Man in Nature: Peter Brueghel and Shakespeare

Abstract

When Sir Kenneth Clark states that Brueghel's methods, which led to “the expression of an all-embracing sympathy with humanity,” are “almost Shakespearean,” he is making an apt comparison, and one with which Brueghel and Shakespeare scholars are familiar.1 “Shakespearean” has always been a complimentary adjective, and nowhere is the word used with greater justification than in describing the work of Peter Brueghel the Elder. One suspects, however, that many of the critics who compare the two men have in mind only the sort of generalized similarities of sentiment between a painter and a poet which led an editor to declare that King Lear and Caravaggio's Decapitation of St. John the Baptist “both evoke a sense of ‘tristezza mortale,’” and that The Tempest “introduces us to an almost Watteauesque fairyland… .”2 Thus, Brueghel has “many affinities”3 with Shakespeare: in our less well-guarded moments it is easy to see in Brueghel's peasants a robust enjoyment of life, and an almost unthinking acceptance of work which recall Bottom, Peter Quince, and the other “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, or Dogberry and Verges, the comic constables of Much Ado about Nothing. The more than one hundred people in the Wedding Dance in the Open Air (Detroit), or the hunters plodding through the snow, or the cowherds performing workday tasks seem to be reminiscent of the multitude of peasants, citizens, soldiers, friars, and gentlemen who people the comedies and tragedies.