Shakespeare and the Visual Arts

The Italian Influence

Michele Marrapodi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351815123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume's tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare's oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting's cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

Part I
Intermediality

Visuality and drama

1 Shakespeare the emblematist

Claudia Corti

Renaissance ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is, roughly defined, the representation in words of a pictorial representation, or, more precisely, the verbal account of a visual work.¹ The theoretical competition between words and images follows two models: either analogical, as in the Renaissance paragone, or “ut pictura poesis”, where – so to say – letter and spirit follow the same path on the basis of Aristotelian mimesis; or hierarchical, where the poem sets out, Platonically speaking, to establish its superiority over the art work. In any case, the most intriguing results of ekphrasis seem to be: a) the possibility that a verbal/depicted narrative can bring the past into the present, without removing their chronological distance, and b) encouragement for the reader to search for and recognize recondite analogies between distant facts and modern experiences.

Shakespeare’s knowledge of the impressive continental debate about the “sister arts” comes to the fore – just to give an example that is akin to my next point – in the opening scene of Timon of Athens, where a poet and a painter engage in a competition for the protagonist’s patronage. While the former calls attention to the limitations of portraiture in the analogical model of, say, Lodovico Dolce and Benedetto Varchi – “To the dumbness of the gesture / One might interpret” (1.1.33–4)² – the latter echoes Leonardo da Vinci, harshly confuting the supposed hegemony of the verbal over the figurative: “A thousand moral paintings I can show / That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s / More pregnantly than words” (1.1.91–3). The widely discussed, accepted or refuted, idea of ‘dumbness’ of visual arts is pervasive in Shakespeare’s last plays, the so-called romances. Let us take Leonte’s rhetorical question in The Winter’s Tale (5.3.78–9): “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?” (although, paradoxically, he is approaching a visual miracle such as Hermione’s image being brought to life). In Cymbeline though, Giacomo convinces Posthumus that he was eagerly invited into Innogen’s bedroom (whose upholstery invokes chaste Diana’s myth) on the evidence of his familiarity with her room’s chimneypiece, where visual dumbness is again involved: “The cutter / Was as another Nature; dumb; outwent her, / Motion and breath left out” (2.4.83–5). Which means that the carver not only imitated nature in the act of creating, but presumably surpassed it, save that he could not compel the fake goddess Diana either to speak or move.

Passing on from what are by now classics to contemporary criticism,³ studies of Renaissance ekphrasis seem to stick to the analogical model of paragone, bypassing the callous question of the hegemony between the two ‘sister arts’. In particular, present debates include related modes of ekphrasis such as tableaux, speaking pictures, and allegory developed by the medieval tradition. This tradition was maintained throughout modernity by the popularity of emblems, in books as well as in coins and embroidery, not to mention processions, pageants, and masques. Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy, writes of ‘speaking pictures’ that enable the poet to create a world ‘other’, a world opened up to the imagined, the missing or the (not yet) unsaid. George Puttenham, in his The Arte of English Poesie, is principally interested in visual allegory, ‘the captaine of all other figures’, in as much as it says one thing, meaning another. Ekphrasis brings time to a halt, and – particularly in Shakespeare’s theatre – arrests the Aristotlean movement of the story from beginning to end, to allow the spectator’s/reader’s moments of either contemplation of a character or exploration of the plot. The eye is understood as a channel between reality and imagination, or between what is public and what is private. Deducting Fame’s iconography from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, Elizabeth required symbolic forms of eyes and ears to be embroidered on the sleeves of many of her dresses, in order to signify to a very heterogeneous and complicated court her complete surveillance over one and all.

Renaissance emblems and drama

Fuellen, in Henry V, offers his own (that is, Shakespeare’s) description of Fortune’s wheel, whose ups and downs affect all the characters in the play, in these emblematic terms:

Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind. And she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you — which is the moral of it — that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation. And her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls and rolls and rolls. (3.6.29–35)

The correspondence with one of the most famous among Andrea Alciato’s emblems is exact: “The wheel of Fortune, on which she sits, is given her on account of her variability and inconstancy”.⁴

Geoffrey Whitney, the first English author of a printed emblem book, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), followed previous writers, and chiefly Alciato, in deriving the term ‘emblem’ from the Greek word meaning ‘to set in’, or ‘to put in’: “properlie meant by such figures, or workes, as are wrought in plate, or in stones in pauementes, or on the waules, or such like, for the adorning of the place” (To the Reader).⁵ Yet meaning should not be immediately obvious: “some wittie deuise expressed with cunning woorkemanship, something obscure to be perceiued at the first, whereby, when with further consideration it is understood, it maie delight the behoulder”. In the Epistle Dedicatorie (to the Earl of Leicester) he adds: “Under plesaunte deuices, are profitable moralles … for the wounding of wickedness, & extolling of virtue”. Alciato presents his emblems as amusements for those whose maturity has taken them beyond games with dice or other playthings, but contextually demonstrates a deep concern for the variability of interpretations of words and the need to search for the ‘spirit’ of what is observed or read. It is not by chance that one of his most common emblems is the one taken up from St. Paul’s remarks in 2 Cor. 3,6, the well-known saying “the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life”. Just as a cube, once thrown, stands firmly on any of its faces, so the emblem, a game too, is capable of being seen and made sense of from several different angles.

If Alciato’s collection, containing a surprising diversity of emblems derived from classical mythology, the Greek Anthology, the Bible, as well as popular superstition and allegorical tradition, is no doubt the most influential book for theatrical choices, one should not forget that another well known treatise, Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’imprese militari et amorose (1555), translated by Samuel Daniel as early as 1585 in his The Worthy Tract of Paulus Iovius (also including materials from Gabriello Simeoni and Lodovico Domenichi) contributed to the Renaissance dramatists’ knowledge of the interdependence of the three components – vox, figura, subscriptio, otherwise called motto, picture, epigram – of the emblematic structure. So did Abraham Fraunce’s dissertation Insignum, Armorum, Emblematum, Hieroglyphicorum, et Symbolorum, quae ab Italis Imprese nominantur, explicatio, which was printed in London in 1588. Fraunce too insists that it is the combination of word and picture that provides the full meaning of an emblematic devise. The very soul – the spirit! – of an emblem is more than the sum of its parts, just as in a human being, forma is more than the mere addition of corpus and anima.⁶

Forms of emblematic theatre

There are various ways of looking for figurative connections and emblematic elements in early modern English drama, especially Shakespeare’s.⁷ The easiest way is of course the search for direct borrowings or transparent quotations, although the emblematic image is frequently so closely integrated in the dramatic movement that it tends to lose static and pictorial quality. An example of such a form of – so to say – hidden emblem, is provided by the first scene of Twelfth Night, when Orsino, yearning for Olivia, compares himself to a wounded deer, summoning up Acteon’s myth:

O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first

Methought she purged the air of pestilence;

That instant was I turned into a hart,

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

E’er since pursue me (1.1. 8–22)

The allusion is to the fate of Acteon, who was torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs: one of the topoi of the Renaissance which appears as the embodiment of both blind desire and foolish curiosity in Alciato and Whitney, under the motto Voluptas aerumnosa (‘Passion full of misery’) whose moral explanation is, in Whitney’s rephrasing, “And as his houndes, soe theire affections base, / Shall them deuowre, and all their deedes deface”. Yet Giordano Bruno employs the story of Acteon in De gl’eroici furori (published in London in 1585), to illustrate human desire for divine beauty (signified by the bathing Diana). Thus Orsino’s situation becomes much more complex and semantically rich, in the perception of the reader/spectator. Even more explicit, and semantically less complicated, is the employment of the same Acteon image in As You Like It, where the mythic relation of melancholic Jaques to the wounded, dying animal is stated in unequivocal emblematic terms:

(…) he lay along

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out

Upon the brook that brawls along this wood,

To the which place a poor sequestered stag

That from the hunter’s aim had tak’n a hurt

Did come to languish. And indeed, my lord,

The wretched animal heaved forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Coursed one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase. And thus the hairy fool,

Much marked of the melancholic Jaques,

Stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook,

Augmenting it with tears. (2.1.30–43)

One comic adaptation of the emblem Voluptas aerumnosa can be detected in the final act of The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff’s disguise as Herne the Hunter is virtually identical with the conventional illustration of Acteon both in the editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, such as La vita et metamorfoseo d’Ouidio figurato e abbreuiato in forma d’Epigrammi da M. Gabrielo Symeoni (1559), and in emblem books: a composite figure with a stag’s head, human body, and hunter’s clothes. Shakespeare’s fidelity to the traditional iconography of the Theban hunter⁸ will have increased the visual effect of Falstaff’s camouflage – “a Windsor Stag, and the fattest, I think, i’ th’ forest’ (5.5.12–3)” – allowing contemporary audiences to recognize immediately the parody of one of the most famous transformation myths.

A different manner of emblematising the theatrical scene can be found in the insertions in plays of allegorical pieces, in the form of tableaux or dumb shows,⁹ which provide figurative commentaries on the action, determining the same reciprocally explanatory combination of word and image that is functionally central to any emblematic method, that is the interaction between “Poets who draw speaking Pictures, and Painters who make dumb Poesie”, as the saying goes. The alluring opportunities offered by the many possibilities of mutual communication of language and picture on stage were extensively exploited by Shakespeare – as we shall see later – conveying to the reader/spectator both allegorical connotations of the action and metaphorical delineations of the characters. The macroscopic example is necessarily The Murder of Gonzago, the dumb show performed before the court of Elsinore, where play and play-within-the play are stylistically contrasted (the stylised and epigrammatic pantomime is commented upon by Hamlet in prose), significantly throwing thematic and symbolic light on each...