Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture (review)

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture is a collection of eleven new essays, many by leading theater and art historians. The first of the book's two sections, "Ruskin and the Theater," contains six chapters that explore either John Ruskin's interest in or influence on Victorian theater; the second, "The Theatre and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century," comprises five chapters that examine connections between Victorian theater and its visual aspects or representations. Ambitious in breadth and variety—though somewhat uneven in quality—this anthology constitutes a significant and vital contribution to the examination of Victorian visual culture. Several essays build on my Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (2007), the only previously published book on Ruskin and theater. However, while Performing the Victorian considers Ruskin's theater-going, his writing about it, and the impact of theatrical performance on his ideas, this book succeeds in its quite different dual purpose: to establish Ruskin's effect on the Victorian theater and to argue for theater as a visual art.

Although I wish that the two halves of the book would speak more directly to each other, Katherine Newey finesses this disjunction in her brief but meaty introduction. She points to the way in which Ruskin and his contemporaries read paintings through the lens of theater, expanding Kate Flint's notion of a porous boundary between the verbal and the visual to the equally permeable line between the visual and the theatrical. Victorian theater employed techniques that specifically drew on the conventions of visual culture, such as tableaux and stage "realizations" of famous paintings and illustrations. Newey situates the project vis-à-vis Martin Meisel most importantly, but also in relation to A. N. Varadac, Jon Klancher, Kevin Gilmartin, and Christopher Balme, explaining that the volume's essays "challenge conventional theatre and art historic narratives," broaching barriers "between high and popular culture" and between "the aesthetic and the material … in order to tell a more nuanced story of the interrelationships between theatre and the visual arts" (9).

Jeffrey Richards's lead essay presents painstaking research into the relationships between Ruskin's aesthetics and the widely reviewed amateur theatrical productions of classical Greek plays at Oxford and elsewhere in the 1880s. He traces seemingly countless interactions between Ruskin and everyone involved with these plays. Attended by luminaries, acted by future stars upon sets by famous painters, these student productions were performed sometimes in translation and sometimes in ancient Greek, much to the classics professors' delight. The phenomenon would be worth investigating in its own right, but it becomes particularly interesting when considered in light of Ruskin's presence at some of these performances, his influence on the participating visual artists, his reverence at this time for ancient Greek religion, and finally, the strength of his ideas about Greek mythology and culture as a vehicle for teaching moral tenets and gender ideology. Richards makes a convincing case for these connections and their larger cultural significance.

Rachel Dickinson's beautifully written blend of archival research and literary analysis focuses primarily on Ruskin's gleeful response in Fors Clavigera (1871–84) to pantomimes such as Cinderella (an area ripe for further analysis), and argues that Ruskin valued theater's "rejuvenating and restorative function" as essential to "human morality and perception" (63), linking popular entertainments to his seminal invocation of the "innocence of the eye" (Ruskin qtd. in Heinrich, Newey, and Richards 63). In the essay's most surprising and original turn, she connects the pantomime's capacity to create a childlike vision in adults with Ruskin's infamous baby-talk letters to his cousin Joan Severn, quoting fascinating unpublished material to make the point.

Like Dickinson's essay, Andrew Leng's "Re-Interpreting Ruskin and Browning's Dramatic 'Art-poems'" hinges on a previously unpublished letter, this one from Robert Browning to Ruskin, included as an appendix. In an explicitly revisionist...