Horace’s ut pictura poesis (“as painting is poetry”) was a fundamental critical tenet of Renaissance art. It mostly rendered commonplace the coincidence of poetry and painting, or of text and picture: “he hath drawne my picture in his letter” (LLL, 5.2/1926), “His Mistris picture, which, by his tongue being made (Cymbeline 5.5/3455). Hence, not all talk of illusion or representation in Shakespeare is theatrical. Nor did it need to be to influence the auditor’s ear or the viewer’s eye.
This chapter, then, consists of a visual survey of Shakespeare’s use of terms related to mimetic representation. It therefore pursues the previous chapters textual survey of representation on less explicitly theatrical grounds and displays exactly where and when in the Folio’s thirty-six plays Shakespeare has his characters speak of either art, imitation, picturing or painting.
Indeed, the Ars poetica itself was the principal critical text for both painting and poetry (Lee 1967). Shakespeare seems to have known this well enough to stage a critical debate between a painter and a poet in his Tymon of Athens (fig.3.29). But that a portion of the Ars poetica was manifestly about the proper acting out of sentiments must not have escaped him either. Nor would he have been unaware, had he read Phillip Sydney’s Defence of Poesie (1595), that Aristotle’s concept of mimesis seemed all too well-suited to the theatre:
Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mim{ee}sis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically. A speaking Picture, with this end to teach and delight. (300–4)
As a creator of “speaking pictures” himself — “This Play is the Image of a murder done in Vienna” (Hamlet, 3.2/2106) — Shakespeare must have felt a certain kinship with the visual arts (after all, his friend and colleague Richard Burbage was, by all accounts, something of a painter himself). And in one of his earliest plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (fig.3.2), he does refer to this correspondence between player (or part) and painting, since he has Proteus refer to both himself and the portrait of Silvia as shadows: “I am but a shadow; And to your shadow, will I make true loue” (4.2/1447–8). The dramatist refers to this shadowy kinship a second time in the play by having Julia make exactly the same analogy with regards the same painting: “Come shadow, come, and take this shadow vp,/ For ‘tis thy riuall” (4.4/2015–6). Shakespeare’s use of the word shadow would not have been above his audience understanding. They would have recognized it as the antonym of “substance”: a portrait being the shadow of its sitter, as an actor is the shadow of a real person.
Later, in Hamlet (fig.3.32), Shakespeare would again point to this kinship between player and painting. For when Claudius questions the grieving Laertes, “Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,/ A face without a heart?” (4.7/3106–7), he is referring back to the grieving Hamlet, whose own analogy was to theatre: “These indeed Seeme,/ For they are actions that a man might play / But I haue that Within, which passeth show” (1.2/264–6).
Ben Jonson famously remarked in 1619 “That Shaksperr wanted Arte” (Patterson 1974, p.5) and though he himself made amends for it in the First Folio , his remark has rather been long-lived. Jonson was referring to Shakespeare’s dramatic technique (which was something prone to excess ). But the remark has often been interpreted as referring to Shakespeare’s general culture and knowledge of the arts as well. The dramatist has long suffered from being perceived as something of a natural, one whose undeniable talent, while not entirely unschooled, was “largely unconscious” (Rowse 1963, p.47). In a brief article that attempts to retrace some of the sources of Tymon’s Paragone debate, for instance, art historian Anthony Blunt rather bemoans that, “as far as criticism of theoretical interest is concerned, Shakespeare hardly says more than that works of art are either very like nature or more beautiful than nature” (Blunt 1939, p.261). But, as Blunt himself surely knew, Vasari in his Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori italiani (1550 and 1568) hardly says much more himself since verisimilitude or the imitation of nature was, ever since Aristotle and Pliny, the basis for appreciating works of art. And Shakespeare would have hardly waxed theoretical in the course of a stage play. As it stands, the polite debate between Tymon’s Painter and Poet is apparently about which of them best imitates (and so deserves preferment): the Poet would “interpret” the “dumbness of the [painting’s] gesture” (1.1/47–8), while the painter could “demonstrate” the poet’s “rough work”, he says “more pregnantly than words” (1.1/114). Of course, the tale they both would tell is that of Tymon of Athens itself, so that — in terms of “mocking the life” (1.1.35/49) — the dramatist, it seems, trumps them both. By staging this brief reprise of the Paragone debate, Shakespeare essentially provides a Defence of Theatre, whereby it proves itself the best at imitation. And yet this singular aspect of Tymon’s artistic debate has largely been overlooked, mostly because no one thought Shakespeare capable of making such an argument. Another example of how Shakespeare’s sense of art was mocked and belittled concerns The Winters Tale (fig.3.14). At the sheep-shearing festival (4.4), the character of Perdita apparently views forced and crossbred flowers — “Which some call natures bastards” (4.4.83/1891) — with distaste. The subject is a fairly innocuous one. But the argument it arouses — between Perdita and the disguised Polixenes — is framed in much loftier terms. Perdita regards grafting suspiciously for its being an Art that “shares with great creating-Nature” (4.4.87–8/1897–8), prompting Polixenes to respond:
Nature is made better by no meane, But Nature makes that Meane: so ouer that Art, (Which you say addes to Nature) is an Art That Nature makes … This is an Art Which do’s mend Nature: change it rather, but The Art it selfe, is Nature. (4.4.90–7/1900–8)
This mending (or beautifying) of nature was another critical commonplace of the time. But in the context of a play that already did “plant, and ore-whelme Custome” (4.1.9/1588) by incorporating elements of comedy, tragedy, pastoral and even of Jonsonian Maske, the passage may be interpreted as a veiled apology for such dramatic hybridization. Yet Shakespeare’s artistic grafting was more wide-ranging still. For the Winters Tale comes to its ultimate resolution by staging a piece “newly perform’d, by that rare Italian Master, Julio Romano, who … would be-guile Nature of her Custome, so perfectly he is her Ape” (5.1.96–100/3104–7). Once again, the underlying coincidence between two of great-creating nature’s apes (grafting and painting) has mostly go un-noticed.
In an article entitled Shakespeare and the Arts (1927), C.H. Herford mostly denigrates Shakespeare’s reference to Giulio Romano: Not only is the mention here of the famous Italian artist, Giulio Romano, the solitary mention, in all Shakespeare, of the name of any artist whatever; but he seems to know exceedingly little either of him or of his art. Giulio Romano is only known as a painter; not as a sculptor; Shakespeare makes him author of what was with the Italians a rare monstrosity, a painted statue, and seems to regard this achievement as the height of art (id. p.281).
What the critic fails to take into consideration, though, is the theatrical context itself (wherein an actor could hardly have been whitewashed to resemble an actual statue). Nor does Herford note what Giulio Romano was actually known for. Vasari, in his Vite, writes at length of Giulio’s trompe l’oeil and faux-reliefs: “they were “coloured so well that they seem[ed] alive, … Giulio has made the illusion complete, the figures are in such relief” (Vasari 1900, v.3 p.103). Hence was Giulio indeed renowned for something akin to painted statues. Yet it does not cross Hereford’s mind that Shakespeare may have picked his Pygmalion rather carefully. Only fairly recently have scholars allowed that Shakespeare may have had some knowledge of the arts and that he furthermore may have been a little more attuned to the artistic temperament of his age than had been previously suspected. Murray Roston in his Renaissance Perspective in Literature and the Visual Arts (1987) writes that Shakespeare did show — especially in his later work — a “mannerist distrust of the senses” (id. p.268). The Mannerist aesthetic itself, according to Linda Murray’s The Late Renaissance and Mannerism (1967), “can be quite easily recognized and defined”:
In general, [Mannerism] is equated with […] subject matter either deliberately obscure, or treated so that it becomes difficult to understand — the main incident pushed into the background or swamped in irrelevant figures serving as excuses for displays of virtuosity in figure painting; with extremes of perspective, distorted proportions or scale — figures jammed into too small a space so that one has the impression that any movement would burst the confines of the picture; with vivid colour schemes, employing discordant contrasts, […] not for descriptive or naturalistic purposes, but as a powerful adjunct to the emotional impact of a picture. (Murray 1967, pp.30–1)
That Shakespeare had on occasion been “deliberately obscure” and “difficult to understand” (Lear) or that some of his principal plots were “pushed in the background” (1 & 2 Henry IV, Much Adoe), or his plays “swamped in irrelevant figures serving as excuses for displays of virtuosity” (Hamlet), or that they presented “extremes of perspective” or “distorted proportions or scale” (Othello, Antonie and Cleopatra) has indeed been the stuff of much Shakespearean scholarship. Hence is John Greenwood, in his Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style (1988), firmer than Roston in his defence of a Mannerist Shakespeare. “The key to Shakespeare’s eventual success as a mannerist playwright” he writes “is his acute and abiding interest in the nature of illusion” (id. p.39), adding that many of Shakespeare’s characters “constitute their own implicit meditation on the nature of the theatre” (ibid.). Thus Greenwood rallies Shakespeare’s signature interest “in the figure of the play metaphor” to the mannerist aesthetic (ibid.).
If, in rhetorical terms, the mannerist artist emphasized inventio, dispositio and articulatio over historia, then it almost certainly was in order that his viewer/spectator appreciate not only what the work represented but also how it did so. Hence, the mannerist aesthetic, itself, may have been essentially emancipatory in that it favoured and emphasized what was shared between artists and their audiences alike: the very actuality or presence of the work of art itself. To affirm that Shakespeare was a mannerist may be altogether too reductive, though aspects of mannerism certainly suited his artistic temperament. But when his characters do meditate on the nature of theatrical or artistic illusion it may indeed be in view of self-reflexive ends akin to those of Greenwood’s mannerism. For Shakespeare’s artistic vocabulary essentially provided him — as well as his fellow players — with another (albeit, related) discourse on the subject of representation.
In attempting to establish our survey’s chosen terms, we initially turned to Vasari’s Vitae where the term maniera (or fine style) appears for the very first time in its art-historical context. Furthermore, Vasari’s book itself might have been known to Shakespeare by the time he wrote The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1609–10) . But if Vasari’s “five qualities”, as defined in the Preface to Part III of the Vitae — good rule, order, proportion, design, & style (Vasari 1965, p.249) — seemed like a good contemporaneous place to start, most of these terms — in Vasari’s sense at least — only rarely applied to what Shakespeare wrote.
There is not a single occurrence of good rule(s) in Shakespeare (where rule is almost always to “rule over”). For him an order, is either a “command”, a “religious fraternity”, or a “state of affairs” (never something Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, or Tuscan); though there is, perhaps, an indication of Vasari’s meaning in what the character of Time in The Winters Tale says: “Let me passe / The same I am, ere ancient’st Order was / Or what is now receiu’d (4.1.9–11/1588–90). A design, for Shakespeare, is a “plan” or a “purpose” and not Vasari’s “imitation of the most beautiful things in nature” on a “flat surface” (ibid.). Proportion most often refers to the relative “size” of something and only rarely to “parts properly arranged” (ibid.). But, here again, there may be two tantalizing exceptions to this last, the first in 1 Henry VI: “For what you see, is but the smallest part, / And least proportion of Humanitie:/ I tell you Madame, were the whole Frame here (2.3.52–4/893–5); the second in Richard III: “I, that am curtail’d of this faire Proportion,/ Cheated of Feature by dissembling Nature,/ Deform’d, vn-finish’d (1.1.18–20/20–2). As for style (or maniera) itself — which Vasari defines as “copying the most beautiful things in nature and combining the most perfect members … to produce the finest possible figure” (id. pp.249–50), Shakespeare mostly uses the word as a synonym for “fashion” or “custom”.
Thus, like the previous survey of theatrical terms, had Shakespeare’s vocabulary of art and imitation mostly to been drawn from his own manifest use of such terms. Generally, we tended to exclude terms of reflection (such as glass or mirror) in favour of those more strongly associated with ‘picturing’ or mimetic representation of an artistic (technical) nature. Yet, though Shakespeare could, on occasion, be quite technical — as when Bertram in All’s Well (fig.3.12) provides a quick cluster of terms (perspective, line, colour and proportions) related to painterly design (5.3.48–52/2754–8) — such occurrences are rather rare. More often than not, Shakespeare resorts to the more familiar shadow, counterfeit, image and picture. Furthermore his use of terms such as art and painting cannot but seem somewhat ambiguous to us now, since what they designated at the time is not quite what they designate today.
The word art, in Shakespeare’s time, mostly referred to learning or skill. But because a skill — or a technique — is something acquired a posteriori, as opposed to given a priori, the term art itself (Polixenes’ defence notwithstanding) was traditionally opposed to that of nature (as shadow was to substance). Therefore was all art inherently perceived a little suspiciously as something either false or deceitful (since an acquired skill counterfeits natural ability). Yet Shakespeare’s use of art in Winter’s Tale and Tempest’s epilogue does seem rather close to our own understanding of the word.
As for painting, Shakespeare often uses the word to designate the “application of false colour” (often as make-up). Yet, according to the OED, two of the first occurrences of the word denoting a “painted image” (or picture) are also found in Shakespeare’s dramatic works: in Loves Labour’s Lost’ “like a man after the old painting” (3.1./789) and in Tymon of Athens’ “A peece of Painting” (1.1. /193). Indeed, in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare himself will even go so far as to comically set one designation (picture) against the other (make-up).
Painting, Sir, I have heard say, is a Misterie; and your Whores sir, being members of my occupation, vsing painting, do prove my Occupation, a Mysterie. (4.2.36–8/1889–91)