ABSTRACT
Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. This chapter examines Charles Lamb's theories of reading and seeing in the light of his encounters with visual spectacles. It focuses on his view of the theatrical representations of Shakespeare's plays in the context of visual experiences ranging from panoramas to illustrations and literary galleries. Lamb's writing locates Shakespearean performances at the centre of the opposition between the visual and the verbal. Abstraction allows for the construction of the reader as a free autonomous subject. Lamb's ideal disenfranchiserrient through reading as a 'vantage-ground of abstraction' draws on a philosophical tradition partly read through his Unitarian background and partly through Sir Joshua Reynolds's art theory. Visuality haunts the definition of reading as abstraction well beyond the dialectic of a binary opposition.
