Shakespeare's Pictures Visual Culture in Drama

Keir Elam's book is the first full-length study of the role of graphic and iconographic images in Shakespeare and references performance history throughout. Chapters examine plays in which pictures are brought on stage as part of the dramatic action (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, among others); the embedding of images from the popular imagination in the action and discourse of the plays; the dialectic between optical and auditory illusion in the romance or late plays, or "how" the visual is "heard" in the theatre, and the question of perspective in the comedies, especially Twelfth Night. The book covers many of the most canonical and studied of Shakespeare's plays, giving new critical insight and argument.

Keir Elam is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna, Italy, where he is resident member of the Institute for Advanced Studies and evaluator for the Humanities in the University Research Observatory (Osservatorio della Ricerca). He is the editor of the Arden Third Series edition of Twelfth Night.

1. Introduction

2. Looking at pictures on the Shakespearian stage

3. (Un)natural perspectives in the comedies

4. Trompe l’oreille: optical allusion and auditory illusion in the romances

5. Pictorial agency in the tragedies

6. The afterlife of Shakespeare’s pictures

References

Index