ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |26 pages

Introduction

Timon of Athens: The theatre and the visual

part I|103 pages

Intermediality

chapter 1|14 pages

Shakespeare the emblematist

chapter 2|12 pages

Titus Andronicus and Renaissance visual culture

Contemporary emblems of the hand and Ekphrasis

chapter 3|22 pages

“All Adonises must die”

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and the episodic imaginary

chapter 4|18 pages

Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra

Between stasis and movement

chapter 5|14 pages

Both goddess and woman

Cleopatra and Venus

part II|110 pages

Shakespeare’s use of the visual

chapter 7|26 pages

“Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow”

Italian visual arts and ekphrastic tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece

chapter 8|19 pages

“Wear this jewel for me, ’tis my picture”

The miniature in Shakespeare’s work

chapter 9|16 pages

The charm of decapitation

Medusa in Caravaggio and Measure for Measure

chapter 10|14 pages

“Those foundations which I build upon”

Construction and misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale

part III|115 pages

Representing the visual arts

chapter 14|30 pages

Shakespearean iconography

Some nineteenth-century popular editions and the verbal-visual nexus to serpents

chapter 15|22 pages

“Paint me in my gallery”

Time, perspective, and the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy

chapter 17|15 pages

Julius Caesar

Shakespeare and the ruins of Rome

chapter |6 pages

Afterword

Beginnings and departures