Seeing Through the Text

Shakespeare is not only England’s pre-eminent author; he is also central to our visual heritage. It has often been observed that after the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the repressed visual impulses of early modern society were rerouted into the theatre, giving impetus to the spectacular flowering of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Stuart Sillars’s book makes a significant contribution to the study of painted responses to Shakespeare’s writing – a field he terms ‘Shakespeare imaging’ (p. 15) – by charting the first and most important phase of the process by which the rich iconography of Shakespearian drama was reintroduced into visual art.

The methodology of Sillars’s book reaches beyond these immediate considerations to produce an exceptional case study of the cultural mechanisms through which words and images interact. His central concern is to examine painting as an analytical response to Shakespeare, outlining the process of ‘visual criticism’ (p. 25) and its role in the scrutiny and interpretation of literature. Despite the rise of visual culture as a discipline, images are still too seldom considered as artefacts that might embody concepts capable of contributing to larger debates, and Sillars’s recognition of painting as a ‘discursive medium’ (p. 5) is therefore particularly welcome. For Samuel Johnson, we are reminded, ‘illustration’ meant textual elucidation and comment, and the images that Sillars examines are shown to have been created during the evolution of the term’s more modern visual connotations.

Sillars’s simultaneous expertise in the textual and performance history of Shakespeare, as well as in painterly convention and technique, affords some exciting observations. He differentiates between those paintings of Shakespearian scenes that draw upon theatrical stagings and those which represent imaginative responses to reading the plays. These can be distinguished from one another, as Sillars demonstrates, by comparing paintings with the records of theatrical productions and with the successive critical editions through which the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement was fought out during the course of the eighteenth century. A particularly striking example of this crucial discrepancy between images inspired by the stage and those derived from textual interpretation is the appearance of the Fool- a character that was omitted from eighteenth-century performances- in paintings of King Lear.

Similarly illuminating is Sillars’s founding analysis of John Wootton’s 1750 painting Macbeth and Banquo Meeting the Weird Sisters. He reveals that this image not only exhibits close attention to the imagery of Shakespeare’s dialogue but also mobilises genres of landscape painting and traditions of mythological representation, imbuing the scene with a moral purpose. One result of this comparison is the claim that painters acted, as the title asserts, as critics: not simply portraying received wisdom about Shakespeare, but putting forward interpretative statements that in some cases ran in advance of written critical responses.

Having thus delineated an intellectual climate in which ‘a knowledge of Shakespeare and an interest in the aesthetics of visual representation were closely connected’ (p. 14), Sillars uses the central chapters of his text to demonstrate a sustained shift from ‘theatre-pieces’ to ‘purely imaginative images’, a process which represented in part a ‘move from seeing to reading Shakespeare’ (p. 16). His account of the way that William Blake’s images offer interpretations of the plays’ ‘metaphoric language’ (p. 17) presents a constructive insight into Blake as a reader. Most impressively, the chapters on Henry Fuseli offer some of the most valuable scholarship yet available on that artist, unpicking the interwoven visual and verbal strands of his rich allusiveness, without which bi-medial attentiveness these apparently esoteric images can too easily be dismissed.

It would be unfair to suggest that a book which defines its own very considerable scope with such clarity has made any significant omissions, but a suggestion for further analysis does arise from one potential aspect of the subject matter that passes with surprisingly little comment. I was particularly struck in some places by the lack of reference to the history and nature of Shakespeare’s own...