ABSTRACT
For the best part of two centuries, from William Hogarth’s The Beggar’s Opera to E. Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, English painting is liberally punctuated with famous images based on literary texts. W. Shakespeare, J. Milton, J. Keats and A. Tennyson are perhaps the most popular poets with painters. The traditional literary critical argument over Shakespeare has been whether to treat his plays as extended poems or as acting scripts. Shakespeare’s plays provided the source for what became one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ most absorbing interests: women. Painting Shakespeare as poetry could scarcely have had a more propitious narrative in art history from which to spring for, though frequently chosen by later artists, Ophelia was at this time a highly original subject. In a fascinating essay on ‘Shakespeare and the Theatre of Illustration’, Cary Mazer describes the idiom in which nineteenth-century productions of Shakespeare were staged as ‘pictorial realism’.
