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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters, and: Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions
  • Stuart Sillars (bio)
Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. By Frederick Kiefer . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Illus. Pp. xiv + 358. $75.00 cloth.
Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions. By Stephen Orgel . London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Illus. Pp. xvi + 172. $26.95 cloth.

These two volumes share a concern with the visual identities of Shakespeare's plays, as constructed through performance and the artistic traditions that the dramas both draw on and instigate. In this they form part of a welcome interest in bringing the visual history of the plays into dialogue with contemporary criticism. Kiefer's book provides valuable information about an area of characterization that has received little concentrated attention, offering insights for staging as well as study. Orgel's reveals, through a [End Page 240] series of conceptually linked essays, the powers of critical interpretation which underlie traditions of production and the visual arts.

Shakespeare's Visual Theatre explores the stage presentation of abstractions, a category given broad interpretation by the inclusion not only of Time, Rumour, and Revenge but also of classical deities such as Mars and Venus, an extension implicitly justified by Kiefer's approach to these figures as embodiments of human characteristics and their relation to literary, dramatic, and art historical conventions. The book proceeds chronologically through the canon, beginning with "Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost" and moving through "Revenge, Murder, and Rape in Titus Andronicus," "Rumour in 2 Henry IV," the witches in Macbeth,1 the senses in Timon, and "Time and the Deities in the Late Plays."

The book's declared aim is threefold: to reconstruct each figure's appearance, explain its symbolism, and assess its larger significance in the play. As Kiefer makes clear, we know very little of what Shakespeare might have known or seen of the conventions of depicting such figures. In consequence, rather than addressing only the iconographic tradition from which the personifications stem, Kiefer includes literary treatments of similar abstractions and their theatrical presentations both in Shakespeare's time and much more recently. Always conscious of the demands of the stage, he moves from sources in classical and Renaissance mythology through the visual tradition of Ripa and countless printmakers and personifications in Jonson, Marston, and the Elizabethan entertainments to performances in London, Stratford, and New York in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Kiefer's method is best exemplified in his discussion of Mars in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The dual aspect of the god of war is expounded, first in his negative and destructive identity in Alain de Lille, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Marston, then as the positive incarnation of manly virtue in Christine de Pisan, Jonson, Heywood, and in Richard II and Henry V.An analysis of the visual presentation of Mars, which demonstrates the dominance of a convention of armor and the short sword, is followed by an account of what may reasonably be conjectured as the figure's appearance in the play. All this is accomplished within a few pages.

In places one might raise questions about omitted material. No reference is made to the tradition of English secular wall painting, for example: an allusion to the wheel of the senses in Longthorpe Tower, near Peterborough, would have considerably enriched the discussion of the senses in Timon. Similarly, mention of the ears of corn in the Rainbow portrait of Elizabeth I would have added depth to Kiefer's account of the masque of Ceres in The Tempest: referred to in the discussion of Iris, it might also have offered an intriguing suggestion about how iconography identified with Elizabeth was used to confer on her successor an association with the putative cultural richness of her reign, thereby inviting analysis of the political frames in which the personified figures may be seen. These are noted in the discussion of Essex's return from Ireland, included to demonstrate the "peculiarly intimate relationship of fame and rumor" (100): earlier [End Page 241] mention of contemporary incarnations of the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex might usefully have extended the...

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