STUART SILLARS, Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820.

Abstract

ANY academic author would envy the lavish style with which this book has been published. On shiny paper with amply spaced text and wide margins, plus 16 well reproduced colour plates and 101 black and white illustrations, it is as handsome as an art volume and not seen in Shakespeare studies since Yale's A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library: ‘As Imagination Bodies Forth’ (William L. Pressly, 1993). Fortunately, Stuart Sillars’ fine text justifies such generous treatment. The eighteenth century is usually seen as a watershed period for editing Shakespeare and the era when bardolatry dominated the stage through Garrick's influence, but it has a reputation for critical dreariness except for Johnson. This book offers the interesting suggestion that if we want new ‘readings’ of Shakespeare we should look not at discursive criticism of the period but at the visual interpretations offered by painters from Hogarth to the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery. It becomes clear that as the century went on, artists increasingly take their inspiration from reading the plays rather than from performances in the theatre, and that their visual realizations of scenes indicate an often acute and original form of interpretation stemming from a critical engagement with issues in each play. A composition ‘reveals in a single, instantaneous statement the forces that drive the play’ (p. 52) and can also comment with insight on character, themes, textual ambiguities, and unobtrusive poetic imagery, as scenes came to be relocated in landscapes in ways that helped to naturalize Shakespeare as the poet of the English countryside.