88, 90, 123, 253, 254–5, 313

360 Index

Arshad, Yasmin 29, 325 n.4, 326 n.7, 327 n.4 art, terms of 10, 25, 36, 41–7, 313–24 artists, kinds of 43, 47 Aston, Margaret 8 audience, role of 3, 5, 6, 9, 17, 19–20, 21–2, 25, 43, 47, 52, 61, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 103–4, 107–8, 116, 126, 127–9, 135, 154, 172–3, 176, 180, 197, 206, 214–15, 219, 220–1, 240, 251, 258, 262, 263, 266, 273, 276–7, 293, 297–9 300–3, 306, 310 exclusion of 17, 19, 53, 57, 64, 121, 166, 241, 244, 245–7, 252 Austin, J. L. 274 authorship (of plays) 328 n.10, 56, 57, 58, 66–7, 110 Ayres, Lady 272–3 Ayres, James 88 Ayres, Sir John 272 Bacon, Francis 210–11, 240 badge, heraldic 44, 313 Bandello, Matteo 122 Banham, Martin 300 Bar, Moshe 14 Barbarigo, Marco, Doge 165 Bardi, Girolamo 162 Barentsz, Willem 275 Barkan, Leonard 26 Barolsky, Paul 335 n.35 Barthes, Roland 32

Bate, Jonathan 202, 253 Baudrillard, Jean 205 Beaumont, Francis: The Knight of the Burning Pestle 90–1 beholding, act of 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 20–2, 23, 24, 31–5, 47, 50, 65, 83, 97, 112, 173, 190, 192, 200, 223–4, 246, 251, 261–2, 267–8 Belluzzi, Amedeo 151 Belsey, Catherine 26, 51 Bembo, Pietro 169 Berain, Katheryn of 229, 230, 233 Berger, Harry, Jr. 26 Bernhardt, Sarah 241, 253 Bible 1–2, 229, 233, 235, 236, 237 see also Gospel illustrations in 1–2, 325 n.1 Blackfriars Theatre 23, 40, 69, 76, 103, 310 blazon 37, 46, 68, 191, 262, 284, 313 Blunt, Anthony 93 body, representations of 23, 43, 72, 73, 77–9, 94–5, 105, 141–2, 178–8, 196, 199, 219, 230, 240, 249, 255, 271, 286, 302, 316 of actor 5, 16, 43, 288 versus soul 94–5, 97, 105, 191, 246, 267 Boitard, François 74, 75 book portraits with 100, 222, 229, 233–9 as prop 213, 226, 239–43

Index

Booth, Edwin 242, 256, 257, 331 n.2 Borris, Kenneth 142 Botticelli, Sandro 244–5, 246, 335 n.36 Bouts, Albrecht 227–8, 230, 333 n.14 Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery 119, 121 Branagh, Kenneth 241 Brecht, Bertolt 229 Bredekamp, Horst 31, 39, 60 Breton, Nicholas 292, 348 Breughel the Elder 87 Bronzino, Agnolo 235–6, 334 n.27 Brotton, Jerry 225, 253–4 Bruster, Douglas 19 Burbage, Richard (as maker of impresa) 20, 39–40, 56 Burrow, Colin 235 Burrows John 328 n.10 Caldecott, Thomas 252 calligraphy 273–5 Campbell, Lorne 234, 330 n.12 captivation (fascination) 8, 33–4, 50, 83 Caraglio, Jacopo 330 n.17 Carlson, Jeffrey 256 Carpaccio, Vittore 153, 160 Carr, Robert, first Earl of Somerset 73–5 Carroll, Tim 302 Carroll, William 62 caskets, interpretation of 3, 4, 11, 170–2, 176–90 Casseri, Giulio Cesare 332 n.7

361

Catholicism 28, 129, 220 catoptrics see reflection Cavendish, Dominic 106 Cavendish, William 125 Cecil, Robert 271–2 Cheney, Liana De Girolami 228, 333 nn.13, 18 Cherbury, Edward Lord Herbert 272–3 Chester, Robert 229 Christ, images of 61, 106–8, 162, 194, 234, 267, 331 n.5 churches, artwork in 23, 87, 88, 221–3, 307, 332 n.1, 336 n.2 Clark, Jonathan 87, 345 Clary, Frank Nicholas 251 classical mythology, representations of 2, 41, 50, 77, 81, 97, 121, 124, 146–9, 150, 176, 247–50, 254, 330 n.17 Clement VII, Pope 129, 329 n.6 Cleopatra, pictures of 29, 52, 79–80, 81 Cleve, Joos van 333 n.18 Clifford, Lady Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery 29, 325 n.4, 326 n.7, 327 n.4 clothes 15, 88, 89, 280, 282 Clubb, Louise George 278 coat of arms 25, 39–40, 116–17, 222, 262, 313, 315, 332 n.7 Shakespeare’s 37–9, 44, 117 coins, allusions to 9, 15,

362 Index

179–81, 185, 251, 256, 319 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 203–4, 328 n.10 Colonna, Vittoria 34 colour code, heraldic 25, 37, 44–5 colours 44, 109, 113, 121, 170, 184, 189, 224–5, 226, 229, 230, 234, 235, 237, 239, 245, 278, 280, 284–5, 307–9, 313, 314, 317, 320, 322 Constable, Henry 270 Cooke, George Frederick 76 Cooper, Tarnya 35–6, 64, 84, 117, 183–4, 196, 327 n.2 Corneanu, Sorana 210 Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Jacob: Laughing Fool 186 Coryat, Thomas 156–68, 170, 171, 176, 182 cosmetics 189, 213, 219, 284–5, 320 costume see clothes Cottegnies, Line 199 counterfeit 42, 46, 47, 52, 61, 93, 187–94, 197, 207, 217–18, 246, 274 meanings of 8, 36, 190, 194, 315 Coxie, Michiel, the Elder: Psyche at her Toilet 124 Craig, Hugh 328 n.10 Crane, Mary Thomas 266, 290 Cranston, Jodi 4, 30, 65, 244, 250

crest, heraldic 39, 44, 313, 315, 333 n.7 criticism, Shakespearian 24–9 Cronenburgh, Adrian van 229, 233 Cropper, Elizabeth 235 cross-dressing 22, 66, 120, 122, 145, 149, 167, 264, 282–3, 299 Cumberbatch, Benedict 257 Cunningham, Valentine 51 curtain, picture 12, 43, 261, 278–9, 284, 307–8, 315 Curteis, Tobit 124 Daly, Peter M. 26 Dance of Death 87, 226–7 Daniel, Samuel 95, 327 n.4 Dante 132 Davies, Thomas 253 Davis, David J. 36, 325 n.1 d’Este, Marfisa 194 death, theme of 7, 11, 50, 77–8, 115, 165, 172, 178–84, 185, 188–9, 200, 202, 225–6, 227, 231, 255, 267–8, 307, 309 death’s head 42, 89, 172, 178, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189, 200, 315, 319 see also memento mori decorative arts 6, 10, 35, 42, 82–9, 123 Dee, John 290–1 deictics 15–16, 51, 64, 102, 104, 141, 229, 270 Dekker, Thomas 83, 84 Del Sapio Garbero, Maria 336 n.1

Index

Derrida, Jacques 206–7 desire, pictures as objects or subjects of 3, 8, 11, 20, 21, 33–5, 53, 60–2, 67–9, 72, 78, 110, 121, 141–3, 146, 170, 178–9, 188, 190, 235, 268, 271, 302 Dethick, William 37, 44 Devereux, Robert, second Earl of Essex 226, 270 device see impresa d’Heere, Lucas: Psyche at her Toilet 124 dialogue, portraits as 4, 30, 244 Digges, Leonard 290 Digges, Thomas 290 dioptrics see refraction diplopia see double vision distemper 87, 124, 324 Dives and Lazarus, pictures of 86, 89, 320 Dixon Hunt, John 37, 93, 101 Dobson, Michael 24 Doebler, John 26 Doge, portraits of 164–5, 168 Doge’s Palace, Venice, pictures in 160–6 Donne, John 131, 132 Doran, Gregory 241, 256 Dou, Gerard: Old Woman Reading a Bible 1–3, 7, 22 double vision 260–2, 302–3 Downie, Penny 256 Drakakis, John 173–4 drama (role of pictures in) 6–9, 17, 21–2, 29, 30–3, 53, 56, 309–10

363

Droeshout, Martin, portrait of Shakespeare 95–7 drollery 43, 82–4, 315 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 302 Dryden, John 335 n.39 duck–rabbit picture 259, 261–2, 276 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 271–2, 278, 313 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 37, 38, 49, 51, 332 n.7 Edward VI, King 28, 236, 293, 334 n.29 effigy, funeral 15, 23, 35, 42, 46, 78, 111, 221–3, 233, 307, 316, 317, 323, 336 n.2 Egmont, Justus van: The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra 80 ekphrasis 29, 37, 46, 47–53, 66, 73, 76, 78–82, 114–15, 138–40, 147, 170, 174, 190, 194–5, 197, 225, 241, 247–50, 284, 299, 321 anti-ekphrasis 53 El Greco: Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple 106–8 Elam, Keir 174, 212 Elephantis 127–8, 133–5, 137–8, 151 El-Gabalawy, Saad 130 Elizabeth I, Queen 23, 36, 56, 124, 178, 180, 271–2, 279, 280, 290, 310

364 Index

portraits of 192–3, 216, 236–7, 272 Elkins, James 34 emblem 7, 15, 37, 38, 40, 42, 200, 227, 277, 313–14, 315, 316, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, critical studies of 25–7, 326 n.9, 328 n.9 embroidery 5, 6, 15, 42–3, 52, 201, 204, 254, 280, 316, 318, 320, 323, 324 enargeia 47, 82, 326 n.14 Engel, William E. 335 n.33 English art, early modern 4, 8, 10, 26, 27, 35–6, 42, 44–5, 49, 64, 79, 85, 88–9, 103, 117–18, 123–5, 164, 167, 172–6, 180, 184, 187, 192, 196, 200, 221–3, 225–6, 285–7, 299–300, 307 engraving 6, 15, 43, 48, 97, 121, 129–30, 135, 136–8, 140, 169, 181, 227, 263, 277, 314, 316, 317, 318–19, 332 English homes, art in 49, 64, 74–5, 88 enigma, visual–verbal 57, 187, 237–9, 240, 261, 276–8, 302, 327 nn.2, 4 Erasmus, Desiderius 51–2 eroticism 11, 37, 52, 53, 60, 62, 70–1, 77, 80–2, 91, 120–51, 181, 258, 268, 272, 275 see also pornography Euclid 290 Evans, Mark 75

Evelyn, John 83–4 Evett, David 26 eye beholder’s 4, 20, 52, 75, 83, 95, 112, 176, 220 deception of 12, 260–4, 265 in pictures 16, 50, 66, 68–72, 92, 150–1, 182, 184, 188, 190–2, 248, 283, 286, 292 Faenza, Luca da 309 Farago, Claire 94, 102 Farmer, Norman K. 26 father/son relationship, pictures and 4, 7, 11, 20, 110–5, 118, 221–3, 223–4, 247–50 Fechter, Charles 256 Ferne, John 44, 262 fetish object, portrait as 8, 62, 142, 271–3 Fèvre, Jean le 226 Fialetti, Odiardo 332 n.7 Fillastre, Guillaume, Bishop 234 Findlay, Alison 148 Finney, Albert 255–6 First Folio 95–6, 126, 195, 207, 216, 217, 258, 266, 326 n.10, 328 n.9, 332 n. 2 Fitton, Mary, portrait of 6, 279–83 Fitton, Sir Edward 279 Fletcher, John (co-author of The Two Noble Kinsmen) 22, 67–9 Florio, John 47, 211 Foister, Susan 35, 42, 84 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 255

Index

Forman, Simon 76–7, 309 Foucault, Michel 19 frame, picture 42, 84, 255, 256, 269, 278, 287, 316, 319 picture as 10, 58, 91–110 Frantz, David O. 130, 141, 142 Frazer, James George 177–8 Freedberg, David 32–3, 62 Freedman, Luba 168–9, 170, 195 Freud, Sigmund 224, 256, 333 n.9, 334–5 n.33 Fried, Michael 32 Frith, Mary 279 frontispiece see prefatory material, iconographic Frye, Roland Mushat 218–19 Füger, Heinrich Friedrich 18 Fumerton, Patricia 287 Fuseli, Henry 335 n.42 gallery 44, 56, 111–12, 121, 123, 133, 146, 162, 164, 172, 202, 244, 253, 279–80, 284, 306–7, 317 Gascoigne, George 11, 126–8, 130, 329 n.4 gaze role of 11, 13–14, 17, 18, 22, 31, 34, 50–1, 66, 70–2, 78, 104, 108, 112, 153–5, 156, 164–5, 171–2, 188–90, 192, 194, 195, 248, 251, 263–4, 268, 286 theory of 13–14, 31 Gell, Alfred 31, 33, 34, 60, 177

365

gender, pictures and 5, 7, 22–4, 78, 141–3, 260, 263, 268, 270, 282, 297–8, 299 genres, artistic 7, 9, 17, 35, 42–3, 47, 75, 83, 87, 89, 99–100, 114, 116, 164, 170, 173, 176, 198, 244, 251, 255, 306 Gent, J. M. 131 Gent, Lucy 26, 46 George, Saint, images of 160 gesture, representations of 17, 21, 26, 92, 97, 100, 111–12, 219, 223, 225, 226, 229, 234, 245–6, 283–4, 287, 288 Gheeraerts, Marcus 226 Ghisi, Giorgio 100 Giambologna 249 Gian Matteo Giberti 136, 329 n.6 Gielgud, John 230 gift, portrait as 3, 7, 22, 62–4, 66, 236, 261, 270–1, 283, 286 Giles, Kate 87, 345 Gilman, Ernest B. 289 Giovio, Paolo 95, 105, 123 Girard, René 217–18 Gisze, George 327 n.2 glass see mirror Globe Theatre 41, 45, 57, 76–7, 81, 90, 103, 255, 284, 301–2, 307, 309–10 gold (as material or colour) 37, 41, 43, 84, 109, 122–3, 176, 189, 191–2, 201, 220, 226, 229, 235,

366 Index

237, 270, 272, 280, 287, 316, 317 interpretation of 171–2, 177–82, 184, 187, 199–200 Golding, Arthur 147–8, 249, 335 n.39 Goldring, Elizabeth 278, 284 Gombrich, Ernst H. 30, 151 Gonzaga, Curzio 264, 298 Gonzaga, Eleanora 169 Gonzaga, Federico II, Duke of Mantua 130, 150 Goodman, Gawen 183–4 Gordon, D. J. 95, 97 Gospels 2 John 196 Luke 2 Gossett, Suzanne 67 Gower, George 280–1 Grabes, Herbert 269 graphics 273–7, 286–7, 291–2, 302 Greenblatt, Stephen 212 Greene, Robert 130 Grogan, Jane 48 Gurr, Andrew 41 Haarlem, Cornelis Cornelisz van: The Cave of Plato 209 Hägele, Hannelore 334 n.22 hair, representations of 113, 148–50, 176, 191–2, 247–8 Hals, Franz 228–9, 333 n.16 Hamlin, Hannibal 86–7 Hamling, Tara 36, 40 Handley, Eleanor 67, 68 Hardwick, Bess of, Countess of

Shrewsbury 87, 88, 123, 216, 284, 325–6 n.7 Hardwick, William 223, 333 n.8 Harrison, William 88, 174 Hartley, Elizabeth 305, 306 Hatley, Tim 106 Hattaway, Michael 90 Haydocke, Richard 9, 170, 331 n.1 Hearn, Karen 216 Henderiks, Valentine 227 Henry IV, King of France 272 Henry VIII, King 220, 278, 293, 332 n.4 Henslowe, Philip 40, 41, 90 heraldry 15, 25, 35, 37, 40, 57, 164, 326 n.8 language of 44–5, 313, 315, 317, 322 Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke 279 Heywood, Thomas 97–8, 288 Hill, Robert 157 Hilliard, Nicholas 99, 109, 216, 255, 288 ‘Art of limning’ 118, 190, 270, 285–7 portrait miniatures of Elizabeth I 192–3, 325 n.5, 332 n.3 portrait miniatures of James I 332 n.3 portrait of Lady Elizabeth Russell 23 portrait of Penelope Rich 270 portrait of unknown man 245 self-portrait 285–7

Index

table portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland 237–8, 239 Hillman, David 331–2 n.7 Hirst, Damien 106 historia (istoria) 112, 157 definition of 112 historical painting 42, 114, 164, 323 Hoby, Thomas 23 Hodgdon, Barbara 120–1, 123 Holbein, Hans 327 n.2 Ambassadors, The 293 Simulachres 227, 231–3, 241 Vanitas 233 Holland, Peter 79 Holy Cross cycle 87 Homer 48, 100, 327 n.7 homoeroticism 142, 143–5 Hooker, John 327 n.2 Hope, Jonathan 67 Horace 327–8 n.7 Hornby, Mary 201–4 Hotson, Leslie 279 household stuff and objects 3, 10, 36, 44, 58, 75, 79, 82–3, 122–3, 264, 278, 284 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 174–5, 225–6 Hulse, Clark 37, 48 Humphreys, A. J. 327 n.5 Hunt, Marvin W. 233 Hunter, Michael C. W. 36, hypotyposis 47, 51, 326 n.15 Hytner, Nicholas 106–8 Ichikawa, Mariko 41

367

iconoclasm 28, 31, 36, 86–7, 194–5, 221 iconography 10, 26, 30, 40, 44, 187, 198, 199, 203–4, 223, 224, 229, 242, 276, 326 n.10 iconology 30 iconophobia 28, 36 iconotext 30, 234 ideology, pictures and 2, 8, 28, 46, 58, 61, 103, 154, 167, 194, 243, 251 idolatry 8, 46, 60–1, 63–5, 194–6, 317, 323 idols 210–11, 317 illusion, optical 51, 91, 159, 166, 197–8, 263, 273, 289–9, 300–2, 306 illustrations, book 2–3, 36, 74–5, 95–7, 121, 127, 130, 137–42, 147, 156, 199, 227, 252–3, 298, 312, 325 n.1, 330–1 n.17, 331–2 n.7, 335 n.43 image devotional 2, 111, 178, 180, 196, 219–24, 234, 236–7, 245, 267, 283 meanings of 318 mental 14, 17, 47 imagetext 30, 40, 85, 136, 138, 141, 184–5, 239, 273 impresa 5, 7, 15, 26, 37–40, 42, 56–7, 71, 95, 116–8, 164, 239, 276, 315, 320, 322, 328 n.9 inn sign 276–7 Innocent III, Pope 334 n.22 inscriptions in paintings 2, 40,

368 Index

42, 57, 85, 99, 117, 182, 184, 185, 187, 287, 318–19, 322, 323 intermedial relations, drama and 9, 10, 11, 37–41, 120, 125, 151, 166, 184, 287 intertextuality 11, 125, 146, 174, 178, 330 n.14 inventory 44, 46, 73–80, 87, 90, 123, 278, 284, 319 inwardness 4–5, 18, 61, 65, 105, 194, 219, 236, 267, 287, 302 Irving, Henry 242, 257–8 Italian art 24, 27, 30, 93, 100–1, 103, 123–5, 129–36, 151, 157–65, 168–70, 191–2, 200, 225–6, 234–6, 293, 308–9 theory 5, 9, 34–5, 37, 46, 93–5, 101–2, 111–12, 157, 170, 250, 291, 294–7, 300, 302 Jackson, MacDonald P. 56 Jackson, Russell 76 Jacobi, Derek 255 Jacobsz, Dirck 227 James I, King 101, 102, 157, 216, 266, 332 n.3 jewel, portrait miniature as 3, 15, 16, 261, 269–71, 280, 283, 287, 319 John I of Castile, monument to 220 Johnson, Gerard (Geraert Janssen) 222 Jones, Ernest 224

Jones, Inigo 94, 97, 284, 299–301, 309 Jones, Jonathan 235 Jones, Malcolm 36 Jonson, Ben 8, 94–7, 105, 125, 132–5, 145, 148, 195, 299–300, 302, 309 on anamorphosis 292 on Aretino’s sonnets 132–3 homoeroticism in 145 on Inigo Jones’s sets 97, 299–300 masques of 94–5, 299, 309 on perspective 299–300 on Romano’s and Raimondi’s modi 132–3 on Shakespeare’s portrait 95–7, 195 on Tiberius’s spintriae 134 on Venetian painters 159 works cited Alchemist, The 133 An Expostulation with Inigo Jones 97 Epicoene 145, 148 Hymenaei 94–5 ‘In Authorem’ 292 Sejanus His Fall 134–5 Masque of Blackness, The 299 ‘To the Reader’ 95 ‘To the right Honourable, the Lord Treasurer of England’ 159 Timber, or Discoveries 159 Volpone 132 joust 66–72 see also tournament Jowett, John 102, 109 Judas, paintings of 114

Index

Julius II, Pope 100, 101, 243 Juvenal 235 Kachalov, Vasily 230 Kahn, Coppélia 102 Kahn, Michael 67–8, 256 Kauffman, Angelica: Elizabeth Hartley as Hermione 305–6 Kean, Charles 242 Kean, Edmund 203, 242 Kemble, Charles 242 Kemble, John Philip 203, 241, 256 Kemp, Martin 234 Kempe, Alfred John 75 Kepler, Johannes 265, 336 n.2 Kiefer, Frederick 27 Kirkall, Elisha 74, 75 kneeling figure, image of 12, 111, 132, 220–4, 233 Knowles, Ronald 313 Korsch, Evelyn 198 Kozintsev, Grigori 255 Krieger, Murray 48 Kyd, Thomas 58, 110–11 Lacan, Jacques 14, 31, 250 Land, Norman E. 170, 191, 194 landscape painting 83, 84, 114, 299 Laoutaris, Chris 22, 29, 221, 279, 325, 326 nn.8, 10, 328 n.9, 330 n.17, 331–2 n.7, 336 nn.3, 2 Larkin, William 272 Law, Jude 230 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 203

369

Layden, Penny 107 lead, meaning of 171–2, 176–80, 187–90 Lee, Sidney 279, 282 lens, optical 265–6, 289–90 Leo X, Pope 128 Leslie, Andrea 239 letter 62–4, 203, 263, 273–5, 280, 303 portrait as 64–6 in portraits 65 Levey, Santina M. 87 Levin, Richard 246 lexicon, iconographic 41–7, 313–24 Leyden, Lucas van: A Young Man Holding a Skull 227–30 Licinio, Bernardino 333 n.13 Life of Adam cycle 87 limning 43, 117–8, 190, 193, 216, 270, 272, 285–8, 319 Llewellyn, Nigel 35, 221, 223, 333 n.8 Lockey, Rowland 237 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 9, 34–5, 37, 170, 291, 300, 302, 331 n.1 looking at pictures 2–3, 11, 13, 21, 50, 154, 159–65, 166, 176–95, 200, 243–51, 306–9 Louvel, Liliane 30 Loyola, Ignatius 131 Lucy, Sir Thomas 326 n.8 Lupton, Donald 86 Lutz, Tom 326 n.12 Lydgate, John 226 Lyon, John Henry 131

370 Index

Maclise, Daniel 203 Macready, William 253–4 magic, image as 3, 5, 11, 65, 113, 115, 176, 179, 265, 266, 290–1, 306, 309 sympathetic (homeopathic) 33, 177–8, 181, 194 Magritte, René 19, 325 n.6 make-up see cosmetics Malone, Edmund 252 Mandel, Corinne 237 Manners, Francis, sixth Earl of Rutland 39, 56 Mantua 124, 130, 143–6, 150–1, 308–9 maps 261, 275 marble, use of 43, 136, 221–2, 319 Marcourt, Antoine de 262 Marcus, Leah S. 334 n.29 Marin, Louis 287 Marlowe, Christopher: Edward II 149–50 Marrapodi, Michele 326 n.11, 330 n.14 Marston, John 8 Antonio and Mellida 116–18 Martini, Simone 191–2, 194, 331 n.4 Marx, Karl 109 Mary, Queen of Scots 271 Mary I, Queen 28 masque 40, 94–7, 150, 167, 171, 199, 279, 284, 209–300, 309 Master of the View of Sainte Gudule 234 materiality (of pictures) 3, 6–7, 15–17, 23, 25, 53, 56,

63, 244, 251, 255, 267, 270 materials, artistic 15, 41, 43, 47, 83, 91, 99, 109, 270 McConnell, Sophie 235 McKeown, Adam 48 medallion portraits 244–5, 251, 255 Medici family 235, 236 Medici, Cosimo I de’ 234 Meek, Richard 29, 50, 115 Mehl, Dieter 25 melancholy 49, 198, 230, 237–40, 292, 302, 326 n.12, 334–5 n.33 Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine 267, 269 Melville, Sir James 271 memento mori 7, 42, 89, 166, 178, 181–7, 188, 189, 198–200, 227, 231, 267, 268, 315, 319 Memling, Hans 220 Mercer, Eric 35 Michelangelo 34, 100, 243 Middleton, Thomas 84, 88, 133, 135 middling sort and the arts 35–6, 49, 64, 88, 198 mimesis 46, 58, 71, 81, 91–9, 105, 194, 327–8 n.7 miniature see portrait, miniature mirror 265–8, 269–70, 288, 290 portrait as 4–5, 99, 106–7, 182, 185, 244 Mitchell, W. J. T. 21, 30, 31–2, 33, 40, 184 Montaigne, Michel de 211–2, 235, 240

Index

monument, funeral 35, 78, 111, 221–3, 316, 318, 319, 320, 326 n.10, 332 n.7 Moroni, Giovanni Battista 327 n.2 motto 5, 26, 38–40, 42, 56–7, 95, 116, 239, 276–7, 315, 320, 324 Moulton, Ian Frederick 143 Mueller, Janel 334 n.29 Muñoz Simonds, Peggy 76, 81 music 126, 187 Muzzi, Antonio 197 narrative painting 2, 42, 48, 50, 84–6, 89, 94, 112, 114, 148, 249, 336 n.4 Nashe, Thomas 30–1, 131, 174 needlework 15, 43, 123, 316, 320 Netherlandish art 83, 103, 223, 227–9, 276, 293 Newall, Michael 14, 325 n.3 Newborough, Mary 279 Nichols, Tom 168 Nikolaos the Sophist 47, 326 n.15 Norris, Herbert 280 Northern Europe, art of 83, 87, 187, 220, 227, 229, 230, 233–4, 235–6, 241–2 Nunn, Trevor 256 Occo, Pompeius 227 O’Connell, Michael 28 oil painting 2, 99, 111, 113, 184, 280, 285, 307, 319 Oliver, Isaac 272

371

Olivier, Laurence 256 Olson, Rebecca 29, 48, 78, 253, 255 Oosterwijk, Sophie 227 optics 103, 197, 264–6, 273, 276, 289–91, 302, 336 nn.1, 2 Orgel, Stephen 27–8, 37, 129, 336 n.1 Ovid 11, 68, 81, 124, 137, 147–51, 178, 247–50, 330 n.12, 335 n.37 Oxford English Dictionary 20, 48, 58, 84, 194, 262, 294, 313–24, 325 n.1 painter as character 91–118 painter scene (Shakespeare’s addition to Kyd) 58, 110–16, 118 painted cloth 7, 41, 42, 49, 58, 86, 88–91, 320–1 Paladini, Filippo 194–5 Palazzo Te (Mantua) 124, 150–1, 308–9 Palma Giovane 157 Palma Vecchio 164 Panofsky, Erwin 30, 137 Paolucci, Alfonso 128 paragone 37, 93–9, 101, 158, 195, 197, 217 Parker, W. H. 329 n.7 passions, pictures arousing 3, 4, 20, 21, 33, 34–5, 53, 66, 97, 115, 245–6, 272–3, 288 patronage 9–10, 24, 91, 101–4, 105, 108, 113, 125, 133, 170, 231

372 Index

female 22–3, 325–6 n.7, 326 n.10 Peacock, John 299, 301 Peake, Robert, the Elder 23 Pearsall Smith, Logan 157, 161 Peirce, C. S. 325 n.3, 326 n.13 Percy, Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland 237–41 performance, pictures in 3–5, 8–10, 15, 17–20, 40–1, 55–7, 67, 70–1, 90–1, 121, 251–8, 277, 307–10 performativity of pictures 10, 39, 56–8, 244, 258, 274–5 Perrot, Richard 85–6 Perry, Gail 306 perspective 5, 8–9, 37, 46, 103–4, 106–8, 111, 261, 277, 285, 287, 288–302, 321, 336 n.5 glass 265, 289–91 scenery 5, 293–300 Peter the Cruel, monument to 220 Petrarch 63, 77, 142, 191–4, 196, 331 n.4 Phelps, Samuel 76 Philips, John 61 Phillips-Court, Kristin 25 picture, definition of 321–2, 325 n.2 scenes in plays 3–4, 9, 11, 15, 22, 67, 69, 71, 102, 122, 154, 172 theory 10, 30, 33–4, 40 Picture Act (Bildakt) 31, 39, 60 Pierguidi, Stefano 309 Pieri, Marzia 297

Pitcher, John 307 Plant, I. M. 127 Plato 61, 100–1, 187, 188, 189, 194, 201, 207–10 Platt, Peter G. 212 Plutarch 327–8 n.7 Pogue, Kate 85 Pontormo, Jacopo da 234–5, 236, 242, 334 n.24 pornography 11, 131, 134, 142, 330 n.17 Porter, Chloe 26 portrait definition of 322 family 110–14, 250–1 full-length 249, 251, 252, 253, 257, 307 half-length 252, 257, 280 miniature 3, 4, 7, 9, 15, 17–19, 22, 23, 35, 64, 67, 99, 118, 173, 176–8, 185, 190, 192, 196, 204, 215–17, 237–40, 245, 249, 251, 252, 255–6, 257, 261, 269–72, 280, 285–7, 318, 319, 325 nn.4, 5, 332 n.3, 336 nn.3, 4 self- 30, 109, 185, 196, 227–8, 230, 231, 240, 283–8 within portrait 244–5 Poussin, Nicolas 335 n.38 prayer, images of 12, 219–24, 233–7, 335 n.34 prefatory material, iconographic 10, 74–5, 227, 252–3, 326 n.10, 328 n.9 priant see kneeling

Index

Priapus, worship of 137–8 prints 7, 35, 129–30, 133, 159, 330 n.17 Prodigal Son, pictures of 82, 84–5, 86, 89 Protestantism 2, 22–3, 28, 35, 36, 61, 87, 131, 221, 237, 325 n.1, 326 n.10 proxy, portrait as 10, 11, 56, 58–72, 173, 196, 271–3 Psyche, pictures of 87, 124 Eros and, pictures of 150 Puttenham, George 47, 52, 240, 246, 289–90 Quintilian 331 n.3 Raimondi, Marcantonio 138–9, 169 and I modi 129–36, 330 n.17 Raphael 333 n.10 design for Ariosto’s I suppositi 128, 296–7 frescoes in Vatican Stanza 99–101 School of Athens, The 101 Reader, Francis 86 reflection 4–5, 12, 154, 182, 185, 231, 260, 265–9, 336 n.2 refraction 210, 265–6, 289–91, 336 n.2 Rensselaer, W. Lee 328 n.7 rhetoric 27, 28, 44, 47, 51–2, 53, 58, 70, 75, 76–8, 82, 92, 135, 178, 236, 331 n.3 Rich, Penelope 270–1

373

Ripa, Cesare 277 Riva, Alessandro 331–2 n.7 Roberts, Helene E. 333 n.13 Roberts, Jeanne Addison 122 Romano, Giulio 11, 23, 37 erotic paintings by 124, 150–1 and I modi 129–40, 330 n.17 named by Shakespeare 162–3, 308–9, 319 Ronayne, John 88 Rosand, David 162 Rose, Mary Beth 334 n.29 Rossi, Ernesto 256 Rowe, Nicholas 74–5 Rowland, Ingrid D. 100, 101 Russell, Anne 279 Russell, Bess 23 Russell, Lady Elizabeth 23, 221, 326 n.11, 336 n.2 Russell Beale, Simon 106–7 Sabatier, Armelle 326 n.11 Sadler, Hamnet 85 Saenredam, Jan 208 Salamon, Linda Bradley 272 Salkeld, Duncan 37 Salusbury, John 229 San Marco (Saint Mark), images of 243 Sannazzaro, Jacopo 100 scepticism 12, 28, 61, 62, 204–5, 211–13, 219, 240 Schlueter, June 62 Schoch, Richard W. 97, 253 Schoenbaum, Samuel 39, 201 Schwenger, Peter 326 n.12 Scott, Charlotte 235 Scott-Giles, C. W. 25, 40, 44

374 Index

Screvin, Thomas 39 scroll 42, 57, 85, 164, 182, 184–5, 187, 195, 234, 322 Scrots, William 236, 293 sculpture 30, 33, 42, 43, 81, 99, 136–7, 157–9, 171, 182, 219, 220–2, 235, 248–9, 306–9, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318–9, 321, 335 n.40 seal 43, 44, 274–5, 318, 322 secrecy 3, 12, 134, 251, 260–1, 269–73, 274, 280 Semler, Liam E. 26 semiotics 10, 26, 44, 59, 171, 211–3, 246, 325 n.3, 326 n.13 Serlio, Sebastiano 294–5 sexual intercourse, representations of 123, 127–9, 134–5, 137–42, 146 shadow 11, 36, 42, 46, 60–6, 68, 97, 187, 194, 201, 207–10, 214, 227, 233, 236, 258 meanings of 323 Shakespeare, John 38, 87 Shakespeare, William as intermedial artist 37–41 portrait of 95–7, 195 works cited All’s Well that Ends Well 292, 316, 321, 324 Antony and Cleopatra 52–3, 79–80 As You Like It 89–90, 239, 316, 319 Cymbeline 6, 10, 24, 44,

46, 53, 58, 73–82, 284, 313, 316, 319, 322, 323, 324 Hamlet 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11–12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26, 28, 33, 40, 41, 45, 53, 65, 67, 70, 81, 98, 114, 115, 117, 176, 182, 190, 201–58, 273, 313, 315, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 323, 332–6 Julius Caesar 323 King Henry IV Part 1 88–9, 317, 318, 319, 320 King Henry IV Part 2 27, 46, 82–91, 315, 316, 319, 324 King Henry V 202, 293–4, 297–8 King Henry VI Part 1 316 King Henry VI Part 2 313, 314, 315, 318, 323 King Henry VI Part 3 316 King Henry VIII 318 King John 316, 317 King Lear 315 King Richard II 267–8, 292, 314, 318, 321 King Richard III 21 Love’s Labour’s Lost 3, 89, 118, 261, 314, 320, 321, 323 Macbeth 17, 20, 27, 34, 115, 266 Measure for Measure 266, 319 Merchant of Venice, The 3, 7, 8, 11, 22, 26, 41,

Index

65, 153–200, 286, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 322 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 25, 84, 313, 316, 320 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 260, 317, 326–7 n.1 Much Ado about Nothing 237, 316, 324 Othello 5, 7, 16, 52, 73, 178, 313, 323 Pericles 5, 10, 55–8, 71, 72, 267, 313, 315, 318, 320, 322, 323, 324 Rape of Lucrece, The 48–51, 113, 254, 275, 317, 321, 324 Sonnets 16, 41, 279, 315, 316, 317, 318, 321, 322, 323 Taming of the Shrew, The 6, 11, 24, 44, 46, 81, 108, 119–51, 315, 317, 320, 321 Tempest, The 84, 309 Timon of Athens 3, 7, 8, 10, 16, 24, 58, 91–110, 113, 319, 320, 321 Titus Andronicus 27, 318 Troilus and Cressida 21, 90, 315, 317, 321 Twelfth Night 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 22, 65, 154–5, 187, 196, 259–303, 306, 307, 314, 318, 319, 322 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 3, 8, 10, 22, 58,

375

58–66, 67, 73, 314, 317, 323, 324 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 3, 8, 10, 22, 34, 53, 58, 66–72, 73, 117 Venus and Adonis 221–2, 317, 318, 319, 323 Winter’s Tale, The 5, 12, 21, 23, 27, 151, 162, 305–10, 314, 319, 321, 322, 323 Shakespeare’s Birthplace 201–3 Shapiro, James 56, 293 Sherlock, Peter 35 shop, picture 44, 323 Shuger, Debora 267–9 Shute, John 294–5 Sidney, Philip 32, 214, 270, 328 n.7 Siemon, James R. 28 signs distrust of 204–6, 211–14, 219, 240–1 interpretation of 38–9, 40, 210, 227, 235, 237, 242, 245, 273 kinds of 50–1, 136, 215, 273, 274, 314, 323 magical 65, 200 Sillars, Stuart 29, 203, 326 n.9, 336 n.5 silver (as material or colour) 37–8, 39, 43, 79–80, 81, 222, 270, 280, 316, 323, 332 n.7 interpretation of 176, 179–80, 184–7 Simon, Jacob 278 Simonides of Cleos 328 n.7 simulacrum 8, 11, 61, 93, 194,

376 Index

204–7, 209–10, 213–14, 218, 219, 225, 227, 230, 233, 258, 274, 315, 318, 322, 323 Skot, John 227 skull 12, 165, 166, 182–3, 185, 189, 200, 203, 213, 226–33, 241, 242, 244, 267, 269, 293, 315, 319, 333 nn.13, 16, 18 Smirke, Robert 119, 121 Smith, Sir Thomas 124, 150 Snook, Edith 325–6 n.7 sodomy 128, 142–6, 330 n.12 Sokol, B. J. 26, 37, 125, 336 n.1 solo scenes 6, 22, 59, 65–7, 71–2 Somerset, Henry, Marquess of Worcester 279 Sothern, E. H. 230 Southern Renaissance, art of 220, 233, 234–6 space domestic (private) 64, 271, 301 public 165–6, 293 theatrical 15, 21, 255, 297, 301, 307 three-dimensional 5, 15, 293, 300 two-dimensional (pictorial) 18, 49, 192, 252, 300 speaking picture 12, 26, 92, 113, 287, 288, 327–8 n.7 speech act, picture as 31–2, 40, 108, 140 Spenser, Edmund 48, 94 spintriae 134–5, 149

Sprague, A. C. 253 stage directions 17, 67, 76, 109, 126, 167, 266 stage properties, pictures as 3, 5, 17, 52, 53, 59, 63, 64, 67, 76–7, 90, 201–3, 244, 253 handheld 19, 64–5, 67, 102, 107, 154, 173, 177, 185, 226, 227, 230, 233–4, 244, 251, 255–7, 270, 335 n.34 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 230 statue 5, 12, 15, 21, 23, 42, 43, 66, 159, 165, 243, 306–10 Steevens, George 252, 279 Stevenson, Warren 328 n.10 story (as pictorial genre) 42, 79, 82–6, 87, 88, 89–91, 157, 324 Stratford-upon-Avon 201–2, 241 artworks in 28, 85–6, 222 destruction of art in 87 Strong, Roy C. 35, 216, 239 Stubbs, Imogen 256 subjectivity 4, 27, 58–9, 61, 231, 267, 287 Suetonius 133–5 surrogate see proxy sword, pictures of 113–14, 224–6, 243 as prop 201–2, 205, 213, 224–5, 242, 244 table (as picture or support) 15, 43, 48, 84, 130, 134, 324 miniature 237–8, 251

Index

Talbot, Mary 279 talisman, picture as 5, 33, 176, 200, 268 tapestry 9, 24–5, 29, 42–3, 48–9, 79–81, 82–3, 87–8, 120–1, 123, 126, 251, 253–5, 313, 320, 323, 324 Tapié, Alain 333 n.13 Tassi, Marguerite A. 8, 28, 36, 61 Tatspaugh, Patricia 67 Tavacchia, Bette 37, 129, 130, 134, 137, 140 taverns, art in 82–6 Taylor, Neil 248, 249, 332 n.2 tears, painting of 49–50, 111–13, 117 see also weeping Tennant, David 242, 256 text dramatic 2, 10, 15, 28, 40, 95–7 of emblems 26, 231 holy 4, 234, 283–4 interpretation of 177, 184, 185 pictures as 29, 64 versus image 133, 135–8, 141, 184, 195, 300 theatregram 278 Thew, Robert 119 Thomas, Julia 203 Thomas, William 155–6, 158, 160, 161, 166–7, 168 Thompson, Ann 149, 248, 249, 330 n.16, 332 n.2 Thorne, Alison 27, 37 Thornton, Dora 202 Thornton, Peter 87

377

Tiberius 133–6 time, representations of 49–50, 107–8, 112–15, 117–18, 164–6, 224–5, 231, 287–8, 307–8 Tintoretto, Domenico: Il Doge Marco Barbarigo 164–5 Tintoretto, Jacopo 159, 161, 162, 331–2 n.7 Paradiso 162 Titian 157, 159, 170, 306, 331 nn.5, 7 ‘La bella’ 197 Portrait of Aretino 169 portraits 168–70, 194–7 Aretino on 191–2 Tittler, Robert 35 Tobias and Raphael, pictures of 85–6 translation of artistic treatises 8–9, 37, 46, 95, 157–8, 170, 291 Trevor, Douglas 240 Tromly, Frederic B. 111 trompe l’œil 262–4, 285, 302, 309 Turner, James Grantham 145 Turner, Lyndsey 257 Turner, Robert Kean 67 Tyler, Richard 85 Ungerer, Gustav 180, 279 Unton, Sir Henry 272, 336 n.4 ut pictura poesis 327 n.7 vanitas pictures 7, 11, 42, 164, 182, 185, 187, 189, 198–200, 227–31, 233, 267, 333 n.13 Varchi, Benedetto 169

378 Index

Vasari, Giorgio 243, 308–9 Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura 100 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 328 Venice architecture of 155–6, 160–1 art of 11, 158–65, 168–70 sightseeing in 153–7 Vere, Elizabeth Countess of Derby de 272 Vermeir, Koen 210 Veronese, Paolo 159, 160, 161 Veronica, Saint, image of 234 Vesalius, Andreas 331–2 n.7 Vicentino, Andrea 164 Vickers, Brian 56, 67, 328 n.10 Vinci, Leonardo de 93–4, 293 Virgil 48, 49, 100, 225 Virgin Mary, images of 157, 162, 306, 332 n.1, 335 n.34 visibility (of pictures on stage) 5, 6, 9, 15, 16, 17–18, 20, 21–2, 52, 53, 57, 67, 121–2, 215, 251, 253, 261, 278, 301 vision, double 260–2, 291–3 visual object 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 31–2, 36, 47, 51, 53, 60, 62, 82, 91, 154, 166, 170, 173, 200, 204, 212, 258, 261–4, 268, 325 n.2, 326 n.1 definition of 14 Vitruvius 158 voyeurism 78, 82, 140–1, 150–1, 273

Waddington, Raymond 37, 129, 142 Wagner, Peter 30 Waith, Eugene 67 wall hanging 15, 25, 42, 43, 46, 48, 49, 58, 86, 88, 123, 320, 324 wall painting 19, 28, 43, 83, 84–5, 86–7, 89, 124, 126, 132, 135, 150, 151, 159, 161–2, 212, 226, 320 watercolour 87, 99 waterwork 43, 82–3, 87, 324 Watt, Tessa 35, 36, 84, 86, 88, 89 wax 43, 99, 274–5, 322, 324 Wayne, Valerie 327 n.3 Webb, Ruth 326 nn.14, 15 weepers (in funeral effigies) 218–19, 223 weeping (over pictures) 34–5, 62 ‘we three’, image of 187, 261, 276–7 Weir, Alison 220, 332 n.4 Weis, René 85–6, 87 Wells-Cole, Anthony 35 Wentworth, Scott 55, 57 West, Shearer 60 Weyden, Rogier van der 234 Whishaw, Ben 256 Whitehall Palace (as performance venue) 56, 293, 299, 301 Whitney, Geoffrey 313–14 Wilkins, George (co-author of Pericles) 56, 57 Williams, Richard L. 325 n.5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 73, 261–2, 268

Index

women as subjects and beholders of pictures 11, 22–3, 49, 60–72, 130, 141–2, 172–6, 187–98, 244–6, 250–1, 278–83, 283–8, 305–10 see also gender; patronage, female woodcut 129, 131, 182, 227, 231–2, 241, 298 Woods-Marsden, Joanna 30 Woodward, Susanne 85

379

Woolnoth, Thomas: Edmund Kean as Hamlet 243 Wotton, Sir Henry 157–60, 161, 169, 170, 176, 306–7, 331 n.1 Wright, Edward 275 Wriothesley, Henry, third Earl of Southampton 39, 221–3 Young, Alan R. 71, 251 Zarish, Janet 256