ABSTRACT
Early modern literature was affected by an intensely representational culture and its varied artistic and aesthetic manifestations. Painting and writing were considered related arts, producing similar effects. For early modern dramatists, painting shared a fundamental element with theatre: its visual nature as the concept of the sister arts informed what de Armas has called "writing for the eyes". By comparing poetry, drama, and painting, Shakespeare sets up painting as a tool for his writings. Shakespeare not only shows an awareness of visual art and the relationship between viewer and work of art, but also an appropriation of pictorial art through the pictorial vocabulary he employs. For Spanish Golden Age dramatists, plays also had a fundamental visual dimension. Shakespeare was concerned with the exploration of the mysterious and ambiguous shared ground between reality and the illusion of art, between the natural and the artificial.
