The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's "Fine Frenzy" in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art (review)

William Pressly's excellent new study argues that the late eighteenth-century conception of the artist developed from the emerging construction of Shakespeare. While many of the artists produced images of the plays, these are not the author's primary concern: the deft analyses of Shakespeare paintings are there to support his larger thesis that the dramatist offered the model of the original genius that artists performed in their lives and works. Hence, the "fine frenzy" of the subtitle, a category of observation and execution borrowed from Theseus's speech in the final act of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is given visual statement in one of John Hamilton Mortimer's Shakespeare Heads, a touchstone of the book. It is a persuasive notion, building on the common critical perception of Shakespeare as a writer whose greatness and innate Englishness rest more on breaking, than following, classical rules.

After a brief introductory statement of this idea, the book in turn addresses "Being a Shakespeare in Art" and "Being a Shakespeare in Poetry." The opening is grounded in the discussions of genius by Edward Young, Jonathan Richardson, and William Duff, developed by carefully selected references to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses and Henry Fuseli's translation of Lavater's Aphorisms on Man. Pressly shows Mortimer to be the earliest figure to adapt a Shakespearean stance toward composition, his engraving Poet (Figure 19) an incarnation of Shakespeare's "fine frenzy," a term much quoted in the book. Stress is laid on Mortimer's remodeling of the work of Salvator Rosa, an outlaw in both style and life, especially in the former's Belisarius and Caius Marius on the Ruins of Carthage (Figures 38–39). Pressly sees these two works displacing the "stately, classicizing harmony" (80) of Nicolas Poussin's history painting, much as Thomas Otway uses Romeo and Juliet disruptively to enliven his own treatment of Caius Marius. The Runciman brothers, Alexander and John, are next praised, John for the "intense spirituality" (84) of his King Lear in the Storm (Figure 46) and Alexander for the freedom and anxiety of Macbeth and the Witches (Figure 50), but also for the self-portrait with John Brown (Figure 52), an image of himself before a folio open at The Tempest. Here, Pressly claims, dramatist and painter are revealed as magicians, an elision of life and work implicit within the concept of the genius. A large section of the book is rightly given over to the work of Fuseli, a topic of almost bewildering scope; but Pressly's selection is judicious, the writing melding close textual readings with discussions of the plays and Fuseli's temperament.

There follows what must be the first account in a book on Shakespeare of the work of James Jefferys, a painter almost unknown until Nancy Pressly's pioneering studies of the 1970s. There are some extraordinary images, including Lear with the Body of Cordelia (Figure 79) and The Trial Scene from "The Merchant of Venice" (Figure 81) with all the figures as classical nudes. It is this abandonment of apparent naturalism that gives the images their unique force, uniting ironic displacement of tradition and direct statement of human suffering. A comparison between Jefferys's Julius Caesar paintings (Figures 71–73) and those of Benjamin West, demonstrated in the mezzotint by Valentine Green after West's painting (Figure 74), reveals the individuality and power of the former, further supporting Pressly's thesis: the classical resonance of the nude contestants turns The Wrestling Scene from "As You Like It" (Figure 85) into a heroic struggle, far from the courtly entertainment envisioned by Francis Hayman (Figure 86). Like Jefferys's Timon and the Banditti (Figure 83), with its allusions to Rosa, it places the artist firmly within "the exclusive fraternity of melancholy genius" (134). That two of Jefferys's youthful self-portraits rest on Mortimer's Poet engraving welds...