The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (review)

For the iconoclasts and anti-theatricalists of the English Reformation, the "scandal" of images lay in their erotic allure, their deceptiveness, and their temptation to idolatry. Yet the malign power of visual art was the obverse of its wondrous ability to move and delight. Focusing on instances in which plays present "painters" as characters or represent paintings — whether "real," as stage props, or conjured by the dramatist's language — this study addresses the paragone between painting and theater. Necessarily, given the ambivalence of the age toward visual art, that engagement will be fraught. It will also be revelatory, assuming as the author does (following the line of critics from David Bevington to Leonard Barkan) that the theater offered as much to the spectator as to the auditor. Thus, when theater includes "painting" as an object of emulation or danger, it also holds the mirror up to its own painterly nature. This reflection is both flattering and disturbing. Confronting such an "other," playwrights "could not thoroughly disparage, much less eliminate, the visual element in their art"; they could, however, "foster a critical awareness" in their audiences of the moral perils of image-making (30). At the same time, they could tap into the energies of the visual by employing language and gesture ekphrastically to invoke "unseen" works of art, thereby suppressing (and yet invoking) the force of the material image.

This argument strikes the keynote in each of the five special cases that follow. Thus, in John Lyly's Campaspe (chapter 2), the play's view of Apelles "is typical of how a Protestant might regard a painter of pagan erotic images — ambivalent, somewhat puritanical, and colored by a fascination with the dangerous, hidden powers unleashed by artistic imitation" (72). In the end the painter is rewarded by his patron Alexander with Campaspe herself, a favored concubine with whom Apelles had fallen in love while doing her portrait. As Lyly himself had spent many fruitless years in the attempt to secure courtly patronage, his Apelles can be seen as a more successful surrogate for the playwright, one who manages the "relationships of art to eros and political power" to his own advantage (71). Chapter 3, on the Boy's Theater at St. Paul's, deals, among other examples, with the anonymous The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, in which a nobleman disguises himself as a journeyman painter to woo his beloved in secret — playing the role of a painter, that is, in a way that dramatizes the bond between "painting and playing" (126).

A final, obligatory survey of Shakespeare (chapter 6) runs too quickly through a number of familiar moments, such as the portraits of Claudius and the elder Hamlet and Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale. But it is preceded by two meticulous discussions of Arden of Faversham (chapter 4) and of the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy (chapter 5). The former play underscores the danger of painting through the conceit of a picture imbued with a poison that will blind and stifle the viewer; in the latter the bereaved Hieronimo, visited by a painter who has also lost a son, imagines a complex painting representing both his own misfortune and his impending revenge. His invention, as the author shows, is related to two kinds of Elizabethan genre, the memorial portrait and the memento vindicate, a less-well-known variant intended to incite the viewer's vengeance against those responsible for the death of the subject commemorated.

The main thesis of this book — the dramatists' self-conscious and self-reflexive moral "ambivalence" about the visual resources they nevertheless brilliantly deploy — is more often reiterated than developed. At times, too, the attempt to push Barkan's claim that "Theater is England's lively pictorial culture" (21) prompts the author to imagine "likely...