Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture

Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture

Chloe Porter*Nottingham Trent University

Abstract

This essay presents an overview of recent work in the area of studies of Shakespeare and visualculture. Aiming to give an indication of the diverse range of approaches that may be adopted inthis highly interdisciplinary field, the essay focuses particularly on a recent trend for the analysis ofShakespeare’s engagements with visuality from strongly literary perspectives. This trend has pro-duced some valuable work, with significant implications for our understanding of Shakespeare’sstatus as a ‘literary’ figure. An emphasis on literariness in Shakespeare’s interactions with visual cul-ture is linked partly to concerns about the status of visual culture in post-Reformation England.Recent developments in art history and visual studies challenge some of the assumptions aboutpost-Reformation English visual culture that inform current works on Shakespeare and visual cul-ture. By looking closely at relevant new art-historical thinking, literary critics may significantlybroaden the framework for the exploration of Shakespeare’s works as a part of early modern visualculture.

In 1944, in his From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance, George R.Kernodle described theatre as a part of the visual arts (2). Whilst extensive critical atten-tion has been paid to the subject of relationships between Shakespeare’s plays and poetryand visual culture in the years since Kernodle’s publication, the notion of Shakespeare’sworks as ‘a part’ of the visual world rarely shapes research in this area. Instead, criticsconcerned with this topic frequently express anxiety about perceived ‘gaps’ in Shake-speare and his contemporaries’ relationship to visual contexts. For example, in 1981,introducing her important work, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620, Lucy Gent notes that inearly modern literature, ‘allusions to pictures are constantly turning up’, but that this pro-liferation of literary allusions is not accompanied by corresponding art works accessible tomodern-day readers (1). Gent laments that for those intrigued by the prospect of explor-ing art works which may have been seen by early modern English writers:

The snag is that the obvious clues in the literature do not lead to actual pictures, or at least toany that have survived; the poets’ descriptions cannot be related to their pictorial counterparts.Furthermore, the poets praise a degree of artistry in their pictures which it turns out to beimpossible to match in the works of art they had around them. (1)

Gent here highlights the two ‘gaps’ that have come to define many works on Shakespeareand visual culture. Firstly, the lack of material, physical evidence relating to visual itemsthat Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have actually seen, and secondly, what isperceived to be the impoverished state of early modern English visual culture in compari-son with the visual cultures of the European Continent. In particular, 16th- and 17th-century English visual culture is often contrasted unfavourably with the sophisticatedvisual culture of Renaissance Italy, which in this period was the source of major innova-tions in visual representation such as the development of the theory of linear perspective,discussed below.

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The supposed inferiority of early modern English visual culture in comparison withContinental visual worlds is often seen as the result of what is perceived as the detrimen-tal, even destructive impact of the Reformation on the development of the English visualarts. The break with Roman Catholicism and the creation of the Church of England sig-nalled the limitation of access to knowledge about the visual arts emerging from contem-porary Italy (Chaney xiii; Gent 6), and the removal of religious images, viewed asidolatrous, from English Churches (Aston 1988; Duffy 1992; Phillips 1973). The contro-versy concerning the role and status of images in spiritual life can be linked to a broaderanxiety about visual experiences in general. As is frequently noted, plays could be subjectto the same accusations of idolatry as could visual images (Howard 28; O’Connell 14).Attacks on playhouses as centres of idolatrous activity are suggestive of the extent towhich drama is a part of visual culture in the early modern period. Further complicatingthe picture of Shakespearean interactions with visuality, however, is the fact that Shake-speare’s works often participate in and are informed by anti-visual discourses (Diehl1996). For example, in a misogynistic outburst at Ophelia, Hamlet focuses on femaleusage of cosmetics, as he tells her ‘I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hathgiven you one face and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.143–5).1 In The Merchant ofVenice, meanwhile, seeking to choose the casket which contains the portrait of hisbeloved Portia, Bassanio comments that ‘the world is still deceived with ornament’(3.2.74). Making his selection with this suspicion of decorous visual appearances in mind,Bassanio correctly guesses that the least visually appealing ‘leaden’ casket contains Portia’sportrait (3.2.101–38). Shakespeare’s characters thus echo the anti-idolatrous sentimentsthat were often directed at plays during this period.

Faced with the ambiguous position of visuality in early modern English culture, butfascinated by frequent allusions to visual experience in Shakespearean texts, recent criticshave tended to focus on Shakespeare’s literary, rhetorical engagements with visual cul-ture. In particular, ekphrasis, or literary descriptions of visual images, and the discourseof ut pictura poesis (‘as is painting, so poetry’), have received extensive attention in stud-ies of Shakespeare’s works (Meek 2009; Thorne 2000). I shall discuss this developmenttowards a literary understanding of Shakespeare’s visual culture in the second part ofthis essay. The first section of the essay, meanwhile, begins with an overview of theinterdisciplinary contexts for the study of this subject area in both Shakespeare criticismand art history and visual studies. I conclude with suggestions of possible futuredirections for the field, particularly in close engagements with art-historical research. Ingeneral, I hope to show the diversity of approaches possible within the field ofShakespeare and visual culture, and to demonstrate that we do not always need to focuson the apparent ‘gaps’ in knowledge, evidence and connections that frequently informwork in this area.

To understand the range of lenses through which we may view the topic ofShakespeare and visual culture, it is pertinent to begin with an extract from the conclu-ding scenes of The Winter’s Tale (1611). Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, this late romance isthe drama most often associated with the visual arts, largely because of the final ‘statuescene’ of the play, in which a sculpture depicting the supposedly dead Sicilian queen He-rmione appears to come to life. The statue is located in the home of Paulina, wife of thecourtier Antigonus. Prior to the statue scene, Paulina’s steward describes the sculpture:

which is in the keeping of Paulina, a piece many years in doing, and now newly performed bythat rare Italian master Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath intohis work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. (5.2.86–90)

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The only reference to a living visual artist in Shakespeare’s works, this allusion to GiulioRomano has been extensively discussed by critics (Apseloff 2002; Barkan 1981; Sokol1994; Ziegler 1985). The reference to Romano is typical of Shakespearean allusions tovisual experience, in that it exposes the many ‘gaps’ that seem to puncture connectionsbetween literature and the visual arts in this period. Romano was known in Italy as apainter, and not a sculptor, and so the allusion is inaccurate, as has been noted by manycritics, including B. J. Sokol in his monograph on the play (86). Despite this inaccuracy,however, the reference to Romano demonstrates that Shakespeare must have encoun-tered knowledge about the Italian visual arts by the time of writing The Winter’s Tale,probably in 1610 or 1611. Many have speculated that Shakespeare may have read GiorgioVasari’s Vite De’ Piu Eccellenti Pittori Scultori e Architettori (1568), which includes a life ofRomano (Barkan 647–9; Sokol 95). Speculation in this area, however, is tempered bythe knowledge that the Vite was ‘hard to find in England’ during Shakespeare’s lifetime(Gent 72). Whilst we can never know exactly what writing on the visual arts Shakespearedid encounter, the playwright’s depiction of Romano as one ‘who could put breath inhis work’ and ‘beguile nature’ echoes Italian humanist discourses on the visual arts, inwhich parallels are invoked ‘between nature and art’ (Baxandall 58). Combining art-historical inaccuracy with modes of describing visual culture drawn from Italian writing,Shakespeare’s allusion to Romano indicates dual engagement with and disengagementfrom knowledge about elite, Continental visual cultures.

Stepping aside from the question of Shakespeare’s knowledge about visual culture,there are many more avenues of enquiry to pursue in this brief speech by Paulina’s stew-ard, and the famous statue scene. For example, we might study the steward’s descriptionof the statue as an example of ekphrasis, as most recently attempted by Richard Meek,who, as discussed below, finds such descriptions to be exemplary of the ‘persuasivenessand vividness’ of Shakespeare’s narrative art (Meek 165). Turning to an analysis of art-historical contexts for Hermione’s statue, meanwhile, it is implied that, as ‘a piece manyyears in doing’, in the home of Paulina, the statue is a long-term project, overseen byPaulina as patron to perhaps more than one visual artist, most recently Romano. Manyearly modern female patrons of the visual arts were widows or were ‘released from mari-tal responsibilities’, and were of a high social status (Lawrence 13). Elizabeth, Countess ofShrewsbury (‘Bess of Hardwick’), who commissioned Hardwick Hall as ‘a wealthywidow’ in 1590, provides a pertinent example (Friedman 114–5). Paulina fits this profile;although she does not know for certain that her husband, the courtier Antigonus, is dead,she has lived as a widow throughout much of the timescale of the drama (3.3.58SD,5.2.64–7). The context of female patronage has received insufficient attention in studiesof The Winter’s Tale, although the events of the ‘statue scene’ have been discussed fromthe perspective of questions of gender, for example in Abbe Blum’s exploration of the‘monumentalizing’ of women in the play (1990).

The most frequently debated visual topic in The Winter’s Tale is the question ofwhether or not Hermione was ‘alive all along’ throughout the play, meaning that therenever was a statue in the statue scene, merely a performance of a statue by Hermione(Lupton 217; Wilson 263). This debate has had significant implications for readings ofthe play that concern religious controversies over visual representation in early modernEngland. Whilst certain critics suggest that the play is anti-iconoclastic (Jensen 306), and‘embraces’ Catholic modes of worship (O’Connell 141), Julia Reinhard Lupton arguesthat in the statue scene Shakespeare stages idolatry before ‘iconoclastically breaking theillusion’ in the revelation that the statue is a performance (217). Richard Wilson, in con-trast, emphasises the ambiguity of the transformation of the statue and Hermione’s claims

Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture 545


to survival (263–4). Wilson also highlights that the scene may have been written forperformance at the Blackfriars theatre, which was closely adjoined by a popular recusantchapel (264). My own recent article on The Winter’s Tale draws on these debates toexplore the implications of Shakespeare’s engagements with concepts of idolatry andiconoclasm for our understanding of constructions of spectator (and therefore audience)agency in early modern drama (Porter 2009).

A brief overview of one of the most famous instances of the depiction of a visual artwork in a Shakespeare play, then, has revealed a wide range of possible areas of enquiryrelating to visual culture. At this point it is useful to ask what exactly is meant by thephrase ‘visual culture’. At its broadest, this phrase can refer to anything which is seen(Elkins 4). Visual culture can therefore include any aspect of what might be termed ‘thevisual world’, from building exteriors and interiors, to gardens; clothing, cosmetics, orany material objects from books and furniture to tools and mechanical implements. Giventhat any form of visual item may be included within visual culture, the study of this sub-ject is highly interdisciplinary, intersecting particularly closely with work on material cul-tures, drama and film. Much of the most high-profile work on visual culture has focusedon 20th-century film, or modern and postmodern visuality, for example Laura Mulvey’sseminal work on the ‘gaze’ in film (Mulvey 1975). The earliest use of ‘visual culture’ inan art-historical context, meanwhile, is often attributed to Michael Baxandall, in his Paint-ing and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, published in 1972 (Baxandall 141; Elkins 4).

The study of visual culture should be distinguished from the study of the visual arts,which suggests a focus on the traditional ‘fine arts’ such as painting and sculpture (which,of course, are a part of ‘visual culture’). Approaches that concern visual culture ratherthan the visual arts are particularly appropriate for historicised studies of Shakespeare,since a notion of the traditional fine arts, as opposed to the decorative arts or ‘crafts’, isan invention of the 18th century (Shiner 12). During Shakespeare’s lifetime, boundariesbetween painting, sculpting (or ‘carving’) and other forms of visual and material produc-tion could be very fluid. For example, Rowland Buckett, a ‘joiner and painter’ active inLondon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, worked on ‘what todaywould be called easel paintings as well as decorative painting’ (Wells-Cole 32, 207).Buckett was charged with ‘decorating’ Hatfield House (Wells-Cole 32), where today it isstill possible to see a chamber organ dated to 1611–1612 that was decorated by the pain-ter and joiner (Fig. 1). In addition, like many visual artists active in London, Buckettcontributed as a painter to the production of civic pageants, in this case AnthonyMunday’s 1614 Lord Mayor’s Show, Himatia-Poleos (Bergeron 250). Given the lack ofhierarchical categorisation between different types of visual work undertaken in earlymodern England, it is profitable to approach the historical contexts of early modernvisuality from a cultural perspective that embraces a broad range of visual practices.My own forthcoming monograph adopts this approach, exploring Shakespeare and hiscontemporaries’ preoccupation with visual and material processes of ‘making’ includingpainting, carving, drawing, tailoring, shoemaking, and even the ‘grinding’ of pigments foruse in painting (Porter forthcoming).

That such a diverse range of practices can be understood as a part of early modernvisual culture is reflected in the fact that visual appearances and experiences are a recur-ring theme in critical explorations of early modern culture more generally. Some of themost significant insights into the operation of visual discourses in Shakespearean Englandhave been offered by new historicist works not explicitly concerned with visuality. In theseminal new historicist essay ‘Invisible Bullets’, Stephen Greenblatt draws our attentionto the significance of the ‘privileged visibility’ of Elizabethan power as a context for



constructions of monarchy in Henry V (64). Katharine Eisaman Maus’s study ofRenaissance ‘inwardness’, meanwhile, links conventional thinking about the impact ofreligious change on early modern visual culture to questions of identity formation:

The period’s social and religious upheavals arguably provoke a keen, apparently nearly universalsuspicion of ‘‘appearances.’’ Whatever the origins of this distrust, it produces a distinctive wayof thinking about human subjectivity that emphasizes the disparity between what a person isand what he or she seems to other people. (210)

Maus’s interpretation of the importance of ‘appearances’ in early modern England drawsattention to what is at stake in thinking about visuality in relation to Shakespeare. Couldnew developments in our understanding of early modern visual experience impact onwider thinking about the culture in which Shakespearean texts were produced? More-over, the possible implications of new work on conceptualisations of visual culture in theearly modern period could reach beyond the context of studies informed by new histori-cist or cultural materialist approaches. With the growth in popularity of studies of themateriality of Shakespearean texts, for example, we might also consider how far newthinking about early modern aesthetics might have significant implications for the studyof books and manuscripts as objects.

The potential for new research in this area, then, is very promising, with approachesthat engage with questions of materiality seeming to present particularly fruitful avenues

Fig. 1. Detail of chamber organ decorated by Rowland Buckett (1611–12), Hatfield House. Reproduction courtesyof Hatfield House/Heritage House Group.



of enquiry. Such future work might build on the strong foundations laid by AnneRosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s highly significant study of literature, clothing andmemory in early modern culture (2000), which has been followed by a number of workson early modern drama and aspects of material and visual culture (Karim-Cooper 2006;Richardson 2006). The exploration of Shakespeare in relation to visual subjects has, how-ever, remained largely focused on the traditional ‘fine arts’, in combination, increasingly,with a focus on Shakespeare as a ‘literary’ figure. The second part of this essay will chartthe emergence of this approach to Shakespeare and visual culture, via an overview of keyworks published in this area since the 20th century.

At times, work on Shakespeare and visual topics can seem motivated by a desire to linkperceived high points in English literature, such as the work of Shakespeare andChristopher Marlowe, to seemingly correspondent achievements in the visual arts, such asthe work of Leonardo and Titian. Such an approach to Shakespeare as a representative ofRenaissance ‘genius’ was particularly prevalent in certain eras of 20th-century criticism, ascritics such as Mario Praz (1974) and Wylie Sypher (1978) advocated ‘synchronic’ criti-cism, which assumes ‘that in each era literature and the visual arts, as aesthetic expressionsof the cultural patterns dominant at that time, are likely to share certain thematic and sty-listic qualities’ (Roston 3). Unconcerned with historical specificity, for example, Sypherdiscusses Cellini’s Perseus (Florence, Loggia de Lanzi), which was sculpted between 1545and 1554, in the context of allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, first performed 1600–1601,and a number of sculptures by Michelangelo made for different contexts of display in theearly decades of the 16th century (158). In the latter part of the 20th century, theapplication of postmodern theory to literary and visual studies led to a shift in focus fromdecontextualised understandings of Renaissance creative ‘genius’, to a concern withhistoricised readings of literary and visual works (Evett 1990). Furthermore, the scope forearly modern visual studies broadened as critics re-evaluated the central position occupiedby the Italian Renaissance in favour of more global perspectives (Erickson and Hulse2000; Farago 1995; Jardine and Brotton 2000).

Despite this shift in focus, however, monographs on Shakespeare and visual culturehave remained largely concerned with the Italian visual arts. This focus can be understoodas extensively justified, since knowledge and theories about modes of visual representationavailable in early modern northern Europe can often be connected to Italian sources.Writing historicised accounts, however, authors must acknowledge the ‘gaps’ betweenShakespeare and Italian visual contexts. A concern with literary and rhetorical adaptationsof Italian visual themes, moreover, often heightens awareness of differences between wordand image, even as critics explore rhetorical discourses that highlight parallels betweenmodes of representation. I will refer here to three selected studies from the past decade;Alison Thorne’s Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (2000),Frederick Kiefer’s Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (2003), andRichard Meek’s Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (2009). These works share an interestin Shakespeare’s use of literary, rhetorical and theatrical devices for the adaptation ofItalianate and classical visual images, discourses, concepts and motifs.

Thorne’s study builds on a body of work on early modern drama and the theory oflinear perspective that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, most importantly in StephenOrgel and Roy Strong’s discussions of the political significance of Inigo Jones’s innovativeuse of linear perspective in stage designs for Stuart court masques (Orgel 1975; Strong1984). A method for the pictorial representation of space, linear perspective was firstdeveloped in 15th-century Florence by the goldsmith, sculptor and architect FilippoBrunelleschi (Kemp 9–10), and was first described in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura



(1435). Linear perspective situates the viewer in relation to the viewed object, and so is arich source of reference for discussions of connections between spectators and viewedrepresentations, including plays. Thorne exploits this theme fruitfully, particularly in aconcluding chapter in which she argues that The Tempest subversively reverses the hierar-chical visual structure of the Jonesian court masque, dramatising Prospero’s failure toimpose his own single perspectival vision within the playworld (198–225). At the sametime, however, Thorne’s study is shaped by a sense of difference between Shakespeareand visuality that is encouraged by a focus on literary and rhetorical perspectives.

There is no evidence that Shakespeare had read De Pictura, or its Italian successor, DellaPictura (1436). Thorne acknowledges that during the early 17th century ‘outside theenclosed world of Whitehall’ it ‘was rare for artists to use perspective consistently as away of rationalizing and unifying the whole of the pictured space’ (52). Thorne thereforegrounds Shakespeare’s engagement with visuality in the verbal and visual interactions thatformed a part of the Tudor humanistic education (9), suggesting that the playwrightdeploys rhetorical devices to engage with the ‘imaginative pluralism’ and non-conformityperceived as characteristic of English responses to Albertian perspective (55). In particular,the rhetoric of ut pictura poesis is explored as a vehicle through which Shakespeare could‘experiment with translating the essentially visual phenomenon of perspective into therhetorical (and dramatic) language of his own medium’ (56). The use of the concept of‘translation’ here is significant. As noted above, the phrase ut pictura poesis is associatedwith commonalities between verbal and visual modes of expression; Thorne’s allusion to‘translation’, however, suggests that visual and verbal cultures are alien to one another,with verbal expression very much Shakespeare’s ‘own’ home territory. Whilst Thorne’sargument is structured around an attempt to bridge a perceived gap between verbal andvisual modes of communication, this argument is therefore simultaneously embedded inevidence of the normalised status of verbal ⁄visual interaction in the humanist educationalpractices known to Shakespeare. Thorne painstakingly elaborates fascinating links betweenShakespeare and early modern European developments in visual theory, but by looking atShakespeare from a literary and rhetorical perspective that embraces mainly ItalianRenaissance contexts, she simultaneously reveals distances and differences between dramaand visual culture.

The bridging of perceived ‘gaps’ between word and image that shapes Thorne’s studyis echoed in Kiefer’s and Meek’s texts. Kiefer’s study presents a detailed and very usefulexploration of the visual contexts for symbolic ‘personifications’ in Shakespeare’s plays,such as Time in The Winter’s Tale, or Tamora and her sons’ appearance as Revenge,Murder and Rape in Titus Andronicus, which Kiefer links to the depiction of rape in TheRape of Lucrece (59–61). Attempting to reconstruct the appearance of such characters,Kiefer refers to stage directions, written accounts, and to available visual evidence, partic-ularly from prints, engravings, emblem books and the ‘treasure trove’ of visual informa-tion offered by the context of early modern civic entertainments (15). For example,Rumour, who appears ‘painted full of tongues’ in the Induction to 2 Henry IV, isdiscussed alongside representations of Fame in emblem books such as Cesare Ripa’s Icono-logia (1603), and in William Kip’s engravings of the triumphal arches designed by StephenHarrison for James I’s royal entry of 1604 (64).

Kiefer demonstrates the extent to which exploration of visual contexts can illuminateour understanding of a wide range of themes in Shakespeare’s plays, which, followingKernodle, he understands as a part of visual culture (14). At the same time, however,Kiefer expresses anxieties about the ‘lost … visual vocabulary of Elizabethan England’,and the ‘frustratingly incomplete or silent’ accounts of personifications by Shakespeare’s



contemporaries (14). Moreover, Kiefer’s discussion opens with an account of Elizabeth I’srejection of the gift of an illustrated prayer book in 1562 as indicative of a ‘preference forwords over pictures’ that ‘suggests a major direction of 16th-century culture in England’(1). As in Thorne’s study, then, Kiefer’s methodology is structured so as to overcome theperceived problem of supposed early modern English isolation from visual culture, and‘gaps’ in the evidence that might connect Shakespeare with visual culture.

The most recent monograph to be published in this area, by Richard Meek, is similarlyintroduced with a description of ‘the pictorial culture of early modern England’ as ‘rela-tively underdeveloped compared to the rest of Europe’ (15). In this context, Meekargues, Shakespeare develops a mode of ekphrastic writing that is dependent on language‘and the audience’s imagination’ to fill in the visual ‘absences’ invoked in scenes that are‘narrated rather than staged’, such as Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet(82). Meek’s text perhaps marks a turning point in the study of Shakespearean visuality,as his approach is strongly based on a view of Shakespeare as a ‘ ‘‘literary’’ dramatist’(8–9) as opposed to (or as well as) a ‘man of the theatre’ (2). Meek uses questions aboutShakespeare’s attitude to visual culture as a springboard from which to make interventionsinto debates about text and performance, orality and theatricality, hearing and seeing inShakespeare’s works. This approach necessarily highlights distinctions between literaryand visual modes of expression, for example in Meek’s discussion of Shakespeare’sengagements with the paragone (‘comparison’) debates. Popular in early modern Englishliterary circles, the paragone debates revolve around the struggle for superiority amongstmodes of representation. Shakespeare, for example, stages a paragone debate in Act 1 scene1 of Timon of Athens, as a painter and a poet compete for Timon’s patronage. Signifi-cantly, the paragone debates were associated in 16th-century Italy with ‘the struggle ofartists to achieve intellectual status paralleling that of men of letters’, and so derive from acontext in which visual expression is considered inferior to writing (Farago 1996: 90–1).In Meek’s analysis, Shakespeare’s engagements with ekphrasis and the paragone debates arerelated to the contexts of early modern English attitudes to visual experience (15). In adiscussion of Venus and Adonis, for example, Venus’s admonition of Adonis as a ‘well-painted idol, image, dull and dead’ (line 212), is rightly connected by Meek to ‘the dis-course of iconoclasm’ (34). Meek also sees the iconoclasm of Shakespeare’s language inthis passage as evidence of the playwright’s interest in the limitations of visual expression(34); post-Reformation aversion to visual images is here framed within the competitiveoppositions of the paragone debates.

Where Thorne and Kiefer highlight differences between word and image as they striveto bridge perceived ‘gaps’ between both, Meek’s argument explicitly operates within anaesthetic realm characterised by such distinctions and divisions. Building on the view thatShakespeare’s ekphrastic narratives may supplant visual experience by persuading us that‘we are ‘‘seeing’’ the thing itself’ (179), Meek concludes that the strength of the endingsof Shakespeare’s plays is often dependent on the deferral of acts of narration, such aswhen Hermione promises, in the closing lines of The Winter’s Tale, that in future ‘thoushalt hear’ the story of her mysterious survival since her supposed death sixteen years ear-lier (5.3.126–9). Meek highlights Shakespeare’s powers as a ‘literary’ figure in his incisiveobservation that in such deferrals, Shakespeare ‘increases our sense of the play’s verisimili-tude, and seemingly fulfils – or rather defers – our desire for satisfaction and closure’(195). Further to this, Meek suggests that the ‘phenomenon’ of Shakespeare’s narrativedeferrals ‘dismantles any fixed hierarchy between text and performance’, since the with-holding of narrative is felt ‘both when we read the play and when we see (and hear) theplay at the theatre’ (195). This deconstruction of a perceived opposition between text



and performance is noticeably generated by an understanding of verbal expression ascapable of supplanting implicitly inferior modes of visual representation. Even as he seeksto collapse boundaries between ‘literary’ and ‘theatrical’ Shakespeares, therefore, Meek’sstudy is shaped by an over-arching sense of difference between literary text and visualspectacle.

Looking to future approaches to the subject of Shakespeare and visual culture, per-haps there is space for thinking about Shakespeare’s ‘literariness’ whilst also consideringhis participation in visual culture. Rhetorical discourses on relations between word andimage provide a very important context for this subject area, as do post-Reformationanxieties about visual culture. It may be liberating, however, for Shakespearean schol-ars to combine understanding of these contexts with closer engagements with newart-historical thinking about the impact of the Reformation on early modern visualcultures. A recent collection of essays edited by Tara Hamling and Richard L.Williams (2007), for example, challenges the widely accepted view that the Refor-mation in England was destructive for visual culture, suggesting instead that post-Reformation visual culture should be understood in terms of an ongoing process ofadaptation and transformation. Similarly, Stacey Boldrick and Richard Clay’s editedcollection of essays on iconoclasm invite us to recognise the ‘creative dimension’ oficonoclasm (9). In Aura Satz’s contribution to this collection, such a re-thinking oficonoclasm is applied to the representation of puppets in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair(45–6). What are the implications of such a re-thinking of iconoclastic acts for studiesof Shakespeare?

Given the dominance of a view of early modern English culture as iconoclastically hos-tile to visuality, such revisions of the post-Reformation context could have significantimplications for Shakespearean criticism that refers to visual experiences. In particular,new thinking about the cultural impact of the Reformation enables literary critics toapproach visual contexts not as obstacles to cross-disciplinary study, but as a mine ofexciting avenues of enquiry. For example, a recent interdisciplinary collection ofessays, Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, C. 1570–1720(Kaplan et al. 2009), presents work on recusant visual and material cultural production inProtestant contexts. Such studies highlight the nuanced relations between visual expres-sion and religion in early modern Europe, thus providing a fascinatingly complex back-ground for the ambiguous and conflicted engagements with religious visual culturepresented by plays such as The Winter’s Tale. Art-historical research on this period, more-over, exposes a wealth of potential early modern visual sources that might be discussed inrelation to the representation of visuality in Shakespearean texts. Essays in the collectionAlbion’s Classicism, edited by Lucy Gent, for example, offer evidence of Protestant Englishadaptations of classicism that present excellent points of comparison with Shakespeare’sown engagements with classical and Italian cultures (Gent 1995).

In recent years, critics have approached Shakespeare and visual culture from an increas-ingly literary standpoint; this approach can be illuminating, particularly for those con-cerned with the operation of rhetorical discourses in Shakespearean contexts. Anemphasis on purely literary perspectives can, however, obscure our view of the fruitfulopportunities for interdisciplinary study presented by Shakespeare’s works. Engaging withart-historical revisions of early modern visual culture, we might begin to questionassumptions about the visual contexts for Shakespeare’s writing. Looking beyond strictoppositions between word and image, moreover, we may work with Kernodle’s concep-tualisation of drama as a part of the visual world and begin to bridge perceived ‘gaps’between Shakespeare’s works and visual culture.



Short Biography

Chloe Porter is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Nottingham Trent University.Her research explores intersections between early modern literary and visual cultures, andshe has published on the significance of visual experience in works by John Lyly andShakespeare. She is currently completing a monograph, Making and Unmaking in EarlyModern English Drama, which asks why early modern English playwrights are obsessedwith visual and material processes of construction.

Note

* Correspondence: Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK. Email:[email protected]

1 All references to Shakespeare’s works are to The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2nd ed. NewYork: Norton. 2008.

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Shakespeare and Early Modern Visual Culture

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