1st Edition
Shakespeare and the Visual Arts The Italian Influence
Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
Timon of Athens. The Theatre and the Visual
Michele Marrapodi
PART I: INTERMEDIALITY: VISUALITY AND DRAMA
1 Shakespeare the Emblematist
Claudia Corti
2 Titus Andronicus and Renaissance Visual Culture: Contemporary Emblems of Hand and Ekphrasis
Paromita Deb
3 "All Adonises must die": Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and the Episodic Imaginary
Peter Latka
4 Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra: Between Stasis and Movement
Olivia Coulomb
5 Both Goddess and Woman: Cleopatra and Venus
Hanna Scolnicov
6 Vanishing Points and Horizons of Audience Perception in Shakespeare’s Late Plays Claire T. Guéron
PART II: SHAKESPEARE’S USE OF THE VISUAL
7 "Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow": Italian Visual Arts and Ekphrastic Tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece
Michele Marrapodi
8 "Wear this jewel for me, ’tis my picture": The Miniature in Shakespeare’s Work
Camilla Caporicci
9 The Charm of Decapitation: Medusa in Caravaggio and Measure for Measure
Rocco Coronato
10 ‘Those foundations which I build upon’: Construction and Misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale
Muriel Cunin
11 Shakespeare’s Genre Paintings
Anthony R. Guneratne
12 Verbal Painting by Means of Dance and Portraits
Necla Çikigil
PART III: REPRESENTING THE VISUAL ARTS
13 Painting and Representing Gender in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Spanish Contemporaries
José M. Gonzàlez
14 "Paint me in my gallery": Time, Perspective, and the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy
Timothy A. Turner
15 Shakespearean Iconography: The Verbal-Visual Nexus to Serpents in Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Editions
Sandra Pietrini
16 Wladyslaw Czachòrski – A Polish Painter with Italian Soul and Shakespearean Vision: "Hamlet Receiving the Players"
Sabina Laskowska-Hinz
17 Julius Caesar: Shakespeare and the Ruins of Rome
Graham Holderness
Afterword:
Beginnings and Departures
Stuart Sillars
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Michele Marrapodi is Full Professor of English Language and Literature, and History of English Drama, in the Department of Scienze Umanistiche at the University of Palermo.
