ABSTRACT
Shakespeare, a poet of verbal imagination, wrote plays creating a visual theatre with his rhetoric although the language he used did not even have an established dictionary until 1604. Shakespeare's poetry is creating "the intellectual dance" but what the dramatist further accomplishes is that through his use of "dance allusions", he creates an advanced and sophisticated level of "intellectual dance" and a unique type of "visual art". As a playwright and an actor (therefore probably a dancer), Shakespeare was well-aware of the "dancing" spirit of the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare uses active dancing in his plays to form a theatrical scene but also uses dance rhetoric to "paint pictures" for the spectators and readers to visualize what he wants to tell them. When the relationship of visual arts and verbal arts is observed once again, it is rewarding to take notice of numerous artists who, being inspired by Shakespeare by the characters and scenes from his plays, created engravings and paintings.
