ABSTRACT
The only literally visual representations of "wanton pictures" occur in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century illustrations of the play, as part of the more general tendency to visualize every line in Shakespeare, including verbal allusions to what is strategically invisible in the plays. The pictures are also hinted at in nineteenth-century illustrated editions, as in Felix Octavius Carr Darley's illustration for the William Cullen Bryant edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Unlike large-scale works of art, wall-paintings or tapestries, music could and often was produced on the early modern English stage, and in the second scene of Shakespeare's Induction, as the Folio stage direction indicates, it is duly performed for Sly, probably much to his displeasure. The material presence of music in Shakespeare's play only underlines even further the material absence of pictures. If Shakespeare, as seems likely, is echoing Ariosto in his Induction, he must have read I suppositi in original Italian, as well as in Gascoigne's translation.
