Marguerite A. Tassi The Scandal of Images Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama 2005

The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama
Marguerite A. Tassi
Susquehanna University Press
The Scandal of Images
The Apple-Zimmerman Series in Early Modern Culture Susquehanna University Press Editors: Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania Carole Levin, University of Nebraska
This interdisciplinary series will include books that examine a wide range of aesthetic works and moments in their original cultural milieu. This would include, for example, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as the products of the burgeoning theatrical industry, designed for the entertainment of heterogeneous audiences who lived in a rapidly changing world where politics, religion, national identity, and gender roles were all subjects of contestation and redefinition. We solicit manuscripts from fields including, but not limited to, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and political science, in order to enable a truly multifaceted understanding of the early modern period. Titles in This Series Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama Ann. A. Hurley, John Donnes Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture

Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama
Marguerite A. Tassi
Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press
2005 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [1-57591-085-3/05 $10.00 + 8 pp, pc.]
Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tassi, Marguerite A., 1965 The scandal of images : iconoclasm, eroticism, and painting in early Modern English drama / Marguerite A. Tassi. p. cm. (The Apple-Zimmerman series in early modern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57591-085-3 (alk. paper) 1. English dramaEarly modern and Elizabethan, 15001600History and criticism. 2. Art and literatureEnglandHistory16th century. 3. Art and literatureEnglandHistory17th century. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564 1616 KnowledgeArt. 5. Iconoclasm in literature. 6. Painting in literature. 7. Erotic art England. 8. Sex in literature. 9. Painting, English. I. Title. II. Series. PR658.A73T37 2005 822.309357dc22 2004017599
printed in the united states of america
This book is dedicated to my husband, Shaun, whose faith in my scholarship never waned, and to the memory of my father, Aldo Tassi, who inspired my love of theater and painting
Here is her picture . . . . Come, shadow, come, and take this shadow up, For tis thy rival. O thou senseless form, Thou shalt be worshippd, kissd, lovd, and adord; And were there sense in his idolatry, My substance should be statue in thy stead. Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona In the Art called of Aristotle . . . Graphice, and in English paynting there be in this citie [London] cunning Maisters, for eyther shadowing, purtraying, counterfetting, tricking, paynting, enlumining, or lymming. But this is an Art now not accounted ingenuous or fit for a Gentleman, by reason that it is much fallen from the reputation, which it had aunciently, which whether it bee for the unworthinesse or unskilfulnes of the persons exercising and practising it in this age, or for the abuses and deceipts used by Paynters, or for the scandall of Images and Idols (for the which Philo condemneth it) or for the foule deuise of the fayre Cosmetica: or for what other cause I know not well, but sure I am it is now accounted base and mechanicall . . . . George Buc, The Third Universitie of England, Appendix to John Stow, The Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England
Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Ut Pictura Theatrum: The Dramatists Ambivalent Muse 1. The Power of Images in Early Modern England: Prejudices Against and Defenses of Painting and Playing 2. John Lylys Campaspe and the Subtle Eroticism of the Elizabethan Miniature 3. Dramatic Uses of Portrait Properties and Face-Painting in the Boys Theater at St. Pauls 4. Scandalous Counterfeiting: Iconophobia, Poison, and Painting in Arden of Faversham 5. Stretch thine art: Painting Passions, Revenge, and the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy 6. Images Lawful and Beguiling: Ambivalent Responses to Painting in Shakespeares Drama Notes Bibliography Index 9 11 15 29 66 98 130
152 178 216 239 253
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Illustrations
1. Title page to Thomas Tuke, A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women, 1616. 2. George Gower, Self-Portrait, 1579. 3. Nicholas Hilliard, Self-Portrait, 1577. 4. Jodocus a Winghe, Apelles malt Kampaspe, c. 1600. 5. Nicholas Hilliard, Alice Hilliard, 1578. 6. Bartholomaeus Spranger, Venus und Adonis, c. 1597. 7. Title verso to Arden of Faversham, 1633. 8. Frontispiece to Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 1623. 9. Artist unknown, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Unton, c. 1596. 10. Livinus de Vogelaare, The Memorial of Lord Darnley, 1568. 11. Francesco Bartolozzi, Hamlet and his Mother, engraving after a design by William Hamilton, 1796.
49 57 59 75 81 83 132 167 169 172 198
Acknowledgments This
project began some years ago with my discovery of the Painter Addition to Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy. This unusual, moving exchange between a painter and the famous avenger Hieronimo, written for a revival of that popular play, caught my attention, particularly because the whole scene turned on an imaginary revenge painting conjured by a grieving father. The question of arts power was clearly at issue in this scene, as it was in Protestant England. My fascination with Elizabethan dramatists appropriation of painting continued to take shape during the course of many felicitous conversations and paper sessions with colleagues at the South-Central Renaissance Conference. Of these colleagues, I wish to express my gratitude especially to John Ford, whose brilliance and enthusiasm for Elizabethan theater have inspired my own passions and guided some of my best insights. The Research Services Council of the University of Nebraska-Kearney and Dean Kenneth Nikels have supported this project from its inception with financial assistance, including two summer grants, which gave me the opportunity to conduct research at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. These grants also enabled me to do valuable research at the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, Guildhall Library in London, York Minster Library, and the British Library. I greatly appreciate the support of my colleagues at the University of Nebraska, most particularly my friends, John Damon, Christine Boeckl, and Carole Levin, who generously read portions of my work and offered stimulating conversation that has influenced the writing of this book. Thanks are due to my friends and colleagues from the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeares Theaters: Inside and Out (summer 2002), directed by the inexhaustible theater visionary Ralph Alan Cohen. Our theatrical experiments in the new Blackfriars and Globe Theaters demonstrated the intellectual and artistic rewards of reading scripts with an eye and an ear for staging. Our joyful rediscovery of many 11
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acknowledgments
dramatic scenes in their original theatrical spaces arose from the collaborative efforts of scholars, teachers, theater specialists, directors, and actors. Most of all, my deepest debt of gratitude goes to my husband, Shaun Padgett, who shared every discovery and read every word of this manuscript. Without his patience, good sense, and sound advice, this book would not have been possible. His keen editorial advice and support of the project buoyed me up at low points, and his faith in the integrity of the project amazingly never waned. The following journals have kindly given me permission to reprint portions of previously published articles: Explorations in Renaissance Culture, for The Players Passion and the Elizabethan Painting Trope: A Study of the Painter Addition to Kyds The Spanish Tragedy, 26.1 (Summer 2000): 73100 (copyright 2000 South-Central Renaissance Conference); The Ben Jonson Journal, for Lover, Poisoner, Counterfeiter: The Painter in Elizabethan Drama, 7 (2000): 12956; and Discoveries, for O fair face: The Aesthetic of the Portrait Miniature in John Lylys Campaspe, 17, no. 3 (fall 2000): 12, 1113. The following publishers granted permission to reproduce portions of early modern dramas appearing in their modem editions: Houghton Mifflin Company for The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (copyright 1974); and Manchester University Press for Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, edited by G. K. Hunter and David Bevington (copyright 1998, Manchester, UK).
Introduction Ut Pictura Theatrum: The Dramatists Ambivalent Muse

The whole doctrine of Comedies and Tragedies is a perfite imitation, or faire liuelie painted picture of the life of euerie degree of man. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster We love art and hate it; we cherish it and are afraid; we know of its powers. They are powers that, when we do not destroy, we call redemptive. If they are too troubling, they are the powers of images, not of art. David Freedberg, The Power of Images
When I visited Londons reconstructed Globe Theater in June

2000 to see a production of Hamlet, I was surprised to find myself relishing Shakespeares play as visual spectacle or, to use Elizabethan terms, as a faire liuelie painted picture.1 Trained to think of early modern theatergoers as audiences, or attentive auditors (the Latin term means hearers; audiens means hearing), I had expected to be listening keenly to the actors as they spoke the text of Hamlet in this Elizabethan-style playhouse. Instead, I responded as a spectator, relishing the sight of lavish period clothing, hanging painted cloths of Fortune and other allegorical figures, the colorful, woven banqueting cloth set upon a table, portrait miniatures, and the Players dumb show. The program notes indicated that the producerdirector, Giles Block, had taken the actors to Robert Cecils Hatfield House to give them a sense of the reality of the imagined space in Hamlet.2 The influence of Cecils house, especially its portraits and furnishings, shaped the productions Elizabethan aesthetic: the actors comportment, clothing, and props all made them appear like ceremonial Tudor portraits come to life. The performance concluded with a visually striking afterpiece in which the cast, each bearing a staff with a skull, danced a jig. One actor appeared as the figure of Death. This dance presented a lively picture of tragedy that depended on two popular Renaissance pictorial themes, the Dance of Death and the memento mori.3 The productions emphasis on visual art, on Hamlet as an iconic picture of the life and death of euerie 15
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the scandal of images
degree of man,4 was emotionally rousing and cathartic. In its ability to elicit such a strong response, this modern Globe production recalled Thomas Heywoods claim about the efficacious images of Elizabethan theater: when theater offers a true portrature of characters in action, it becomes so bewitching a thing . . . that it hath power to new mold the harts of spectators.5 This productions recovery of visual stage conventions reminds us that early modern playgoers experienced drama as a sensuous, mixed media; not only did they hear poetry and grand oratory in the theater, but they also witnessed impressive visual phenomena like the Dance of Death, dumb show tableaux, and statues coming to life. Such images had the power to convey truth and move the passions through visual, rather than verbal, language. To paraphrase from Shakespeares The Winters Tale, Elizabethan theater offered many sights that were meant to be seen, not spoken of (5.2.42 43). This is a significant point to belabor given that modern criticism on the Elizabethan theater has rested on two central premises: the stage as a bare scaffold and the primacy of language. Conventional wisdom has it that Elizabethans went to hear a play. This book challenges these premises by arguing that early modern English theater was regarded as not only a great rhetorical art, but also a great visual art, and an exceedingly complex, appealing, and provocative one at that. Lest my approach cast me as one of Hamlets barren spectators, a phrase that betrays a puritanical bias against theatrical spectacle, I acknowledge in the pages that follow that language, especially visual tropes and verbal images, affected the stage picture and enhanced the players performance. Indeed, Shakespeare acknowledges the balance of visual and verbal powers in the theater when he has Hamlet fantasize about an actor like himself who can amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears (2.2.56566). It is not my wish to deny the communicative power of language in this theater; rather, through my attention to the visual, I wish to establish a critical understanding of how the Elizabethan theater functioned as an aspect of Londons visual culture, as a place for seeing, to invoke theaters root in the Greek theatron. The term theater was not used often in early modern discourses, but we should remember that James Burbage chose to call the first freestanding playhouse the Theater. Clearly he named his great commercial venture in a celebratory, descriptive wayhis building served as a permanent place for seeing, where paying customers came to enjoy themselves as spectators. Quite a number of early modern texts, including plays, refer to people going to see plays. According to Gabriel Egans research, early modern texts contain significantly more references to seeing plays than to hearing them.6 John Marston, for example, refers to seeing a play four times in Histriomastix (1610). Even stage directions bear evidence of theatrical
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spectatorship, as in John Days The Ile of Gulls (1606): Enter seuerally 3. Gentlemen, as to see a play. Although Shakespeare made more references than his contemporaries to auditors and the aural qualities of drama, from 1600 onwards, as Andrew Gurr observes, he favored spectators and the ambiguities of spectatorship.7 A new term came into use in the late sixteenth century to describe people who went to see a play: spectator, from the Latin specere, to see, spectare, to watch, and spectaculum, a play, a show, or theater. The coexistence of neutral, positive, and pejorative uses of the term spectator indicates that there were conflicting early modern attitudes towards the act of seeing in the theater.8 Because Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood that theater offered both place and occasion for seeing, whether at the Globe, Middle Temple, or Whitehall, they invented scenes of guided seeing in which both perception and the object perceived were presented in a self-conscious way, and sometimes in an ambivalent or skeptical light. As we know, Elizabethan plays often call for onstage viewers to watch pageants, masques, and plays-within-plays (e.g., Marlowes Doctor Faustus, Shakespeares Hamlet), as well as characters to gaze upon static or apparent works of art (e.g., John Lylys Campaspe, Shakespeares The Winters Tale). The emphasis in these scenes is on characters getting caught up in the wonders, dangers, and ambiguities of spectatorship. Underlying theatrical performance and early modern discourses on visual phenomena were assumptions writers derived from ancient and medieval optical theories that emphasized the direct contact between the eye and objects of sight. The theory of extramission, espoused by Plato and Euclid, assumed that the gaze (rays of light emanating from the eye) acted upon the world, affecting its objects. Intromission, espoused by medieval theorists, assumed that objects struck a mostly passive eye. A connective function was attributed to sight in both theories.9 In moral terms, the classical trope of the eye as window to the soul held true for Elizabethans; therefore, vision gave the objects of the world access to the mind. A polluted or corrupt object could be said to infect the eye (i.e., the soul). Sight was potentially dangerous, erotic, and spiritually deviant, as the medieval phrase libido videndi (lust of the eye) and the Protestant emphasis on the idolatrous eye emphasize. The courtly love tradition, as well, supported the notion that a beautiful womans eyes could bind the soul of a man; by extromission, her visual rays wounded her victim through his eyes. This implied that the male gazers eyes were passive, as in the intromission theory, and were penetrated, and sometimes blinded, by the intensely beautiful image of the beloved. It is now a critical commonplace that the Protestant antitheatricalists, more than any group, focused on the dangerous carnality of vision in the theater. The minister John Stockwood found that the most appropriate
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insult to hurl at the Burbages Theater was to call it a theater.10 In their attack on the theater, moralists denigrated vision because of its putative power to make or unmake the moral character of the viewer. No one knew better the bewitching qualities of sights in the theater than the reformed players and dramatists (e.g., Stephen Gosson, Anthony Munday) whose youthful indiscretions in the theater later drove them in fits of conscience to blast the sinful shows in Londons playhouses. As Stephen Gosson fearfully phrases it, spectators so looke, so gaze, so gape upon plaies, that as men that stare on the head of Maedusa and are turned to stone, wee freeze unto ease in our own follies.11 In the rhetorical progression from looke to gaze to gape, Gosson conveys a sense of the destructive passivity in theatrical viewing that results in sensual ease and the paralysis of reason. Theatrical images are like Medusa headsalluring, dangerous, and petrifying. Anthony Munday exploits the eye as window trope in a passage from A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters (1580),
There cometh much euil in at the eares, but more at the eies, by these two open windowes death breaketh into the soule. Nothing entereth more effectualie into the memorie, than that which commeth by seeing: things heard do lightlie passe awaie, but the tokens of that which wee haue seen, saith Petrarch, sticke fast in vs whether we wil or no.12
Munday followed the visual theory of intromission: evil images enter through the eyes and lay siege to the soul. He added rhetorical flourish and moral fervor to Horaces claim in Ars Poetica about spectatorship in the theater. As Horace wrote centuries earlier, An action either takes place on the stage, or is announced as having taken place off of it. What finds entrance through the ear strikes the mind less vividly than what is brought before the trusty eyes of the spectator himself.13 It could be argued that the antitheatricalists constituted a lunatic fringe in early modern London and consequently their testimony is not representative of the average playgoer in the city, much less at court. The radical reactions of the stages enemies are indeed too extreme to speak for a culture, but their emphasis on gaping at theatrical sights and the dangers of the idolatrous eye rests on a sound premisethat theater has sensual appeal to the eye. Much contemporary evidence of a secular nature reveals the truth of this premise as well. Elizabethan descriptions of the theaters, the Rose manager Philip Henslowes Diary, and early modern playscripts all support the notion that visual consumption was central to theatrical experience. This study will be concerned with examining a variety of playscripts that reflect in a fairly specific way upon the theaters status as a visual art. Far from neutral, this status was a highly compromised one. In
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the plays selected for discussion here, we shall see how dramatists not only thematized cultural ambivalences toward spectatorship and images, but also confronted another compromised visual art, painting, as a means by which to examine aesthetic, moral, and perceptual issues at stake in the act of seeing. Because images of all kinds could provoke discomfort and ambivalence in Elizabethans due to Reformation iconoclasm, dramatists most often used painting to signify a range of forbidden, disturbing, and morally questionable experiences. There are many ways in which painting was important to the early modern theater, from the adorning of the stage and playhouse properties to rubbing colors on the face. More important to the purposes of this study, however, is how portraits and fine-art painters were treated on the stage, both in terms of their material presence as handheld properties and embodied characters and their inspirational effects on rhetoric and playing style. Elizabethan dramatists often employed painting as a trope, which did not depend on the appearance of a material picture onstage. This implied a tension between the seen and unseen, which dramatists resolved by withholding the picture, in effect denying spectacle and exploiting visual effects through rhetoric. While this rhetorical strategy placed word above image, it is important to recognize dramatists dependence on material works of art, which informed their imaginative representations of Tudor portraits, miniatures, emblems, history paintings, sculpture, funeral effigies, etc. As a property held by the actor, however, painting had a visual presence onstage, which charmed the eyes of characters as well as the watching playgoers. Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomsons research indicates that thirty-five picture properties are called for in stage directions from early modern English drama,14 yet pictures were in greater use than this suggests. The use of properties was often cued through characters speech rather than explicitly noted in stage directions. Shakespeares Timon of Athens, for example, requires a picture for the Painter to give Timon, yet no stage direction appears in the playscript. Pictures would have been a recognizable, frequently used property in early modern theaters. Dramatists exploited pictures (as well as references to painting) to elicit specific emotional and moral responses in characters and the plays spectators. Dramatists uses of pictures betray their assumption that spectators would have believed in the efficaciousness of images. On the early modern stage, painted images are shown to have the power to move the passions of characters and, in some cases, to cause them to believe in or vehemently reject the images supposed animation. While paintings featured in theatrical productions were certainly not religious iconsindeed, their status as stage properties rendered them as blatant representationsdramatists exploited the iconoclastic belief in their potential to become idols and to elicit
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perceptual and moral error; thus, painted images are, in some cases, treated with a degree of skepticism and iconoclastic suspicion. Dramatic characterizations of painters, as well, betrayed common cultural associations made between painting and scandalous activities, from the idolatrous worship of images to the erotic adventures of seduction. The earliest English play to bring the character of a painter to the stage was most likely The Painters Daughter, staged by the Earl of Warwicks players at Hampton Court for Queen Elizabeth on December 26, 1576.15 Because this play is no longer extant, however, we can only speculate about a painters inclusion in the dramatis personae. The title calls attention to the artists profession and suggests some significance, perhaps of a moral (or immoral) nature, in deeming the heroine an artists daughter. We can be certain, however, about John Lylys early representation of the classical artist Apelles in Campaspe (printed in 1584). Other plays that employ painter characters or a painter disguise are: Arden of Faversham (1592), John Marstons Antonio and Mellida (1599), The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600), the Painter Addition to Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tradegy (1602), The Wit of a Woman (1604), The Trial of Chivalry, also known as The Gallant Cavaliero Dick Bowyer (1605), and William Shakespeares Timon of Athens (c. 1607). To this list, we can add a dramatic entertainment attributed to John Lyly, Queen Elizabeths Entertainment at Mitcham (1598). From this brief list, we can see that the painters appearance on the Elizabethan stage was rare; however, as this study will demonstrate, dramatists chose to employ the painter character in a highly selfconscious way, emphasizing his problematic status as a visual artist and the ambivalence of image-making in an iconoclastic culture. Let me briefly address the non-dramatic evidence mentioned above. Since the 1940s, critics have attended to the visual imagery in drama (treating the text as literature) and to the iconographic features of the stage (treating the text as secondary to the visual symbolism of the theater).16 In his influential book From Art to Theatre (1944), for example, George R. Kernodle argued, it is time to recognize that the theatre is one of the visual arts. If it is an offspring of literature on one side of the family tree, it is no less a descendant of painting and sculpture on the other side.17 Essentially a study of European theater architecture, visual symbolism, and scenic design, Kernodles book signaled a newfound emphasis on the iconic meanings of the playhouse and the influence of medieval and Renaissance visual arts on drama. While his reading of Shakespeares art invites an overly iconic view, as David Bevington warns,18 Kernodle helped us understand that the visual arrangement of the stage fa cade with its symbolic locations inherited from medieval art was meaningful to the Elizabethan viewers eye. More recently, critics such as Bevington, Frederick Kiefer, Alan C. Dessen, and Leonard Barkan have made arguments that posit
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Elizabethan theater as a significant visual, even pictorial, experience.19 Bevington treats costume, gesture, properties, and theatrical space as visual language, all of which signify meanings to the viewer that are familiar, although not necessarily fixed. Kiefer argues persuasively that dramatists actively employed visual symbolism, especially in their character personifications; from the visually sophisticated courtier to the groundling, playgoers would have been able to make connections between widely known symbols and stage images. Dessen, like Horace and Munday before him, argues that theatrical images, although difficult for modern interpreters to recover, can be more memorable than any words spoken.20 Few, however, have stated the case for theater as a visual culture in its own right as well as Leonard Barkan: Theater, he claims, is Englands lively pictorial culture, the answer, the compensation, the suppl ement in the face of all the painting, sculpture, and art theory that was so famously alive in the European civilizations that Elizabethans dreamed about.21 Considering what little opportunity non-aristocratic Elizabethans had for seeing and commissioning pictures, Barkans claim suggests where pictorial culture was created and experienced by the average London citizen. On the other end of the social spectrum, for aristocrats and courtiers, dramatic productions at court would have been perceived as an extension of the visual opulence that attended buildings such as Whitehall and Hampton Court. With the building of the new Bankside Globe in London (completed in 1997), we are now in a position to test assumptions about iconicity and spectatorship in the Elizabethan playhouse. The research into iconography and decoration for the painting of the new Globes interior has validated Barkans claim, demonstrating that Elizabethan commercial theaters must have been perceived as far from bare spaces. These theaters were essentially painted worlds, lavishly set forth with allegorical schemes, hanging cloths, carvings, and illusionistic imitations of materials such as marble.22 Puritan ministers described the public theaters as sumptuous, gorgeous, and splendid, all terms of moral condemnation from their perspective.23 As John Astington points out, these complaints suggest that the players attempted to decorate their stages and tiring houses with something of the e lan of royal magnificence.24 Theater entrepreneur Philip Henslowe confirms how important the visual dimension of theatrical performance was, particularly from the economic standpoint of the amphitheater manager. His Diary records expenses incurred by the Lord Admirals Men for productions at the Rose playhouse and lists, in particular, page after page of expensive, lavish, and colorful clothing purchased for the actors. He also lists many handheld properties and a surprising array of large props such as a cage, the tombs of Guido and Dido, a baye tree, and the sittie of Rome.25 Some of the larger scenic pieces would have required painting and most certainly
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would have been used to arrange the stage picture in a visually appealing and significant manner. Henslowe appealed to the barren spectator in his audience because of the profitability in doing so. The playwright of course thought more about the value (aesthetic and commercial) of his poetry, which involved imagining how the script would play on the stage, fleshed out before the eyes of spectators. The managers or shareholders power to oversee scriptwriting and theatrical performance guaranteed that when the play came to the stage, emphasis was placed on the most enticing aspect of the theaterthe visual presentation. Dramatists, however, were not altogether comfortable with the theaters identity as a visual art, particularly because, as such, theater was subjected to attacks from Puritans and other moralists. They sought to defend themselves by subtly critiquing or undermining painting, and by aligning themselves, at times, with the Reformed emphasis on the word. To make a point, early modern dramatists sometimes insisted, as modern critics emphasize, that the theater was a place where people should come to hear a Poets pen.26 In the contemporary debate over theatrical show, Ben Jonson famously argued that hearing was superior to seeing. Yet a telling ambivalence can be detected even in Jonsons attitude towards the visual if we look at contradictory statements he made about painting and poetry in Timber: or, Discoveries (printed in 1640). Jonson asserts that Whosoever loves not Picture, is injurious to Truth: and all the wisdome of Poetry.27 At the same time, he insists that while poetry and painting are similar mimetic arts, the Pen is more noble, then the Pencill [the painters brush]. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense. 28 Jonson is repeating a longstanding binary opposition: painting belongs to the realm of the senses, the eyes, the body; poetry belongs to the realm of the mind, reason, understanding. The classic expression of this opposition can be found in the rhetorical device known as the paragone, a rivalry between arts based on their relative merits. In Iconology, W. J. T. Mitchell treats the paragone as a war of signs in which the stakes are things like nature, truth, reality, and the human spirit:
Each art, each type of sign or medium, lays claim to certain things that it is best equipped to mediate, and each grounds its claim in a certain characterization of its self, its own proper essence. Equally important, each art characterizes itself in opposition to its significant other.29
This, I think, expresses the matter well for the Elizabethan dramatist: the questions I address in this book center on how and why dramatists appropriated, celebrated, and undermined painting as their significant other. In characterizing the relationship between dramatists and painters as paragonal, I do not mean to say that these dramatists were necessarily familiar
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with the literary device, though some were, nor that they deliberately exploited the paragone for the stage, though some did; rather, I suggest that the traditional, sometimes antagonistic, relationship between poetry and painting naturally found expression in a mixed media form, which is precisely what the new commercial theater was. When Shakespeare staged the paragone in the opening scene of Timon of Athens around 1607, he simply made explicit the debate between verbal and visual arts that had already been subtly rehearsed many times in Elizabethan plays, his own included, before that date. Dramas that made use of the painters art enacted the competitive impulses and energies of the paragone either through explicit dialogue and action or suggestive allusions. Paintings visual potency was widely acknowledged with both fear and wonder in early modern English culture. By appropriating painting as trope and property, dramatists could enrich their language, heighten the visual presentation onstage, and intensify, even direct, the players performance. When dramatists used the painter onstage, this character provoked extraordinarily vivid uses of language, sometimes witty and satiric, sometimes pictorially specific and ekphrastic. Ekphrasis was a traditional rhetorical device, originally a classical schoolboys exercise, that gave voice to a work of art or replicated the visual qualities of a work of art, such that the reader or listener felt he could conjure the work in his imagination. The premise of dramatic scenes with painter characters is often rather damning for the painters art. Painting is betrayed as having certain undeniable limitationspictures cannot give voice to their own story, nor can they animate their own images. In social and artistic terms, the painter is presented as a failure in some of these plays: he fails to produce what his client demands, whether it is a type of painting or a lifelike image. He is found to be morally suspicious because he exploits the underlying eroticism that emerges in the relationship between painter and model, or he proves to be corrupt in his willingness to flatter a patron or, far worse, poison an image. We detect a secret desire, perhaps the shared conspiracy of dramatist and player, to outdo the painter altogether by verbally coining and enacting images that defy the spatial confines and static nature of painting. Critical emphasis on theater as a visual art must necessarily involve an awareness of the tension between love and hatred of art, which in an age of iconoclasm was often articulated as a conflict between the veneration and fear of images. Reformation iconoclasm cast suspicion on all visual art, attributing painting and theater with the power of images. As David Freedberg observes, if the powers of art are too troubling, they are the powers of images, not of art.30 The word image was highly charged in Elizabethan English, referring to material objects such as statues, effigies, stained glass, emblems, paintings, and players, as well as the immaterial
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pictures formed by rhetoric and the mind. The various kinds of images were united by their common second-class status as mere imitations of the real and, for the reformers, as filthy (idolatrous) objects of sight. The players most dangerous quality for the Protestant iconoclasts lay in this shadowy business of imitation, or the act of impersonation. This act of identity transformation was regarded as nothing short of a scandal, a religious sacrilege, since the impersonator engaged in an act of falsehood that denied his God-given identity and drew spectators into admiring a falsehood. At the same time, the actor was a carnal presence. Like the painter, the player offered a material illusion of personhood, which could be so compelling spectators were led to attribute the shadow with a life of its own or, in the iconoclasts terms, to treat the representation as an idol. In his brief report on English arts printed in John Stows Annals, Master of the Revels Sir George Buc noted the poor reputation of painting and wondered if this strange state of affairs had to do with guilt by association. The scandal of images is the telling phrase he used to characterize a cultural ambivalence toward the painters art in early modern England. Buc engaged both secular and religious meanings of the word scandal something that hinders reception of the faith or obedience to the Divine law, and damage to reputation; slander (OED, 1b and 2a). How one defined the nature of this scandal of images depended on where one stood in the religious controversies of the day, as well as how one regarded the nature and function of art in Elizabethan culture. In its ambivalence, Bucs account of paintings lost reputation gets at fundamental tensions in his culture. On the one hand, iconoclasts slandered all images by transforming them into potential idols. On the other hand, the reformers argued that only the Catholic abuse of images hindered genuine faith and obedience to divine law. While Buc seems to have recognized this, as well as the fluidity of boundaries between religious and secular images, he betrayed his sympathy with the reformers by defending painting in a begrudging manner. He invoked the Hebrew theologian Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus) as an ancient authority and predecessor to Englands iconoclasts to signal the longstanding moral battle against the pollution of religious images. As he suggested, the iconoclasts rejection of images became a special problem for the fine-art painter whose profession hinged on image-making. Even secular pictures were tainted because they could evoke immoral responses of an emotional, erotic, or idolatrous nature. The element of scandal arose in relation to all kinds of images. The human image came to be regarded as a likeness that had the dangerous potential to be mistaken for a presence (the living essence of a person or divinity), and this presence, when believed in and venerated in some way, led the spectator to idolatry. Images were still kissed in Protes-
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tant England and generally treated as devotional objects, substitutes for persons, remembrances of spiritual realities, and conduits between the self and another person. The image of the face, in particular, provoked strong emotional and erotic responses, as can be seen in dramas such as John Lylys Campaspe and Shakespeares The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Here is thy picture, Shakespeares character exclaims as she holds up a portrait onstage: O thou senseless form, / Thou shalt be worshippd, kissd, lovd, and adord (4.4.19899).31 Margaret Aston surmises that even portraiture could be seen to hold spiritual dangers and could be placed on the wrong side of idolatry. . . . Worship could easily go wrong through the seduction of the face.32 More broadly speaking, Patrick Collinson asserts, by 1600 to be found in possession of a picture (almost any picture) was to be a suspected papist.33 Although Collinsons claim seems exaggerated, from the devout Protestants perspective, the case against painting must have been unequivocal. The dramatists relationship to the painter was particularly charged during the Elizabethan period in that both artists faced similar battles for acceptance in London and at court. Not only were both arts, by the end of the sixteenth century, achieving the greatest degree of native artistic excellence yet witnessed in England,34 but they were also in a state of transition, vying for social status and patronage, struggling against moral attacks based on iconoclasm and historic prejudices, and learning to cater to secular, rather than religious, tastes and markets. As Leonard Barkan points out, the theater and the visual arts are in this period coming to understand their own discourses and practices; the two media become interrelated as they attempt to define and promote themselves.35 It is surely an important factor, however, that while the professional theater was a thriving, fiercely competitive commercial enterprise at this time, painting was in a precarious, ill-defined state. As we know, there was no established school of English painting at this time, and the Stuart era of connoisseurship was yet to come. Having lost ecclesiastical patronage more than a generation earlier with the advent of the Reformation and the ensuing iconoclastic legislation, native artisans depended heavily on employment in the royal Office of Works and on the emergence of secular markets. Without a thriving, reliable market structure in place, it was difficult for skilled painters or workshops to maintain a constant stream of commissions.36 Fine-art painters sought out the small number of aristocrats, merchants, and people of lesser social degree who were willing to use their disposable income to commission elaborate decorative work and easelpaintings for houses, guildhalls, and other public buildings. Because drama was the more popular and economically successful of the two arts, dramatists were in a position to exploit the painters vulnerable social and artistic status by setting up painting as a foil for their own art.
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Late sixteenth-century dramatists reflected the ill-defined status of painting by cleverly invoking the painters art as a means of responding to their cultures iconoclasm. Not only was painting treated as both mechanical craft and fine art, low-wage decorative work and a gentlemans art, the term had a variety of referents that suggested immoral practices. The historic uses of the term painting found in the OED indicate an ingrained unfavorable view of all practices falling under that name. Since the fourteenth century, painting had referred to coloring the face with cosmetics, a practice shared by women and stage-players, and censured by moralists. It had longstanding Platonic associations with deceit, counterfeiting, and artifice, not to mention flattery and disguise. Thus, the ontology of painting was understood in moral terms; if painting was in essence a false thing, it could only lead painters and those who gazed upon images to the false position of idolatry and, ultimately, to damnation. Therein lay the scandal of imageseven secular images shared this moral taint. These unfavorable associations are the very ones attributed to playing and the theater at this time. Just as Jonas Barish identified an antitheatrical prejudice in his book bearing that title, I would argue that we can see a virulent anti-painting prejudice, first articulated by Plato, and then taken up by English iconoclasts and moral purists, who wished to free the state and the church of false, morally dangerous images.37 The anti-painting prejudice was as much a part of the early modern English mindset as the antitheatrical prejudice was; indeed, the two arts bear a distinct resemblance as mimetic, visual forms, which suggests a longstanding, fundamental opposition to visual art. As can be expected, both theater and painting had their defenders at this time. Combating the anti-painting prejudice was the literary tradition of ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), which helped shape the subtle, complex, and competitive relationship between drama and fine-art painting. Inherited from the legendary Simonides of Ceos and Horace, this popular classical topos was frequently invoked by Elizabethan writers and extended both in theory and in practice to drama and the theater. Since drama and painting were both regarded as imitative arts that, unlike poetry, re-presented phenomena directly to the eye, it must have seemed an apt and natural extension of the well-known comparison. Ut pictura poesis led naturally to ut pictura theatrum (as is painting so is theater). Painting had traditionally been regarded as the model of imitative arts; thus writers since ancient times had attempted to reproduce the qualities and effects of painting through language. It was thought that painters imitated nature directly in emulation of Gods creativity, while poets imitations required the mediation of language and lacked visible presence. Dramatists had a distinct advantage over poets and painters, for their art came as close to mimetic completeness, a marriage of word and picture, as
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any form could. The dramatists paragone with painting called attention to the artistic incompleteness of word without image, and image without the lively presence of the actor. Their use of painting as a source of invention resulted in competitive, metamorphic imitations that gave speech and movement to a speechless, static art. At the same time, dramatic uses of portraits and painters typically involved ambivalent, even negative, perceptions of visual images, which reinforced not only the mimetic inadequacy of painting, but the moral dangers involved in the painters profession and art, as well. In a sense, the pervasive iconoclasm in Tudor England only served to heighten dramatists preoccupation with images, especially since they, like painters, were visual artists who produced work that required a place for viewing. The realization of ut pictura theatrum in dramatic scenes onstage offered a sublime confirmation of the power of images in the Elizabethan theater. Visually potent and moving (in both senses of the word), these images were just the kind that appalled the enemies of art. Rather than presenting a single, linear argument, the following chapters examine specific ways dramatists exploited painting and responded to iconoclastic controversy in plays performed on public and private stages. Taking my cue from George Bucs commentary on the scandal of images, chapter 1 examines the intersection between iconoclasm and art, with some attention given to moral invectives against face-painting, an art necessary to the player and featured both rhetorically and dramatically on the stage. This chapter demonstrates how the painters poor reputation, like that of the players, reflected both traditional and contemporary prejudices. Combating such prejudices were defenses of playing and painting based on moral, nationalistic, and phenomenological grounds. This chapter examines the nature, value, and contexts of some of these defenses. Chapter 2 explores at length a secular dramatic example of Protestant ambivalence toward painting. In John Lylys Campaspe, the classical painter Apelles is represented onstage not only adoring his beautiful model Campaspe, but her image as well. Chapter 3 proposes that the portrait as a property and trope became a rare, or exceptionally ingenious, device in the boys theater for communicating a range of phenomenal experiences and ideas about visual art and theater. Pictures functioned as complex signifiers of relationships between characters, and between the boys company at St. Pauls theater and adult-company competitors. Portraits of known individuals, such as the pictures of dramatist John Marston and a St. Pauls financier in Marstons Antonio and Mellida, were occasionally used to make sly self-references. Chapter 4 presents the most scandalous image of a painter on the early modern stage, which was seen in the domestic drama Arden of Faversham. Exploiting the anti-painting prejudice, Ardens dramatist used a thoroughly corrupt painter, an artist willing to sell poisoned
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images and kill for love, as a foil for other characters and for the dramatist himself. Chapter 5 examines how painting could serve as the inspiration and visual cue for a kind of painterly acting, or more specifically the dramatic enactment of painting. In the Painter Addition to Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy, the avenger Hieronimo seeks to commission a painting. He ends up impersonating the figures he wants to see depicted in this painting. The scene has an aura of pathos and scandal, in that it is a vengeance painting enacted. But painting itself, as a tangible, visible form, is noticeably absent from this scene, which allows the player greater freedom with his form. Finally, chapter 6 explores Shakespeares ambivalence about painting through analysis of his characters responses to painted images and their presentation of themselves as painted works of art. The chapter and book as a whole culminate in a discussion of art in The Winters Tale, a play in which early modern spectators found a resolution to the paragone between painted and dramatic art in the paradox of living artthe seeming statue of Hermione. The present study grows out of a felicitous marriage between traditional methodologies and recent critical studies in visual culture. Through close examination of an unusual, although highly significant, group of early modern English plays, some unknown in the scholarly and theatrical worlds, this book offers a unique analysis of painting properties, picture tropes, and painter characters.38 Central questions addressed here are the following: What attracted dramatists to painting? How did they exploit cultural ambivalences about images and spectacle in their treatment of the painter and paintings? What gains were made by the dramatist and theatrical art from this creative, paragonal relationship? The reader should be alerted that this book does not address the influence of the emblem and masque on drama, both of which are beyond the purview of this study. These forms have been treated extensively in studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.39 Nor is this study simply an elaboration on the shadow/ substance topos or ut pictura poesis. I am concerned here with the compelling artistic and social realities that motivated dramatists to represent the painter and painting in ambivalent ways on the stage. Among them were competition for social status, the defense of dramas moral and artistic integrity against iconoclastic and antitheatrical attacks, the need to heighten the efficacy of language and stage pictures in order to depict a perfite imitation, as Ascham phrased it,40 and the desire to intensify the players passions, wit, and characterization. The chapters that follow will investigate how these motives for competition with and dramatic transformation of painting played out on stages throughout London and the surrounding area, from the public amphitheaters, to indoor childrens theaters, to the royal court.
1
The Power of Images in Early Modern England: Prejudices Against and Defenses of Painting and Playing
Silvia. I am very loath to be your idol, sir; But since your falsehood shall become you well To worship shadows and adore false shapes, Send to me in the morning, and Ill send it [the portrait]. Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona Othello. . . . and she can weep, sir, weep; And shes obedient, as you say, obedient; Very obedient.Proceed you in your tears. . . . O well-painted passion! Shakespeare, Othello Clown. Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; and your whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery. . . . Shakespeare, Measure for Measure . . . you painters make but a painting-table of a pretty wench and spoil her beauty with blotting. Anonymous, Arden of Faversham
Elizabethans were as much in love with images, as they were

fearful of the dangerous powers attributed to them. Although long regarded as a visually impoverished culture, early Protestant England produced images of many kindsmost importantly the moving images of theaterand engaged in passionate controversy over their proper use. Due to the radical strain of iconoclasm, which lasted from the 1530s to the 1640s, the English witnessed public scenes of altar-stripping and imagedestruction, not all of which were sanctioned by law.1 Actions such as these drew attention to the power of images and provoked further violence 29
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or counterresponses. The anti-visual prejudice and religious fervor inherent in the iconoclasts attacks on graven images extended to secular images and activities, as well.2 The iconoclasts labeled secular arts such as portrait-painting, theatrical performance, and face-painting as idolatrous, thus betraying a strong iconophobic impulse to suppress all forms of image-making. Since the eyes were the conduit of participation between the gazer and the image, the sense of sight and the visual allure of art (including that of a beautified face or body) were often focal points of attack in the many pamphlets and books published in opposition to graven images, theater, and face-painting. Countering the radical iconoclasts were moderate religious writers, dramatists, painters, and literary figures, who argued that drama and painting have moral purpose and authority. Recalling the medieval Churchs position, articulated most memorably in the sixth century by Gregory the Great in his letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, they held that visual images teach virtues to be imitated and vices to be avoided. As Gregory the Great wrote, [F]or it is one thing to adore a picture and quite another to learn from narrative paintings what should be adored. For what a book is to those who can read, a picture provides to even the unlearned who look at it carefully, for in it the unlearned see what they should follow, and those who cannot read books read it. Hence a picture especially serves as a book to the common people.3 Defenders of visual art assumed either the centrality of images to moral education and religious devotion, or the special ontology of art. An image, many argued, recalls to memory what it represents far more vividly, and therefore effectually, than words. The account of how St. Gregory of Nyssen wept upon seeing a painting of the Sacrifice of Isaac was often invoked to illustrate how images moved the spectator to compassion and devotion. As a bishop from the Second Council of Nicaea commented, Many times the father had read the story, but perchance he had not wept; but when once he saw it painted, he wept.4 Ernest Gilman has argued that the conflicting impulses between iconophobia and iconophilia in English culture had an impact not only on religious discourses and practices, but also on poetry of the early Protestant period.5 This insight holds true to a greater extent for dramatists, insofar as their art, once it reached the stage, directly engaged the visual. Dramatists were made acutely aware of their status as visual artists by iconoclastic antitheatrical sermons and publications, which waged war against their livelihood. They responded to this virulent antitheatricalism in ambivalent ways, for they could not thoroughly disparage, much less eliminate, the visual element of their art. What they could do was differentiate between kinds of vision and visual art and thereby foster a critical awareness in their audience of how only certain images are prone to the idolatrous gaze. To
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do this, they called attention to the morally problematic ontology of portraits and other pictures as counterfeits, illusory shadows, and dangerous products of the imagination. They employed painting tropes to characterize actions and individuals as artificial and false. Furthermore, in some cases, they suppressed material images in order to showcase verbal or ekphrastic images, thus rendering the unseen as the focus of the audiences attention. These were arguably strategies to reform the stage, to invoke Huston Diehls argument. Although Diehl does not examine dramatic uses of portraits, painters, and picture tropes, her argument in Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (1997) is relevant to the present study. Given the Protestant ethos of early modern England, she claims, dramatists refashioned the theater according to Protestant ways of seeing by fundamentally destabilizing and transforming viewers relationships with images.6 This persuasive point gives way, however, to a more radical view that plays ultimately became the victims of the reformed religions iconoclastic impulses. . . . they participate[d] in their own demise.7 While I agree that early modern theater reflected iconoclastic impulses, as some of my examples will demonstrate, it also can be said to have promoted iconophilia and the belief that theatrical images had a special truth-telling power. While dramatists marshaled their defenses by subjecting certain kinds of pictures to iconoclastic scrutiny, emphasizing their ability to deceive the viewer and to elicit erotic responses, they did not, ultimately, create an iconoclastic theater per se, as Diehl argues. Rather, they made strategic uses of iconoclasm, all the while depending on the power of images to make for compelling dramatic devices that would impress spectators. In the cases of ekphrasis and rhetorical substitutions for the visual, an arguably iconoclastic strategy, we need only remind ourselves that the fundamental appeal with this kind of language lay in the visual realm, for the tropes directed audiences to visualize the unseento picture images or the action of painting. The priority, not the evasion, of pictures is evident in such rhetorical moments. In this and other subtle ways, Elizabethan dramatists attempted to distance their art from the idols and images that were the objects of the reformers attacks while, at the same time, refusing to banish visual tropes, pictures, spectacle, and dumb shows from the stage. These devices were undeniably popular and attracted audiences. In a sense, dramatists found an opportunity in the iconoclastic controversy and were able to have it both ways: theater could charm spectators with scenes of spirit-conjuring (e.g., Marlowes Doctor Faustus, Shakespeares The Tempest), portrait-painting (e.g., Lylys Campaspe, The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll), and horrific spectacle (e.g., Tourneurs The Revengers Tragedy, Shakespeares Titus
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Andronicus), while at the same time signaling the troubling powers and effects of images (e.g., Faustus perceives that the illusory Helen of Troy sucks his soul from him; Prospero must relinquish his art; Apelles mars his picture of Campaspe, etc.). As our subject is the dramatists appropriation and ambivalent treatment of painting, let us start with some examples from Elizabethan drama in which the iconoclastic impulse becomes entangled with the anti-painting prejudice. In the passage quoted above from Shakespeares The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), Silvia attempts to ward off the unwelcome advances of her lovers friend, Proteus, by reluctantly agreeing to send him her portrait. Rather than conceptualizing her portrait as a likeness, a love token, or an aesthetic representation, she figures it as an idol and mere shadow lacking substance, and assumes that Proteus will wrongfully worship the picture. Silvia thus figures Proteuss error, his desire to worship shadows and adore false images, in overtly religious and Platonic language and implies that he will fulfill the meaning of his name, changeability and falseness, by worshipping an image. This provocative and damning view of painting as a shadow, false shape, and inducement to unholy, erotic worship was in fact a common one found in sixteenth-century English plays. Although dramatists mostly steered clear of religious issues in their scripts, they invoked the debates surrounding idolatry and images in secular moments such as this one. Dramatists were keenly aware of, and therefore capable of exploiting for the stage, the Reformation controversies surrounding the moral status, ontology, and legitimate uses of images. Elizabethan dramatists understood, perhaps better than painters did, the power of images. Drama, after all, was a compelling visual art itself, which purported to be offering true images in place of the host of false images attacked during the early modern period. In the example from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the actor playing Silvia presents himself as the true Silvia, whereas the portrait functions as a sign of false representationan idol. The actors language and treatment of the portrait deliberately deflect Proteuss illicit gaze from the theatrical body (I am loath to be your idol, sir) to the painted image. The underlying irony and vulnerability of such a stance can be detected, and certainly was by the antitheatricalists. However, the actor, with his compelling speech and gestures on the stage, had a far greater chance of making the case for his arts ontological status as a truthful form than did a mute picture accused of being an idol. Dramatists could therefore use paintings onstage as a subtle means of defense and as a theatrical vehicle through which their characters could distinguish between proper and improper uses of an image. The kind of painting typically found on the stage was the portrait, known for its use of
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symbol and color, and even more importantly, its focus on the human face and form. Portraits were assumed to be the lively image of the sitter, which meant that viewers could be led to attribute a degree of animism to them, thereby falling into the sin of idolatry. The character Silvia, for example, believes that Proteus will fall into this trap, for he will assume that in some way her spirit resides within the image, just as the religious idol was thought by some to be animated by a god or saint. In extreme cases of dramatic iconoclasm, audiences witnessed characters wreaking their emotions upon a picture, stabbing or tearing at the image as if it were the person depicted. In Dekker and Rowleys The Noble Spanish Souldier (c. 1610; printed 1634), a spurned woman, Onaelia, stabs the portrait of her lover, the king, in vengeful fury.8 She momentarily becomes lost to her passion and abuses a picture as if it were the king himself. Her actions betray an assumption about images that reformers, with every act of verbal and physical image-breaking, were bent on eradicating. Onaelia is driven to violence because she believes the image possesses the kings presence destroying his picture, therefore, expresses her desire to hurt the king. Furthermore, that the particular image abused is the kings renders the action even more provocative, for it was considered a crime in England to deface the monarchs image. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James, the monarchs image served as an acceptable political icon; to damage these secular icons was to commit treason.9 Viewers must have felt an odd mixture of discomfort and fascination while watching a kings image abused on the public stage. In these and many other examples from the period, figurative and literal uses of painting tend to reflect ingrained cultural associations of visual art with idolatry, falsehood, illusion, deceit, perceptual error, and eroticism. In the passage quoted above from Shakespeares Othello (1604), Othellos revulsion towards Desdemonas well-painted passion expresses both anti-painting and antitheatrical prejudices. The painting trope is used to describe the exhibition of false passions. Othello assumes that Desdemonas tears are insincere, that she is merely painting her passions in order to hide her guilt. While this negative use of the trope damns painting as an artificial, deceitful practice, it manages to take an ambivalent stance towards playing. The painting trope assumes distinctions between false and true acting: false actions are painted and performed, whereas true actions have a natural complexion and occur spontaneously. The terrible irony in Othellos use of this trope lies in the reality that Desdemonas passion is not painted at all; it is Othellos perceptual error fueled by a jealous imagination that causes him to perceive falseness where there is only truth. The example from Shakespeares Measure for Measure (1604) again figures painting in its negative aspect. A character denigrates, even
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ridicules, the mystery or skilled craft of painting by verbally linking it to the prostitutes painting (another false art) and the fools servitude. The painters skill is thus represented as not any better than that of a common whore or witty, obsequious servant. Such hostile and vulgar depictions as these ones betray cultural assumptions that painting was a common rather than gentle practice associated particularly with actors and whores, and that the painter was given to sexual misconduct. The character of the painter made relatively few appearances on the Elizabethan stage, but in every case, the dramatist exploited a cultural ambivalence about the visual artist and betrayed underlying iconoclastic anxieties about visual representation. An anti-painting prejudice is particularly evident in Arden of Faversham (1592), for example, where the painter is accused of being the sort of man who makes but a painting-table of a pretty wench, and thereby blots, or ruins, her reputation. To paint carries the figurative sense of making love here and in other early modern dramas; thus, the figurative description of the painter treating the pretty wench as the board upon which he paints his desire conveys a literal image of his reputed erotic behavior. Painters were not only perceived as libidinous, but also as mercenary. Again, in Arden of Faversham the painter appears as a cunning fellow who agrees to sell adulterous lovers a poisoned portrait and, even worse, a poisoned crucifix to aid them in killing the womans husband. Such negative or fundamentally ambivalent depictions of the painter and his art drew attention to the problematic nature of image-making, but did so to the dramatists advantage. When dramatists chose to depict painters as characters, they were deliberately calling attention to the social and moral ambiguities surrounding this artisan figure and to the troubling nature, especially the iconicity, of visual representation and imagemaking. Because the fine-art painter was a mimetic artist and imagemaker, he could easily serve as both a foil and an antagonist for the dramatist and player, who were both concerned with mirroring truth and creating compelling, morally acceptable stage images. By portraying the painter and his images in an unattractive moral light, such as we find in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Arden of Faversham, Elizabethan playwrights attempted to divert theatergoers attention away from the Puritan charge that the theater renue[d] [the] reme[m]brance of hethen ydolatrie, as Philip Stubbes claimed in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583).10 By tapping into latent or strongly held iconoclastic fears and anti-painting prejudices, dramatists forced their audiences to make distinctions between kinds of seeing and between the ontological and moral values of the different visual arts. Underlying their appropriation of painting for the theater was the dramatists strategic move to enhance the visual appeal of their art, while at the same time offering a scapegoat to their opponents.
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The Polemical Battle over the Theater

As Jonas Barish so aptly points out in The Antitheatrical Prejudice, hostility toward the stage erupts when the theater is flourishing and contributing to the community in vital ways.11 With the building of permanent playhouses in London, which began in the 1570s, theater became a popular, commercial enterprise that brought income and professional stability to players, dramatists, playhouse owners, and shareholders. The theaters attractions and its ability to satisfy spectators cannot be underestimated in this Play-admiring age,12 as the political Puritan William Prynne spitefully called the period. The English traveler Fynes Moryson implicitly touched upon the source of theaters allure in his description of the London theaters and their popularity. In his Itinerary (1617), he writes,
The Citty of London alone hath foure or fiue Companyes of players with their peculiar Theaters Capable of many thousands, wherein they all play euery day in the weeke but Sunday, with most strang concourse of people, besydes many strange toyes and fances exposed by signes to be seene in priuate houses, to which and to many musterings and other frequent spectacles, the people flocke in great nombers, being naturally more newe-fangled then the Athenians to heare newes and gaze vpon euery toye, as there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London then in all the partes of the worlde I haue seene, so doe these players or Comedians excell all other in the worlde.13
Morysons description confers an aura of sociological curiosity to English playgoing, which is categorized as one of the pleasures to which the English are addicted. Theaters are peculiar; the concourse of people is strang, as are the toyes and fances visually displayed in private theaters; and most revealing is the newfangledness of the English, who wish to hear news (gossip?), and gaze upon curiosities and new devices. The theaters, then, satisfied a desire for novelty and exoticism, and they did so in appealingly visual terms. The newly built theaters featured excellent actors who fed peoples eyes with fancies and spectacles. What was once, just a few decades earlier, a sacred theater that fostered a devotional (or idolatrous, according to the reformers) gaze in Christian worshippers had given way, by order of law, to a secular and commercial form of play that satisfied the curious, hungry gaze of spectators who gathered in a new kind of social arena. We must ask, however, whether this apparent radical change in the nature of theater completely altered how audiences understood and participated in the theater. Were there vestiges of the old religious theater in the new? To what extentor how radicallydid the absence of religious content in plays and the building of special theaters (seeing places) alter the mode of spectatorship at plays? These questions bring us directly to the heart of controversy and to the
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obsessive opposition to theater that gripped Protestant ministers and others of the puritan persuasion. Despite its secularism, early modern theater was subjected to attacks that were grounded in specifically moral and religious terms. In particular, the theaters were charged with being schools of idolatry; plays and actors were regarded as idols. The reformed dramatists Stephen Gosson and Anthony Munday attacked the theater with the moral fervor of converts; they viewed the theater as the devils playground where he lures spectators into idleness, wantonness, ostentation, and idolatry. They fashioned plays as the inuentions of the deuil, the offerings of Idolatrie.14 That dramatists themselves reformed and turned against theater to join the antitheatricalists points up how psychologically gripping fears about theaters dangerous, corrupting powers were in English culture. Generally speaking, theater was perceived as a potentially unruly force that threatened social and religious stability; government officials and religious authorities worked feverishly at times to censor and suppress theatrical activities. But what were the perceived dangers inherent in the new, secular theater? What motivated the antitheatricalists passionate denunciation of the theaters vices? Jonas Barish suggests a psychological fixation: the luxuriousness of the theatrical enterprise not only provoked anxiety over irrational forces that could result in chaos, but also represented a deeply disturbing temptation, which could only be dealt with by being disowned and converted into a passionate outrage.15 That some of the antitheatrical pamphleteers were former dramatists certainly strengthens this argumentthey disowned the part of themselves that had indulged in image-making. Michael OConnell has advanced a persuasive argument, which places the antitheatrical impulse within the context of the iconoclastic attack on religious images. The opposition to theater, like the hostility to graven images, reflects fear and anxiety about a state of mind that grants presence, i.e., the presence of a god, or another essence not made by God, to an image.16 With their fixation on the visual regime of the theater, the antitheatricalists treated the player as a self-created image. To create a self through impersonation or to witness such a creation taking place (i.e., to participate vicariously) was to engage in a dangerously sacrilegious business. Because the actor willfully transformed himself into another being, he transgressed against the essentialism of identity bestowed by God. At least that is how William Prynne and other religious polemicists perceived the actors false situation: God hath given a uniforme distinct and proper being to every creature, the bounds of which may not be exceeded.17 By exceeding his God-given bounds, the player uses his body as a sinful vessel for hypocrisyhis very body lies, for it is a false image, treated as an idol by all those, including himself, who believe in the fiction of the other self s presence. Underlying this anxiety about players transforma-
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tions, one detects a willful confusion between reality and fiction. What is more, the religious context for this confusion seems to be related to the charged controversy over the Eucharist. In Catholic belief, the Eucharist is the body of Christ, which contains the actual presence of Christ. As OConnell and others before him have argued, theater provoked such a violent, repetitive, and passionate outcry because, in fundamental ways, it resembled features of the forbidden Catholic Massspectacle, ritual, costume, and, worst of all, transubstantiation.18 Rather than perceiving players as benign fiction-makers and licensed entertainers, antitheatricalists viewed them with deadly seriousness as idols and incarnations of the persons they played. Spectators, then, were drawn to see another presence within the player. This mode of visiona carnal or bodily form of vision associated with Roman Catholic worshipwas precisely what the iconoclasts were battling. The antitheatrical writers often included other arts, such as dance, music, and painting, in their diatribes, for these arts, as well, were inducements to pleasure, bawdry, and idleness. What is more, these other arts were to be found in the theaters. Music and dance were common features of Elizabethan stage performances; musicians were employed to accompany song and dance, and to announce ceremonial entrances, while dancing was incorporated into dramatic scenes and used as pre- and postperformance entertainment. Painting could be found adorning the theaters walls and stages, and could often be seen in the form of portrait miniatures in the players hands or larger pictures displayed for dramatic effect. The characters cued reactions to pictures and their image-laden descriptions shaped spectators responses to images. Typically, these responses were provoked by the discourses of idolatry, wonder, and eroticism. In signaling a range of responses to images, dramatists reflected an engagement with both traditional and recently articulated arguments about the power of images and the purpose of visual art. Expressions of hostility towards visual art in the sixteenth-century reflect a longstanding tradition, from Plato through Tertullian to the Lollards, in which purists set themselves in opposition to the polluting forces of visual art. In Platos famous rejection of imitative arts from his republic, he characterized painting, poetry, and drama as dangerous to individual morality as well as the orderly governance of the state. The artist who is not making art under the guidance of the state and for the positive administration of the states laws sets up a badly governed state in the soul of each individual.19 The argument is made upon moral and ontological grounds, for the essential problem with imitative arts is that they exist as a copy of a copy, or that is, an image twice removed from the truth. Artistic representations, thus, produce false, pleasing images of reality that corrupt and bewitch audiences; art provokes disordered emotional responses of an
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unhealthy kind because it appeals to base qualities in the human soul. In their obsessive cataloguing of sins and societal ills that art supposedly fosters, the sixteenth-century purists extended Platos argument to include every conceivable corruption of both individual and society. Their emphasis on the actors hypocrisy, both his false position as actor and his false assumption of a second nature, betrays a Platonic anxiety about man-made copies or counterfeits. Their plentiful tirades against spectacle and spectatorship reflect a Platonic distrust of the world of appearances, which is apprehended primarily through the eyes. Countering Platos anti-mimetic stance was Aristotles view of artistic imitation as a valuable contribution to society and the development of the human soul. Rather than defining illusion or image-making as an inherently false activity, Aristotle claimed that art produces an image of truth with material that can be perceived by the senses, and through which the idea of the universal can be made manifest.20 Art imitates nature, Aristotle claimed, and by this he meant that the artist, like the creative force of nature, seeks to reproduce life. Life is constituted primarily by the activities of the soul, or inward states of emotion, thought, and will. Aristotles use of painting analogies in his Poetics indicates that, as in the ut pictura poesis tradition, there are essential resemblances between poetry and painting. For Aristotle, however, it is drama that resembles a painting, the central difference lying in dramas freedom of movement, or its freedom to reproduce the movements of the soul in all their variety. Just as form, color, facial expression, and gesture reveal moral character in a portrait, so, too, do they reveal the soul through the actors presentation; the actor, however, can present the process of becoming, for he is not fixed in time. Aristotles assumption is that the soul animates the body and renders its phenomena visible through the bodys form. In some instances in the Poetics, Aristotle holds up painting as a model for dramatists. In particular, regarding arts purpose to idealize or purify natures originals, Aristotle writes, Again, since Tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level, the example of good portrait-painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful.21 Aristotle argues that the imitative arts, while staying true to external forms, complete the imperfections of nature, and produce contemplative joy and pleasure within the minds of spectators and listeners. Quite distinct from Aristotle, Plato upholds the realm of pure being as the only sphere of truthand this is not a sphere that allows for imitation. He contends that painting and poetry lack moral seriousness, and he distrusts the bewitching pleasures that accompany artistic performances. One detects the unfortunate influence of Plato, rather than Aristotle, in the early Latin Church Fathers writings on art. Tertullian (c. 160225), a
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forceful opponent of pagan and Christian idolatry, charged not only painting and sculpture, but also the theater with creating images that were false snares (i.e., fictions, lies). Like other puritanical religious writers, he extended the Mosaic injunctions against making and worshipping graven images (Exodus 20:4 5) beyond religious painting and sculpture to include any similitude of the image of a corruptible man, & of birdes, and foure foted beastes, & of creeping things (Romans 1:23).22 His emphasis, like that of many iconoclasts, was that in adoring a man-made image, men misdirected worship from God to earthly things, especially their own creations, which are shadowy copies of the divine creation. The danger lay in the probability that mens souls would become helplessly ensnared in the sensuousness of the image, such that the image would fail to lead them toward rational contemplation of God. Following Plato, Tertullian regarded mimetic art as false and claimed that it provokes the sins of cross-dressing and adultery. In reaction to the decadent Roman theater, he wrote in De Spectaculis 23,
And then all this business of masks, I ask if God can be pleased with it, who forbids the likeness of anything to be made, how much more of His own image? The Author of truth loves no falsehood; all that is feigned is adultery in His sight. The man who counterfeits voice, sex, or age, who makes a show of false love and hate, false sighs and tears, He will not approve, for He condemns all hypocrisy. In His law He denounces that man as accursed who shall go dressed in womens clothes; what then will be His judgement upon the pantomime who is trained to play the woman?23
Tertullian, like many antitheatricalists, refused to accept the basic premise of theater; he treated theater as if it were life and the actors as if they were essentially cross-dressers and hypocrites. The male actor in both Roman and Elizabethan theaters played women, which left him vulnerable to the charge that he defied the Deuteronomic prohibition (23.5) against men wearing womens clothes. The actor also broke the second and seventh commandments by making a false image of man. This false imagemaking was regarded as adulterous because the actor polluted or adulterated the original imageman in Gods image. Spiritual fornication and adultery resulted when spectators adored the actors man-made image. Elizabethan antitheatricalists were equally as reactionary in their pamphlets and sermons, focusing on the sinful nature of personation, as acting was called. This descriptive term for playing focuses on the actors ability to make a person come into being; in a sense it points up what was perceived to be sacrilegious about playingthe actors goal to create a similitude of a person other than his God-given self. Put another way, the actor is a counterfeit. Tertullians damning view of the actors nature is articulated once again by the English antitheatricalists: his chiefe essence
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is, A daily Counterfeit. . . . When hee is most commendable, you must confesse there is no truth in him: his best action is but an imitation of truth and nullum simile est idem.24 Thus, the actor is in a false position, for his profession demands that he seem rather than be, and this seeming corrupts his essential being. The phrase imitation of truth assumes the Platonic, rather than the Aristotelian, ontology of playing. The radical position of the Early Church Fathers gave way to a moderate acceptance of drama during the medieval period. Opposition to theater waned, primarily because dramatic art was a function of Christian belief and worship. Mystery cycles and liturgical drama supported the Churchs rituals and teachings. Like painting, drama could be used as a book for the illiterate. However, one extant antitheatrical sermon from the fourteenth century suggests the presence of a minority group in England, mainly comprised of Lollards, who feared the corrupting force of drama. In A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, a Lollard author argues that religious drama only plays at truth and mocks the biblical stories it enacts. Because drama functions as entertainment, giving pleasure to spectators, it is not a serious and godly enterprise. Theater deliten men bodily rather than spiritually25; therefore, its images serve only to enliven lust, rather than godliness. He makes this point in response to the argument that theater offers a living enactment of Gods miracles:
Also, sithen it is leveful to han the myraclis of God peyntid, why is not as wel leveful to han the myraclis of God pleyed, sythen, men mowen bettere reden the wille of God and his mervelous werkis in the pleyinge of hem than in the peyntynge, and betere thei ben holden in mennus mynde and aftere rehersid by the pleyinge of hem than by the peyntynge, for this is a deed bok, the tother a qu[i]ck.26
This pro-theater argument hinges on a comparison between painting and drama that simultaneously raises theaters status while demoting painting from its honored position as a vivid book for the illiterate. The key point in the polemic lies in the last phrase: painting is a deed bok, the tother a qu[i]ck. In other words, playing has the ability to quicken images or to give birth to living forms, whereas painting can only produce static images, which lie dead on the illuminators page or the painters board. Here is an early English example of a paragone, or competition, between theater and painting, which promotes the power of theater at paintings expense. The Lollard writer rehearses this argument so that he can defend the use of images to promote proper, moral beliefs (i.e., the long familiar argument that painting has its moral and didactic purposes). In contrast, the theater is irredeemable. The quick book of theater, he insists, is dangerous and offensive. The corruptions noted by the Lollard author emanate from unruly, sensuous elements of the theatrical situation: the audience is
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present to gaze upon a bodily re-enactment of biblical stories. Performers give their own, sometimes humorous, renditions of their characters, which result in laughter, pleasure, and playfulness. Unlike painting, theater presents dangers of a most persuasive kind, for spectators are drawn to the corporeal presence of actors who impersonate characters as they enact their stories. Given the near pathological nature of the attack on theater, sixteenthcentury apologists for drama were compelled to marshal a defense. All in all, their arguments proved to be a disappointment, however, for they were often poorly reasoned. In some cases, the author undermined his own argument. Jonas Barish has brilliantly demonstrated Thomas Heywoods failure in An Apology for Actors (1612) to make a clear, logical case for the theater: Heywoods bungling is such that he is constantly thrusting weapons into the hands of his adversaries.27 Although his argument is generally inept, Heywood does incorporate some rousing passages in his text, especially where he focuses on the notion of theater as a living art. Similar to the medieval defense of religious theater, Heywood praises the quick images of mythological and historical personages created by actors in the theater: neither oratory nor painting can compete with the sensuous experience of seeing as I haue seene, Hercules in his owne shape hunting the Boare, knocking downe the Bull, taming the Hart, fighting with the Hydra, murdering Gerion, slaughtering Diomed.28 The sensuousness one encounters in the theater, Heywood argues, is not an appeal to base instincts and emotions, as Plato and the later antitheatricalists would have it, nor is it an incitement to immoral thought and action. The actors are not idols to be worshipped; rather, they are inspired impersonators whose ability to take noble shapes has the power to shape the spectators soul and, therefore, his moral behavior:
[S]o bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it hath the power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.29
For Heywood, the phenomenal experience of bewitchmenta heightened state of consciousnessis the essential condition under which moral transformation takes place. Like Heywood, Thomas Nashe defends the theaters moral efficacy and its ability to serve as a reproof to contemporary idleness and vice. In the actors ability to resurrect brave warriors from the past, exemplary figures present their cases, not through dead, worm-eaten books, but through their lively presence on the stage:
First, for the subiect of them (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant acts (that haue line long buried in
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rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence: than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours?30
Here Nashe indirectly answers the charge of idolatry. He contends that actors engage in historical re-enactments designed to make spectators into virtuous people. Yet he has theater performing the miracle of resurrection: it can raise honorable and valiant men from the grave and give them open presence through the actors performance among the living. One can immediately see how Nashe errs in making his case in such a fashion. Like Heywood, he captures what is most attractive and magical about the theatrical experience, but, in effect, concedes that something extraordinary, even supernatural, takes place in the actors impersonation of another self. As Heywood and Nashe would have it, by virtue of its extraordinary ability to create presence, theater has the power to change men and women for the better. Unfortunately, this enthusiastic appeal could very well serve as a weapon unwittingly thrust into their enemies hands, to echo Barishs point. The emphasis on bewitchment, as we saw with Plato, could be used against the theater, as it suggests the ability in drama to provoke responses of an irrational kind. If spectators find themselves charmed by the performance, they have, in effect, lost their faculty of reason; for Plato, this was a dangerous state of affairs that led to the individuals corruption and, ultimately, to the states disorder. Like the theaters detractors, Nashe and Heywood agree that the actors presence had profound psychological and moral effects on spectators and that these were not to be taken lightly. Although Heywood writes of the players noble attempt, a classinflected phrase that conflates the actors ability and the action represented, one cannot help but think of the countless attempts at ignoble actions in the theater. The Puritans were keenly aware of the representations of immoral actions on the stage and declared that vicarious participation in wickedness and bawdry would corrupt theatergoers. Since plays are filthy or unclean and originate from the devil, they infect spectators and players who choose to serue the Diuel . . . at plaies rather than serve God in some chaste, cleanly fashion.31 This claim reflects a rigid resistance to understanding theater or fiction of any kind as an ontological category in its own right. Although he seemed to share some of the puritanical anxieties about theater expressed by such men as Gosson and Munday, Sir Philip Sidney nonetheless offered the most significant early modern argument for the special ontological status of dramatic literature in A Defence of Poesie (written c. 1583; printed in 1595). Unlike other apologists, he turned to Aristotle and Neoplatonism for guidance in steering a course around his
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cultures iconoclastic resistance to mimetic art. His definition of poetry (and drama, which according to Aristotle is a species of poetry) derives its force and character from its metaphorical association with pictures. Sidney thoroughly embraces the famous sister arts analogy between painting and poetry, for both were mimetic arts that should, in his view, have the same goalto teach virtue and to delight the audience. Underlying Sidneys view of poetry is an understanding of the power of image-making. As S. K. Heninger, Jr. claims, Sidney radically revised the nature of poetry, turning it into a primarily image-making activity.32 The best figure for a poem, in Sidneys view, is that of a picture: Poesie therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word Mimesis, that is to say a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth: to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture.33 Imitation itself is a process of metaphor-makingthe finding out of metaphors that will sufficiently figure reality or nature. According to Sidney, the excellence of poetry as a mimetic art lies in its figurative nature, which teaches and delights by striking not the outer, but the inner eye with images that are true and representative of the inward virtues of humankind. His definition of the poet sets forth a view of the artist as a maker of new things that better or transcend natures offerings, as Aristotle had claimed:
Onely the Poet, disdayning to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his owne in[v]ention, dooth growe in effect into another nature, in making things either better then Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anewe; formes such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her guifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit.34
Sidney importantly redeems Platos view of the arts in his Defence, reflecting a Neoplatonism that had gained currency during the Renaissance. Sidneys Neoplatonic influence becomes apparent when he identifies the skill of artificerspoets, dramatists, and paintersas lying in the Idea rather than the executed work. Through the works of continental writers such as Castiglione and Lomazzo, the Neoplatonic doctrine of Idea became influential in England, persuading some to view the painter as a near demigod who had intimate contact with essences, or Ideas, rather than shadowy appearances. Quite the opposite of Platos view, the Neoplatonists embraced the artists special relationship with the invisible world of Ideas. From this perspective, poets and painters work with a fore-conceit, which makes them imaginative artists, rather than mere mechanical craftsmen. Sidney distinguishes between mean and excellent painters as a way to shed light on how the poet employs his fore-conceit. The meaner sort of
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Painters counterfeit only the faces they see before them, just as the philosophical poets are forced to remain within the bounds of their subject; whereas excellent painters, like the best sort of poets, have no law but wit and can therefore represent in their forms imitations of inward qualities and virtues.35 He uses the example of a painter who wishes to represent Lucretia. If he is the excellent sort, he would paint the constant though lamenting looke of Lucretia, when she punished in her selfe an others fault; wherein he painteth not Lucretia whom he never sawe, but painteth the outwarde beauty of such a vertue.36 In this analogy, he credits neither the material nature of painting, nor the painters ability to render likenesses, but rather the painters ability to imitate inward qualities and to strike the viewers moral imagination. Sidney suppresses the sensuous body of painting in order to offer a figurative reality that has moral purpose. The experience of painting and poetry, as for Aristotle, comes in the form of pleasure, but for Sidney, we find an all-important emphasis on didacticismart, as Horace and many ancient Greek theorists before him argued, must instruct the audience in virtuous conduct and moral truths in order to fulfill its higher purpose. While Sidneys argument can be applied to dramatic literature, he betrays ambivalence about the sensuousness and corrupting power of drama in performance. Heywood and Nashe insist on dramas ability to inculcate moral virtues, but they, too, reflect assumptions about playing that undermine their defenses. Dramatists found the best form of rebuttal in their own art and their most powerful venue in the theater itself. To return to the argument I am advancing, one specific defensive strategy dramatists employed was to scapegoat the painter and to treat painted images as morally vexing, inferior, and false in comparison to dramatic images. By highlighting the problematic status of painting, as well as negative connotations with the art, they could deflect hostility from their own art. Let us now address the painters situation during the English Reformation in order to understand how painting came to be regarded as a socially inferior, morally dangerous art, and how painters and their defenders responded to prejudices against painting. We shall then be able to gauge how dramatists exploited not only the inherited myths and ideals about painting from classical antiquity, but, more strategically, the contemporary social realities and cultural attitudes about painters and painted images.
The Anti-Painting Prejudice in England

Views of the painter and his art in late sixteenth-century England were contradictory and, at times, inherently ambiguous. As we have seen, the intellectual traditions established by Aristotle and Plato treated painting,
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on the one hand, as a praiseworthy, exemplary form of mimesis and, on the other, as a morally bankrupt imitation of the real. The Renaissance Neoplatonists redeemed the painter by claiming that he could express the Idea, or the essence of a thing, in his works, which made art preferable to material reality. Ranging between the extremes of idealization and disparagement, attitudes toward the painters images tended toward ambivalence. Attitudes toward the painter as a professional artisan were shaped, as well, by social and economic realities in Elizabethan society. For one, the painter lacked a stable, well-defined social position in late sixteenthcentury England. Such factors as religious controversy, iconoclastic laws, and superstitions about images contributed to the artisans lack of prestige and stable social position. Once the Reformation was underway in the 1540s, painters lost a ready-made patronage system in the Catholic Church and were forbidden to make religious images of any kind. If they wished to gain commissions for work that was not menial in nature (e.g., signpainting), they were forced to depend on the largess of bourgeois and aristocratic clients and to seek support from the monarchy. An English prejudice against painting, irrespective of Protestant iconoclasm, can be detected as early as the fourteenth century. The historic uses of the term painting found in the OED betray negative cultural views of all practices falling under that name. This and other art-related terms, such as image, picture, and perspective, were used rather vaguely in the sixteenth century, as Margaret Aston and Lucy Gent have demonstrated.37 The negative connotations underlying art terms and the imprecision in their use reflect a telling lack of clarity about the relationship between signs and their referents. This linguistic slipperiness reveals uncertainty and anxiety about the nature and moral status of visual art in early modern England. In John Stows The Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England, an additional section authored by Master of Revels George Buc (1615 edition) offers reasons why the English would have come to regard painting in such a prejudicial manner. In Bucs account, the lack of precision in his terms and his uncertainty about the logical connection between cause and effect betray an ambivalent view of art. He writes, In the Art called of Aristotle . . . Graphice, and in English paynting:
there be in this citie [London] cunning Maisters, for eyther shadowing, purtraying, counterfetting, tricking, paynting, enlumining, or lymming. But this is an Art now not accounted ingenuous or fit for a Gentleman, by reason that it is much fallen from the reputation, which it had aunciently, which whether it bee for the unworthinesse or unskilfulnes of the persons exercising and practising it in this age, or for the abuses and deceipts used by Paynters, or for the scandall of Images and Idols (for the which Philo condemneth it) or for the foule deuise of the fayre Cosmetica: or for what other cause I know not well, but sure I am it is now accounted base and mechanicall. . . .38
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At first painters are presented as cunning Maisters, or skilled artisans who have mastered a variety of painting techniques (shadowing, purtraying, etc.), which are merely catalogued, rather than differentiated. What follows, however, casts the worst possible light on the art and its reputation in London. The very terms used commonly by Elizabethans to refer to painting cunning, shadowing, counterfeiting, and tricking are far from neutral. They possess negative connotations, such as lack of authenticity and moral baseness, that, when implied, condemn the art. Cunning, as well, carries the troubling connotations of illicit or occult knowledge. The popular use of such ambiguous terms betrays the moral suspicion at the heart of Elizabethan perceptions of painting. The phrase abuses and deceipts used by Paynters gives the general impression that the artisan behaved in a corrupt fashion, both as a professional who engaged in economic and social transactions and as a maker of painted images. The term abuse conjures at least one specific meaning that we can gauge: in early modern England, it referred to the making or gazing upon unlawful, iconic images; thus, the word would have carried a moral charge, indicating both an immoral and a criminal activity. Deceipts would have referred to the painters skill at creating illusions that trick the eye and cause the viewer to accept a false image as truthful. The term scandal invokes religious impropriety of the worst kind. The negative implications of these words, which are clearly intended here, derive mainly from social forces and popular associations beyond the painters control. The negative attitude Buc reveals in this passage seems to be a product of cultural iconophobia and a longstanding association of art with vice, or base activities. As Bucs text suggests, there existed a disturbing conflation of the painters art with face-painting. The devices of foul Cosmetica were perceived to be antithetical to those of fair Natura, whose painting was entirely natural. Since the fourteenth century, according to the OED, the English term painting had referred to coloring the face with cosmetics. Because the other face-painter, the fine-art portraitist, also placed colors upon a surface to beautify a faceto create a counterfeit face, as it were the connection between these two arts was readily made and always detrimental to fine-art painting. Although it was primarily apothecaries, rather than painters, who sold the chemicals and colors to clients for dyeing their hair and coloring their faces, the associations between cosmetics and portrait painting were ingrained in the language and mindset of Elizabethans. The section dealing with the art of painting in Stows Annales demonstrates this curious coupling, for the title reads, Of Graphice, or Art of Paynting, and of Pourtraiture, and of Stayning, and of Cosmetica. The author declares the association valid by making the following argument: womens painting is an art in that it requires skill and assumes
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a body of knowledge that can be taught. Lest one assume that this heading reflects a unique conflation, we should turn to Richard Haydockes translation of the Italian Giovanni Lomazzos painting treatise. The book includes a section called Of the Painting of Women in what is otherwise a lengthy discourse on the professional painters art. Even for art theorists, it was difficult to disentangle the problem of womens painting from discourses on fine-art painting. In another example of the moral entangling of fine art and face-painting, Thomas Nashes Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell (1592) presents a rhetorically elaborate commentary on pride, which, at one point, turns to the excesses of feminine cosmetics use:
I need not fetch colours from other countries to paint the vglie visage of Pride, since her picture is set forth in so many painted faces here at home. What drugs, what sorceries, what oiles, what waters, what ointments, doe our curious Dames vse to inlarge their withered beauties. Their lips are as lauishly red, as if they vsed to kisse an okerman euery morning, and their cheeks sugar-candied and cherry blusht so sweetly, after the colour of a newe Lord Mayors postes, as if the pageant of their wedlocke holiday were harde at the doore: so that if a Painter were to drawe any of their Counterfets on a Table, he needes no more but wet his pencil, and dab it on their cheeks, and he shall haue vermillion and white enough to furnish out his worke, though he leaue his tar-boxe at home behind him.39
The analogy is made a bit more explicit with a gloss that conflates two kinds of Counterfets, painted women who are the picture of pride and the painters images of women: They may well be called counterfaites [portraits], since the beauty they imitate is counterfeited.40 The assumption here is that women who sat for their portraits used cosmetics. Women are blamed, in part, for a portraits counterfeit status: how can a picture based on counterfeit beauty be truthful? An echo of the Platonic argument can be heard here: the painted portrait is doubly inauthentic, a copy of a counterfeit. Both artifice and art are under attack. The conceit we are to imagine, though, is subtly suggestive of a masculine anxiety about womens painting. If the painter can take his colors directly from the womans face, and thereby furnish his work with vermilion and white, the implication here is that the woman has a creative capacity; it is she who has first painted her own work of art by heightening and altering her face. The painter, then, merely borrows the colors she has already applied to a surface and imitates her work. The logical conclusion, then, is that he will imitate what the woman has already created; in the use of cosmetics lies a womans potential to create and transform herself. The creative power underlying the feminine use of face paint represents one of the central concerns of the iconoclastic polemicists who wrote
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vociferously against cosmetics use. In A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women (1616), Thomas Tuke (figure 1) includes an appendix titled, The Picture of a Picture, or, The Character of a Painted Woman, in which he argues that a woman who paints needs to be twice defined; for she is not that she seemes. And though shee bee the creature of God, as she is a woman, yet is she her own creatrisse, as a picture.41 We can intuit here that the fundamental social problem with face painting lies in its perceived ability to facilitate female creativity and agency. In the most damning sense, women who paint have usurped Gods position as creator to become self-created or creatrisses. Sermonists such as John Donne complained that these women have taken the pencil (paint brush) out of Gods hand. While it was not always unproblematic for male artists to seize the pencil, it was always morally transgressive for women to do so, especially when it was their own God-given faces that became the canvas for their work. As Tuke writes, Her body is (I weene) of Gods making: and yet it is a question; for many parts thereof she made her selfe.42 Painted women threatened social order, as Frances E. Dolan has argued, by disturbing boundaries between categories such as creator and creation, desiring subject and desired object, self and body, masculine and feminine, and gentlewoman and prostitute.43 It was not only prostitutes who painted their faces, Dolan reminds us; the Queen herself most likely initiated the fashionable use of cosmetics, and her courtiers certainly followed the Queens lead.44 Thus, the commoner or gentlewoman who painted would have made herself vulnerable to comparison with a prostitute, but she also could equally have been perceived as imitating her social betters with an outward sign of ambitious self-fashioning. The iconoclasts argument against image-making underlies Tukes objection to cosmetics use: A painted face is not much vnlike an Idoll; it is not that, it would be taken for: and they, that make it, are like vnto it, and so are all they that do delight therein, and worship it.45 Painted women have made themselves into idols to be worshipped by male admirers. They are sinners who incite men to sin. Invoking classical and patristic authorities, Tuke not only reviles face painting, which he associates with a host of sins including murder by poisoning, pride, vanity, adultery, and witchcraft; he also roundly condemns all kinds of painting, proclaiming with a moralists fervor that to paint is to flaunt ones own art pridefully in the face of Gods creation and natures powers. Thus, it would seem, feminine face-painting became a focus for iconoclasts anxieties about image-making; in blaming women for their idolatrous practices, Tuke also implicates everyone who takes the pencil out of Gods hands. These charges would have included players, for they were, after women, the second most visible group of persons guilty of face-painting. While Tuke does not directly attack players, he does cast the painted woman as a
1. Title page to Thomas Tuke, A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women. London, 1616. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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character who is a cunning practitioner in the art of seeming. Tukes conceptual framework is strikingly dramatic. Like the player, the painted woman inhabits a double positionher being is defined by ambiguity and deceptive appearance. She is, at the same time, a picture, an artificial image of herself. In Sir Thomas Overburys What a Character Is, one of the meanings he offers for a character is a picture (reall or personall) quaintlie drawne in various collours, all of them heightned by one shadowing.46 The rhetoric suggests a strict dichotomy between artifice/art and nature. Art requires the skillful (quaint) application of colors, which is antithetical to natures own colors. Shakespeare appreciates this antithesis in Sonnet 20 with his praise of his beloved friends face, which has been painted by Natures own hand, rather than Cosmeticas. Players, pictures, and painted women all belong to an artificial realm of being in which colors heighten and alter their natural forms. While the painters art had the misfortune of being associated with the foule use of cosmetics, even worse was its association with the scandall of Images and Idolsthe Catholic making and worshipping of pictures and statuary. As Sir Roy Strong has argued, the theological debate surrounding iconoclasm produced a shrivelling of patronage and the propagation of an attitude of mind suspicious of all the visual arts as somehow leading to Popery and the Whore of Babylon of Rome.47 Strong articulates a radical iconoclastic view, but there is no doubt such attitudes were expressed during the sixteenth century and certainly had their impact on the painters profession. In losing his major patron, the Catholic Church, from which many of his commissions came, the painter suffered blows in both economic and social terms. With the stripping of the altars and the growing hostility towards liturgical images, painters were no longer employed to ornament statuary, paint biblical scenes upon church walls, or provide devotional pictures. The reforms must have driven some painters out of the profession and others to accept primarily low-wage piecework. The painters loss of livelihood is reflected in a dark, satirical tale from Tarltons Newes Out of Purgatory in which a painter living during the time of Catholic Marys reign finds that he has lost his skill in painting the human form. While the writers reformed view of images is quite clear, the tale gives us a sense of how confusing it must have been for artists to endure the shifts in attitude and law regarding image-making during the sixteenth century. The writer begins his tale by telling us how popery and superstition were banished in the days of King Edward VIs rule. The painters that livde with such trashe, as trimming of shrines and roodes, alters and saints having so little work . . . almost forgot their occupation.48 When Mary Tudor took the throne, she proclaimed that images of Christ, Mary, and the saints were lawful again and that parishes were to restore their damaged or removed sacred images. Thus, the church of
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Doncaster in Yorkeshire, wishing to be most obedient, found itself once more in need of a painter. They hired a painter to make a new rood, the old one obviously having been destroyed; he fell to work, but unfortunately, because his hand had beene out of use by the space of six yeeres, he had forgot the lineaments of the visage, and the other wonted proportion.49 The result was a distorted, ill-favored image of Christ, which caused an uproar in the parish. Children cried and feared to look on the image. The parishioners accused him of being a bungler and his image of being a hindrance to devotion. The vicar of the parish refused to pay the painter for such inept work, so the artisan sought recourse from the mayor. The mayor, who happened to have Protestant sympathies, saw an opportunity in this situation. He ordered the parish to pay for the rood, and gave the following advice, which the painter gladly took up: if he wil not serve you for a God . . . clap a paire of hornes on his head, and I warrant you hee will prove an excellent good devil.50 This clever tale betrays ambiguous sympathies: on the one hand, the painter and mayor end up in agreement over how to handle an injustice. The painter should be paid for his labor, and retribution against the parish is made. But in the humorous solution of painting a devil over the illfavored Christ one detects an underlying hostility toward images and toward the painter himself. The painter will have to mar his own picture, which in a sense was marred already by his lack of cunning due to religious reform. He will be forced to transform what was intended to be a sacred image into a demonic one. In having the painter ruin his own work, the reformer-mayor outwits both painter and parish and has the last laugh. No images are to be worshipped in his precinct. Shortly thereafter, the vicar exercises his power to ensure that the painter ends up in purgatory. Mary Tudors brief Catholic reign did not fundamentally deter the course of the Protestant Reformation and iconoclasm in England. As Roy Strong indicated, after Henry VIIIs break from Rome, the whole enterprise of image-making gave rise to suspicion, moral uncertainty, and fear. Even secular images found in painting, sculpture, and drama were granted a certain degree of fear-inspiring power by some reformers, Puritans, and other iconophobic Elizabethans. The reformer Rudolf Gualter, for example, refused to send a self-portrait to Christopher Hales lest, he anxiously exclaimed, a door shall hereafter be opened to idolatry.51 In A Treatise . . . Concerning Images, addressed to Edward VI, Nicholas Ridley couples the invention of a secular image with idolatry. He turns to the Book of Wisdom to recall the tale of a father who makes an image of his deceased son as a memorial. In the passage from Wisdom, the family worships the image as a god.52 Such examples as these attest to a persistent cultural fear that all images possessed an indefinable power that could provoke an idolatrous attitude. The Early Latin Church Fathers arguments (e.g., in
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the writings of Tertullian, Clement, and Lactantius) had long established that images stirred up the senses and incited spiritual fornication. The sixteenth-century reformers invoked these arguments to support their attacks on images. As Ridley wrote in his treatise, images are meretrices or whores, for their worship is called in the prophets fornication and adultery. . . . they rather distract the mind from prayer, hearing Gods word, and other godly mediations.53 Ridley, like Tertullian and others before him, categorizes images with fallen women and adultery, thus assuming a licentious male gaze that needs protection from a seductive feminized image. During Elizabeths reign, warnings against the abuse of images were common, but what constituted an abuse, rather than a legitimate, moral use of an image was not altogether clear. For a start, distinctions necessarily had to be made between religious and secular images, yet as the evidence suggests, such distinctions did not hold either in the reformers or the popular imagination. In A Reformed Catholike (1597) and A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (1601), iconoclast William Perkins, a well-known Puritan theologian, distinguished unlawful religious images from three kinds of lawful images, each of which reflected a secular, morally acceptable purpose: secular paintings designed to preserve the memory of a person or event, symbolic and political uses of the monarchs head, and architectural ornamentation. Perkinss Warning, however, takes a radical turn when he fulminates against inner idols or images created in the mind: A thing fained in the mind by imagination is an idol.54 What is more, devotion to a person can transform that person into an idol: Now if any mere man shal be worshipped with any worship that is more than politicke or civill, he is made more then a man, and by this meanes he is transformed into an Idol.55 Perkinss description recalls Ridleys example and applies equally to the many instances of secular idolatry in which lovers worship each other or images of each other. This extreme example of iconophobia in which love or devotion alters the ontology of the beloved reflects a deep-seated suspicion of the imagination, which is granted the power to conjure false images and to transform the nature of vision and the visible object. Works of art that exhibited a high degree of verisimilitude and threedimensionality (e.g., perspectival art, sculpture, theater) presented the greatest moral danger for iconoclasts. As James Calfhill, Professor of Divinity at Oxford, wrote in the late sixteenth century, the livelier the counterfeit is, the greater error is engendered.56 It seems logical to conclude that Elizabethan pictorial artists adopted anti-illusionist painting techniques in response to reformed views of images. They often inscribed paintings with texts, names, and dates, and depicted their sitters as pallid, unexpressive figures set in flat, linear spatial arrangements. Their pictures
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appear to have been designed as texts for reading; indeed, many portraits, with their allegorical features and inscriptions, must have struck viewers forcefully as representations or symbols conveying specific information and ideas, rather than as aesthetically pleasing likenesses. Sensuousness was reserved for the depiction of costumes and jewelry, rather than faces and bodies. As modern viewers, we tend to feel that only the rare Tudor portrait lives up to the popular Elizabethan epithet of lively art. Early modern responses to portraits, however, yield surprising results to the critic with modern aesthetic biases. Many Elizabethan texts, including dramatic scripts, attribute liveliness and emotional power to these seemingly flat, uninspired pictorial images. To understand how early modern viewers might have been drawn to infuse relatively wooden-looking figures in pictures with liveliness, we need to become more sensitive to their assumptions about images. At the same time, we must acknowledge that we are dealing with ways of seeing that were conditioned by loss the loss of a visual culture associated with religious images, spaces, and rituals. Perceptions of visual art were shaped, as well, in response to iconoclastic laws, public episodes of image-breaking, the presence of defaced objects in churches, buildings, and city landscapes, and iconophobic preaching and pamphleteering. Despite painters attempts to suppress sensuous qualities in their images, the evidence strongly suggests that early modern viewers found something compellingindeed, perhaps needed to find something compellingin portraits and other visual images of their time.
The Pencils Trade and the Defense of Painting

Let us now turn to defenses of painting and to the social realities of the painters trade in order to understand how some fine-art painters achieved a degree of success and recognition despite strong cultural prejudices and foreign competition. The professional Tudor painter was typically regarded as an artificer, and handy craftsman,57 rather than a fine artist; he spent most, if not all, of his working life completing menial and routine tasks, such as sign-painting, wainscot-trimming, and carriage-painting. The term painter in late sixteenth-century English referred to an artisan who used colors to depict objects on a surface, or to a workman who simply coated a surface with paint. Since it was a craft-based tradition, painting was invariably treated as a mechanical artas work produced by the hands rather than the mind. Painters were generally not renowned for their handiwork, nor paid much for it. Tudor household inventories reveal that paintings were assigned a monetary value that reflected size and material costs rather than workmanship, artistic merit, or the fame of the
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painter.58 Even painters working under the Sergeant Painter at court received a low per diem wage and were employed primarily for their decorative abilities. Many professional painters were freemen who belonged to the London Painter-Stainers Company. In 1502, the Stainers had joined the wellestablished Painters Guild, which, prior to this union, had already acquired a grant of arms and a small degree of social prestige that accompanied such a recognition.59 In 1532 the Company acquired its own private hall in London, a sign of relative prosperity.60 When the Painter-Stainers were granted their charter of incorporation by Queen Elizabeth in 1581, they gained legal power and a degree of autonomy. The appeal for a royal charter had been motivated primarily by the painters need to protect market interests. Native English painters were hostile toward foreign painters who were encroaching on their territory at court and in London. Competition from foreign artists, especially for prestigious work at court, posed a distinct threat to the livelihood of guild members. By consolidating their group and gaining a corporate identity, native painters could regulate wages and apprenticeships, guarantee the quality of their work, and use their newly won status to negotiate court patronage and an aristocratic client base. Yet within the hierarchy of guilds, this Company had little social or political prestige in London, mainly because they were not a merchant trade guild with economic power. The twelve Great Companies, as they were called, dominated the London scene; they were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Clothworkers, Merchant Taylors, Skinners, Haberdashers, Goldsmiths, Vintners, Salters, and Ironmongers.61 The painters work was neither as economically viable nor as materially necessary as the merchants or the grocers, nor was his skill as highly valued as the goldsmiths and the clothmakers. There were no large revenues to be had from the painters trade. And then there was the undeniable fact that English painters lacked training for fine-art portrait painting. How could native English painters compete with the likes of Holbein, Hans Eworth, Van Dyck, Rubens, and other superbly trained foreign painters, who employed sophisticated techniques? Most of the skilled portrait painters known to have been painting in early modern England were foreigners, especially religious and political exiles from the Low Countries. Since portraits were in relatively high demand during the latter part of the sixteenth century, so too were highly skilled portraitists. Therein lay the problem for the PainterStainers. Some successful native English portraitists, such as Nicholas Hilliard, actually belonged to guilds more prestigious than that of the Painter-Stainers. Hilliard was the son of a goldsmith; thus, he apprenticed in his fathers craft and became a member of the Goldsmiths Company.
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Although Hilliard worked as a professional painter and produced many fine miniatures for Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers, he nonetheless maintained his membership in the more prominent guild to which his family belonged. While little evidence exists to show that many guild members were fineart painters, there were surely some picturemakers, as they were called, who belonged to the Painter-Stainers Company. While fine-art painting does not seem to have been the specific aim of most guild members, some of them clearly had a talent for painting portraits. The guilds 1575 petition to Elizabeth I expressed concern with incompetent workmanship practiced by non-guild members, specifically in the painting of the Queens image and that of noblemen of the realm. This complaint strongly suggests that some guild members painted not only aristocrats portraits, but also images of the Queen herself. It appears that what the Painter-Stainers wanted was nothing short of a monopoly on all painting activities in London. One guild member, George Gower, actually sought a monopoly on the Queens image. Gower offers a rare example of a public figure who was both a fine picture-maker and a gentleman. He served as Serjeant Painter from 1581, the same year of the companys incorporation, to 1596, the year of his death. While as Serjeant Painter he worked under the Controller of the Works and was responsible primarily for decorative and heraldic work at court; at the same time, he was a talented portraitist. A surviving draft patent of 158384 records that he and Nicholas Hilliard, both indigenous painters, applied for a monopoly on all painted and engraved images of the Queen: Hilliard would have been responsible for painting the Queen in miniature, and Gower, for painting her in full-scale, large portraits.62 We cannot be sure whether Elizabeth granted such a license; it seems unlikely given the many surviving portraits of the Queen by other artists. Only the magnificent Armada Portrait currently at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire has been attributed, albeit shakily, to Gower. A number of miniatures and at least three life-size portraits of the Queen (the Ermine Portrait at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the Pelican Portrait in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the Phoenix Portrait in the National Art Gallery, London) have been attributed to Hilliard. A number of conclusions can be drawn from Hilliard and Gowers conspiratorial proposal to Elizabeth. First, they clearly sought to wrest Elizabeths image from both foreign and incompetent hands. An English monopoly on the monarchs image would have solidified the tenuous tradition in royal patronage to native artists. Their strategic move reveals their personal ambitions, as well. Such a proposition as theirs can be viewed as a preemptive strike against all competitors for royal patronage in painting. Once Hilliard and Gower had footholds at court, they sought to
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secure their positions with the highest honor imaginable to an Elizabethan artistto be the sole makers of the royal image. Although this was an age when fewe or no Gentleman or generous & liberall person will aduenture . . . practising this art,63 Hilliard and Gower not only painted professionally, but also regarded painting as a gentlemans practice. Both men shrewdly made claims to gentility that extended to their art. The historical record shows that they were grandsons of gentlemen; Gowers grandfather was Sir John Gower of Stettenham, Yorkshire, and his family had a coat of arms, as can be seen in George Gowers self-portrait. According to Hilliards son Laurence, his father was grandson of John Hilliard, a gentleman of Cornwall.64 In his painting treatise, Hilliard declares that limning is fittest for gentlemen65; both the painter and his clientele should be of gentle or noble birth. His argument may appear to be in favor of a socially elite cadre of painters, yet he also makes reference to natures gentlemen, lest his own gentility be looked into too closely. Yet by John Stows insistence that fewe or no Gentleman practice painting, we are given to understand that it must have been regarded as a social paradox in early modern England to have a gentlemanpainter at work in society. George Gowers self-portrait (1579) offers a visual record of such a paradox (figure 2), as well as a unique painterly example of self-justification and self-fashioning. Gowers work distinguishes itself as an unusual one, most likely prompted by the artists ambitions and sense of self-identity. Not only is this a rare self-portrait made by an Elizabethan and the only extant example in large, Gowers picture also boldly displays the tools of the painters craft. On his panel, Gower celebrates and visually justifies his ambiguous status as gentleman-painter: he appears as a solemn, gaunt man with a palette and brush in hand; an inscribed poem and an allegorical image of the painters compass outweighing his familys coat of arms present his defense of art. Indeed, Gower makes strategic use of the coat of arms, a regular feature in the portraits of the status-conscious aristocracy, by placing it in the higher, lighter scale in the upper right hand corner. His gentility is importantly established, but contextualized in a highly idiosyncratic fashion in order to support the visual argument. The verse reads as a motto for the picture:
Thogh yovthfull wayes me did intyse, From armes and uertew e[ke] yet thanckt be God for his god gift, wch long did rest as slepe Now skill reuyues wth gayne, and lyfe to leade in rest by pensils trade, wherfore I must, esteme of it as best The proof wherof thies ballance show, and armes my birth displayes what Parents bare by iust re[n]owme, my skill mayntenes the prayes And them whose vertew, fame and acts, haue won for me this shield I reuerence muche wth seruyce eke, and thanks to them do yield.66
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2. George Gower, Self-Portrait, 1579. Private Collection.
Gower embraces the pencils trade and claims it thankfully as his Godgiven gift. Arms may display his gentle birth, but he values his skill as a painter more highly, as the compass weighing down the balance demonstrates. He argues that his skill will mayntenes the prayse his family has won over the years with acts, fame, and virtue. His position as Serjeant Painter to the Queen, arguably the most significant social appointment a painter could win, did indeed bring him fame.
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The self-portrait with painters tools is an obvious medium through which a painter could defend his art and his social identity; yet Gowers portrait appears to have been exceptional among English painters. Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver produced miniature self-portraits, yet these pictures did not reflect their self-fashioning as painters per se. Hilliards portrait of himself aged thirty captures a sense of the artists charm, daring, and self-possession. His simple, yet fine attire, a lacy ruff and jewels in his cap, reflects elegance and status. The image speaks for itself in representing the artist as a confident, attractive man worthy as any of his gentle and noble sitters to have his likeness rendered in miniature. The dating of the portrait, 1577 (figure 3), places Hilliard in France at the Valois court, which suggests the positive influence of French painters on the making of the picture. Equally as important, Hilliards exposure to sophisticated continental views of art and French connoisseurs high regard for painters must have shaped his sense of himself as a highly talented gentleman-artist and his art as a liberal, rather than mechanical, one. More typical were the printed defenses of painting that came in the form of handbooks, treatises, and translations of continental works. These texts began to surface in English arts and letters at the turn of the century and in the early Stuart years as part of an elite humanist effort to claim painting as a liberal art and as the province of gentlemen and aristocrats. This marked a return to a more positive outlook on the visual arts, which had been expressed in the early Tudor period before Henry VIIIs break with Rome and the advent of Protestant iconoclasm. In 1531, for example, in The Book Named the Governor, Sir Thomas Elyot had advocated the practice of painting for gentlemen and young princes because of the cognitive value of such an activity. Painting, he argues, improves the memory and imagination, entices one to study, and provides the skills for drawing not only virtuous histories, by which one becomes inflamed with virtue, but also devices for war and the lay of an enemys land:
. . . it is comendable in a gentilman to paint and kerue, exactly if nature euer to doth induce hym. . . . More ouer the feate of portraiture shall be an allectiue [enticement] to euery other studie or exercise. For the witte therto disposed shall alway couaite congruent mater, wherin it may be occupied. And whan he happeneth to rede or here any fable or historie, forthwith he apprehendeth it more desirously, and retaineth it better than any other, that lacketh the sayd feate; by reason that he hath founde mater apte to his fantasie.67
Elyot sounds a defensive note when he addresses some enuious reder,68 whom he imagines charging him with making a nobleman into a mere mason or painter. For precedents of noble painters, he turns to princes and ancient Roman emperors who painted not out of idleness or voluptuousness, but as an expression of excellent wit and vertuous occupation.69 A
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3. Nicholas Hilliard, Self-Portrait, 1577. Enlargement of a miniature. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
prince or gentleman should model himself after these ancient examples. Elyots argument, which was to be taken up, in part, later in the century, is that painting is a liberal art that involves the acquisition of knowledge and the imitation of virtue essential to those who govern. Like the later writers and the Painter-Stainers themselves, Elyot complained that the English had turned to the skillful painting, carving, and weaving of foreigners, rather than cultivating these arts on native soil. Thus, his advocacy of painting, like that of other English humanists, was inspired by a nationalistic desire to see England excel above other nations in the practice of arts. Another related argument was that the practice of such arts as painting and carving enabled England to beautify her monu-
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ments and adorn her palaces. Painting retained in the nations memory the excellent Actions of men who had honored the state.70 William Segar, in Honor Military, and Civill (1602), claimed in a section on monuments and epitaphs,
Another respect publique, to continue Monuments in reputation, is that thereby divers Arts of good qualitie (as Graving, Carving, Masonry, Painting, Imbossing, and other commendable knowledges) be exercised. For by such industry, many princely buildings be beautified, and many Artificers doe aspire to great fame and riches.71
Segars use of the phrase commendable knowledges reflects his assumption that painting and the other arts he lists are worthy of the name liberal arts. The early modern defenses of painting invariably rehearse the history of painting and invoke ancient and contemporary continental authorities, such as Aristotle and Castiglione. Certain ironies mark these treatises, for the authors promulgate a mythology of the painter, while at the same time descrying his failures. The writers are compelled to attest to a falling away or decay in the art of painting since classical antiquity, yet they remain silent about the role Protestant iconoclasm played in promoting this decline. The Painter-Stainers similarly mention nothing about reforms when they lodged a complaint in petitions (1575, 1578) to Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley, which lamented the aparunt decay of that auncient science.72 While the painters targets were the unregulated, foreign painters and other craftsmen (Plasterers, Heralds) who had encroached on their market, the elite humanists target was the unskilled English painter himself. Contemporary English painting, the authors stated or implied, pales in comparison to the reputed glorious masterpieces of Apelles, Zeuxis, and Parrhasius, as well as the highly skilled works of the Italian masters and Albrecht D urer, who was praised by Hilliard and Erasmus, among others. Ancient works of art, such as Apelles Venus Anadyomene, had acquired the sort of dignity conferred by loss and nostalgia; thus, the anecdotes of the painters lives and works created an unassailable myth of genius and exceptional skill. In his translation of Giovanni Lomazzos mannerist treatise on painting, which he called A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Painting (1598), Richard Haydocke claims that painting never attained to any great perfection amongst us (save in some very fewe of late) yet is it much decayed amongst the ordinarie sorte.73 He chastises artisans, whom he calls saucy doultes, for producing most lame, disproportioned and unseemlie Counterfeites, and making no difference between the renowned sceptor of K:Henry the 8. and Tarltons pipe.74 Yet one of Haydockes purposes in undertaking the translation of Lomazzos treatise is to praise painting and
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to inspire English gentlemen and nobility to strive for excellence in the art: What Prince or ingenuous man is there, which taketh not delight, with his pencell to imitate God in nature, so farre foorth as he is able?75 Here we find an example of how, even with his awareness of the real limitations of contemporary, native practitioners, the artists defender gives voice to the myth of the painters semi-divinity. At Haydockes request, Nicholas Hilliard, Queen Elizabeths favorite limner and one of those fewe of late who could paint skillfully, wrote A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (c. 15981600), in which he describes his working methods and materials, and praises miniature painting as a noble, courtly art; yet he does this, most noticeably, at the expense of other kinds of painting. As an exquisite form of secret painting that involved the use of precious gems and metals, limning alone is a kind of gentill painting . . . that excelleth all other Painting. . . . [and] seemeth to be . . . euen the worke of god and not of man.76 Secrecy was a mark of limnings gentility and discretion. A few years later, Henry Peacham wrote The Art of Drawing (1606; reprinted as Graphice or The Most Avncient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limning, 1612) in which he strongly advocated drawing and painting as worthy practices for gentlemen, as did Elyot many years before. Like Elyot, he also emphasizes memory and a strong imagination as part of the painters cognitive makeup, only he claims that these qualities serve as the midwives to this arte and practice as in all things els the nurse that brings it to the ful growth and perfection.77 He makes clear in this little tract, however, that certain pictures are strictly forbidden to the artist, for they constitute an abuse of painting: these images include that of God, the Trinity, and bawdy subjects. The painter in a Protestant state may not lawfully produce religious images and, beyond that, he admonishes, must abstaine with Christian modesty from drawing arts of filthiness, & laying open those parts which Nature would have kept secret.78 Here the notion of secrecy carries a negative chargeboth the spiritual and material worlds have their secrets, which must not be uncovered, much less represented, by the God-fearing Christian artist. While Haydocke suppressed the sections in Lomazzos text that dealt with religious images, Peacham addressed their forbidden nature. In both cases, the defense of painting took shape in response to the destructive social force of iconoclasm.
Social Interactions among Painters, Dramatists, and Players

Given that early modern discourses promoted both negative and positive views of the painter, the dramatists appropriation of painting and his
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representations of the painter must necessarily appear in a more complex light than stated earlier in this chapter. Let us qualify our claim: while dramatists clearly exploited the painters art and made rhetorical and visual associations between painting and falseness, artificiality, and deceit, they also, at times, recognized the virtues in pictures, their compelling, attractive powers, and the qualities drama sharedor would like to sharewith painting. What is more, I would argue that practical realities, such as social interactions, professional relationships, and collegial friendships between painters and dramatists influenced theatrical representations of painters and their art. This claim gives rise to a number of questions worth exploring briefly: What occasions were there for painters and dramatists to associate with one another in early modern England? How might social relations between these two artists, as well as the players, have affected dramatic representations of painting and the painter character? Were painters among the spectators who frequented the public and private theaters? As Philip Henslowes Diary demonstrates, painters had commercial business with theater owners; they were hired to do practical and ornamental painting for the stage and theater interiors; they were also commissioned to provide painted cloths, portraits, and painted properties.79 Given their professional work in the theaters, painters would have been well positioned to attend plays in those very theaters where their workmanship was on display. Theatergoing, as we well know, was a highly popular form of entertainment that appealed to most Elizabethans, with the notable exception of radical iconoclasts and antitheatrical Puritans. Thus, artisans who had some annual income would not only have been able to afford entrance to the public theaters, but would have also been attracted to plays by virtue of their novelty, popularity, and proximity to their own residences. Although contemporary evidence reveals that gentlemen and Inns of Court students were a highly visible and audible body in the public amphitheaters, Andrew Gurr suggests that citizens and their lesser neighbours the prosperous artisan class were a kind of silent majority in the playhouses.80 Painters were surely a part of this silent majority. Mary Edmonds research demonstrates that painters resided in the parishes surrounding some of the private and public theaters.81 Many foreign artists, particularly limners, settled in the precinct of St. Anne Blackfriars, a former monastic foundation close to St. Pauls Cathedral and playhouse. This precinct was attractive to immigrants, i.e., noncitizens, because it lay outside the Citys jurisdiction. Players, as well, gravitated toward this precinct, where the first and second Blackfriars playhouses were established. Nicholas Hilliard, the master limner, lived in St. Vedasts parish, just northeast of St. Pauls, and the de Critz family, immigrants from the Netherlands, appears to have lived in St. Andrew Undershafts parish,
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adjacent to St. Anne Backfriars. A painters center dedicated to St. Luke, the painters patron saint, existed in the large parish of St. Giles-withoutCripplegate, also residence for many players because of its proximity to the public theaters. Many Dutch, German, and Flemish immigrants, including painters and sculptors, took up residence in Southwark, where the Globe and Rose Theaters were built, during the fifteenth century and were therefore well established by the end of the sixteenth century.82 It seems reasonable to assume that, due to commercial interactions and proximity, painters were among the artisans who attended plays not only in the inexpensive public theaters, but also in private theaters that were in or near their communities. Dramatists writing for court and elite private-hall theaters, such as the Blackfriars or St. Pauls, would have assumed that their audiences included well-trained, foreign and native painters, as well as affluent art connoisseurs and patrons. An emphasis on artifice, courtliness, satire, and parody mark their dramas, which clearly must have catered to the tastes of sophisticated theatergoers. Court dramatists had to keep in mind the literary predilections of Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers who enjoyed masques, wit-contests, allegories, enigmas, and classical tales; if the drama was to have its rehearsal for court in a private theater, the plays audience would first consist of a socially mixed group of wealthy gentry, Inns of Court men, and aspiring professionals of various kinds, each group fashioning themselves as elites.83 The private-theater playwrights frequently allude in their plays to the gentility or desired gentility of their audience. John Marston includes a self-referential moment in Jack Drums Entertainment when two characters discuss performances at St. Pauls theater (the play itself was performed in the Cathedral). Marston flatters his gentle audience:
Planet. Ifaith I like the Audience that frequenteth there With much applause: A man shall not be choakte With the stench of Garlicke, nor be pasted To the barmy Iacket of a Beer brewer. Brabant Junior. Tis a good gentle Audience. . . .84
Compared to the penny entrance fee to public playhouses, the private theaters cost was relatively high. At St. Pauls theater, for example, admission ran between four- and sixpence; and evidence exists for theatergoers having paid a shilling or a crown at other halls.85 Audiences at court and in the private halls would have included many patrons and potential patrons of the arts; thus, dramatists would have been well aware of the social and financial gains involved when their plays were found pleasing. Elite, well-educated, and well-traveled playgoers would have been the most likely candidates to give patronage or social position to a
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dramatist, as well as to commission portraits. They would have found the painter a familiar figure, since many aristocrats would have had their portraits painted. Court and private-theater dramas highlighted the painters aesthetic judgment and the beauty of his images, while at the same time portraying the artist as amorous by nature and at the service of his betters. Unlike the private playhouse dramatists, those working for a publictheater company would have expected a large, socially diverse audience of a few thousand attending each performance. The public playhouse audience was essentially comprised of any person, male or female, commoner or aristocrat, who could pay a penny. Laborers, apprentices, artisans, servants, merchants, and professionals would have attended performances. Painters, especially from the Painter-Stainers guild, would have been in this group, as well. The socially ambitious painter, however, who had his sights set on court would undoubtedly have preferred to pay for private-theater entertainment. Serious treatments of the painter on public stages emphasized the artisans interactions with patrons. In The Spanish Tragedy, for example, the painter is at the mercy of his patrons whims and listens patiently to the description of a painting that turns out to be an impossible charge. The painter also received his most damning representation in a public-theater drama, Arden of Faversham. In this popular play, the painter is a cunning artisan who is hired to make a poisoned portrait and crucifix. The roles for painter characters tended to be small ones, especially those written for public theaters. We might speculate that, given the presence of painters working in the theaters, an actual painter may have been cast to play the role of a painter. We know, in fact, of a number of players who were also painters. The most famous painter-player was Richard Burbage, the great tragedian who belonged to the Lord Chamberlains Men. The painting of Burbage in the Dulwich Collection may very well be his selfportrait. However, given Burbages fame, he would not have been cast to play small roles, at least not in the heyday of his career. A portrait of Shakespeare discovered in 2001 suggests a more realistic possibility. The picture has been identified as the work of John Sanders. Theater historian Frederick Fleay indicates that a James Sandes was an apprentice under the Kings Mens player Augustine Phillips from 16035.86 If Sandes is the John Sanders who painted Shakespeares portrait, then he was a small-time actor who happened to have a gift for painting. The skill required to render the portrait of Shakespeare was above that of the average Tudor painter. Since no other portraits have been authenticated as his, we might speculate that he earned his livelihood both from playing and scenic or ornamental painting in the theaters. Perhaps he was called upon to take bit parts, such as servants and artisans, including painters. Nonetheless, if he was a member of the Kings Men in the early seventeenth century, as Fleay indicates,
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he must have been acquainted with Shakespeare. The portrait bears the date 1603 (a date authenticated by the Canadian Conservation Institute), which would place Shakespeare at thirty-nine years, by which time he had gained popularity with London audiences and economic success through investment in the Globe Theater and other ventures. He had already written a host of successful plays, including Hamlet, and acquired a family coat of arms. That he would seek to have his portrait painted during this successful period in his life is understandable. Other dramatists, such as Ben Jonson, had done as much. And that he would turn to one of his own players or scene-painters to produce the portrait is also probable. We should remember that Shakespeare wrote Timon of Athens, a drama that features the small, but important, role of a painter, a few years after Sanders portrait was completed. Might not Sanders have been the most fitting actor for the painters part? Because dramatists, players, and painters worked in close proximity with one another, their mutual influence upon one another was inevitable. Painters were indispensable to the theater and were therefore called upon to aid in various ways with the visual presentation of plays. Many kinds of painting produced in early modern England, from the portrait miniature to allegorical wall hangings, were made visible upon the stage. By giving their characters painting properties to use on the stage and pictorial tropes to enhance their language, dramatists signaled specific kinds of interactions with images and, at times, a style of acting from their players that resembled the iconic gestures and vividness of painting. The popular Elizabethan metaphor of painting passions was a double-edged one, however, which reflected cultural ambivalence about painted images. The phrase could refer to the players effective bodily representation of emotions and states of mind. At the same time, dramatists could use the painting trope as Shakespeare did in Othello to distinguish between natural and artificial acting. Painted passions in this case referred to a false representation of emotion aimed to deceive an audience. Because images had the potential to call up anxiety and the fear of idolatry, dramatists could use pictures, whether imagined or real, to evoke responses from audiences that ranged from irrational fear and rage to moral contemplation. In the chapters that follow, we shall observe the various strategic ways dramatists employed the character of the painter and his art in dramatic scripts and performances on Londons stages.
2
John Lylys Campaspe and the Subtle Eroticism of the Elizabethan Miniature
If the poet says that he can inflame men with love, which is the central aim in all animal species, the painter has the power to do the same, and to an even greater degree, in that he can place in front of the lover the true likeness of that which is beloved, often making him kiss and speak to it. Leonardo da Vinci, On Painting Apelles. Then will I gaze continually on thy picture. Campaspe. That will not feed thy heart. Apelles. Yet shall it fill mine eye. Besides, the sweet thoughts, the sure hopes, thy protested faith, will cause me to embrace thy shadow continually in mine arms, of the which by strong imagination I will make a substance. John Lyly, Campaspe
For centuries, ecclesiastical art had served a positive function

in the devotional lives of English Catholics. With the Reformation came suspicions about the spiritual validity of image-use in worship; religious reformers sought to break the emotional and psychological hold images had over the devout. As we saw in the previous chapter, secular images as well were regarded as visually potent, compelling, and potentially dangerous to the spiritual well-being of the viewer. Leonardo da Vincis famous examples of paintings strange powers suggest how images of many kinds were understood to provoke responses from Renaissance viewers. He tells a curious story in one of his manuscripts about a man who purchased a holy picture from him. The man came to love the picture so much that he wished to kiss it. Because he feared the sin of idolatry, he wished to have the religious attributes removed so that he might kiss the image without guilt. In time, however, he found that his conscience overcame his sighs and lust, and he was forced to banish it from his house.1 The man became obsessed with the picture and believed that it possessed great powerit aroused devotion, lust, fear, and guilt in him. Because his fear of idolatry was greater than his love of the image, he ultimately could not alter his 66
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perception of the picture even after its religious attributes had been removed. The sighs and lust elicited by the picture continued to disturb the man; therefore, he had no choice but to banish the image from his sight. Leonardos anecdote proves that painting arouses desires in ways that poetry cannot (his famous paragone), but he also reveals a basic early modern assumption about the ontology of pictures. Once the painters image is made, men perceive in it a nature, a presence, and a function. A holy picture, it would seem, cannot be divested easily of its intrinsic holiness, nor are secular pictures mere representations; rather, viewers intuit a presence in any image that appears in human guise. The anecdote demonstrates that the act of gazing upon an image, whether sacred or secular, is inherently fraught with dangers of emotional and moral kinds. Like many early modern people, iconoclasts included, Leonardo assumes that paintings sensuous immediacy and lifelikeness (true likeness) cause viewers to attribute a spirit or humanity to pictures and to respond accordingly. He offers other examples of a secular nature that illustrate strong emotional and physical responses to images. Leonardo describes how people yawn constantly while gazing upon a painted yawn, and kiss and speak to pictures of their beloved. He relates how paintings of libidinous and wanton acts have driven spectators to indulge in these same activities.2 These examples drawn from Leonardos experience reveal features of popular belief about image-potency; they also indicate kinds of visual experiences, associated often with Catholic devotion, that provoked iconoclastic sentiment. Although reformers were generally successful in suppressing the use of religious images throughout England, they could neither license peoples imaginations nor control beliefs regarding other kinds of images. One excellent example of a secular image to which people expressed both amorous and spiritual devotion was the popular limned miniature, which from all accounts seems to have elicited strong feelings from those who possessed them. Countless examples from early modern English drama suggest that, despite the reformers iconoclastic teachings, people retained some vestige of Catholic belief in the liveliness of portraits and continued to treat them in ways that might be construed as dangerously close to idolatry. Stage portraits were used most often in an erotic context: when a lover made love to an image, kissing and fondling it, he betrayed an excessive devotion not unlike idolatry. The stage lover treated the image as a surrogate that possesses the beloveds qualities. When the makers of such images appeared on the stage, they were typically lovers themselves who used their art in pursuit of erotic fulfillment. Such was the case with the earliest extant English drama to represent a painter, John Lylys A most excellent Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes (printed in 1584). Given the religious controversy over images and Lylys attraction to classical poets and painters, it is no acci-
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dent that his play emphasizes the association of painting with eroticism and idolatry. Lylys painter is the great classical artist Apelles who, in the course of painting a portrait, falls hopelessly in love with his sitter, Campaspe; at the same time, he experiences the erotic lure of her portrait. In one emotionally charged exchange between the lovers, the artist exclaims that he will love her image, embracing it until his strong imagination renders it a substance. Apelles recognizes that the portrait is a shadow, yet willfully imagines it to be as substantial as the woman he loves. Such a desire reflects a dangerous tendency toward secular idolatry, or even pagan idolatry, for Apelles claims that Campaspe is the express image of Venus (3.5.46 47). Because Apelles worships an image he has made with his own hands, his devoted gaze and erotic caresses are like those of Pygmaliondirected toward his own art. This is a radically ambivalent portrayal of an artist on the Elizabethan stage; although Apelles is recognized as highly skilled, he undergoes an experience similar to that of idolaters. For an Elizabethan audience, the coexistence of classical values and a Protestant ambivalence about images and image-makers would not have been perceived as odd; rather, the refashioning of a classical story according to a Protestant ethos made its pagan origins morally relevant and mildly scandalous. Lylys portrayal of Apelles taps into iconoclastic fears about images, yet at the same time indulges his audiences iconophilia. To understand why and how Lyly performed this feat, let us examine Campaspe, the dramatists possible relationships with painters, and his handling of literary and visual sources for evidence of tension between iconoclastic and iconophilic impulses. Despite the first quartos title, Lylys play came to be known as Campaspe, which reflects the dramatists and his coterie audiences interest in Campaspes character and legend. Campaspe seems to have been popular, for three editions were printed in 1584, and another in 1591. In the wellknown story from classical antiquity, Campaspe is Alexander the Greats Theban concubine; when Alexander commissions his favorite painter, Apelles, to paint her portrait, the artist falls in love with her. Perceiving this, Alexander conquers his own desire by magnanimously bestowing his beloved concubine upon the painter. This tale became emblematic for painters and kings alike in the Renaissance: Alexanders respect for Apelles conferred dignity upon painting, and his transcendence of love reflected the triumph of royal self-command. Yet Campaspe exerts her own power in Lylys drama as the compelling inspiration for painting and love. Indeed, the scenes featuring Campaspe and the painter produce an emotional center of gravity that competes with scenes governed by an antiromantic masculine discourse and Alexanders declaration of a not-so-hard-won restraint. The implied stage design for the play symbolically separates the charac-
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ters into camps. The plays groupings call for at least three houses, or standing properties made of Canvasse, fframed, ffashioned & paynted accordingly.3 The painters workshop with Apelles pictures of Venus and the women ravished by Jupiter are prominently featured in one locale on the stage with the cynic Diogenes tub and Alexanders palace positioned at other points on the stage.4 In front of the artists workshop, in the midst of erotic pictures of Venus, Leda, Europa, Alcmena, and Dana e, a private relationship unfolds between Apelles and Campaspethis site, therefore, proves to be the most visually and emotionally charged area of the stage, for it is fraught with the energies of art and desire. Framing the lovers dialogues, the philosophers, men of state, and apprentices offer critical and debased views of love and art. Although Diogenes may rail against love from his tub, calling it a filthy lust you colour under a courtly colour of love (4.1.39 40), his jaundiced description does not fit the experience of Apelles and Campaspe. And despite Alexanders ultimate figuring of his competition with Apelles for Campaspes love as a peacetime interlude, even a game of sorts, the rhetorical effects of the lovers heightened repartee and agonized speeches bear emotional weight in the theater.5 Lylys prologues, however, coyly de-emphasize the experience of romantic love, as well as the dramas ability to represent truth in a substantial way. In his prologue at court, Lyly calls attention to theatrical performance as an illusory art, comparable to Agrippas shadows and a painting covered by a pleasing cloth. His figure of Agrippas shadowsspirits conjured from the deadis an ambivalent one, for with it he associates the dramatist with magic and necromancy. He was certainly aware that players and plays were commonly called shadows by Elizabethans; so, too, was painting, for though these arts had their powers, as we have seen, there was a rhetorical insistence on their insubstantiality. In an iconoclastic culture, the Platonic discourse of substance/shadow countered the instinctual, emotional responses experienced by spectators before works of art. When one is constantly reminded, even by artists themselves, that art is all shadow, no substance, the warning is clear: do not mistake artistic illusion for truth. A play is mere shadow. This ontological argument serves as a clever rebuttal to iconoclasts and antitheatricalists however, for while it concedes that art is illusion, it allows art to exist in a figurative realm; art, then, has a special reality of its own and does not attempt to be taken for substance, or the thing itself. Lylys comparison of his prologue to an attractive curtain placed over a painting is as strategic as his shadow figure. He invents a case in which Alcibiades covered his pictures, being owls and apes, with a curtain embroidered with lions and eagles (4 5); analogously, Lyly offers his smooth excuse (6), a rhetorically pleasing apology, in order to cover the
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rough, shadowy material of his play. His figure of the drama as a hidden painting, however, strongly suggests the motif of secrecy, which, in the play, refers to the acts of painting and wooing, as well as the artists competition with his patron. With his play, Lyly would seem to be promising nothing more than an idle pastime for the Queen; to entertain her, he resurrects the shadow Alexander from the grave so that he might seek, yet ultimately transcend, love of a common woman. Yet the presence of Apelles and Campaspe exerts a counterpressure to this claim. Not only does Campaspe appear as the very image of Venus and the subject of erotic painting (what lies beneath the curtain), but the lovers form a secret alliance and, in doing so, present an argument for the claims of love over war and politics. Lyly betrays a fascination with the genius of Apelles, whose images were renowned for their compelling grace and beauty. In a sense he competes with Apelles in the creation of beautiful shadows that burn brightly for a moment and, though insubstantial, take love as their substance. Lylys ambivalent figures for dramatic performance shrewdly call attention to illusion-making, while at the same time implying that there is a subtle power in the illusion. Indeed, he intends for Elizabeth and the courts spectators to be favorably impressed by the representation of a court artist, whose tremendous skill commands respect and admiration from a great patron, Alexander. Lyly must have seen himself, to some extent, in the figure of Apellesa skilled artist seeking to please a patron with grace and tact.6 Lylys career as a literary figure was marked by the rewards and constraints of patronage and professional ambition.7 Born of prosperous parents in Canterbury, Lyly received a B. A. and M. A. from Oxford and then settled in London where the young literati, such as Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser, were located. During the 1580s, Lyly enjoyed the patronage of a leading courtier, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was Lord Burghleys ward and son-in-law. As Lyly was related to Burghley, he must have met Oxford through that connection. The Earl gave Lyly a temporary lease to the Blackfriars Theater in 1583, enabling him to take command of a troupe of boy players (an amalgamation of Pauls Boys and the Children of the Chapel) and write dramas for both a gentle London audience and the court. Oxford commissioned dramas for the 158384 Christmas season from Lyly, most likely as bids for the Queens favor, for he had been notoriously out of her favor after his amorous pursuit of Anne Vavasour, a gentlewoman of Elizabeths bedchamber. Lylys Campaspe was performed first at the Blackfriars for a select audience and then at Elizabeths court. Although Lyly had the prestige of serving as Oxfords servant and secretary, a position he had won after his success with his witty Euphues novellas, his ultimate ambition, as his many letters of petition reveal, was
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to work directly for the Queen. Along with Campaspe, he witnessed another success at court during the winter season with Sappho and Phao (printed 1584). This brief period of productivity, however, gave way to misfortune, for Lyly lost the Blackfriars lease in 1584 and landed in prison for failure to pay his debts. The Queen herself released Lyly, perhaps due to the favorable impression he had made with his witty dramas. Later in the decade, he resumed his dramatic writing for court, while pursuing the coveted position of Master of Revels. However, he lost direct access to court when theatrical activities at St. Pauls were suspended in 1590; although there was a revival later in the decade, Lylys dramatic success belonged to the past. In an eloquent petition to the Queen, he reminds her that she had encouraged him to direct his energies toward attaining this position: I was entertained, your Majestys servant, by your own gracious favor, strengthened with conditions that I should aim all my courses at the Revels.8 Written at some point in the 1590s, he notes, almost despairingly, that he has lived in hope and unwearied patience for ten years. When the Revels Master-in-reversion was appointed to Sir George Buc in the late 1590s, Lyly set his sights on the Mastership of the Tents and Toils, but that ambition shortly proved fruitless as well. Ultimately, Lylys petitions were in vain. As G. K. Hunter argues, like many idealistic humanist courtiers, Lyly entertained the Queen in the hope of honorable status and tangible reward, both of which proved to be elusive.9 Most critics have placed Lylys dramatic works in a courtly context, viewing them as examples of royal flattery and appeals for royal patronage.10 While it is certainly the case that Lyly desired a position at court, it cannot fail to strike the reader of Campaspe that Lyly expressed ambivalence about the constraints and dangers to artistic independence entailed by patronage. His dramatic portrait of the courtly artist in both secret and public competition with his monarch captures this ambivalence; furthermore, Lyly portrays the relationships of art to eros and political power as fraught with conflict and danger. In depicting the painters position in relation to his patron, Lyly explores the tension between freedom and constraint, a tension he was surely aware of in his station as Oxfords secretary. Because of Lylys serious interest in painting, his associations with Oxfords circle, and his ambitions at court, it is likely that the dramatist encountered some of the practicing painters of the day, including the great miniature-painter and goldsmith Nicholas Hilliard. By 1572 Hilliard had become Queen Elizabeths limner, and his reputation among courtiers, aristocrats, and poets was of the finest, as John Donne attests: a hand, or eye / By Hilliard drawne, is worth an history, / By a worse painter made.11 As artists in the service of the monarch and her courtiers, Lyly and Hilliard would have been highly sensitized to the subtle forms of
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power, pleasure, and reward that such a relationship entailed. Lylys representations of the painter, especially in Campaspe and his Euphues novellas, reflect the subtle balance of power in the artist-patron relationship. Both artists understood, as well, the unmistakable element of eroticism in art that involved the human form, especially the face. In the act of painting, this eroticism erupts in part because the painter is given a privileged position in a household or at court; he is allowed to gaze at length and possibly in private upon his sitter. The painters gaze may become voluptuous and desiring if the subject is attractive in any way. He, then, is transformed from a coolly objective artisan into a passionate lover whose painting becomes an act of possession. The painter, thus, morally endangers himself as well as others for, as Puritans and reformers argued, images give rise to concupiscence and idolatry. In Elizabethan performances of Campaspe, the painters erotic transformation and ensuing moral distress surely became apparent to spectators. Lylys view of Apelles is typical of how a Protestant might regard a painter of pagan erotic imagesambivalent, somewhat puritanical, and colored by a fascination with the dangerous, hidden powers unleashed by artistic imitation. Once Apelles has fallen in love, strong imagination gives birth to eroticism and idolatry: he worships the shadow of Campaspe because he cannot have the woman in the flesh. In the end, however, Lyly attempts to defuse unruly passions and to avert moral danger in his play. He has Alexander symbolically unite art and love, image and substance, through the marital bond of Campaspe and Apelles; the private spheres of love and art are thus separated from the public spheres of governance and war. Alexander has proven that he is neither lover nor artist. After his lesson in drawing from Apelles, he claims that he would rather be setting of a battle than blotting of a board (3.4.12526). Alexander will conquer the world, his rightful arena; the painter can have love and domesticity. The monarchs struggle with love, in truth, has been little more than a trivial, peacetime pursuit, though not quite an abstract debate taking place in [his] mind, an intellectual exercise, as one critic claimed.12 Decorum and order are established at the plays end: love is a fitting muse for a painter, a mere toy for a monarch. The traditional association between eroticism and painting can be traced back to the lives and loves of the ancient painters. The most famous and highly revered of all classical painters was Apelles of Cos (4th c. bc), who was frequently invoked by Renaissance writers as the prototypical painter and the embodiment of excellence in painting. He was famed for ingenium, or inborn ability and genius, as well as charis, whose Latin equivalents are venustas, meaning visible grace, glamour, sexual charm, and gratia, signifying internal grace and favor given, received or possessed.13 He was famous, as well, for having fallen in love with Alexander the Greats
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mistress, who was, according to some sources, his model for the famous painting of Venus Anadyomene (Venus Rising from the Sea). His genius in painting was best expressed through graceful representations of eros; indeed, the subject most worthy of fame is Venus herself, for she is the corporeal presence of grace, or venustas, the very root of her name. Ironically, Apelles fame grew through literary rather than visual sources, for his masterpieces disappeared over time; his life and works were preserved in the anecdotes and histories of ancient writers, most especially those of the Elder Pliny. Pliny may have claimed for Apelles that his Artemis in the midst of a Band of Maidens offering a Sacrifice was thought to have surpassed Homers verses describing the same subject;14 however, the fact remains that the material evidence (the painting itself ) had disappeared by the time he wrote his Natural History. Early modern readers had only descriptions such as the one provided by Pliny to evoke an image of what had formerly existed. What is revealing in Plinys account of Apelles life and art is the precedence he gives to poetry when he praises the painting of Venus: this like other works is eclipsed yet made famous by the Greek verses which sing its praises.15 Painting is thus placed in a position of dependence on poetry, for it is verse, Pliny argues, that confers immortality upon the works of painters. Indeed, ekphrastic verse often represented actual works of art in vivid, evocative detail. Implicit in Plinys claim for verse is a paragone between painting and poetry. Poetry, the logocentric art, asserts her longevity and her authority through the ability to confer fame. Painting not only cannot speak for herself but also, given her material existence, cannot stave off ruin and destruction. The irony of this paragonal situation cannot fail to strike us, if we recall Leonardos views on the matter. The problem for poetry is as follows: if poets grant that painting has engaged their imaginations to the extent that they imitate the painters images, then what they produce is in fact an imitation of a far superior imitation of nature. Indeed, Leonardo grants painting the status of a body, while poetry is that bodys shadow. He qualifies this comparison by exclaiming that the case for poetry is even worse than this, for poets create an imaginary form of the body, which is born in the darkness of the inner eye.16 When the poet takes painting as his subject, he has as much admitted that the painter, rather than nature, is his muse. The poet may grant longevity to the painter whose pictures have been destroyed, but in doing so he has betrayed a dependence upon painting that is unmistakable. For continental painters seeking models of authority, Plinys text offered confirmation of paintings ancient status as a noble art and the monarchs position as magnanimous patron. Following Pliny, painters such as Francesco Morandini, Willem van Haecht II, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, portrayed Alexander the Great honoring Apelles with a visit to his studio
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and the commission to paint his concubine Campaspe. According to art historian David Cast, this anecdote became legend and was not only an extremely popular subject invoked frequently during the Renaissance, but a slightly enticing one due to Campaspes nudity.17 Many paintings, such as Jodocus a Winghes mannerist Apelles malt Kampaspe (c. 1600), feature a double image of feminine nuditythe female subjects lovely body and the painted canvas of a nude (figure 4). Winghe chose to emphasize eros and the painter, rather than Alexander and his grand gesture. The associations with Venus and the art of painting are made explicit through the depiction of traditional iconography and the painters tools (rule, compass, paints, brushes). The nude Campaspe stands with her lovely, serpentine back to the viewer; she is positioned in the foreground stepping out of a scallop shell with an attendant holding a mirror (an attribute of both Venus and painting). In the center of Winghes painting stands Apelles picture, which reveals a frontal view of Campaspes unclothed body, apple in one hand (suggesting Venuss victory in the Judgment of Paris) and Neptune with his trident. Cupid stands below the painted image of Campaspe with his arrow striking Apelles. An angel descends from above the picture to crown the love-struck Apelles king of painters. A few interpreters, such as Jesuit Carlo Rosignoli and painter Fran cois Boitard, regarded the anecdote as obscene, but as Cast puts it, the theme was one that any gentleman could admit to his house and show his friends with pride and a clear conscience.18 Any gentleman on the continent, that is. Pride and a clear conscience were evidently not the sentiments regarding this theme in England, for the legendary tale was not adopted as a suitable subject for English painters, nor does it seem to have been depicted by continental painters working in England. The tale did make its way into English ballads of the mid-sixteenth century, where enticing or bawdy themes were expected and appreciated. Occasionally poets mentioned Apelles as an exemplary painter.19 More interesting, however, is the appearance of the Apelles-Campaspe-Alexander legend as a dramatic subject for English Renaissance theater. Lylys Campaspe is unique in representing a classical artist on the Elizabethan stage. As we shall see, Lylys medium and his cultural milieu exerted shaping influences on the retelling of this famous tale. Protestant attitudes toward love, painting, and images mark some of the central differences between Lylys play and the classicalcontinental versions of the tale. Throughout his literary career, from his early euphuestic prose works to his Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Mitcham (1598),20 Lyly presented the classical painter as a figure of the Renaissance artist. The classical Greek painters Parrhasius, Zeuxis, Timanthes and, above all, Apelles appear in his highly popular prose works, Euphues: The Anatomy
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4. Jodocus a Winghe, Apelles malt Kampaspe, c. 1600. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien.
of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580). In his dedicatory epistle to Edward de Vere in the latter work, Lyly likens himself to Phydias the first Paynter who shadowed his own person as an experiment designed to offend no one but himself.21 Similarly, Lyly shadowed Euphues, apparently a figure of himself, and then rendered a second portrait after the first met with success. He compares himself, as well, to Apelles who When Bucephalus was painted . . . craued the iudgement of none but Zeuxis;22 de Vere, a poet and dramatist, plays Zeuxis to Lylys
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Apelles. He poses as a naif when he calls himself an unskillful and naughty painter who is really fit only to grinde colours for Appelles and must shield himself under the name of his most noble Patron.23 He claims his portrait of Euphues to be unfinished, as was Apelles famous Venus, but insists that Apelles dyed not before he could finish Venus, but before he durst.24 Thus, he suggests something forbidden, daring, half-hidden in his portrait which must be imagined by his patron and reader. Lyly regarded Apelles as a sympathetic, albeit troubling figure for the artist: as Alexander the Greats painter, he had status and important public commissions, yet he had to negotiate his authority with diplomacy and wit. He was, at the same time, a devotee of female beauty and worshipper of Venus, as Michael Pincombe puts it,25 and therefore susceptible to the snares of erotic love. Following the Platonic tradition, Lyly finds that danger lies in gazing upon beautiful bodies, for the eyes are the conduits to the other senses. Visual pleasures are, at root, fetishistic:
Loue commeth in at the eye, not at the eare, by seeing Natures workes, not by hearing womens words. And such effects and pleasure doth sight bring vnto vs, that diuers haue lyued by looking on faire and beautifull pictures, desiring no meate, nor harkning to any Musick. . . . Pigmalion for beautie, loued an Image of Iuory, Appelles the counterfeit of Campaspe, and none we haue heard off so sencelesse, that the name of beautie, cannot either breake or bende. It is this onely that Princes desire in their Houses, Gardeins, Orchards, and Beddes, following Alexander, who more esteemed the face of Venus, not yet finished, then the Table of the nyne Muses perfected.26
In this passage from Euphues and his England, the beauty of a woman bewitches even the wise, and most especially the artificer who makes the image and therefore has intimate contact with both the model (Natures work) and the counterfeit (the beautiful picture). Beauty in a portrait works on the senses so powerfully that the gazer finds his will broken by the image. Lylys examples of such possession by an image are taken from the ancient world and reveal the seeds of his soon-to-be-written drama Campaspe: Pygmalion, Apelles, and Alexander all find themselves enraptured by a work of art. In Campaspe, Apelles seems compelled as much by the beauty of Campaspe, as by her image. Lyly conflates Pygmalions dotage with Apelles skill in his representation of the painter, which suggests that he perceived the dangerous power that lies in all images of humanity, as well as in the process of artistic imitation itself.27 The artist cannot help but wish to see his images quickened for, as the common trope would have it, they lack only breath in order to live. Like many educated Elizabethans who revered classical authorities, Lyly would have known the anecdotes of Apelles life found in the works
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of Pliny the Elder, Aelianus, and Quintilian. In Aelianus, he would have read,
Many instances of love among the ancients have been recorded for us, among them the following prominent cases. Pausanias was in love with his wife, Apelles with Alexanders mistressshe was called Pancaste and came from Larisa. She is said to have been the first woman Alexander slept with.28
Aelianus slyly breaks off his list of prominent cases to record historical hearsay about how Alexander the Great lost his virginity. One gathers that these are laughable, pathetic loves in Aelianuss estimation. This is not the case in Lylys portrayal of Campaspe and Apelles, where love springs from contemplation of beauty and becomes a subject worthy of debate. Lylys Alexander believes he loves truly, even though Campaspe is his captive and can claim no more than a modest birth: I love Campaspe, a thing far unfit for a Macedonian, for a king, for Alexander (2.2.24 25). He refuses to entertain Hephestions argument that love is effeminizing. Significantly, Alexander has not taken Campaspe as his concubine in Lylys drama. Indeed, Campaspe and Alexander are never alone on the stage; rather, he contemplates his love for her from afar. Perhaps the best-known account of Apelles in the Renaissance, surely Lylys major source, came from Plinys Natural History, a much-admired collection of lore. Pliny describes Apelles in the following way: he possessed great courtesy of manners, which made him more agreeable to Alexander the Great, who frequently visited his studiofor, as we have said, Alexander had published an edict forbidding any other artist to paint his portrait.29 Apelles manner, as much as his skill, compel Alexander to recognize the authority of his art. When Alexander attempts to hold forth on the subject of painting, Apelles would politely advise him to drop the subject, saying that the boys engaged in grinding the colours were laughing at him: so much power did his authority exercise over a King who was otherwise of an irascible temper.30 Alexander not only gave Apelles sole command to paint his portraits, he also honored him with a special commission. Alexander had such an admiration:
for the beauty of his favourite mistress, named Pancaspe, that he gave orders that she should be painted in the nude by Apelles, and then discovering that the artist while executing the commission had fallen in love with the woman, he presented her to him, great-minded as he was and still greater owing to his control of himself, and of a greatness proved by this action as much as by any other victory: because he conquered himself, and presented not only his bedmate but his affection also to the artist, and was not even influenced by regard for the feelings of his favourite in having been recently the mistress of a monarch and now belonged to a painter. Some persons believe that she was the
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model from which the Aphrodite Anadyomene (Rising from the Sea) was painted.31
The eroticism implicit in painting a nude from life can be inferred from this account, although it is clear that this is not Plinys interest. Indeed, Apelles was not known as an erotic painter per se, even though his most famous subject is Venus. In Plinys histories, it is Parrhasius who paints minoribus tabellis libidines, smaller pictures of a libidinous or wanton nature.32 Lyly himself distinguishes between libidinal and graceful portrayals of women; in the dedication to Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, he claims, Parativs drawing the counterfaite of Helen . . . made the attier of hir head loose, who being demaunded why he dyd so, he aunswered, she was loose.33 Apelles is distinguished from such painters, for he was famous for representing grace, not wantonness, in its various aspects. Lyly would have known Sir Thomas Hobys translation of Castigliones The Book of the Courtier (1561), which offers a more nuanced and idealized understanding of the relationship between affection, beauty, and the painters skill. The Count argues that Appelles conceived a far greater joy in behoulding the beawty of Campaspes then did Alexander for
the knowleage in peinctinge is cause of verye great pleasure. And this let them think that do enjoy and view the beauty of a woman so throughly that they think them selves in paradise, and yet have not the feate of peinctinge: the which if they had, they would conceive a farre greater contentation, for then should they more perfectly understand the beauty that in their brest engendreth such hartes ease.34
The Count further interprets the tale by suggesting that Alexander bestows Campaspe upon Apelles when he realizes that the painters skill enables him to knowe her more perfectlye then he did.35 While many things may enflame our mindes, he claims, those loves that arise onelye of the beauty which we dyscerne superficially in bodyes, without doubt will bring a farre greater delite to him that hath a more skill therein then to him that hath but a little.36 Here Lyly would have found a Neoplatonic view of beauty and a defense of the painters art; the painters special knowledge enables him to contemplate beauty more profoundly than a world conqueror or mere courtier can. While Lylys Alexander barely resembles Castigliones refined, wise monarch, his Apelles does fit the model of the sensitive artist who can perceive Campaspes beauty with great joy and admiration. Lyly, however, departs significantly from his literary sources in reflecting ambivalence about the nature of the painters love: is his love born of an irrational eroticism, a Neoplatonic or aesthetic appreciation of his sitters beauty, an idolatrous love of woman and image, or a Pygmalion-like
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devotion to his own artistry? One might easily answer in the affirmative to each of these views at different moments in the play. Let us examine Lylys English Renaissance version of the classical tale to see how he negotiates this ambivalence about eros, beauty, idolatry, and painting. Lyly elaborates upon the classical story by imagining four encounters between Apelles and Campaspe and giving the lovers soliloquies in which they betray their inner anguish. The subtle eroticism expressed between the painter and his beautiful sitter derives from the artistic situation, which provokes forbidden love. Lyly invents wooing scenes marked by repartee between artist and sitter, a paragone between nature and art, and a Pygmalion-Galatea subtext. He adds the comic role of the witty apprentice, Psyllus, whose shrewd comments about his masters art not only undercut paintings seriousness, but also signify its potentially dangerous nature: the better he shadows her face the more will he burn his own heart (3.2.67). Painting from life is shown to have its erotic dangers. The creative process itself has the power to burn or inflame the heart with love, but it is only the work of a highly skilled painter that can activate such a passion. Like a religious devotee who worships and kisses an image of the Virgin or Venus, Apelles loses himself in rapturous moments of secular idolatry. Desire compels him to embrace Campaspes shadow. He is a Pygmalion-like maker who imitates Natures work of art and then dotes upon his own creation. Similarly, in Lylys prologue for the court, the author refers to his dramatic images as Agrippas shadows, which can take varying shapes according to spectators perceptions and the torchs light, which consumes itself as it burns brightly for others. These are ambiguous representations of drama itself, as we saw earlier in this chapterself-deprecatory, yet revelatory of the theaters power and allure. Lylys ambivalence about love in Campaspe is not his only departure from the legend as previously represented in western literature and painting. Unlike the previous versions of the legend, Lylys Campaspe has become a witty heroine in a drama. Not only this, Lyly elevates her status from concubine, which implies sexual union and enforced prostitution, to dignified, virtuous maid, which renders her a virgin worthy of honorable love. Her first words in the drama reflect a desire to keep her honor; she appeals to Alexander to preserve her virginity, which is dearer to her than life. Alexander not only respects her chastity, he also frees her and calls her a gentlewoman. Lyly, of necessity, rejected her depiction as a nude or semi-nude figure, which had firmly established her as an erotic subject, as well as the object of the erotic gaze, in most Renaissance paintings of the legend. This was an understandably necessary shift in focus given the conventions of the childrens theater for which Lyly wrote: codes of public decency, as well as the requisite suspension of disbelief in the theater, dictated that the juvenile boy actors who played women be fully costumed.
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One might wonder whether Apelles is to be painting Campaspe in the nude inside his workshop, a discovery space on one side of the stage. Lyly cautiously diverts the audiences attention from this provocative question by having Apelles dwell upon Campaspes face: O fair face! O unhappy hand! And why didst thou draw it so fair a face? O beautiful countenance, the express image of Venus, but somewhat fresher . . . (3.5.44 47). Lyly avoids confronting the female nude by focusing instead on Campaspes sweet face. Alexanders first words of praise for Campaspe indicate that he had been gazing not upon her sensuous body, but rather upon her beautiful countenance: Hephestion, how do ye like the sweet face of Campaspe? (2.2.2) Indeed, throughout the play, much emphasis is placed upon the beauty of the feminine face, rather than the body. As we know, nudes were not the typical fare of Elizabethan painters or patrons of the arts. Yet this is not to say that Lylys drama does not explore the eroticism of painting; rather, his approach is subtle and might be best likened to that of an Elizabethan miniaturist, who for the most part was not concerned with representing the body, much less the female nude. It is the aesthetic of the miniature that influenced Lylys depiction of painting in Campaspe because it provided a solution to the moral and representational problems of presenting a nude on the Elizabethan stage. Lylys attraction to miniatures complements his literary aesthetic, which is defined by attention to detailed, even precious, rhetorical ornamentation. G. K. Hunter has aptly called Lyly an exquisite miniaturist,37 which applies equally as well to Lylys Apelles. Editor R. Warwick Bond has speculated that Lyly actually knew a painter, perhaps the Flemish Lucas de Heere, and frequented a painters studio in 1579.38 Bond is correct in assuming that Lyly knew more about painting than what he found in Pliny, but if Lyly had made the acquaintance of a painter, or based his descriptions of painting upon a known artists works and techniques, it probably was not Lucas de Heere. The Protestant exile had fled to London in the 1560s, but then returned to Ghent just after the Pacification in 1576.39 A more likely candidate might be the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, the prototypical Elizabethan artist, who seems to have had a close connection with John Lyly, as David Evitt speculates.40 After a two-years stay in France, Hilliard returned to London at some point in 1578 or 1579 and worked both at court and in his house/workshop in Gutter Lane off Cheapside, an area just northeast of St. Pauls.41 While Lyly never indicates that Apelles is painting a miniature, the painters attention to Campaspes countenance, her delicate coloring and lovely facial features, resembles the somewhat idealized and intimate rendering of the face typical of a Hilliard limning. Hilliard wrote in A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (c. 1600), of all things, the perfection is to imitate the face of mankind . . . so near and so well after
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5. Nicholas Hilliard, Alice Hilliard, 1578. Enlargement of a miniature. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
the life.42 Hilliards portrait after the life of his wife, Alice, exemplifies the grace and lovely elegance of the artists miniatures (figure 5). Alices face appears luminous with her darkly accentuated eyes focused intimately on the viewer. Her slightly exposed breast reinforces the subtle sensuality of her face. Elizabethan portraits, especially miniatures, were focused primarily on the face. Although these pictures shared some qualities with funeral effigies and heraldry, and in that sense reflected symbolic and social meanings, miniatures tended to be treated as private images and, what is more, amorous images.43 Understanding the discreet charm and eroticism of the
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Elizabethan portrait as Lyly must have known it seems a rather elusive enterprise for us, but only if we take the voluptuous continental nude as our norm for representing beauty and erotic love. Continental paintings such as Sandro Botticellis The Birth of Venus (c. 148586) and Bartholomaeus Sprangers Venus und Adonis (c. 1597) depict Venuss beauty and charming graces primarily through her body (figure 6). Curious as it may seem, Lylys vision of Venus suppresses the body altogether. Venuss allure is found in her face alone; Apelles calls the beautiful painted image of Campaspes face the express image of Venus (3.5.46 47), and when Alexander asks Apelles whether he has finished his painting of Venus (undoubtedly a reference to the famous Venus Anadyomene), he asks, Is Venus face yet finished? (2.2.175, my emphasis). Thus, Lyly reveals the meanings of the goddesss root name, venustas grace, glamour, and sexual charmthrough the beauty of Venuss and Campaspes faces. Lylys concentration on Campaspes face reflects his awareness of the new aesthetic of the miniature cultivated by an Elizabethan elite in the 1570s and 1580s. Unlike large-scale English portraits, which reflected the patrons lineage, wealth, and accomplishments through external signs such as costume and coat of arms, miniatures focused on the face in its naked delicacy and grace. The miniature was almost exclusively associated with the aristocracy and the court, Lylys intended audience for Campaspe. As Hilliard emphasized in his limning treatise, it is a kind of gentle painting. . . . Moreover, it is secret: a man may use it, and scarcely be perceived of his own folk. . . . [It] is for the service of noble persons very meet, in small volumes, in private manner . . . [and] of necessity requireth the partys own presence.44 These small images of the face were regarded as intimate love tokens or signs of affection to be exchanged and kissed; we can see from many of the surviving Elizabethan portraits, both large and small, that they were worn in lockets on chains, sometimes close to the heart. They could also be kept hidden from public view in small cabinets. The Scottish ambassador, Sir James Melville, discovered this when Queen Elizabeth ushered him into her bedchamber to show him her cabinet filled with divers little pictures wrapt within paper. Upon one of those portraits was written My Lords picture, which was that of the Earl of Leicester.45 This coy, semiprivate exchange between a queen and an ambassador betrays the extent to which miniatures were treasured as sentimentally valuable objects through which people could reveal their affections. Nicholas Hilliards treatise on miniature-painting can offer us an instructive text on how Elizabethans understood the subtle eroticism of the face. One of Hilliards concerns is with how to capture grace in countenance, by which the affections appear.46 In contemplating how the painter must gaze upon his sitters face, caught within a mutual erotic gaze, Hilliard reveals a common temptation experienced by drawers after the
6. Bartholomaeus Spranger, Venus und Adonis, c. 1597. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien.
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life.47 When the painter observes his beautiful sitters lovely graces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances which suddenly like lightning pass, his judgment cannot help but become affectionate and his young and simple heart blast [ed] with love.48 Hilliard warns the painter that he must be in heart wise, as it will hardly fail that he shall be amorous and therefore, he concludes, the art of painting is fittest for gentlemen.49 Since it is natural for mens minds to become inflamed by the beauty of human shape, the gentle painter must be vigilant and sublimate his desire; by doing so, he shall come to experience a more amorous joy and contentment than the vulgar.50 His passage concludes with a catalogue of keen observations made by the painter that are causally related to the proper (i.e., gentle) channeling of his affections. The painter shows his skill and wisdom by applying his affectionate good judgment to the hard . . . matter . . . [at] handcalling those graces one by one to their due places: noting how in smiling how the eye changeth and narroweth, holding the sight just between the lids as a centre; how the mouth a little extendeth both ends of the line upwards, and so forth.51 However, as Clark Hulse notes, the artist is suspended in the gaze of his sitters, poised on the border between gentility and profligacy.52 Even Hilliard, as aware as he was of the subtle interactions between painter and sitter, could not escape this reality. Lyly, too, must have felt some uneasiness about the passions aroused in the act of painting, for he has Apelles deliberately mar his image of Campaspes face. Once Apelles has finished the painting, he blemishes Campaspes image so that he has an excuse for continuing to seek her presence. Though a plot device, this is also an unusual form of iconoclasm, which ironically benefits the painter at his own expense.53 It is a fitting, literal act of image-breaking, in that Apelles appears to have fallen in love with Campaspes painted image. The extreme devotion Apelles lavishes upon his image is a form of secular idolatry. The danger of continued idolatry is averted when Alexander proclaims that he has discovered the painters amorous relationship with Campaspe; once their love is revealed, the lovers energies are directed from the secret eroticism of art to a socially acceptable public union. In the plays final moments, Alexander unites the couple with words that echo the marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. Seen in a Protestant light, one might conclude that this is a satisfying arrangement for the lovers, for they are now blessed in holy matrimony. As Mary Beth Rose argues in her study of married love as a Protestant ideal, Lylys drama exemplifies a meeting of Petrarchan love (and the idolatry that it entailed) with the more realistic, multifaceted view of married love that was beginning to announce its presence both in the drama and in the moral and religious outpourings of the surrounding society.54
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In his translation of C. A. Du Fresnoys Art of Painting (1695), John Dryden conveyed best the English Protestant interpretation of the ApellesCampaspe tale when he claimed that amongst the ancient painters we find none recorded for being married, but only Apelles, to whom Alexander the Great made a present of his own mistress; this was a fortunate situation, in Drydens opinion, since marriage is a remedy against concupiscence, [and] it is doubly so in respect of painters, who are more frequently under the occasions of sin, than other men, because they are under a frequent necessity of seeing nature bare-faced.55 Drydens reference to female nudity is discreetly veiled in his personification of Nature who bares only her face. Lyly, as well, has discreetly focused the painters passion on the bare face of Campaspe, even though he, and most of his courtly audience, knew very well that Plinys tale referred to a concubine painted in the nude. One can only speculate about how Queen Elizabeth responded to Lylys image of the painter enraptured by his sitters beauty. As the subject of countless portraits, some of which she sat for in person, Elizabeth was surely aware of the intimacy of the situation. Painting from life, as Elizabethans understood it, is an intimate and mysterious process of capturing the essence or grace of the sitter. Did she see in Apelles and Campaspe a flattering, though provocative, image of her younger self and her favorite limner, Nicholas Hilliard? In Hilliards account of painting the Queen, the only extant record of a painter taking the image of the Queen from life, he presents himself as a courtly servant who listens deferentially to Elizabeths judgment about how her image should be presented. As he discourses on the virtue of representing the face without shadows, he recalls the words of the Queen who, he says with a gentlemanly discretion, greatly bettered [his] judgment on matters of art.56 When first I came in her Highnesss presence to draw, he writes,
Who, after showing me how she noted great difference of shadowing in the works, and the diversity of drawers of sundry nations, and that the Italians, who had the name to be cunningest and to draw best, shadowed not, required of me the reason of it, seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place, but rather the open light. The which I granted, and affirmed. . . .57
After these reflections on mannerist technique, the Queen took her seat in an open space in the garden where no shadow could mar her face.58 Hilliard agrees with the Queen, in part, because she expresses views similar to his own. He quotes the mannerist Paolo Lomazzo on the matter: What is shadow but the defect of light? 59 A beautiful face, Hilliard philosophizes, is like clear truth, which is not shamed with the light, nor needs to be obscured.60 His portraits of Elizabeth are flattering and sym-
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bolic: her face is represented as luminous and ageless. Indeed his miniature of the Queen dated 1572 impresses upon the viewers eye these qualities, as well as steadfastness in character. But what can be said of the emotional and moral dangers of painting from life? Hilliard maintains a gentle and discreet silence about his affections or those he may have marked upon the Queens face as he painted. Let us return to Lylys drama, keeping in mind his royal audience, and look more closely at the four scenes that feature the painter and his sitter. In the lovers heightened dialogue and their soliloquies, Lyly clearly places emphasis on painting as a trope that signifies both aesthetic interest and erotic desire. As he declared in Euphues and his England, Ladies are to be woed with Appelles pencil.61 In their first encounter, Apelles speaks before he paints, or that is, he paints with his tongue to praise Campaspes beauty before he begins to depict her beauty with his pencil. Both kinds of colorsthe painters oils and the speakers rhetoricbetray the aesthetic and erotic elements that charge the encounter between Campaspe and Apelles. The language of painting expresses the intimate, private nature of the painters relationship with his sitter. Apelles admiring gaze is initially that of a painter appraising his subjects beauty. Yet Campaspe detects an element of flattery in his discourse. His hyperbolic words of praise appear to call into question paintings ability to shadow the original substance of her beauty: Lady, I doubt whether there be any colour so fresh that may shadow a countenance so fair (3.1.12). He echoes his own comments about Venus made just minutes before his meeting with Campaspe: Beauty is not so soon shadowed, whose perfection cometh not within the compass either of cunning or of colour (2.2.17678). Alexander compels the painter to take on a new commission, which will offer a challenge unlike any he has known: I will show you that finished by nature that you have been trifling about by art (18081). Campaspe is that finished by nature, the supreme artist. Apelles words of praise to her are met with a response that indicates she expects him to paint in respectful silence and to refrain from using a glozing tongue: Sir, I had thought you had been commanded to paint with your hand, not to gloze with your tongue (3.2.3 4). The emphasis on commanded reminds Apelles that his art is at the service of power; the antitheses (paint/gloze, hand/tongue) imply distinctions between freedom and constraint. His tongue is free to flatter Campaspe, yet his hand is bound by Alexanders command. Seemingly unaware of her beauty, Campaspe modestly declares her unworthiness to be represented by a fine painters art: as I have heard, it is the hardest thing in painting to set down a hard favour [ugly face], which maketh you to despair of my face, and then shall you have as great thanks to spare your labour as to discredit your art (3.1.58). Apelles, in turn,
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takes her words to be reflective of a beguiling, feminine modesty, designed to cause men to lose themselves in admiration. Campaspes innocence becomes apparent when she responds that she is too young to understand your speech though old enough to withstand your device. You have been so long used to colours you can do nothing but colour (3.1.1517). Campaspes conflation of the painters colors and the flatterers figures implies that her honor needs defense from the painters desire. Ironically, Apelles feels the vulnerability of love coming upon him; he fears for himself, for he confesses that her beauty will visibly affect him: Indeed the colours I see, I fear will alter the colour I have (3.2.1819). She will be able to detect in the blanching or blushing of his face that she has moved him. Psyllus, Apelles apprentice, comments after this first exchange, the better he shadows her face the more will he burn his own heart (3.2.67). His words imply danger: close association with the mysterious graces and charms of the face cause the artist to fall in love. Apelles and Campaspe then move inside the workshop, leaving Psyllus out of doors. This privacy signals the opportunity for the painters erotic feelings to develop. In their next encounter, Apelles attraction to Campaspe has indeed increased; his use of painting tropes now reflects intensity of feeling and fear for her fate with Alexander, rather than mere flattery. His first words indicate that he is enamored: I shall never draw your eyes well, because they blind mine (3.3.12). Here we have the traditional notion of the mistresss eyes blinding the male lover. Although this is a commonplace, there is every reason to believe that Apelles is genuinely struck by Campaspes beauty. She, however, is uncomfortable being the object of Apelles gaze and the subject of painting, a visual art that exposes her sensuality and beauty to the painter and, eventually, the portraits possessor. This act of painterly possession prefigures the act of sexual possession that awaits her with Alexander. When Apelles inquires whether she has been shadowed before, she not only declares that she has not, but also she expresses a desire to be hidden altogether from the gaze of others: No. And would you could so now shadow me that I might not be perceived of any (3.3.56). Her response challenges Apelles to spare her from eros and to shroud her sensuality in shadow. This, of course, would seem to defy the very nature of painting, yet as their conversation continues, Apelles makes the distinction between Campaspes absolute beauty (in a sense, beyond art) and the other less worthy images he has painted that are intended to adorn Venuss temple. The distinction is essentially between kinds of love, as well as kinds of beauty, that inflame the hearts of men. His love and, therefore, his representation of Campaspe are motivated by her purity and beauty. He wishes to protect Campaspe from violence, lust, and deceit, all of which underlie the erotic paintings adorning his workshops walls. Co-
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vertly expressing his fear for Campaspes fate, Apelles hopes that Campaspes portrait will not be hung with those of the other ravished women in Venus temple (3.4.8). W. Reavley Gair suggests that these portraits were intended to be seen by the audience; they would therefore have been rather large pictures that could be displayed on the walls of the workshop.62 It is possible, however, that the pictures were small enough to hold in the handthe actors then might have held each up in turn as they discussed them. The pictures, though erotic in nature, would undoubtedly not have followed classical and Renaissance norms in depicting nudes or partially nude women, which would have made for a rather provocative gallery for an English viewing audience. The mortal loves of the gods may very well have appeared only as beautiful faces in Apelles portraits. What matters in this scene is how Apelles presents the images, and how Campaspe responds to them. The scene is fascinating because of the tensions the images producethis is a dark moment in the comedy, for Campaspes fate is shadowed in the lovely faces of these rape victims. As Campaspe turns to the paintings of Leda, Alcmena, Dana e, and Europa, Apelles names them and their conqueror. Each name calls up an implicit narrative of divine erotic conquest. Apelles betrayal of the violent eroticism underlying each image provokes outraged moral commentary from Campaspe. In reaction to the portrait of Leda, whom Jove deceived in likeness of a swan, she exclaims, A fair woman, but a foul deceit (3.3.1012). She is shocked by Jupiters abuse of power. When Apelles laments that gods may use their powers as they desire, Campaspe retorts with moral authority, Nay, therefore it was evil done because he was a god (3.3.1718). Their conversation implicitly reflects Campaspes own situation as Alexanders captive and her innocence regarding her situation. The historical Alexander, as we know, called himself a god. In Lylys play he has spared Campaspe foul deceit and rape, yet his intentions are not entirely clear. These dark images of beauty defiled by divine violence seem to predict her fate. They turn, finally, to a portrait of Venus, goddess of love. Campaspe is surprised that not only gods, but goddesses as well may love; she is curious to know how Venus might be hired (3.3.37). Naive and innocent, she reveals that she knows nothing about the ways of love. Apelles explains how men worship Venus with prayers, sacrifices, and bribes. His worship of the goddess now manifests itself in his adoration of Campaspe. He returns again to the beauty of her face: It is not possible that a face so fair and a wit so sharp, both without comparison, should not be apt to love (3.3.5152). Campaspes witty retort is a sharp reminder that he has forgotten Alexanders command: If you begin to tip your tongue with cunning, I pray dip your pencil in colours and fall to that you must do, not that you would do (3.3.5355). Again Campaspe distinguishes between the
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painters skilled flattery and his use of colors, his desire (what he would do) and his masters charge (what he must do). Alexander himself has suspected that the painter will be subdued to the aesthetic, for he recognizes the power of Campaspes beauty. She exemplifies the Renaissance commonplace that nature triumphs over art; yet at the same time, she is the most worthy natural subject of art. A paragone between nature and art is made explicit when Alexander visits the painters shop. Though Natures own hand has painted Campaspes beauty to perfection, Alexander has asked Apelles to use his skill to reproduce Natures work. He now comes to have a look at Apelles accomplishment. He has belittled painting as mere trifling about (2.2.181), yet, at the same time, he dignifies Apelles with the task of painting Campaspe, for he is the only artist who can capture the grace and beauty of nature. Apelles exclaims to Alexander, Beauty is not so soon shadowed, whose perfection cometh not within the compass either of cunning or of colour (2.2.17678). He has not said that he cannot render the beauty of Venus; indeed, he has implied that something more than skill and color is needed. In a later scene, Alexander expresses a wish that Apelles could colour the life with the feature (3.4.73). He nonetheless praises Apelles cunning by suggesting that the artist could paint flowers as well with sweet smells as fresh colours (3.4.7576). Apelles discreet, modest response hides his true intent: Your Majesty must know it is no less hard to paint savours than virtues; colours can neither speak nor think (3.4.7880). Here he seems to speak in literal terms about the limits of visual representation, perhaps echoing the old epigram, If you wish to paint a likeness, paint a sound. What underlies his response is his own defense of the difficulty and skill involved in painting virtue, beauty, or any innate quality. The colors by themselves have no life; it is the painters art that gives them seeming speech and thought. When Alexander asks, When will you finish Campaspe? the artist responds, Never finish; for always in absolute beauty there is somewhat above art (3.4.9294). Apelles portrait of Campaspe is here subtly associated with both the famous, unfinished Venus at Cos and the Venus Anadyomene for which the Elder Pliny claimed Campaspe may have been the model. The Venus Anadyomene was known to have been damaged, which according to Pliny contributed all the more to Apelles glory. The Venus at Cos, though, was to have surpassed his first Venus, but death overcame Apelles before he could finish it. In these stories, the powers of the artist achieve a mythic dimension, for the perfection of the artist can only be half-revealed to human eyes. He has intimate contact with nature. Unlike the Aristotelian notion that the artist perfects natures imperfections, the idea Apelles expresses is that nature produces absolute beauty, which the artist may seek to imitate, but can never fully reproduce.
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In his despairing soliloquy addressed to Venus, Apelles articulates both his idolatrous predilection and another set of paragone from classical antiquity: painting versus sculpture, human artistry versus divine creation. Although Apelles understands that art must yield to nature (3.5.20), he associates this yielding with loss of reason and wisdom. Ironically, then, he is driven to irrational, yet seemingly necessary, actions in his moments of despair. Because he loves a woman whom Alexander has claimed, Apelles realizes that he has only the painted image of Campaspe to adore, much as Pygmalion had only his beloved statue to worship until Venus took pity on him. Alexanders officer Hephestion moralizes on this disturbing phenomenon, which closely resembles that of pagan idolatry: commonly we see it incident in artificers to be enamoured of their own works (5.4.1516). Hephestion argues that painters especially are given to falling in love with their own images, for playing with their own conceits, now coveting to draw a glancing eye, then a rolling, now a winking, still mending it, never ending it till they be caught with it. And then, poor souls, they kiss the colours with their lips, with which before they were loath to taint their fingers (5.4.18, 1924). Apelles himself alludes to Pygmalion in a despairing soliloquy directed towards Venus:
Unfortunate Apelles. . . . Could Pygmalion entreat by prayer to have his ivory turned into flesh, and cannot Apelles obtain by plaints to have the picture of his love changed to life? Is painting so far inferior to carving, or dost thou, Venus, more delight to be hewed with chisels than shadowed with colours (3.5.13, 21 26).
He then proclaims that he has celebrated Venuss fair face and given the goddess fame; for this, she should reward him. Yet Venus, he fears, may envy his art, in that his portrait of sweet Campaspe outdoes his paintings of the goddess. In Apelles imagination, Venus and Campaspe are virtually one, for in Campaspes countenance, he sees the express image of Venus (3.5.46 47). Thus, by extension, worship of his image is an idolatrous worship of Venus. At least this is how a Protestant spectator might have understood the situation. Differing from Plinys and Castigliones accounts, Lylys Campaspe falls in love with the painter and articulates her experience of love for the theaters audience. She reveals herself first in a soliloquy and then in a dialogue with the painter that only half hides her desire. In her soliloquy, Campaspe chides herself for baseness and lack of wisdom: Campaspe, it is hard to judge whether thy choice be more unwise or thy chance unfortunate. . . . Hath a painter crept further into thy mind than a prince? Apelles than Alexander? Fond wench, the baseness of thy mind bewrays the meanness of thy birth (4.2.12, 58). She recognizes the power of affection; it is fundamentally irrational, in that it does not discriminate between base-
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ness and nobility. Yet in her later soliloquy, she reflects implicitly on the justness of her attachment to Apelles, for he is not a star out of her reach, as is Alexander. Social status must be of concern in matters of love, but so, too, is the quality of love, which Campaspe figures as integrally bound with social station:
O Apelles, thy love cometh from the heart, but Alexanders from the mouth. The love of kings is like the blowing of winds, which whistle sometimes gently among the leaves, and straightways turn the trees up by the roots. . . . They place affection by times, by policy, by appointment; if they frown, who dares call them unconstant, if bewray secrets, who will term them untrue, if fall to other loves, who trembles not if he call them unfaithful? In kings there can be no love but to queens; for as near must they meet in majesty as they do in affection. (4.4.2125, 2834)
Campaspe recognizes the indecorousness of marriage between a lowly gentlewoman and a king. Her desire is for a freely given love from a loyal gentleman, rather than a kingly affection that must be subordinated to, or even tainted by, political rule and worldly power. In her next encounter with Apelles, Campaspe uses her wit to test Apelles affections and to make a covert declaration of love. Rather than insisting that the tongue can only flatter, which means that it obscures the truth, she suggests now that the tongue can reveal the heart. Their dialogue begins with Apelles alluding to a blemish in her painting: Gentlewoman, the misfortune I had with your picture will put you to some pains to sit again to be painted (4.2.2122). This misfortune becomes the lovers opportunity to meet again. Apelles has indeed contrived a way to shadow Campaspe so that she is, for the moment, released from Alexanders gaze. Apelles delight in her presence prompts him to compare her favorably to Venus once more: to paint Venus was a pleasure, but to shadow the sweet face of Campaspe, it is a heaven (4.2.2526). Campaspe subtly reveals her affection by claiming to love best he that made me last in the world (4.2.43). She appears to be admiring Apelles artistry by suggesting that he is godlike in his powers as a maker. Campaspe invokes a variant of the divine painter topos and thereby lavishes the greatest imaginable praise upon Apelles as a maker and painting as an art. Elizabethans were familiar with two related topoi: Deus artifex (and its parallel theme, Natura artifex), which derived originally from biblical sources and Platos Timaeus; and Deus Pictor, which derived from Empedocles and Pindar.63 They would have encountered variants of these topoi in classical texts, such as the elder Philostratuss Life of Apollonius of Tyana, as well as Elizabethan works such as Hobys translation of Castigliones The Book of the Courtier, Richard Haydockes translation of Giovanni Lomazzos painting treatise, Hilliards The Art of Limning,
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Sidneys Defence of Poesie and Peachams The Art of Drawing. Peacham, for example, writes, Painters at the first (saith Aelian) were such bunglers and so rude, that they were fayn to write over a Cow or a Hog, what beast it was: otherwise the behoulder could not tell what to make of it: but in a short time they grew to that perfection, that they were honoured well nigh as Gods.64 In his painting treatise, Hilliard sets out to establish that God was the first teacher of painting and calls only the most worthy to the vocation.65 Lylys representation of the artists semidivinity is modestly qualified by the painters own reverence for divinely created beauty. The repartee between Apelles and Campaspe reveals as much:
Apelles. Campaspe. Apelles. Campaspe. Whom do you love best in the world? He that made me last in the world. That was a god. I had thought it had been a man. (4.2.42 45)
The painter, himself, praises divine creation, or natures beauty, over his own art. Yet the dialogue captures an ambiguity that places the painters skill in a favorable light. A passage from Lylys Euphues and his England exemplifies how the analogy between divine and human creators can be used to praise the painter. Beauty is the greatest gift from the gods, he declares,
For as when the counterfeit of Ganimedes, was showen at a market, euery one would faine buye it, bicause Zeuxis had there-in shewed his greatest cunning: so when a beautifull woman appeareth in a multitude, euery man is drawne to sue to hir, for that the Gods (the onely Painters of beautie) haue in hir expressed, the art of their Deitie.66
Thus, man is drawn to the beautiful, but only the gods are the true makers of beauty. Painters, in a sense, are the most godlike of men, for they are able to capture in visible form the beauty of the gods. Similarly, in his treatise on painting, Leonardo argued that because of paintings abilities, it deserved to be called not only a science, but a deity as well.67 In the case of Campaspe, however, only Alexander, a man who has earthly powers almost as great as the gods, has the power to decide the fate of beauty. Apelles must console himself with honoring the thing that is likest Campaspe (4.2.47)her picture. In his writings on art, Leonardo had attested to the portraits ability to function as a surrogate in a persons absence, a function that poetry cannot perform.68 On the theatrical level, as a physical stage property gazed upon and touched by the actor, Campaspes portrait serves quite compellingly as both a figurative and material substitute for the woman
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herself. As Frances Teague argues, because a property is an object on a stage that often has a strong association with a performer, it can become a metonymic token of that performers identity in the role, and even function as a substitute for the actor.69 This substitution is most readily effected in the case of a portrait, in that there is a perceived likeness between the image and the actor. Apelles can possess Campaspe only through her surrogate, the image he himself has painted, because she belongs to Alexander. When Campaspe asks him whom he honors most, Apelles indicates that it is her portrait, for I dare not venture upon your person (4.2.49). Yet on a spiritual or moral level, by honoring her image, Apelles enters into a frame of mind that was very likely construed by Elizabethan audiences as idolatrous. Thus the theatrical treatment of the painting property reinforces the idea of a morally problematic attitude towards images. In his edition of the play, G. K. Hunter admits that he does not know how far one should pursue the implicit parallel with the religious capacity to believe in an invisible substance.70 Hunters hesitation to delve into the religious controversies of the day in relation to Lylys classical comedy is understandable, yet given the explosive nature of the debate over images, it is reasonable to argue that an element of anxiety, even scandal, underlies Lylys representation of Apelles devotion to his image. In the last private encounter between Apelles and Campaspe, the painters attitude toward the image of Campaspe reflects a desperate lovers displaced devotion. On the one hand, he is like Pygmalion, claiming that if he cannot possess Campaspe, he will embrace thy shadow continually in my arms, of the which by strong imagination I will make a substance (4.4.14 15). Pygmalion embraced, kissed, and stroked his beautiful statue, as if it were living. Apelles, too, will do as much with Campaspes portrait. Yet there is a crucial difference here, which is that Apelles picture is a representation of a living woman. In this scene, the audience witnesses how the painters gaze is divided between substance and shadow, prototype and copy. In the case of Pygmalion, he has only a statue, which is later transformed into flesh. The substance, or prototype Campaspeis physically present on the stage in the actors body. Thus, Apelles imagination will perform a creative act, indeed a procreative act, by giving birth to a substance in his painting. This act of the imagination coupled with Apelles worshipful attitude would have been understood, therefore, not only in reference to mythology, but also in light of the contemporary iconoclastic controversy. If Apelles perceives or imaginatively creates a substance in the image, he has committed the same error for which idolaters are guilty: taking the image for the reality (prototype), or believing that there is a presence in the image. Apelles, himself, betrays some awareness of the problematic nature inherent in his relationship with the image. He not only praises nature over art at crucial moments in the play, but also blemishes the image. The
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marring of his image figuratively and literally suggests something problematic about image-making and the creative process of distilling life into figurative art. In deliberately marring Campaspes image, he ensures that he cannot worship the image as perfect; he must turn back to the original. He breaks the temptation to idolatry. In the implicit paragone between nature and art, the artist humbly recognizes that painting is not an authentic substitute for the living original. In the end, Apelles uses his wit and art to protect and serve Campaspe, rather than merely to seduce or possess her vicariously. Alexander, too, is ultimately chastened, for he recognizes that he cannot command anothers love as if it were a country to conquer. Because the fitting action for a monarch is conquest, he subdues his own affection: Alexander, he proclaims, maketh but a toy of love and leadeth affection in fetters, using fancy as a fool to make him sport or as a minstrel to make him merry (5.4.147 49). Unlike Apelles, whose imagination is powerfully engaged by his desire to possess Campaspe, Alexanders imagination will serve only to delight him with sport. He condescendingly calls the lovers two loving worms (5.4.141) and, as he unites them, his words echo the marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer:
These parties are agreed; they would have me both priest and witness. Apelles, take Campaspe. Why move ye not? Campaspe, take Apelles. Will it not be? If you be ashamed one of the other, by my consent you shall never come together. But dissemble not. Campaspe, do you love Apelles? (5.4.13035)
They appear hesitant because their defiance of Alexander has become an open secret. In declaring their love for one another before the monarch, they both yield to Alexanders will, yet paradoxically assert their own wills as well. In the end, Lyly appears to have slipped in a shrewd argument for the superiority of drama over painting. Drama is aligned with nature and verbal expression, while the painted image clearly belongs to the realm of art, which not only cannot reveal its perfection, but also lures men into the dangers of idolatry. Thus, after exploiting paintings ability to create erotic tension and to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of sophisticated theatergoers, Lyly strategically defuses the arts power. Apelles image of Campaspe is of necessity blemished and then finally suppressed. The audience perceives that the painters forbidden love, which arose from his artistic activity of image-making, has been domesticated by a monarch whose self-command favorably reflects that of the Virgin Queens. Alexanders attitude about love, that it is a gentlemans sport (5.4.106) and diversion unfitting for a monarch to entertain with any degree of seriousness, extends as well to painting.
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Seen in this light, Lylys drama appears to flatter the Queen, shadowed in the figure of Alexander, at the painters expense. Lyly reveals to his coterie audience the dramatists skill in appropriating and critiquing another form of artpaintingthat is more dangerous and beguiling than his own. We find this to be overtly the case in one of Lylys later dramatic works, the Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Mitcham (1598), in which he stages a paragone between a painter and poet. The two actors are joined by a third who plays a musician. He enters into the debate not only to put in a good word for music, but also to give voice to well-known criticisms of painting and poetry. None of the artists win the debate, for each of them perceives all too well the limitations of the others art, as well as their insecure and lowly social positions. The debate begins with the painter and poet questioning which art has the capacity to penetrate directly to the understanding. The poet claims, in our artes are as great oddes as betweene seeing and vnderstanding.71 The painter makes a great claim for his art, that it can express anything seen or unseen: The vertues, the sences, the thoughtes: all lymed out so lyvely, that even thinges invisible are caught by the eye, insenceible felt with conceipt.72 Although the painter would seem to deal only with the visible world, he can make claims for articulating the invisible if his images are expressive in a symbolic way. Pliny made a similar claim for Apelles, when he wrote that the artist even painted things that cannot be represented in pictures.73 His examples came from naturethunder, lightning, and thunderbolts. In Campaspe, Lyly renders those invisible qualities as inner torments:
Now must I paint things unpossible for mine art but agreeable with my affections: deep and hollow sighs, sad and melancholy thoughts, wounds and slaughters of conceits, a life posting to death, a death galloping from life, a wavering constancy, an unsettled resolution, and what not, Apelles? And what but, Apelles? (3.5.5056)
Sighs, thoughts, conceits: these are the products of sound, mind, and imagination, each technically beyond the realm of visibility. When a musician intrudes upon the argument, he exclaims in a (perhaps mock) contemptuous, moral vein, A Poet, and a Paynter, idoll makers for Idlenes: the one casting fancyes in a mould, the other faces.74 His wordplay on idol/idle is clever, for the musician conflates two common criticisms of poets and paintersthey idle away their time with work that lacks seriousness and, what is more, they induce idleness and idolatry in those who make use of their work. He then boasts that his art, unlike poetry and painting, is one of the seven liberall sciences,75 which gives him an intellectual and social prominence denied to the other artists. This point, while true, does not win the debate for the musician, perhaps because poetry and painting had gained some degree of social acceptability and
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status at Elizabeths court. Yet because the artists have gathered before the Queen to honor her and to praise her perfection, they must, of necessity, not claim perfection for themselves. The poet brings the argument to a close by humbly invoking the inexpressibility topos for all three arts. He admits that all art fails in the face of perfectionthe Queen herself: Witt, colors, nor ayres can expresse that which wee most covett, her perfection; therefore lett vs all ioyne in consort, and praye that the world maye so long inioye her as tyme shall the world, and that after her, there bee neither witt, colours, nor sowndes leaft in the world.76 The musician and painter agree, yet the painter is compelled to speak further. He becomes loquacious, perhaps desiring the last word, and launches into a critical tirade against contemporary uses of painting. Our art growes stale, he complains,
For where in elder ages, none were colored but memorable for their vertues to paynt out imitation to posterity, nowe every Citizens wife that weares a taffata kirtle and a velvett hatt, and every gentlewoman that can boord a paire of borders must have her picture in the parlour.77
There is an elitist thrust to his argument, for he objects to commoners and lower gentility commissioning their own portraits in order to gratify their vanity and ornament their parlors. If virtues are the only worthy subjects of painting, then painting should be reserved for recording rare images of virtue. The unmistakable implication, however, is that only nobility and royalty embody virtues worth commemorating for posterity. The Queens image, rather than the bourgeois citizens, should hang in every parlor. The poet tries again to put an end to the dialogue by saying, No more wordes.78 As the literary artist, he must dispense with words. The three actors bow before the Queen, as the poet gives the gift of a gown in place of a poem, painting, or musical air. Thus, the spirited paragone draws to a close with the artists humbling themselves before the monarch. As a poet-entertainer, Lyly, too, necessarily found himself in the position of Queens servant. He clearly sought to please the Queen by appealing to her vanity, her discrimination in matters of art, and her literary sensibility. In his dramatic works, he humbled himself, for as a courtierartist, he had much to lose if he failed to please her. If this entertainment was a late bid for preferment or position, it reflects Lylys persistence in the face of economic hardship and professional misfortune. Despite the dramatists many ploys for favor and patronage, he failed to receive the position of Master of Revels, which would have given him both a stable court position and a salary. While Elizabeth awarded him an honorable position as Esquire of the Body in the late 1580s, the rank carried no stipend. Like Nicholas Hilliard, he was a well-educated, refined artist with ambitions to gentility; his desired audience was an elite, courtly one. Both
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artists deferred to the Queens tastes, sought with little to no success remuneration for their efforts, and died in poverty. Their fascination with paintings secrecy and subtle eroticism reflected not only personal taste, but also a typical Elizabethan reaction to the iconoclasts attack on images. Although neither artist produced religious images, they both treated the human face as iconic. In their art, the face functioned as an image that elicits strong emotional responses from spectators who, like Leonardos guilty client, cannot resist kissing, touching, and even worshipping it. To create secular images that provoke such responses is to acknowledge the power that lies in all images. The human face possesses the greatest power of all, however, for as Hilliard claims, The comeliness and beauty of the face . . . feedeth so wonderfully our affection.79
3
Dramatic Uses of Portrait Properties and FacePainting in the Boys Theater at St. Pauls
Painter. O Lord, sir, I cannot make a picture sing. Balurdo. Why? Slid, I have seen painted things sing as sweet. Marston, Antonio and Mellida We haue the finest Painter here at boord wages, that euer made Flowerdelice, and the best bed-fellow too: for I may lie all night tryumphing from corner to corner. . . . See, my Mistresse Lucilia, shees neuer from him: I pray God he paints no pictures with her: But I hope my fellowe hireling will not be so sawcie. The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll
As Rosencrantz so famously complained in Hamlet, there is, sir,

an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clappd fort. These are now the fashion, and so [berattle] the common stages. . . . (2.2.339 42). St. Pauls Boys were one such aery of children, a youthful company that distinguished itself in memorable ways. These boy choristers were the repertory actors at St. Pauls theater, which offered secular drama, some of it tinged with religious controversy, in the prominent Cathedral. Significantly, St. Pauls Boys became the earliest permanently based theater company in London. Once established in the early 1570s, the playhouse attracted the first fee-paying audience in the City.1 The theaters success may have been due, in part, to its location in a thriving residential and commercial area in London with close proximity to the Inns of Court, but as Trevor Lennam speculates, it was the establishment of the playhouse during the fiercely competitive years [for theatrical troupes] between 1570 and 1575 that brought success, for their permanent residence resulted in continuous playing and polished performances from the children players.2 As Rosencrantz indicates, the boy troupes were quite the fashion during Elizabeths rule; under the direction of Sebastian Westcott (155382), the Children of Pauls thrived as paid court and city entertainers. With the mastership of Thomas 98
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Gyles (1584 1600) and Edward Pearce (15991612), however, a greater emphasis was placed on productions at St. Pauls Cathedral. While early sixteenth-century childrens dramas were primarily pedagogical exercises for the boys, moral interludes, such as the Wit plays, and entertainments for court, childrens drama written and performed later in the sixteenth century had greater artistic range both rhetorically and theatrically. Inventiveness and experimentation, especially in the realm of satire and theatrical parody of well-known adult dramas, marked many of the productions. Portraits, painters, and painting devices were used in the repertory as a mark of the theaters ingenuity and, as we saw in Lylys Campaspe, painting became a central theme and pervasive visual trope in some of the dramas. When St. Pauls reopened in the late 1590s after a closure of almost a decade due to political and religious scandal,3 paintings were featured in highly inventive ways in quite a number of the plays. Edward Pearce was now the Master of Choristers and with the financial help of William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby (also an aspiring dramatist), and the satirical dramatic vision of John Marston, innovation and selfconscious artistry defined the new dramas that were produced. A number of plays from the years of St. Pauls revival (c. 15991600) will be featured in this chapter, for they emerge as central to an understanding of paintings function in Elizabethan drama: John Marstons Antonio and Mellida (performed 1599; printed 1602), and the anonymous The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (performed and printed 1600). While it has been widely assumed that dramatists writing for the St. Pauls theater exploited the boy choristers range of skills, particularly singing, and competed with other childrens and adult companies, few have noted the ways in which St. Pauls dramatists and players defined their art and expressed their skills through the use of painting.4 Through both word and image, St. Pauls theater featured painting as an expressive visual art form particularly conducive to dramatic and extra-dramatic use on the stage. As we saw in John Lylys Campaspe, the boy chorister who played the role of painter and gazed at portraits on the stage called attention to the scandal of images, as well as the artists role in relation to a powerful patron. At the same time, as an adolescent player, he conveyed the intensity of first love and quite possibly displayed his own attempts at painting. It may have been the case that there was an apprentice painter among the St. Pauls choristers in its early years, and another present later when the theater revived at the end of the century.5 These young players would have provided portraits for the stage and, most likely, have played the painter characters. In The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, for example, the painter is discovered in the act of painting, which could possibly have called for artistic expertise on the players part. The Master of Choristers could also have commissioned paintings from artisans living in one of the
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nearby parishes.6 Painters would certainly have had occasion to visit the Cathedral, more likely to conduct business in the yard or inside the building, than attend religious services. Artisans were known to have set up their shops in the small chapels in St. Pauls. Not only would they have conducted business of various kinds in the Cathedrals precinct, painters would also have had the opportunity to see the choristers perform in plays and to offer their services to the Master of Choristers. The appeal of portraits and painter characters for St. Pauls dramatists can best be understood in relation to their audiences social aspirations, self-perceptions, and artistic interests. St. Pauls personnel clearly found painting to be an expressive medium through which to communicate to a clientele sensitive to the cultural, moral, and aesthetic signs embedded in painting and painterly language. Alfred Harbage has argued that the gentility of the private playhouse audiences is beyond question.7 Although shopkeepers and apprentices from the areas surrounding St. Pauls would have been playgoers, the theater primarily attracted members of the gentryaristocrats, lawyers, students from the Inns of Court, provincial gallants, literary men, to name a fewwho could pay the entrance fee of 2d to 6d.8 It seems logical to conclude that dramatists wrote to attract a rather select London audience, which mainly consisted of Inns of Court friends of St. Pauls personnel, such as John Marston and William Stanley, and gentlemen and nobles who enjoyed the fashions of the day. These audiences in the private theater, which sat no more than one hundred, were generally of higher rank than those who made up the thousands of spectators at the open-air public playhouses.9 Many of these men would have been cultured sophisticates who could claim a university education, travel in Europe, and literary skills of their own. Michael Shapiro has insightfully characterized the childrens theater audience as made up of actual, potential, or self-styled figures of power and responsibility who wanted and could afford vicarious participation in a courtly occasion.10 By attending the rehearsals for court entertainments, these men (and some women) could fancy themselves as elites, whether they were or not, by participating in a significant social ritual enjoyed by the elite. The affluent, whether they were aristocrats or working citizens with social ambitions, were the most likely candidates not only to frequent the theater, but also to commission portraits. When used on the stage, the portrait would have appeared as a desirable material commodity that many in the audience would have associated with aristocratic fashion. The character of the painter would have struck this audience as an intriguing, even socially familiar, figure ripe for dramatic intrigue, praise, mockery, and satire. We can gather from the dramatic scripts used by St. Pauls Boys that the portrait property served a range of functions and was considered a powerful device for marshaling responses of moral, aesthetic, and social kinds in
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the plays characters, as well as their spectators. The playwrights assumed that certain powers resided in images: at the very least, an image could capture the likeness and status of an individual for posterity, provoke remembrance of that individual, and move the passions. An image could also serve as a shorthand reference to a character or an idea associated with images (e.g., idolatry, counterfeiting, idealized or lost youth). What is more, a portrait could be used metadramatically as an amusing reflection on a boy actors youth, beauty, and diminutive size, or as a weapon of attack against an enemy or rival. Thomas Dekker, for example, used a mock portrait of Ben Jonson in his Satiro-mastix (1601) in order to untruss or undo this rival dramatist. In another example, the dramatist (perhaps Thomas Middleton) of The Puritaine, or the Widdow of WatlingStreet (printed 1606) has a Puritan widow lavish kisses and tears upon her dead husbands portraitDeare Copie of my husband, oh let me kisse theeonly to have her forget her grief shortly thereafter.11 The author makes a sly commentary on Puritan hypocrisy: not only does the widow betray a histrionic tendency rather than constancy or restrained emotion, but also an iconophilia, which the Puritans, among other religious radicals, opposed. W. Reavley Gair rightly observes that the use of a portrait as a dramatic property established the first identifiable feature of the Pauls repertoire.12 At St. Pauls theater, the portrait was first used as a property in the 1540s in the Master of Chorister John Redfords Wit and Science. The anonymous modernization of Redfords play, renamed The new and Pleasaunt enterlude intituled the marriage of Witte and Science (entered in the Stationers Register in 1569), followed suit by incorporating a painting property as well. The Wit plays were based in the morality tradition; thus, the portrait served as a kind of ideal moral mirror. Wit and Science depicts a young suitor named Wit engaged in winning his love, Science (scientia, or knowledge), daughter of Reason and Experience. Two important stage properties aid him in his courtship, which is, allegorically speaking, the pursuit of knowledge: the mirror of Reason and a goodly picture / Of Wit himself (4950).13 On the one hand, the portrait is a modern likeness, a full-length picture of an attractive male suitor, designed to show his beloved how well-favored he is. On the other hand, his image is an unchanging ideal, for it represents Wits finest qualities, which are no longer apparent in his physical appearance when he becomes corrupted by Idleness. Wits face is spotted or disfigured with cosmetics to reflect his moral degeneration and sinfulness. Scenes of face-painting were used in both the earlier and later dramas at St. Pauls to convey the idea of moral corruption. Over a half a century later, the device was still being used: in John Marstons Antonio and Mellida, face-painting conveys in graphic terms the decadence and artfulness of two aspiring courtiers. Gair has suggested that the use of portraits at St. Pauls expressed the
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growing concern with the preservation of individual identity, especially for the affluent who could afford to commission a painter.14 Gairs emphasis on identity is well placed. By the end of Elizabeths reign, there was social precedent among the lower gentry and aristocrats for having portraits painted. This practice became a mode of self-fashioning, for a portrait not only recorded age, status, and family position, but also, through the inclusion of symbols and text, created specially inscribed signs that indicated sensibility and moral character. Portraits offered individuals a visible form through which they could fashion an image of themselves for both public and private spectatorseither to adorn their galleries, or to be gazed upon in a private chamber. In the theater, the portrait signified a similar set of functions, demonstrating vividly how people assumed portraits to be continuous with and expressive of an individuals identity. This vogue in portraiture, in an odd sense, compensated for the loss of thousands of religious images in English culture; in other words, the loss of rituals involving images was addressed in personal and secular terms. The theater both filled this void in its own strikingly visual way, and featured portraits as signs and symbols of the cultures complex, ambivalent attitudes toward images. The portrait falls into a special category of stage property, fulfilling the etymology of the term property in an unusually compelling way. The term comes from the Latin proprius, signifying what is ones own, or ones attribute (OED). The portrait, then, is the proper image of someone, not only associated metonymically with that person, but also serving to conjure that persons presence with a likeness. Because a portrait resembles its original, those who gaze upon it are willing to grant the copy elements of the original. Thus, even though no one looking upon a portrait truly mistakes it for the person depicted, the portrait calls forth an affective response, just as a person might, from the viewer. Responses depend to some extent on the painters skill in rendering likeness. As David Freedberg argues, the greater the likeness or realism of the image, the more probable viewers are to grant the image presence and efficacy.15 The portrait property worked effectively in early modern theater because the audience found the actors responses to images moving in psychological, emotional, and spiritual terms. In order to gauge how some theatergoers at St. Pauls used portraiture in their personal lives and social interactions, we can look to the Autobiography of the professional musician, madrigals composer, and gentleman, Thomas Whythorne (152896).16 During his lifetime, he commissioned no fewer than four paintings and drawings of himself, some in the context of his identity as musician. Neither a landowner nor a courtier, Whythorne earned his living primarily as a music tutor. When he published his madrigals and duets (1571, 1590), he included a woodcut picture of himself as
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father of the songs that bear his name, his coat of arms from paternal and maternal sides, and a motto of his own devising, Aspra ma non troppo (Sharp but not too much). In these visual and verbal signs, we detect Whythornes concern with self-representationhe wishes to be perceived as both a gentleman and an artist. His motto suggests ambition and moderation at the same time. In the only extant painting of Whythorne (1569) from when he was forty-one, his coat of arms appears in one corner of the painting, but the viewers gaze is drawn mainly to the figures eyes, which seem to reflect the musicians sensitivity and melancholy. This portrait emphasizes gentility, while also revealing visual signs of inwardness and sensibility. During his early service in John Heywoods household (1545 49), Whythorne may very well have come into contact with personnel from St. Pauls, for Heywood was known to have collaborated with Pauls Master of Choristers in productions for court.17 He most certainly was exposed to Heywoods dramatic writing, for he mentions a fair transcription he made of his employers interlude on the Parts of Man.18 Following these instructive years, Whythorne took quarters in London and sought to educate himself further in the arts. In a self-conscious manner, he relates in his autobiography how he composed sonnets about his troubles, played exotic instruments (the gittern and cittern), and commissioned two paintings to reflect his aspiration to become a master musician. One painting was meant for his chamber, where it would both feed his self-conceit and signify his professional accomplishment to visitors:
I caused a table to be made to hang in my chamber, whereon was painted, in oil colours, the figure and image of a young woman playing upon a lute, who I gave to name Terpsichore. . . . Since I knew that this Terpsichore was a goddess of that sort of music which I then professed to be a master and teacher of, I caused to be painted by and with her in the same table, she playing upon a lute, not only the counterfeit of a virginal, but also of the gittern and cittern, and also a book wherein is both pricksong and tablature for the lute, and also this sonnet following. . . .19
He had the sonnet, a six-line verse reflecting the power of music to expel sorrow, painted directly on the picture. He then records that he had another counterfeit of himself playing the lute painted directly on the virginals. He composed a melancholic poem about aging and loss of pleasure as a private reflection to adorn his instrument. He moralized that By this ye may perceive that, although I took some pleasure in the painters art and set out my fantasy in colours, yet I did know that the pleasures of this world are but vain and not permanent or abiding.20 Thus, these paintings functioned for Whythorne like impresas, or personal badges, the one fashion-
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ing him as an accomplished musical and literary artist, the other reflecting his inward self. His next set of commissions was motivated by a desire for his female employers erotic attention and a curiosity about his own changing appearance. While in the household of his employer, an affluent gentlewoman and widow who employed him as tutor and servant, Whythorne developed an erotic attachment to her. He employed music, poetry, and painting as romantic strategies designed to inflame her passion. He reports that after his mistress had her counterfeit made for her own chamber, he hired the same painter to make a copy of that portrait to be placed in his chamber. He then writes that he wished to have another portrait of himself made in order to see how I was changed after a long sickness.21 He again wrote verses to be painted on the table with his new image, although he indicates that he was advised not to use them. The poem, like his previous one, was a melancholic meditation on the restless race of youth and the loss of mirth.22 He intended for his mistress to see the poem and portrait, as well as his portrait of her, so that she would be flattered that I made a great account of her, inasmuch as I was so willing to have that whereby I might the more and oftener remember her.23 At a number of points in his life, Whythorne had his portrait painted in order to see how time had altered his appearance. He recounts visiting a painter, an old acquaintance who had painted his portrait in 1550 and again in 1562, whose house contained many pictures. Seeing such a wealth of portraits inspires Whythorne to meditate upon what causes people to have their images painted. For the young, he reflects, vanity and pleasure drive them to see their beauty reflected in their portraits. Older people, however, are desirous of having records of their changing appearance, for the looking glass, realistically speaking, can afford only a fleeting image of ones self in the present. He muses how people also wish to leave friends and children with a remembrance of themselves. Children, when they grow older, may then reflect on their parents virtues or vices, which are implicitly captured in their images. Whythornes opinions of what portraits signified to those who commissioned, owned, and viewed them were fairly common among Elizabethans, indeed common enough to constitute a mindset, which could be reflected and exploited on the stage. There were also the associations of painted images with forbidden icons and idolatry, which could be subtly implied through rhetoric and characters treatment of images. Two childrens dramas, Thomas Dekkers Blurt, Master Constable, or The Spaniards Night-walke (sundry times privately acted 16012; printed 1602) and John Marstons Parasitaster, or The Fawn (performed c. 1604; printed 1606), offer telling examples of how portraits were used at St. Pauls to reflect character, highlight the artful, erotic, and forbidden elements of
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love, and fuel dramatic intrigue. These dramas feature miniature portraits, which were often used in St. Pauls dramas; these small, alluring pictures, frequently set in jewels, drew attention to the smallness and effeminacy of the boy actors. Like miniature portraits, the youthful choristers were attractive counterfeits, or adults in little. In material terms, portraits represented a desirable commodity to the St. Pauls audience, many of whom were economically well-off, socially elite, and desirous of being fashionable. Miniatures were considered a fashionable element of costume, courtship, and erotic intrigue in both life and drama. St. Pauls dramatists therefore sought opportunities to invoke and satirize such uses of miniature portraits. Dekkers bawdy satire on romantic comedy, Blurt, Master Constable, burlesques the role portrait miniatures played in love. The portrait of a French prisoner-of-war, Fontinell, becomes the object not of loving adoration, but of a courtesans lust. In a lengthy scene set in a brothel, Dekker indulges in bawdy wordplay as he has the infamous courtesan Imperia respond in naughty ways to Fontinells image. The play opens with the Italians returning from war; one gentleman among them, Hippolito, conjures up a device to keep Fontinell from marrying his sister, Violetta, whom the man loves. He sends Fontinells portrait to Imperia who loves to have her chamber hung with the pictures of men (sig. C22).24 His intention is to use the image to provoke her lust and then to enforce a marriage between her and Fontinell. Imperias servant reports his mistresss lustful reaction to Hippolito, The wodden picture you sent her hath set her on fire (sig. D3v). Imperia and her attendants in the brothel fawn over the portrait, noting how sweetly made (sig. (C4r) it is. She exclaims, A little face, but a lovely face; fye, fye, fye, no matter what face he make, so the other parts be Legittimate, and goe upright (sig. C4v). This bawdy remark is followed by the mock-melancholic exclamation,
Hey ho, as I live I must love thee, and sucke kisses from thy lips; alacke that women should fall thus deeplie in love, with dumb things, that have no feeling? but they are womens crosses, and the only way to take them is to take them patiently. (sig. C4v)
Her banter is half-serious in its momentary lament about womens crosses, but she quickly moves on to fantasize about how she will love the pretty boy Fontinell. She claims that she will treat him as her Ganymede, an erotic conceit that reflects her will to power, as well as the pretty, effeminate physical appearance of the boy actor. Later in the play, she calls him you little effeminate sweete Cheveleere (sig. G2v). Fueled by eros, she exclaims, soules are things to be trodden under our feete, when we daunce after loves Pipe; therefore heere hang this counterfeit at my beds
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feete (sig. C4v). Her servant replies in kind: If he be counterfeit, nayle him up upon one of your poastes (sig. C4v). The play concludes with the triumph of feminine wit, a bed trick, and a sly debunking of romantic love. Violetta wins Imperia to her cause (to catch her husband in a supposed impropriety and to outwit her brother and would-be lover). The courtesan playacts admirably, directing her lust for Fontinells image into a performance designed to ensnare the character. In the end, Violetta reveals that she and Fontinell had plotted the bed trick together and tells her audience that Imperia never drew loves picture by his face (sig. H2v). Her wordplay recalls how Imperias lust was fueled by Fontinells picture, rather than his face; this love was insubstantial and far from pure. Such clever, erotically charged intrigues involving portraits and bed tricks would have struck spectators as a childrens burlesque version of adult comedy. In Marstons The Fawn, acted by the Children of the Queens Majestys Revels and Pauls Boys, the portrait occasions other kinds of wordplay on counterfeiting. As a handheld prop, the miniature serves as both a substitute for a man and the occasion for repartee between lovers. The Duke of Ferrara, Hercules, has disguised himself as the wise and vengeful Faunus, whose purpose is to expose the folly and vice of others. In an early scene, when Hercules son, Tiberio, visits Gonzago, the Duke of Urban, at his court, he pulls out a miniature portrait of his father as he speaks of him. The portrait is a remembrance of the father, but it also serves to conjure his presence momentarily. The irony here is that Hercules is actually present onstage and counterfeiting as Faunusthus, he appears as a double counterfeit; a further irony, however, lies in Hercules intent to unmaskto expose the counterfeit naturesof corrupt courtiers. Gonzagos daughter, Dulcimel, greets Tiberio, her beloved, and looks at the portrait: Is this your fathers true proportion? (1.2.102) she queries.25 No, lady, he responds, but the perfect counterfeit (1.2.103). As a manner of chastising Tiberio for his absence, she wishes the painter would send a counterfeit to move our love (1.2.106). Tiberios response entertains the conceit of children being true images of their parents: Why, fairest princess, if your eye dislike that deader piece, behold me, his true form and livelier image. Such my father hath been (1.2.11012). She continues to ask how the portrait compares to the duke himself; Tiberio concludes that the portrait flatters his father, for the courtesy of art hath given more life (1.2.131) to his eye and youth to his countenance than is true to life. Thus, this visual record of Hercules, rather than signifying age, cares, and fatigue, represents him idealistically in the vigor of youth. Marstons sly commentary underlying this exchange over a picture lies in his putative comparison between two kinds of images, the one, a dead counterfeit and the other, a living form. Painting, in Tiberios estimation, is
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that deader piece, which the eye dislikes in favor of the other, livelier image, which only the spirited, flesh and blood person can present. Painting is implicitly contrasted with playing here, for it is the boy actor who creates the livelier image of Tiberio. Yet the courtesy of art to give more life extends to both painting and playing, for both arts are in the business of resurrecting the dead, creating lifelike images, and artfully memorializing persons. There was undoubtedly a regular theatergoing crowd at St. Pauls that appreciated artful devices and language, especially those which called attention to the boy actors skills and physical appearance. Anthony Caputi has described the atmosphere at St. Pauls theater as rarified and the theatrical movement as avant-garde. 26 This seems to put the case well, especially regarding drama at the second St. Pauls, which reflected experimentation with and invention of rare, sophisticated, satirical devices. Painting and metatheatrical devices promoted a mode of double vision, or dual consciousness, as some critics have called it, in the viewing audience.27 Caputi, Shapiro, and R. A. Foakes have emphasized the element of parody in childrens dramahow an amused audience was aware that boy choristers were aping both male and female adults, speaking bawdily as refined children should not, and parodying the adult players.28 This element of self-reference pervades John Marstons dramas in particular, but as Adrian Weiss emphasizes, this simply calls attention to the St. Pauls environment and the boys rhetorical training from school.29 Additionally, as W. Reavley Gair argues, Marstons Antonio plays, with their rare art devices, introduced the second St. Pauls audience to various aspects of a new theaterthe boy choristers talents, the properties, acting space, etc.30 The revival dramas called attention to the specific playing situation of the boy choristers at St. Pauls and, what is more, to the audience gathered there. As they watched dramas such as Antonio and Mellida and The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, the St. Pauls audience could not have failed to miss how their own social aspirations, aesthetic prejudices, and moral attitudes were being indulged, gently mocked, even outrageously flaunted by the dramatists and boy actors.
John Marstons Antonio and Mellida

Antonio and Mellida contains not only signature elements of the childrens theater and St. Pauls repertoryartistic self-consciousness, portraits, satire, bawdry, and parodybut also the character of a painter and a satire on painting. In a self-consciously theatrical manner, Antonio and Mellida satirizes courtly manners in the guise of portraying a serious romance. The Induction presents the boy choristers with their parts in hand discussing
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how to personate (a term Marston coined) their characters. They make clever, mocking references to the rank custom and vulgar fashion (15, 16) of the adult playersWho cannot be proud, stroke up the hair and strut? (14). Marston has given the boy players an occasion to display their rhetorical abilities in a spirited metatheatrical scene that fosters the illusion for the audience that it is being given a real look at the choristers rehearsal at St. Pauls. Although Antonio worries about being hissed at for taking an Amazon disguise, and for failing to make the protean changes in character required in doubling, and Feliche refers to the impossibility of limn[ing] so many persons in so small a tablet as the compass of our plays afford (13233), these fears of inadequacy are energetically brushed aside with the announcement of a second part (136) for some of the actors in a sequel to the play. At this point, the Prologue enters, and the exchange comes to a halt. As Adrian Weiss argues, the boy-actors, Antonio excluded, exude a self-confidence grounded in their mastery of rhetoric which tempts them to undertake a performance with no more rehearsal than a brief discussion of the rhetorical principles which define their respective roles.31 Antonios cued lack of confidence is designed to have a positive effect, however, in that his speeches emphasize the difficulty of double personation and therefore the skill of the players who do it well. The Induction sets the tone for the drama and for St. Pauls revival: the audience can expect sophisticated selfconscious playing and rhetorical virtuosity from the choristers. This is a new St. Pauls eminently aware of itself as a theater with highly skilled personnel. Marstons Prologue delivers an eloquent, somewhat obsequious, apology for the drama, begging the Select and most respected auditors (3) to forgive their muses lack of invention and rare art, yet the play exhibits precisely these qualities. The rarity of art, the distilled juice of rich conceit (12, 13), is everywhere in evidence in the plays language, which depends to a great extent on visual evocation and painting tropes. An Italianate drama, Antonio and Mellida presents the Venetian court as a playground for painted fools, fops, and bawdy ladies. Some of the characters Italian names indicate the nature of Marstons satire: according to Florios Italian-English dictionary, Balurdo means a fool, a noddy, a dizzard, an idiot, a giddy head;32 his page Dildos name is obscene, a term newly minted in Elizabethan parlance to mean both a real and artificial penis; Castilio Balthazars name is an obvious satiric reference to Baldassare Castiglione, the Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and author of Il Cortegiano; and his other page Catzo has an obscene name, referring again to the male member. His stoic commentator is ironically named Feliche, meaning happy or blessed.
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At the opening of the play, the proud and tyrannical Duke of Venice has just won a victory over his private enemy, Andrugio, Duke of Genoa. Andrugio and his son Antonio, whose rhetorical styles both parody passionate adult playing, have survived; Antonio, disguised as an Amazon, appears at the Venetian court in pursuit of his beloved Mellida, the Dukes daughter. Although the lovers are united in the end in a marriage that signifies a political truce between Venice and Genoa, Marstons concern lies in neither the triumph of love nor peace between nations; rather he revels in absurdities, foolish characterization, and melodramatic speech. Painting does not escape Marstons satire, for he presents the art as threefold in its uselessness and decadence: first, in the vain practice of face-painting, second, as an art at the service of vain fools, and third, as Natures imperfect practice. In a bitter, despairing speech, Andrugio responds to a letter from Piero to the princes of Italy in which he called for Andrugios and his sons heads. He laments how Nature has made the earth dumb and blind to grief. All that she has formed is unperfect, useless, vain (3.1.35). He compares Nature to a cunning Dutchman who Paints me a puppet even with seeming breath / And gives a sot appearance of a soul (3.1.31, 3233). Andrugio accuses Nature of having created him as a mere puppet manipulated like the life-like images of a skilled German painter. In his passion he writhes, falls upon the ground, calls out, but to no avail; his excessive grief finds no answering response from the universe. Andrugio may just as well be a puppet or painted image, for he certainly appears foolish and helpless in his passion. Ironically, the character of the painter, the maker of images, appears to be little more than a puppet when he is called upon the stage, although he is not as foolish as some of the other courtiers. Marston devised a jestbook sketch, seemingly extraneous to the central plot, in which Balurdo, a foppish Venetian gentleman, attempts to commission a picture from a reluctant painter. Marston has the fop call for the painter for the sole purpose of giving his characters fatuous wit an occasion for exercise. Yet a number of striking ideas about painting emerge from the stage business and dialogue in this scene. When the painter arrives carrying two portraits, Balurdo interrogates him: And are you a painter, sir? Can you draw? (5.1.1). When the painter responds simply, perhaps holding up the portraits as evidence, Yes sir, Balurdo seizes the opportunity for a pun: Now so can my fathers fore-horse, he exclaims (5.1.23). He seems immensely pleased with himself for hitting upon a witty conflation of the painters activity and the horses labor. The degrading comparison suggests, as well, the painters unsuccessful struggle in society to distinguish himself from other mechanical laborers. Balurdos question emphasizes this prejudice against painters as mere mechanical craftsmen when he asks, And
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are these the workmanship of your hands? (5.1.3 4). The painter responds, I did limn them (5.1.5). Indulging his appetite for words and neat phrases, Balurdo savors the word limn, rolling it on his tongue. In calling attention to the word limning, Marston invokes a popular Elizabethan term for portrait painting, especially the delicate miniature. The term also could refer metaphorically to playing, as Marston well knew, for he makes a point in his Induction of employing both limning and personation to refer to playing a part. While personation has the notion of person writ into it, limning has, as its primary definition, the art of painting, as well as an inscribed pun on limb, which suggests the presence of the body. When the actor exclaims, I fear it is not possible to limn so many persons in so small a tablet as the compass of your play affords (13234), he employs picture metaphors to describe both playing and the theater space at St. Pauls. A tablet literally means a wood panel for a picture, or a leaf of paper for writing; a small tablet refers metaphorically to the diminutive boy players whose very limbs must become the portrait of persons through personation; yet tablet also signifies the small playing space at St. Pauls. The compass of the play includes both the scope and artifice of the fiction, as well as the measurement and bounds of the space in which the fiction must be played. Marston draws attention to the similarities between painting and playingboth arts involve certain limitations or bounds that define the working conditions for creativity or performance, yet rarity of art and rich conceits are possible not only despite, but perhaps because of these limitations. Limitations provoke ingenuity within the realm of the possible, as can be seen in Marstons handling of the portraits onstage. The audiences attention turns to the two pictures in the painters hands as Balurdo looks them over. His ridiculous commentary is designed to make spectators feel their own cleverness at the characters expense. They, like the painter, listen to the courtiers ignorant responses to art, and laugh. He reads the inscriptions: Anno Domini 1599 appears on one and Aetatis suae 24 on the other. He mistakes the date for an agea good settled ageand jokes, Belike master Aetatis suae was Anno Dominis son (5.1.8, 1011). Marstons jest at Balurdos expense turns out to be an allusion. In 1599 Marston was in his twenty-fourth year, which argues strongly for the identity of the sitter being the playwright himself. If the second sitter was old enough to be his father, then the portrait could quite possibly have been that of Marstons patron, William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby. Indeed, Stanley, who was in his late thirties in 1599, financed the revival of St. Pauls.33 Acutely aware of his status as the dramatic inspiration for the new St. Pauls, Marston inscribed his signature by way of an image in the plays performance and flattered his patron by displaying his picture as well.
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This moment of self-definition for Marston and St. Pauls Company is achieved in the context of satire, a daring satire upon courtly patronage, in which the patron is an oblivious fool. The painter, like the audience, realizes that Balurdo is an idiot and perhaps even drunk. He prepares to hear something foolish as Balurdo calls him to approach and makes his request for a picture: I did send for you to draw me a device, an impresa, by synecdoche, a mott (5.1.1617). The impresa he envisions is designed to feed the eyes: look you sir, how think you ont? I would have you paint me for my device a good fat leg of ewe mutton swimming in stewd broth of plums (5.1.1821). He pauses again, this time to reprimand Dildo who is apparently drooling: boy, keel your mouth; it runs over (5.1.21). In the tradition of comic servants, Dildo is perpetually underfed and therefore, upon hearing the description of food, he responds to it not as art, but as real mutton and plums.34 Balurdo continues with his stewpan conceit by adding the motto to the image: the word shall be: Hold my dish whilst I spill my pottage (5.1.22). The painter responds with understandable reticence, even disgust: Twould scent of kitchen-stuff too much (5.1.25). Perhaps struck by the idea of a painting having a scent, Balurdo hits upon a frivolous inspiration, the rarest device in my head that ever breathed. Can you paint me a driveling, reeling song, and let the word be, Uh (5.1.2628). The painter reacts with incredulousness, A belch? (5.1.29). Balurdo preposterously insists, O, no, no; uh; paint me uh or nothing (5.1.30). The painter explains that this is impossible except by a seeming kind of drunkenness (5.1.31). He can represent only the illusion of drunkenness, or a seeming image of that condition. Balurdo continues unfazed: No? Well, let me have a good massy ring with your own posy graven in it, that must sing a small treble. (5.1.3236). O Lord, sir, the painter sighs with exasperation, I cannot make a picture sing (5.1.37). His tone conveys that even a fool should know that. The speaking picture trope, thus, has found its ridiculous literal counterpart in Balurdos drunken imagination. Marston has emphasized the limitations of visual art in a highly satirical manner. Balurdos final retort in his dialogue with the painter is intended to be wittyWhy? Slid, I have seen painted things sing as sweet. But I havet will tickle it for a conceit (5.1.3839). Although he has been told that his request is impossible, he absurdly insists that he will tickle it or bring the conceit to a gratifying end. Balurdos shift from impresas and singing pictures to painted ladies reflects the ease with which paintings meaning could shift from one object or referent to another. Indeed, the image of painted things singing sweetly bears directly on the boy choristers whose principle art was song. The audience would have heard them singing at various times during the per-
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formance of the play. Painted things describes Balurdo himself, for he is an effeminate courtier who sings and paints his face, yet his appearance and wit are a ridiculous parody of courtly artifice and grace. The artificial exteriors of the characters, especially their painted faces, are frequently emphasized in repartee, as when Feliche quips to Balurdo, twere not for printing [dyeing] and painting, my breech and your face would be out of reparation (2.1.241 42). Balurdo echoes the conceit word for word, exemplifying a parody of the very principle of artmimesis. While he fancies himself a poet who can tickle a rare device, he is capable only of echoing or imitating the wit and behaviors of others. His character is described in the Induction as being like an empty hollow vault still giving an echo to wit, greedily champing what any other well-valued judgment had beforehand chewd (3639). This satirical character must have appealed to the St. Pauls audience, for Balurdo returns again in Antonios Revenge, with obtuse jests rolling off his tongue and a writing table in hand for jotting down every witticism he hears. Marstons most graphic device for revealing the decadent vanity and moral shallowness of these courtiers comes in a highly theatricalized scene of face-painting.35 Balurdo and Rossaline, the vivacious wit and cousin of Mellida, enter the stage with their servants, Dildo and Flavia, who carry looking glasses for them. Unlike the allegorical mirror of Reason from earlier St. Pauls morality plays like Wit and Science, the looking glass in Marstons play is an attribute of vanity; these characters lovingly scrutinize themselves to gauge how well they have aped their social superiors. The scene begins with the two applying cosmetics to set their faces while Feliche engages in the rare sport of spying on rare fools (3.2.157, 117). As in the Induction, Feliche refers to the limitations of the theater and the dramatic fiction: O, for time and place long enough and large enough to act these fools! Here might be made a rare scene of folly, if the plot could bear it (3.2.11719). Yet the impression these lines give is that Feliche relishes playing spectator to the aspiring courtiers performance; indeed, he desires as much of it as he can get, for it feeds his satire, as it does Marstons. Balurdo and Rossaline primp and preen themselves before their mirrors, while their servants flatter and mock them. When Balurdo fantasizes that he is as elegant a courtier as (5.1.132), a prominent name of the time may very well have been used, which would have elicited amused laughter from the audience. Balurdo solicits compliments from Dildo, who exclaims, in part to the audience, you are wonderd at [aside] for an ass (3.2.134 35). When Dildo slyly tells Balurdo that his one fault is that he sleeps with his mouth open, Balurdo swears that he will correct it by sleeping with a looking glass naild to the testern of the bed (3.2.141 42). Rossaline uses cosmetics to emulate the appearance of Princess
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Mellida. Knowing this, Flavia plays the flatterer, By my troth you look as like the Princess now, to which Rossaline replies, as she paints her lips, Ay, but her lip islip is a littleredder, a very little redder. But by the help of Art or Nature, ere I change my periwig mine shall be as red (3.2.145 48). Art holds court in this scene of self-conscious masking and image-making. While Rossaline employs art to her advantage, she is also capable of self-mockery and criticizing the courtly artifice of others. In her satire on male lovers and young gallants, she claims to suspect imperfections hidden beneath their artful dress. She invents artful behaviors for a gallery of fools, her fantastical thirty-nine servant-lovers. In her energetic display of wit, which stops only because it is interrupted, she depicts two of her lovers as face-painters, one of whom can paint with his tongue as well, for he speaks with the colors of rhetoric. The quiet, disdainful figure of the painter offsets this decadent image of courtly painting, but not in a wholly meaningful way for the art of painting, for he appears in the play to serve Marstons satire. The boy who acted the painter had to play straight man to the foolish Balurdo; he was, perhaps, a serious artist horrified by drunken fantasies of paintings that depict legs of mutton. Marston, however, denies the painter sufficient agency and opportunity to defend his art; rather he appears as a foil to corrupt characters in this world of courtly artifice and face-painting. Marston does not condemn all painting any more than he condemns all art; rather, the excesses of painted courtiers and courtly patrons fueled his wit and motivated his parody. Antonio and Mellida ends with art, after all, but it is Antonios device, rather than the painters, that amazes the audience. The concluding spectacle represents the dramatists triumph over other arts, for he can do what the painter cannotmake painted things sing, and what is more, bring a dead image to life. Pretending to be dead, Antonio is carried onto the stage in a coffin. The tragic spectacle of Antonios breathless trunk (5.2.173, 175) moves everyone, including Genoas enemy, Piero, who exclaims with sudden genuine feeling, O that my life, her love, my dearest blood, / Would but redeem one minute of his breath! (5.2.2078). Upon this cue, Antonio rises from the coffin, seize[s] that breath (5.2.209) and lives once more. As was often said about life-like art, it wants only breath. From apparent corpse or seeming funeral statuary, Antonio is transformed into an actor who will either be given his freedom or will perform his death in earnest upon a pleasing stage before Most wishd spectators of my tragedy (5.2.214 15). The painting metaphor arises one last time in the play in Mellidas response to Antonios miraculous re-animation. Yet it clearly refers to the function of language rather than to the art of painting. Mellida wishes
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to register her speechlessness: Can breath depaint my unconceived thoughts? / Can words describe my infinite delight / Of seeing thee, my lord Antonio? (5.2.21820). Since she cannot give appropriate words or images to her feelings, she uses her breath to kiss Antonioa fitting stage image to reflect romantic union. Rossalines bawdy wit sounds once more in the metaphor of pricking down a husband: she claims that she will survey her servants, and he that hath the best parts ofIll prick him down for my husband (5.2.25657). Here is another opportunity for Marston or the player to supply a familiar name for the audiences amusement. Balurdo offers the rejoinder, asking to be remembered when she is pricking down the good parts of her servants. As I am true knight, he concludes, I grow stiff; I shall carry it (5.2.25960). The puns abound here, for prick refers to musical notation, marking off a name, and, in obscene slang that was relatively new in 1600, to the male member (OED). The good parts refer simultaneously to melodies for voices, theatrical characters, and bodily features. Balurdos vanity and good parts, then, tell him that he is prepared to play the part of lover. Thus, Marstons drama concludes with artful repartee, obscene humor, and comic reconciliation.
The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll

At the turn of the century when St. Pauls revival took place, the argument for paintings gentility or nobility had gained social currency among the bourgeois and aristocratic elite. We might recall the gentleman-painter George Gowers paradoxical self-portrait from 1579 in which he painted a highly unusual apologia pro sua vita; he daringly depicted his painters pencil outweighing his arms. When, in 1584, Lyly depicted Apelles in his comedy, the painter was inherently noble, but not of noble birth. He appeared as an amorous artist who reigned supreme in the interconnected worlds of painting and love. He suffered as any great lover would, even marring his art to win his lady. The rank of the painter in Antonio and Mellida is not entirely clear, but given the way he is treated, the audience would conclude that he is not of gentle birth. He is a servant of the gentlemen who, in their vanity, seek status at the Venetian court. Yet in 1600, probably just months after the performance of Antonio and Mellida, another painter appears in a childrens play, the anonymous romantic comedy The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, and this time, the painter is an earl. The coincidence of nobility and painting, while treated as a norm in the play, produces interesting tensions and conflicts.36 The dramatist has the noble painter disguise himself as a journeyman painter, a telling situation that reveals two things: first, it was perceived to be somewhat beneath an earls dignity to paint openly and second, painting had a reputation of
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being a successful means of wooing or seduction. The disguise also adds a metatheatrical dimension to the play; indeed the Earl seems to wish that he could continuously play the painter without discovery. Sundrie times Acted by the Children of Powles, The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (printed and performed in 1600), owes much to Lylys Campaspe, as well the dramas for adult players that dealt with art, love, and enchantment, such as Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and Romeo and Juliet. 37 The clever dramatist not only saw the painter disguise as a novel version of the conventional pedant disguise, such as was used in Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew (performed c. 159094), but also as a device that would flatter his audience, while slyly chiding their courtly pretensions and artistic predilections. He regarded the paradoxical Elizabethan painter as a provocative, dramatic character that would appeal to the sympathies and prejudices of St. Paul theatergoers. Various attitudes toward painters are represented not only by the painter himself, but also by different characters in the play. Thus, the painter appears in double perspective, like those figures in anamorphic paintings, both as a nobleman and commoner, a genius and an ass, an eloquent lover and an erotic opportunist, an ideal husband and a melancholic loner. Lyrical praise for painting surely pleased those amateur and professional painters in the audience, yet the representation of the painter as amorous implicitly warned patrons of the erotic dangers in the artistsitter relationship. For painters and elites in the audience, the vision of the Earl of Lassingberghs freedom gained through loss of status would have seemed a strangely compelling social fantasy. In this drama, painting is associated with an idealized erotic world, which is shattered when the painters identity as an earl is exposed. Painting is thus emblematic of secrecy and passion, as it was in Lylys Campaspe. Traditionally painting derived its power, in part, from the analogy of human creativity with natural and divine creation, which resulted in the well-known Renaissance mythology of painter as demigod. Yet when practiced by a nobleman in pursuit of eros, a nobleman who has his familys name and honor at stake, painting leads to disgrace and scandal. Featured in this play is the German Earl of Lassingbergh, nephew of the Duke of Brunswick, who happens to be a highly skilled, amateur painter. He, therefore, is able to disguise himself with authority as a journeyman artisan, Cornelius, in order to woo his lady freely in secret. In time, however, he cannot sustain his playactingAll day a Painter, and an Earle at night (sig. C3v)for he is discovered by a gentleman, another painter, who knows him, as well as his work. Although the Earl strikes a romantic figure, especially at the opening of the play, his ladys servant presents an antiromantic view of Lassingbergh as a fool and deceiver: Whom shall a man trust? a Painter? no. / A
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seruant? no: a bedfellowe? no (sig. C3r). For as an Asse may weare a Lyons skinne, he chimes, referring to the fable of the ass in lions skin, So noble Earles haue sometimes Painters binne (sig. C4r). The servants association of ass and earl, lion and painter reverses our expectations, suggesting that the painter disguise lends Lassingbergh a kind of power, authority, and virility he does not possess when he is simply an earl. The painter-earl, thus, appears as an ambiguous, complex figure, morally questionable, yet enviable in his secret (i.e., illicit) pursuit of painting and love. The noble painters intrigue with the jewelers daughter is one of many amorous plots in the play that unfold in an intricate, artful fashion. Each plot involves some mix of the elements of art, deception, disguise, magic, passionate longing, and discovery. In brief, the Prince Alberdure (secretly loved by Cornelia, the jewelers other daughter) longs for Hyanthe, an earls daughter. He goes mad for love, nearly drowns, disguises himself as a peasant, and finally wins his love after a long trial. Duke Alphonso also longs for Hyanthe, but has agreed to a political union with the Duchess Katherine; he deceives her ambassador by claiming to have had ominous visions and dreams of his future, but is eventually humbled into marriage with the Duchess when she appears in person at his court. The ridiculous French Doctor Dodypoll, whose wisdom is folly motivated by selfimportance and ill will, and a merchant pursue Cornelia for her fortune. Flores, however, desires to raise his status by having Cornelia marry the prince; thus, he purchases a love potion from the doctor, which harms the prince, seeming to drive him mad and further into the arms of Hyanthe. In friendship to Flores, Lord Cassimere takes Cornelia as his wife. When he fails to win Cornelia and is insulted by Flores, Dodypoll seeks revenge upon the jeweler, which causes momentary harm. The ridiculous doctor represents undesirable elements in society that are banished at the end of the play. The comedy resolves in amity with the promise of marriage for the four couples: Lucilia and Lassingbergh, Alberdure and Hyanthe, Alphonso and Katherine, and Cassimere and Cornelia. The plays most alluring stage image is that of the artist painting a woman. This is Dodypolls central imagea kind of romantic fantasy that achieves its power through the complementary union of stage picture and painting tropes. The play opens in a highly romantic and aesthetic atmosphere, for a curtain is drawn aside on the stage to reveal the painter at work in the discovery space: the Earl Lassingbergh is discouered (like a Painter) painting Lucilia, who sits working on a piece of Cushion worke (sig. A3r). The disguised Lassingbergh has been engaged in Floress household, where he can secretly paint and make love to the jewellers beautiful daughter, Lucilia. In an eloquent passage that as earned the praise of critics such as Swinburne, Lamb, and Bullen, Lassingbergh idealizes his mistress and painting in lyrical, vivid poetry.38 There is a quasireligious,
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Petrarchan element to his idealization, for he treats Lucilias image as an icon that inspires religious devotion. The womans image, however, is strangely scattered throughout a decorative, grotesque painting. This is an Antick work, which would consist of ornamental fantastic representations of human, animal, and floral forms, incongruously running into one another (OED). Instead of painting a typical Renaissance portrait, the Earl deliberately hides Lucilias features within an elaborate decorative scheme, which he is apparently painting on a wall or hanging cloth.39 He has not been officially commissioned to paint her portrait. The half-hidden image of Lucilia, thus, emblematizes the secret nature of the artists love, yet it also signifies the spiritual and erotic dangers of images. The painter betrays an iconophilic or idolatrous tendency when he claims that pilgrim lovers would adore her image and he, himself, would be ravished by her image. Lassingberghs speech is inspired by the act of painting, for he admires Lucilia in iconic or painterly verse that praises the glory in both art and nature. He calls upon the morning to find in his work the dispersed, glorious parts of faire Lucilia (sig. A3r) and to join them to the heavenly spheres where they will shine as an eternall light, / For Louers to adore and wonder at (sig. A3r). Punning on Lucilias name, the Earl verbally recreates his beloved as a fixed light, a beacon for lovers, which transcends his painted work. Lucilias response, like that of Campaspe in Lylys drama, is modest, yet witty. She recognizes the pleasing power of his sweet verbal painting, for his tongue is as much a curious pencill as his painters brush is:
You paint your flattering words Lassinbergh, Making a curious pensill of your tongue, And that faire artificiall hand of yours, Were fitter to haue painted heauens faire storie, Then here to worke on Antickes and on me: Thus for my sake, you (of a noble Earle) Are glad to be a mercinary Painter. (sig. A3rv)
Lassingbergh responds to this negative view of the painter as mercinary by lavishing praise on Nature her selfe diuine who is a maker and a meere Painter (sig. A3v). Inspired by Natures painting, he proceeds with an ekphrastic poem that describes the physical beauty of her work: why the world / With all her beautie was by painting made, he exclaims:
Looke on the heauens colourd with golden starres, The firmamentall ground of it, all blew. Looke on the ayre, where with a hundred changes
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The watry Rain-bow doth imbrace the earth. Looke on the sommer fields adornd with flowers, How much is natures painting honourd there? (sig. A3v)
He continues by invoking metals, jewels, man, woman, the beasts, and the elements. The emphasis, however, lies on color; that is, Natures painting gives the world its shimmering, beautiful colors. The painter, in similar fashion, gives color to form and ravishes the eye. Like Lylys Campaspe, he invokes a variant of the divine painter topos in order to dignify painting as a noble art, and as a natural, rather than patently artificial, art. A Neoplatonic idealism can be detected in such passages as this, which express a mythology of painting. Comparisons between divine or natural art and the painters work were commonplace in Elizabethan England and reflected a popular myth about artistic creativity rather than the reality of the Elizabethan painters lowly status and ambiguous reputation. For example, in a popular compendium of similes, witticisms, and aphorisms, Francis Meress Palladis Tamia; Wits Treasvry (1598), the following analogy, one of numerous painting analogies, appeared in a section titled Man: As a Painter in delineating and pourtraying a picture, hath it in his power to make it of what fashion hee list: so hath God the framing and disposition of man.40 In another excellent Similitude from Du Bartass Les Sepmaines, translated by Joshua Sylvester as His Deuine Weekes and workes (1605), on the seventh day of creation, God regards his newly wrought universe as a cunning painter does his limned work of art:
The cunning Painter, that with curious care, Limning a Land-scape, various, rich, and rare, Hath set a Worke in all and euery part, Inuention, Iudgement, Nature, Vse, and Art; And hath at length (timmortalize his name) With wearie Pencill perfected the same; Forgets his paines; and inly filld with glee, Still on his Picture gazeth greedilie.41
According to the logic of this analogy, Gods best work is man who has a spark of divinity in him, which can be seen when he imitates his creator in the act of creation. Yet underlying some of these analogies is ambivalence about the Elizabethan painters relationship with art. Sylvesters translation captures the curiously troubling situation particularly well in his description of how the Pygmalion-like artist still, with its double meaning of continuously and stilled, feeds his eyes greedily on his own picture. Such language resembles the antitheatricalists charge that spectators gazed and gaped at sights in the theater. Greedily filling their eyes with
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images, they find their reason stilled by the sensuous pleasures offered the eye. When Lucilia praises Lassingberghs eye-rauishing Art (sig. A3v), the Earl thus necessarily denies that his painting, as it exists in the Antick style, has such powers. If his art could unite Lucilias parts, then, he indicates, she and others would wonder at it; indeed, she would be recognized through his art as queen of love, and her image would ravish him. When he describes in another ekphrastic passage how he has hidden her features amidst flowers,42 he confesses his private motivations for choosing the ancient Roman style:
Here, in the Center of this Mary-gold, Like a bright Diamond I enchast thine eye. Here, vnderneath this little Rosie bush Thy crimson cheekes peers forth more faire then it. Here, Cupid (hanging downe his wings) doth sit, Comparing Cherries to thy Ruby lippes: Here is thy browe, thy haire, thy neck, thy hand, Of purpose all in seuerall shrowds disperst: Least rauisht, I should dote on mine owne worke, Or Enuy-burning eyes should malice it. (sig. A4r)
This brilliant ekphrasis reveals two motivations for style: he wishes to avoid a Pygmalion-like irrational devotion to an image, and he wants to protect Lucilia and himself from the envious gaze of others. While Apelles was compelled to paint Campaspes glorious beauty for Alexander, the Earl of Lassingbergh is under no such obligation: he discreetly paints his beloveds image for his eyes alone. Only he knows where each part lies and can therefore imaginatively unite the parts. Yet it appears that his art has ravished someoneor that is to say, his dramatic self-portrait as artist coupled with the images he has made have performed a powerful magic. The phrase, I enchast thine eye, with its play on enchast / enchant, betrays the reality. Lucilias eye is utterly enchanted by Lassingberghs personation of the painter Cornelius. With the allusion to Pygmalion, the audience at St. Pauls might have been reminded of Marstons recently printed book, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image and Certain Satires (1598). Unlike the romanticism of Dodypoll, Marstons poem parodies the conventional lover by presenting Pygmalion as his example. The poem is overtly erotic, dwelling on Pygmalions fondling and kissing of the statue. Pygmalion believes that the statue has blood coursing through its veins, yet fears that his senses deceive him. Marston compares the foolish, doting artificer to the peevish Papists who crouch and kneel
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To some dumb idol with their offering, As if a senseless carv` ed stone could feel The ardour of his bootlesse chattering, So fond he was, and earnest in his suit To his remorselesse image, dumb and mute.43
The overt religious reference to papists invokes iconoclastic attitudes toward images. Seen through Marstons satiric lens, Pygmalion has lost any scrap of dignity as an artist or a man. The author of Dodypoll, however, only subtly implies wrongful misdirection of religious devotion in his artificer. In his painter disguise, Lassingbergh is far from a parody of the amorous artist; indeed, he has tremendous appeal as a romantic character, not only to Lucilia, but also undoubtedly to the audience. He would have cut an attractive figure on the stage, played by an adolescent youth old enough to love, but young enough to articulate an ideal vision of love and art unspoiled by adult worldliness. Yet, as is often the case in dramas written for St. Pauls, a satiric double vision, which could be described as anamorphic, is at work. The audiences initial response to him is comically undercut with the entrance of Lucilias irreverent servant, Hans, a descendent of Roman comedys wily servant. He is both clown and master of the revels, offering amusing commentary to the audience on his mistresss business with the painter. The painter clearly is too fine for his position, yet his behavior is quite sawcie. Hans euphemistically suggests the Earls sauciness by calling his visit to his lady a trip to the fairies, who were traditionally associated with amorousness.44
We haue the finest Painter here at boord wages, that euer made Flowerdelice, and the best bed-fellow too: for I may lie all night tryumphing from corner to corner, while he goes to see the Fayries: but I for my part, see nothing . . . but I find a dollar in it in the morning. See, my Mistress Lucilia, shees neuer from him: I pray to God he paints no pictures with her: But I hope my fellowe hireling will not be so sawcie. (sig. A4r)
This linguistically inventive speech carries a bawdy suggestion with the unexpected notion of the disguised Earl painting pictures with Lucilia, as well as of her. This subtle prepositional shift superimposes over the seemingly innocent scene of the artist painting his model a provocative vision of Lassingbergh making illicit love to Lucilia. Hans shifts the focus from the Earls noble defense of painting to his morally questionable or sawcie intention to paint pictures of an erotic kind with her. This bawdy painting trope figuratively binds the painters activity with the erotic art of seduction. The audiences vision of Lassingbergh, thus, turns into an anamorphic perspectiveseen one way, he appears the youthful
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romantic idealizing his beloved through art; seen another way, he becomes an erotic opportunist whose painting is both the figurative and literal means of bedding his mistress. When Lassingbergh must, perhaps reluctantly, play the servant, a far less romantic role than painter, Hans gleefully takes advantage of their temporary equal status. As they are serving a banquet, he mocks him by equating serving dishes with painting masterpieces:
Come sir, it is not your painting alone, Makes your absolute man; thers as fine a hand To be requird in carrying a dish, And as sweete arte to be shewd int, As in any maister peece whatsoeuer; Better then as you painted the Doctor eene now, With his nose in an Vrinall. (sig. B4rv)
Hans seems to be referring to a quick satirical sketch Lassingbergh made of the self-inflated Doctor Dodypoll. The hand that serves a meal, Hanss own satire suggests, is better than that hand which would paint a dodypoll, a term that means a blockhead with pretensions to learning.45 In irritation, Lassingbergh quips, Be quiet sir, or ile paint you by and by, eating my maisters comfets (sig. B4v). Painting becomes the imaginative source for abuse and a weapon for revenge. To paint a vile or satirical picture can provoke laughter, but it also can serve as punishment. The punishment, in this case, would lie in the painters visual disclosure of Hanss secret habit of eating the masters sweetmeats. Like Apelles style, with its signature grace, Lassingberghs distinctive style and his excellence as a painter compel admiration, but also betray his identity. When a Saxon prince and his party visit Flores, they stop to admire the strange painting in which Lucilias parts have been hidden. The prince is significantly named Alberdure, a composite of Albrecht D urers name.46 This allusion to D urer reveals that the dramatist had some knowledge of continental painters and techniques. Since the play takes place in Saxony, the dramatist invokes the name of the great German painter and engraver to lend authority to the Princes praise of Lassingberghs lively art. He also wishes to appeal to a cultivated Elizabethan audience who might have heard of D urer, the Apelles of Germany, as some called him.47 Hilliard, for one, praised the exquisite and perfect D urer in his limning treatise.48 Elizabethan writers commented on the Germans natural inclination toward painting. As Henry Peacham wrote in The Art of Drawing (1606), Since the greatest persons among them [the Germans] as Dukes, Earles, and in a manner all the Gentlemen doe beare an inbred love to drawing, and of themselves by theyre owne practice
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growe manie times wonderfull expert herein.49 Peachams praise of German picture-making centers on the practice of noblemen and gentlemen, but his general comments are not so favorable. It is the dukes and earls, not the common artisans, who excel in the art. As Alberdure looks upon the Earls antick worke, he cannot help but admire the cunning strangenes (sig. B4v) of the style, for though it appears rough, Yet is it sprinckled with rare flowers of Art (sig. B4v). There is beauty in the picture and what is more, he detects the parts of a womans body, which makes him long to see the whole image of her:
See what a liuelie piercing eye is here; Marke the conueiance of this louelie hand; Where are the other parts of this faire cheeke? Is it not pittie that they should be hid? (sig. B4v)
His terms of praise, liuelie, piercing and conueiance, indicate animation, yet this is surely a strange apprehension of liveliness, for each part is animated independently of the other. The term conveyance suggests the fusion of poetic and painterly principles in Alberdures comments, for it refers to style in verbal expression as well as artificial, cunning, and secretive devices (OED). Indeed, Alberdures fascination with the painting is inspired by a fragmentation suggestive of the lyric blazon and romantic ekphrastic poetry. He describes the woman, feature by scattered feature, as she is rendered by the artist. The exchange following Alberdures compliment reflects the dramatists awareness of the St. Paul Boys talents and perhaps his inspiration for integrating painting into his comedy. Despite the significance of his namesake, Alberdure defers to his young page, Motto, who is a practitioner (sig. B4v) and would therefore have a special capacity to judge the paintings style and aesthetic value. His name Motto symbolically signifies that he will attach the word or phrase to the image, as the motto did to the impresa, to explain the symbolical import of the design. The description of the gentle page and his role as discriminating artist/critic bears directly on the situation of the St. Pauls connoisseur-spectators and the players. Alberdure remarks that Many great maisters thinke him (for his yeares) exceeding cunning (sig. B4v C12). The parenthetical phrase reflects the youthfulness of the boy players, who had cultivated talents in singing, playing, and painting. Like the boy players, Motto is quick-witted and talented for his yeares. He has an excellent, discerning eye, for he immediately recognizes the style in which Lucilias portrait has been painted. Not only that, to everyones surprise, he identifies the painter and thereby gives away the Earls disguise:

I thinke more Art is shaddowed heere, Then any man in Germanie can shew, Except Earle Lassingbergh; and (in my conceipt) This worke was neuer wrought without his hand.
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(sig. C1r)
Lassingberghs art cannot be hidden, or shadowed, even by the grotesque style he employs. With his pun on shadow, the shrewd youth perceives that more Art is shaddowed heere than any other German artist could produce. Lassingbergh may just as well have signed his work, for his art carries its own signifying marks easily recognized by those who are practitioners in or connoisseurs of the art. Flores responds with jealousy and a competitive spirit, for the disguised painter now threatens him in two wayshis honor has been endangered by the painters erotic attentions to his daughter, and the brilliance of his own art now seems to have been overshadowed. What erupts is a paragone between jeweler and painter, for the jeweler would have us believe that his art exceeds that of Lassingbergh. He, too, can paint, only his images are miniature inlays set in exquisite gems. He quickly attempts to assert his authority by angrily sending for his daughter and the painter, and adeptly turning Aberdures attention to things more woorth the sight, / Both for their substance, and their curious Art (sig. C1r). He draws out two of his own jewels, which contain a classical image of Venus and Cupid and a contemporary portrait of Cassimeer, a Saxon courtier who is present in the courtly party. Alberdure praises both portrait miniatures highly for their excellent workmanship and their lifelikeness. When Flores begins an ekphrastic description of the latter, Alberdure completes it by commenting on the naturalness of Cupids wings that spring out of the stone, / As if they needed not the helpe of Art (sig. C1rv). Even more delightful is the image of Cassimeer, which Alberdure compares to the man himself: by viewing both at once, / Either I thinke that both of them do liue, / Or both of them are Images and dead (sig. C1rv). This equivocation serves to underscore the liveliness of Floress images, which must do great justice to their subjects. This exchange also establishes Flores as a courtly artist, who is admired by nobility and who perceives himself to be of noble birth, although somewhat fallen in fortunes. Just before Lassingbergh and Lucilia appear, Cornelia, Floress eldest daughter, who is both ill-favored and deformed, steps forward with a gift for Alberdure, the secret object of her passion. Earlier in the play, Hans had presented Cornelia to the audience as the finest wench pursued by wooers, followed by wink, wink, deare people, and you be wise: and shut; O shut your weeping eyes (sig. A4r). Hanss unkind joke directed to the audience at Cornelias expense is designed to provoke laughter when the
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obviously unattractive, ill-formed boy playing her enters the stage. Appearing with her suitors, the doctor and merchant, lurking behind her, Cornelia gazes forlornly at a picture of Alberdure inside a jewel. When she begins to sing a plaintive song of love, What thing is loue? while gazing at the image of her beloved, the audiences laughter would surely have died away, for the choristers were skilled singers. The boys lovely voice would mitigate his appearance. When her song ends, she sighs, Faire Prince, thy picture is not here imprest, / With such perfection as within my brest (sig. A4v). She possesses the image, wrought by her fathers hands, as a talisman of her beloved, but the perfect image lies unseen in her heart. She now places the jewel in the Princes hand and claims that the gift is worthy only in that it represents him. Alberdure is taken aback and expresses a courtly modesty upon seeing his own image: What? my selfe Lady? trust me it is pittie / So faire a Iemme should hold so rude a picture (sig. C1v). Cornelia passionately exclaims, My Lord tis made a Iewell in your picture, / Which otherwise had not deserud the name (sig. C1v). He graciously accepts the picture from Cornelia, but her love is destined to remain unfulfilled, even with her fathers ambitions and the aid of a love potion bought from the quack, Doctor Dodypoll. When the disguised Lassingbergh appears, the scandal is publicly aired. His identity is revealed to his peers and Lucilias father. The outraged Flores accuses the Earl of villanie and laments how he had daily witnessed their close dealings, winckings, becks, and touches (sig. C1v), yet failed to draw the obvious conclusion. Floress description resembles Nicholas Hilliards account of the witty smilings and stolen glances exchanged between artist and sitter during a portrait-painting session.50 In the presence of Alberdure and Cassimeer, he demands that the Earl marry his daughter. Although clearly angered by the deception, Flores overacts his part, for the Earl, a high-ranking noble in Saxony, is socially speaking, a fine catch for his daughter. All is destined to end well for these lovers, but not yet, for the character of Lassingbergh has been shadowed by the playwright with hidden depths. Once the painter disguise is discovered, Lassingbergh laments that he has been made ridiculous in the stealth of loue (sig. C2r). The disgrace of the unmasking outweighs the praise for his painting, and he finds that the public marriage which Flores demands, coupled with the vnkinde disgrace, / Hath altered the condition of my loue, / And filde my heart with yrksome discontent (sig. C2r). His view of love and marriage had, until this moment, been highly romanticized: She was my wife before she knew my loue / By secret promise, made in sight of heauen (sig. C2r). They had exchanged vows freely, but now his hand is forced and he rebels. He quickly changes from ardent lover to melancholic husband; his response is to flee the scene. Lassingberghs inner transformation reveals that his sensibility has been shaped as much by romantic idealism as by a dramatic aesthetic. His
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exposure was double in nature: he is shown to be, in essence, both an earl (who paints) and a player. When he is forced to sit through a banquet, which immediately follows his discovery, he remains attired as a painter. Flores implores him to change this habit (sig. C3r) for wedding clothes. Lassingbergh wearily sighs, put on me what attire you will, / My discontent, that dwels within me still (sig. C3r). When Lassingbergh, Lucilia, and Flores appear again on the stage, the Earl is still dressed as a lowly painter, for Cassimeere comments on his strange attraction to the humble fortune of a seruants life (sig. D2v). Sunk in melancholy, Lassingbergh quotes from Ovids Amores: Quod licet ingratum est, quod non licet acrius vrit, or What one may do freely has no charm; what one may not do pricks more keenly on (sig. D2v). Here he expresses the psychological and emotional attraction of what is forbidden and difficult. Like the Ovidian lover or traditional courtly lover, he desires obstacles. Until the end, his habit remains that of Cornelius, the painter. Lassingbergh has yet another change of heart, but the Duchess Katherine must chide him in his last appearance on the stage, with our better fortunes change our habits (sig. H3r). This medieval device of changing costume to reflect an inward change calls to mind earlier morality plays such as John Redfords Wit and Science; in Dodypoll, however, there is no indication that Lassingbergh ever appeared in anything but the painter-servants garb. His inward transformations were reflected through language and playacting. When Lassingbergh flees from Lucilia after his exposure, we are given the impression that he delighted in this woman because she fed his romantic fantasies and artistic imagination. He enjoyed making love to her because this love was forbidden and aestheticized by its association with painting. Lucilia, as well, loves as freely and passionately as the Earl does. But this love is not without its dangers. The dramatist invented a strange interlude with an Enchanter to reveal the impact of these dangers in an alluring, sinister fashion. In an odd, seemingly extraneous plot device, the Enchanter intervenes in the lovers conflict when they are in the woods and casts a spell on them. After taking away their memories, he appears to Lucilia in Lassingberghs guise with a banquet and words of love designed to enchant her. Like Lassingbergh, his art lies in the creation of a physical disguise; yet while the Enchanter creates an illusion of the self, the Earl dramatized or personified an aspect of himself. Like the Earl, The Enchanter uses his tongue as a sweet, curious pencil:
Twas I that lead you through the painted meades, Where the light Fairies daunst vpon the flowers, Hanging on euery leafe an orient pearle, Which strooke together with the silken winde, Of their loose mantels made a siluer chime. Twas I that winding my shrill bugle horne, Made a guilt pallace breake out of the hill,
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Filled suddenly with troopes of knights and dames, Who daunst and reueld whilste we sweetly slept, Vpon a bed of Roses wrapt all in goulde, Doost thou not know me yet? (sig. E4r)
His ekphrastic description of the landscape and his magical art are powerful enough to fool Lucilia momentarily into believing in the reality of these illusions and to mistake the Enchanter for Lassingbergh. She is confused, wavering, and clearly in danger. Before their encounter can progress very far, her father and Hans surprise the Enchanter, who promptly disappears with his banquet and attendant spirits. This brief scene reveals the vulnerability of romanticismthe romantic self is all too easily taken in by illusion. The Enchanter, like the painter and player, possesses a compelling power that can bewitch the spectator, such that, as Lucilia says, I know not where I am, nor where I am (sig. E4v). Interestingly, it is a mundane, nonmagical plot device that wins back Lassingberghs affections. Lucilia is convinced by the Duchess Katherine to leave Lassingberghs side; when he awakes to find her missing, he soon begins to desire her again. The absence of Lucilia, like the old adage predicts, makes his heart grow fonder. While the Earl of Lassingbergh may have reveled in his disguise and produced admirable paintings, he cannot forever sustain his dramatic deception of playing the painter in order to fulfill his romantic fantasies. Curiously, the suppression of his self-dramatizing tendencies affects his identity as a painter. Indeed, painting and playing are inextricably bound in his personality. At the end of the play, he has ceased both his playing and his painting, and no mention is made of his status or genius as a painter. This ambivalent portrayal of a painter reflects the dramatists sly commentary on aristocrats who fancy themselves painters and painters who fancy themselves noblemen. It is a complicated, risky business for an earl to paint, for as the dramatist showed his audience at St. Pauls, painting naturally leads to other morally questionable behaviors, like impersonation, deception, and making love. In other words, painting was thought to have the power to feed the imagination, provoke desire, cause idolatry, and result in actions that only an actor would play upon a stage. The Elizabethan gentleman or nobleman who practiced painting in a discreet manner might bring praise and honor to himself, as Lassingbergh received from Alberdure and Motto, yet he just as easily might welcome scandal and dishonor if he indulged in the reputed illicit aspects of a painters life. In contrast, the stakes were quite a bit lower for the gentleman-painter depicted in an adult romantic comedy for the public theater. In an anony-
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mous Italianate drama called The Wit of a Woman, printed in 1604, the influence of The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll is apparent. The dramatist exploits the socially ambiguous and provocative nature of gentle painting, yet his painter, unlike Lassingbergh, merely pretends at painting. The gentleman in this drama, perhaps through dabbling or reading tales of painters, knows what painters do, but what is more, he knows what they have a reputation for doing with their female sitters. He therefore feels capable of adopting a painter disguise in order to woo a lady. Little is known about this prose comedy, and the extant manuscript is in a highly corrupt state; thus, we can only speculate about its original performance. One scholar has made a fairly convincing case for Anthony Munday as the plays author; if so, this play may be Mundays lost Comodey for the corte referred to in Henslowes Diary, or it may have been written for Pembrokes Men to play while on a foreign tour in 1598.51 Four spirited wags and their fathers are all in pursuit of four young ladies. The young men adopt disguises and outwit their fathers by pretending to woo the women on their fathers behalf. One of the young gentlemen, Rinaldo, takes the disguise of a painter in order to woo the woman he desires. Rinaldos friend Veronte counsels him in a jocular manner:
Now for you Sir, you are Apelles for your artificial spirit, and when you come to the mount of Venus, if your Pensill fall, giue ouer your occupation: but in any wise be sure of good stones for the grinding of your colours. (sig. B2r)52
Painting becomes a naughty trope for lovemaking as Veronte casts his friend in the role of Apelles, obscenely bent on mounting the woman he paints. Occupation is a threefold pun signifying his feigned profession, his pursuit of Isabella, and his conquest or coital occupation of the mount (Venuss body). When Veronte jokes about Rinaldos pensill falling, he uses the slang term for penis to make a vulgar suggestion; stones refer to testicles, and spirit indicates vital energy and fluids (semen). The concept of artificial spirit links Rinaldos art with his desire. Rinaldo answers with youthful, waggish bravado: I haue instruction enough for the perfecting of my worke, which if it be not like my selfe, let me bee counted a Bungler (sig. B2v). Rinaldo boasts that he has been schooled in the painters craft, as well as the lovers art; he is prepared to make seduction itself a perfect work of art. As in The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, the trope of lovemaking as painting is dramatically enacted in a witty exchange between painter and sitter. When Rinaldo engages Isabella in repartee, he is not as poetically eloquent or idealistic as Lassingbergh, but his words do reflect sly wit and erotic desire:
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Lady I would craue your pleasure to let me know how you will be drawne, either but a little below the brest or at full length, and eyther as you came into the world, or as you walke in the world, with the ornaments of nature, or the furniture of Art: or as a Sunne in the clowde, with a lawne ouer your Beautie. (sig. D2r)
Isabellas response to the offer to paint her in the nude (as you came into the world . . . with the ornaments of nature) is to take mock offense and to treat his words as flattery. How now Sir? she replies, what can you paint words as well as faces? why, you will make your Arte admirable (sig. D2r). Her curiosity is piqued, perhaps, by his vision of her body as she came into the world, a vision that would have conjured Italian or other continental Renaissance nudes in the imaginations of Elizabethans. But to draw me at length, she continues, what part will you begin? (sig. D2r). Isabellas challenge prompts Rinaldo to give instructions that can be understood as a series of double entendres: Lady my Maister began at the pointe called pray you away, for the needle standing right in the middle, will leade vs the better to our iust measure (sig. D2r). Isabella replies merrily, Well said Sir, but though Appelles were your maister, your mistres is no Venus. . . . you are a Painter of the new fashion (sig. D3v). This new fashion most likely refers to the perspective art practiced by continental masters.53 The needle and iust measure seem to refer, albeit imprecisely as would be the case for most Elizabethans describing continental techniques, to perspective instruments of the sort depicted in Albrecht D urers woodcuts. Needle, as well, carries the bawdy connotation of the male member. Isabellas retort that she is no Venus associates her with Apelles famous Venus and with erotic love itself, despite her rejection of this image of herself. When Rinaldo says that he will First take my measure, and then fall to worke (sig. D3r), we recall his friend Verontes fantasy of how the artist will mount Venus and Rinaldos boast that he will make perfection of his work. For the moment, however, he is unsuccessful in his enterprise, for Isabella dismisses him with her quick tongue, and the audiences attention is shifted to another disguised lover. Although the play is in a corrupt and unfinished state, we can gather that the marriage of the four wags to the four ladies was intended to conclude the comedy. The anonymous dramatists choice of a painter as one of the professional disguises reflects a cultural perception of painters as amorous opportunists and morally unreliable men; that Rinaldo plays the role of an Italian painter only further reinforces this ambivalent image. English prejudices against Italians centered not only on their Catholicism and superstitious idol worshipping, but on their reputed immoral sexual practices as well. In the next chapter, we shall see how these prejudices could be highlighted in even more provocative ways on the stage. As we have seen
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thus far, Elizabethan drama written for the St. Pauls Boys reflected subtle anti-painting prejudices alongside the mythic depiction (mostly verbal or poetic) of the semi-divine painter. In plays written for the adult players, the painters moral corruption and artistic inadequacies are confronted blatantly, rather than obliquely or ambiguously as they were in the boys plays for city and court.
4
Scandalous Counterfeiting: Iconophobia, Poison, and Painting in Arden of Faversham
I happened on a painter yesternight, The only cunning man of Christendom, For he can temper poison with his oil That whoso looks upon the work he draws Shall, with the beams that issue from his sight, Suck venom to his breast and slay himself. Sweet Alice, he shall draw thy counterfeit, That Arden may by gazing on it perish. Arden of Faversham But what a villain is this painter Clarke! Arden of Faversham
The most scandalous early modern representation of a painter

for the English stage can be found in Arden of Faversham, an anonymous domestic drama written for adult players to perform in the public theater during the late 1580s. Attributed variously to Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe, this play offers a tarnished, even sinister, image of the Elizabethan painter as a trafficker in poison as well as paint. Arden of Faversham exploits cultural prejudices against painters and phobic anxieties regarding images and poison. Due to social and religious prejudices, many Elizabethans believed that painting was an inherently distasteful, ungentlemanly, even immoral practice; by extension, painters were imagined to behave in unscrupulous ways with their clients. Examination of this fascinating play will demonstrate the close association painting had in Elizabethan culture with immoral practices, particularly those of poisoning and counterfeiting (i.e., social pretense, playacting, lying, inauthenticity). We shall see, as well, how the anonymous dramatist exploited the conceit of the lethal gaze in order to heighten the sense of danger and scandal surrounding images and vision. The play was first entered in the Stationers Register in 1592, and then published later that year under the title, The Lamentable and True Tragedie 130
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of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent. From all appearances, the play was most likely written for the Earl of Pembrokes company for performance in the public theaters and a tour in the southern provinces prior to 1592. As M. L. Wine claims, From the late fifteen-eighties on into the nineties, London companies frequently toured the southern provinces, with stopovers at Faversham; and it would be surprising if they did not take Arden on tour with them when it came into the repertoire, especially since it very early seems to have become Favershams (and the local areas) own passion play. 1 The play must have been sufficiently popular, as a second edition appeared in 1599, and a third in 1633. The primary reason for Ardens initial popularity must have been its subject, which is luridly announced on the plays 1592 title page: Wherin is shewed the great malice and discimulation of a wicked woman, the vnsatiable desire of filthie lust and the shamefull end of all murderers. The play dramatically re-enacts a real-life domestic crime that took place in 1551 during Edward VIs reignthe murder of Thomas Arden, a prominent landlord and town official of Faversham in Kent. In the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), Raphael Holinshed gives an unusually lengthy account of this priuate matter; he implies that the very horriblenesse of the murder necessitated its inclusion in the public historical record.2 The illicit passions motivating the murder and the savage amorality of the characters gave the incident a scandalous quality in the publics mind. Ardens own wife, Alice, the wicked woman, and her upwardly mobile lover, Mosby, plotted the killing and hired ruffian assassins to aid them. The frontispiece of the 1633 edition of Arden of Faversham depicts the dramatic scene of Ardens murder over a gaming table, with the armed conspirators surrounding him (figure 7). The pictures distorted perspective allows Mosby, in a posture of arrogant ease, to sit high above Arden, calmly watching Black Will and Shakebag kill him. Perhaps the most memorable scene from performance, this image of deceit, betrayal, and murder was chosen by an illustrator as the most fitting visual record of scandal to ornament the text. In the play, there are no fewer than seven assassination plots, all of which fail, involving not only the lovers and the assassins, but also Greene, a man bent on revenge after losing his land to Arden in the redistribution of abbey lands, Clarke, the local painter who creates exotic poisoned pictures, and Ardens servant, Michael, an ambitious youth who wishes to own property. The latter two characters willingly get caught up in assassination plots in the hope of gaining a wife in the bargain, for they both love Mosbys sister, Susan. The dramatist was interested not only in passions, but also superstitious and supernatural elements in the story. Holinshed and others record that the imprint of Ardens body mysteriously remained more than two years in the ground where he had been laid. The dramatist reports this in his epilogue
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7. Title verso to Arden of Faversham. London, 1633. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
and also incorporates other elements of the supernatural, such as charms, black magic, and efficacious images. Significantly, the dramatist emphasizes what the historical record cannot, that bewitchment and imagemaking have the power to control the affections and behaviors of others, as well as take their lives. The lovers accuse each other of using sorcery to compel love, and the character of the painter, who is our particular interest in this chapter, has the air and knowledge of a magician with exotic poisons at his disposal for aiding and abetting the murderous couple. While there were a number of historical sources the dramatist could have consulted regarding this notorious domestic crime, including John Stows Annales of England and the Faversham Wardmote Book, Holinsheds Chronicles offered the only narrative with dramatic potential. The Wardmote Book was an official document that reported the events occurring on the night of Ardens murder; one William Blackborne, painter, is named as an abettor and counselor, but no details of his involvement are given, nor is anything known about the life and works of this historical person.3 Holinshed, on the other hand, mentions a brief encounter between Alice and a painter dwelling in Feuersham; his is a more detailed and colorful account than the Faversham document:
There was a painter dwelling in Feuersham who had skill of poisons, as was reported. She [Alice] therefore demanded of him, whether it were true that he had such skill in that feat or not. And he denied not but that he had indeed. Yea (said she) but I would haue such a one made, as should haue most vehement and speedie operation to dispatch the eater thereof. That can I doo (quoth he) and
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forthwith made hir such a one, and willed hir to put it into the bottome of a porrenger, & then after to powre milke on it.4
Alice forgets his instructions, mixing the poison into the milk; thus, her husband misliked the tast and colour thereof, and ate only enough to make him violently ill.5 The painter, however, does not appear again in Holinsheds account. Ardens dramatist fleshes out this brief narrative for dramatic purposes; he names his painter Clarke, has him speak eloquently of his art, and involves him in more than one plot to murder Arden. Holinsheds text gave the dramatist the idea of a painter with a reputation for skill of poisons; taking up this cue, he exploits two brilliant, contemporary conceitsthe Italianate poisoned portrait and a poisoned crucifixto sensationalize the painters participation in the murder plot. What is more, the dramatist saw that he could use the painter to elicit a more complex response to the character of Alice. The painter becomes Alices foil, for his identity as a counterfeiter, poisoner, and lover highlights her moral condition. Thus, the dramatist embellished the historical account in provocative ways that add to the scandalous material already inherent in the domestic history. Among the Chief actors to Ardens overthrow (8.30), the provincial painter Clarke figures as a minor, although highly important, player. Alices lover, Mosby, first mentions him when he recognizes an opportunity for using the painter to commit murder. With undeniable fascination, he relates to Alice how he has just met a painter who is the most cunning man of Christendom (1.228). The alliterating words, cunning and Christendom, create a disturbing juxtaposition, for the term cunning refers not only to the possession of knowledge, skill, and expertise, but also, as the OED indicates, specifically to possession of magical knowledge. Guileful, crafty, and artful are other negative meanings for cunning listed in the OED. Since painters worked with a variety of chemicals and minerals from which they mixed colors and treatments for a paintings surface, they understood the basic properties of substances, including those that are poisonous. This knowledge of poisons makes the painter potentially dangerous and inspires murderous desires, fear, and wonder in Ardens characters. He is known, then, not as a portrait painter, nor as a humble sign and wainscot painter, but rather as a magician-like poisoner who satisfies an illegal market. As Ian Ousby and Heather Dubrow contend, playgoers of the period would have regarded Clarke as a magician figure who reflects the dangers and failings to which the artist is liable.6 In the 1983 production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon (The Pit; dir. Terry Hands), the painter, a shrewd older man, had covered himself with a black, hooded cloak, which lent him a rather sinister appearance. He looked like a wizard or magician. The lovers bargaining with this figure
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took on a disturbingly dark, erotic air, for they kissed and embraced each other in his presence. Not only that, they embraced the painter as well. The production brilliantly conveyed how Mosby and Alice were turning to the occult arts to find support for their love. Death by poisoning was considered to be an exceedingly cunning form of murder in Tudor England, because neither the murderer nor the murder weapon was easily detected, nor was the crime preventable. Premeditation was clearly an element in this kind of murder. In the The Third Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1602), Sir Edward Coke claims that poison is the most detestable form of murder because it is most horrible and fearful to the nature of man.7 He identifies four different methods of poisoning, each of which indicates malicious intent:
Gustu by taste, that is by eating, or drinking, being infused into his meat or drink: anhelitu, by taking in of breath, as by a poysonous perfume in a chamber, or other room: 3. contactu, by touching: and lastly, suppostu, as by a glyster or the like.8
As this legal definition suggests, there was reason in Elizabethan England to make such distinctions, for cases of poisoning did in fact occur.9 Commoners as well as nobility perceived poisoning to be a real and present danger. Due to this fear, the Act for Poisoning was passed in 1530, which treated this form of murder as high treason and sanctioned severe punishment: the poisoner was boiled to death without the opportunity of penance.10 While this statute was soon repealed, the social attitudes regarding poisoning did not change, and murder by poisoning continued to be treated as first degree murder and was therefore punished harshly. As numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets and historical records such as John Stows Annales reveal, quite a number of poisoners were sentenced to death by burning or hanging. Many of these criminals were wives who administered poison to their husbands. For example, Stow mentions two women who were burnt in Kent in the 1570s for poisoning their husbands. We can infer from these historical accounts that murder by poisoning occurred typically as a domestic crime in England and was a popular choice of weapon for women who strongly desired to be rid of their husbands.11 Murder by poisoning was also considered an Italian art, and such fanciful crimes as murder by poisoned picture or papist crucifix were perceived as Italianate; as one critic claims, dramatic intrigues involving poison would have been regarded as singularly un-English, but far from strange.12 Thomas Nashe described Italy in Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell (1592) as the Apothecary-shop of poison for all Nations.13 And as Fynes Moryson wrote in his Itinerary (c. 1617),
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For poysons the Italians skill in making and putting them to vse hath beene long since tried, to the perishing of kings and Emperours by those deadly potions giuen to them in the very Chalice mingled with the very precious blood of our Redeemer.14
Thus, despite its provincial English setting with domestic concerns particular to a specific place and time, Arden of Faversham subtly tapped into an anti-Italian prejudice, which called up both a phobia of poisons and images. Perhaps because of this widespread fear of poison, many Elizabethan playwrights featured poison as a significant trope or murderous device in their plays. Poison figures largely, for example, in two of Shakespeares tragedies, Hamlet (performed c. 16001601) and Othello (performed c. 1604). In Hamlet, poison is poured in the ear and drunk from a cup, as well as applied to a rapiers end. Claudiuss destructive ambition drives him to procure poison to commit the plays first murder, that of his brother King Hamlet, and it is poison that ultimately kills four other characters, including Claudius himself and Prince Hamlet. In Othello, the Italian villain Iago uses poison as a trope; he swears that he will pour pestilence into Othellos ear. Pestilence serves as a metaphor for false, destructive images, which Iago rhetorically constructs for Othellos consumption. When his vicious insinuations begin to affect Othellos mind, Iago claims,
The Moor already changes with my poison: Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (3.3.32529)
Poison is a figure for jealousy, for like a deadly chemical, jealousy has corrosive effects on the body and mind. Poison is also a figure associated with artistry and erotic images, as it is Iagos verbal poison, his prospect of Desdemona and Cassio making love, that unleashes Othellos jealousy. However, when Othello suggests poison for his murder of Desdemona, Iago is quick to counter with another plan, strangling her in bed. Thus, it seems that murder by poisoning belongs to the most underhanded, wicked artist-villains, and must have appropriate metaphoric or symbolic value. The connection drawn between image-making and poison in Othello suggests that Shakespeare exploited his cultures underlying fear of arts potential to poison the mind with falsehoods. Visual conceits, indeed, may be dangerous, and even as deadly as poison. In the macabre, Italianate tragedies of John Webster, produced more than two decades after Arden of Faversham, the rhetoric of poison con-
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tinues to be ubiquitous and so, too, are theatrical deaths by poisoning. What was a subtly scandalous appeal to the imagination in Arden of the 1590s or Othello of 1604 became a graphic representation of horrors and inverted Catholic rituals on the Jacobean stage of the 1610s. The visual regime of these later plays is terrifying in its graphic specificity. In Websters The White Devil (performed c.1612), for example, a poisoned beaver, poisoned portrait, and a crucifix are used as stage properties. Isabella, the wronged wife of Bracchiano, is murdered with a poisoned picture of her husband. In an elaborate dumb show staged through the black magic of a conjurer, two villains, one of them a corrupt doctor with skill in poisons like the painter in Arden, poison Bracchianos portrait; by wearing spectacles as they perfume the picture and apply poison to the lips, they are careful to prevent their own optical poisoning. Isabella pursues her nightly ritual of pagan idolatry, here a debased form of Italian Catholicism; she enters, draws the curtain to reveal the portrait, kisses it three times after reverencing it. The poison then causes her to faint and die. It is a terrible irony that Bracchiano, positioned as a spectator before this show, praises the conjurers art. Arden of Faversham distinguishes itself not only as an early dramatic reflection of a cultures poison phobia, but more importantly, the play contains an embodiment of that fear in the figure of a painter. The dramatist tapped into cultural prejudices against painters in a manner that would have been perceived as personally threatening to audience-members. Because the painter inhabited a socioeconomic world like their own, spectators would have seen him as a familiar figure, resembling those very artisans they encountered selling their paintings in stalls or workshops in London and elsewhere. The painters willful, easy abuse of art, indeed his readiness to commit murder through poisoned art, would have struck Elizabethans as a fearful kind of lawlessness to which they themselves could become an unsuspecting victim. Art and immorality coincide in a startlingly matter-of-fact manner in the figure of the painter; in this respect, the painter fulfills arts putative potential for corruption and moral abuse. At the same time, he reflects the moral counterfeiting and lethal desires of many of the characters in the bourgeois world of Faversham. It is important to emphasize that the painter is not represented in an allegorical fashion as an evil artisan, for if he were, Arden of Faversham would resemble a morality play more than the realistic social drama that it is. In truth, this play is a complex, ambivalent representation of commoners and the landed gentry, of ambitious artisans, servants, merchants, criminals, and ruthless property owners, whose actions and emotions are made to carry both tragic and comic weight. Many critics have viewed the play as a domestic drama, a somewhat anomalous type in the sixteenth century, but the significance of this categorizing lies, as Lena Cowen Orlin
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argues, in the realization that audiences who went to see Arden of Faversham were witnessing the invention of a theatrical genredomestic tragedy. Like the historical representations of Ardens murder, the play reflects Elizabethans curiosity about domestic secrets and their public, or historical, ramifications. The spectators at this plays early productions were voyeurs into the frightening, private disorders of the domestic world.15 The dramatist extends this disorder to the realm of art when he adds assassination plots involving the painter, which were not part of the historical record. The dangerous potential of art is coupled with private passions in such a way as to produce terror, a tragic emotion, and confirmation of truth for the audience that its suspicions about artisans are justified. The emphasis on domestic intrigue and secrecy in the play heightens the audiences vicarious involvement in the illicit, private dealings between lovers and rogues. The dramatist is careful to distinguish his truthful art, figured in its bareness as this naked tragedy, from the painters counterfeiting art and from dramatic counterfeiting, which involves the overuse of figurative, or painted, verse. He also determines the rank of his desired audience as that of gentility, rather than commoner, which was the status of most of those who are represented in the play itself. In his epilogue, he has Franklin, a kindly character of the dramatists own invention, appeal to a gentle audience to pardon this naked tragedy (Epilogue 14). Franklin argues that the play has represented the simple truth to eye and ear in a style that eschews glozing stuff, or the deceptive mask of rhetorical figuration. In other words, the play has sought to expose in an appropriately realistic language the truth of criminality and corruption within the domestic lives of ordinary people. Yet to rest with this interpretation is to oversimplify the play, for the simple truth is often ironically conveyed, and the dramatist not only employs a good deal of figurative language, but also romantic or lyric poetry as well. This works to an ironic effect, as Alexander Leggatt has pointed out, for it appears that the various lovers of the play have read the right books and are trying to dignify their own grubby passions with a glamorous style they cannot quite handle.16 Sweet words are unfit engines to satisfy the desires of the corrupt. The effect lends itself to ambivalence, for the audience, especially those who are wives, may sympathize with Alices desire for true love and her plea that a loveless marriage is a great burden. However, the deadly actions taken by Alice and her lover can only horrify spectators in the end. Arden of Favershams dramatist employs a number of tropes related to art, particularly the counterfeiting trope, to convey ambivalence and discomfort about the artistic process, particularly when it is in the hands of those who abuse art for immoral purposes. The trope of counterfeiting connects art, morality, love, and selfhood in this drama. According to the
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OED, a counterfeit refers to a likeness or depiction in visual or literary art, an adulteration or thing made of base material, an imitation of the genuine, a false appearance or impersonation, and a form of deceit. Elizabethans called painters counterfeiters as a matter of course, often, it seems, not deliberately intending the word to carry negative connotations. Painters were regarded as professional counterfeiters of truth and nature. While the benign use of this term follows the first OED definition, the other pejorative meanings are often meant to be subtly inferred. This is particularly true of a culture in which iconophobia colored responses to images and iconoclastic legislation was enacted. The painter in Arden may seem at first glance to be merely an unsavory minor character, but his larger significance in the dramas discomforting moral landscape becomes apparent when the audience perceives the underlying pervasiveness of the counterfeit trope. The counterfeit trope is matched only by the tropes of poison and bewitchment, which add deadliness both to the painters image-making and to the characters expressions of love. The bourgeois tragedy derives its moral force from the disturbing ambivalence such tropes generate. Some of the characters express the passions and devotion of courtly lovers, yet, at the same time, they are willing to literalize the metaphor of dying for love in the form of killing for love. Their passions are therefore appropriately figured through unsettling, sometimes literal, uses of art tropes. The ambitious artisans of the play, Clarke the painter and Mosby the tailor, are both lovers in pursuit of women, only their amorousness, like that of Alice, drives them to commit murder for love. They are not only counterfeiters in a professional or social sense, Clarke through his art and Mosby through his social climbing, but also in a moral sense. The equation is thus driven home: to be a counterfeiter by profession or by social positioning is to deform ones spiritual nature. Alice is most definitely a counterfeiter as well; she resembles the counterfeiter-player, in that spectators, both on and off the stage, cannot clearly distinguish between her moments of dissembling and her moments of truthful expression. As Frances E. Dolan observes, the dramatist presents Alice as self-consciously and dexterously playing the part of the illused wife in order to manipulate her audiences.17 The play gives no evidence for Ardens mistreatment of Alice, yet Alice plays her role so piteously that one of Ardens enemies, Master Dick Greene, is moved to set [Alice] free from all this discontent (1.512). Arden is clearly manipulated by Alices performances in scene after scene. Mosby witnesses her playacting and praises her cunning; he, alone, is aware of her skill as a counterfeit abused wife. Her chief essence, to paraphrase one early modern antitheatricalist, is that of a daily counterfeit.18 Mosbys notion, then, of having Clarke paint Alices counterfeit is ironically fitting as a betrayal of her character. Mosby describes for Alice
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how the painter can temper poison with his oils / That whoso looks upon the work he draws / Shall, with the beams that issue from his sight, / Suck venom to his breast and slay himself (1.22932). An ingenious notion strikes him: Sweet Alice, he exclaims, he shall draw thy counterfeit, / That Arden may by gazing on it perish (1.23334). Ardens own gaze will actively draw the poison from the portrait. Of all the well-known recorded means of poisoning in the sixteenth centurytainted food and drink, which kill through ingestion, and treated letters, clothing, saddles, and furniture, which kill through touch or inhalationpoison by optical transmission was never mentioned. This is an idiosyncratic, superstitious, and popular theatrical means of poisoning, which suggests the inherent danger lying within the gaze, as well as the image. Once the rays of vision, or species, as they were called, issuing from Ardens eyes have struck the poisoned image, they would recoil upon him to draw the poison back to his breast; thus, the painting must have species, as well, that shoot forth and can be conveyed along the beams of the eye. This theory of vision, called extramission (species emanating from the eye), was inherited from ancient Greek thought, known widely through Chalcidiuss Galenic influenced translation of Platos Timaeus, as well as the Roman anecdotes of Pliny the Elder and medieval revisions of Greek theory.19 The theory of vision reflected in the play resembles that of the medieval revisionist, William of Conches (c. 1080c. 1150), who emphasized the visual rays return to the eye; it should be noted that William revived Platonic theory, but in this belief, we find an odd deviance from his predecessors doctrine.20 Arden already feels that he is subjected to a disturbing gaze, but it is the gaze of others, not Alice, that he fears. He fears that his shameful secret, his wifes cuckolding of him, has disfigured his face: Her faults, methink, are painted in my face / For every searching eye to overread (4.14 15). The painting metaphor refers at once to the cuckolds horn, his blush of shame, and Mosbys name, a scandal to his own, carved deeply into his brow. Curiously, Alice, too, perceives that Mosby has the power to figure her ruin upon her body: Even in my forehead is thy name engraven (8.76), she laments. He has robbed Alice of her wifely chastity and Arden of his husbandly honor; the couples dishonor manifests itself on their foreheads, the site of inscription for sexual dishonesty. In scene thirteen, the reference to horns is made explicit, when Mosby and Alice boldly approach Arden as lovers. Mosby calls the wronged husband a horned beast (13.82). The ambivalence that arises regarding Ardens situation is typical of the dramatists handling of moral issues. Arden is both wronged husband and a flawed man who has wronged others. Arden sought and received grants of the former abbey land from the King. Former landowners, such as Dick Greene and Dick Reede, are angered and seek revenge against Arden or
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curse him for having taken possession of their property. Greene accuses him of being greedy-gaping still for gain (1.475), which refers to his presence as a rapacious landlord in Kent. Although Arden is perhaps guilty of greed, he appears at many moments in the play to be more sinned against than sinning, most particularly in his marriage. Ambivalence shapes our responses to Alices character, as well, for there are moments when she expresses doubt, fear, and remorse regarding her adultery and murderous intentions. In her meeting with the painter, her reaction to the Italianate picture suggests that she has moral qualms about the impending murder. Alices response to the poisoned portrait is that it is dangerous (1.235) and finally, that she will have no such picture, I (1.244). Much can be made of the fact that Alice has misgivings about having this portrait made. She claims nervously that the portrait might kill Mosby, herself, or others. Anyones eyes might have the power to draw poison from the painting. But she seems particularly concerned that Arden might seek her out first to show her the picture, in which case, the murderous plan would recoil upon her. Her imagination stages a strange encounter indeed; by gazing upon her own counterfeit image, as if in a mirror, Alice would be struck dead, and her husband would have unwittingly been an abettor in her murder. Julie R. Schutzman suggests that, for Alice, the portrait represents an image of herself over which she has no control;21 Alice maintains dominion over her sphere in part by controlling the way she is perceived, which is to say by counterfeiting her behavior as she sees fit. Yet to understand the intensity and meaning of her fear, we need to recognize other underlying motives that prompt her response to this image: iconophobia and superstition. If we consider that the painters counterfeit, in its poisoned condition, figures the truth of Alices spiritual condition, it becomes apparent that Alice fears an image of herself that will not only make evident her corrupt soul and deadly intentions toward her husband, but also unleash poison upon all who gaze at her picture. Although she cannot see it, Alice is, figuratively speaking, poison to the men who love her. Alices iconophobia betrays a belief in what might be called picture magic, a phenomenon Hans-Georg Gadamer claims, depends on the identity and non-differentiation of picture and what is pictured.22 In following the model of the mirror image, he argues that the image of what is represented is inseparable from the original. Even though this so-called picture magic is usually attributed to the early days of image-making, Gadamer contends that non-differentiation remains an essential feature of all experience of pictures.23 This is precisely the frame of mind the iconoclasts fought so bitterly againstthe continuity between or confusion of essence and representation, prototype and image. Of all the different kinds of painting, the portrait seems most to possess an aura
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of real presence. Because it represents the human form, the portrait is the most compelling and therefore the most troubling example of nondifferentiation. For Alice, the very process of visualizing her poisoned portrait triggers an uncanny sense of the ontological continuity between herself and the illicit image. She cannot face such a use of her own representation, not simply because she has lost control of it, but because she will have sanctioned and catalyzed the disturbing, dark powers that lie within an image. Since the poisoned oils comprise the material body of the picture, poison is inextricably bound to the image, which then poisons the viewer in the act of spectatorship. As we have seen, the perception that pictures possessed an aura of real presence was not uncommon in England during this historical period. One can see it in the well-known literary example of Shakespeares The Rape of Lucrece (1594) in which Lucrece tears at the painted image of Sinon, because she momentarily takes the illusion for truth, or believes in the ontological continuity between the image and its original. In a dramatic example from Thomas Dekker and Samuel Rowleys The Noble Spanish Souldier (c. 1610), a dishonored woman, Onaelia, defaces her lovers portrait. When her lover, the King, enters Onaelias chamber, he finds her dressed in black and the room darkened as if for a funeral. His ruined portrait hangs near a holy cross. Onaelia calls the portrait the Image of my living wrongs and the cross the object of my wounded soule / To which I pray to keepe me from despaire.24 When she vehemently exclaims, And wrapd in just disdaine, and like a woman / On that dumb picture wreakd I my passions, the King replies, And wishd it had beene I.25 He understands that the portrait functions as his surrogate and therefore the wronged woman gains some satisfaction in hurting his image. Despite the reformers efforts to make distinctions between images and prototypes, the conflation of these two categories in the popular imagination persisted. Their warnings about the veneration of images produced anxiety about owning and gazing upon religious pictures, but they certainly did not eradicate peoples belief in the efficacy of images. There were notorious cases of violent treatment of Queen Elizabeths portraits, which give evidence for the belief in picture magic in early modern English culture. There are known cases in which her image was burnt, stabbed, cut to pieces, poisoned, and even hung on a horses tail.26 Roy Strong calls some of these incidents out and out black magic, but he continues by arguing that, witchcraft aside, it is clear that it was commonplace that to maliciously attack or deface a portrait of the Queen would somehow affect her.27 Two such cases of picture magic involving the Queens image were recorded in William Camdens The History of Princess Elizabeth (London, 1630).28 In 1591, a year before Arden of Faversham was recorded in the
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Stationers Register, two men, William Hacket and Brien ORork, were brought to trial for such a crime. Hacket was a vicious commoner from Oundle who took to counterfeiting holiness and professing that he was the new incarnation of Christ come to judge and reform England. His ignorant lackeys walked through the streets of London proclaiming Hacket the supreme monarch and calling for Elizabeths deposition. As Camden claims, That Hacket bare an implacable Hatred against the Queen appeareth by this, That he had often given out that she had forfeited her Right to the Crown, and had in a Rage defaced her Arms and Picture drawn upon a Board, striking his Dagger through the Breast of it. And no Marvel: for he had perswaded himself that he was ordained by God to be King of all Europe. . . .29 Hacket was captured, condemned for these crimes, and sent to the gallows. His execution in London was quite a spectacle, according to Camdens description; after he was hanged, the multitude cried to have his body cut down, and then watched as his bowels were taken out and the body quartered. That Hackets hatred of the Queen manifested in action taken against her portrait is our concern here. Underlying this furious act of iconoclasm was Hackets assumption that the portrait was more than a mere representation of the Queen and her royal arms. The picture itselfthat is to say, what Hacket believed was inherent in it inspired his defacement and murder of the image. This kind of treatment of an image betrayed malicious intent against the Queen and was therefore regarded as treasonous. The case of Brien ORork, a rebellious lord in Ireland, is that of a traitor who committed many lawless acts against the English in Ireland and sympathized actively with the Spaniards. He was arraigned and charged with a host of crimes against the Queen, including the following: he excited and encouraged Alexander Mac-Conell and others against the Queen; that he had commanded the Queens Picture, painted in a Table, to be hung at a Horses Tail, and hurried about the Streets in Scorn, and at last disgracefully cut in pieces. . . .30 Again, we find an example of extraordinary treatment of a picture, which signifies a belief in some intrinsic property in the image that is contiguous with the Queen herself. The shaming and mutilation of the picture reflect ORorks contempt for Elizabeth and a savagely satisfying enactment of his ill will against her. Both he and Hacket treated the Queens picture as more than mere representation or symbol; rather, the picture must have seemed to possess not only the Queens spirit, but also essential qualities and principles associated with her reign, which they wished to eradicate. If we return to the conceit of the poisoned portrait in Arden of Faversham, it is possible to see, in light of these historical cases, that the imagined counterfeit of Alice reflects Mosbys hostility and hatred not
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only toward Arden, but also toward Alice herself. His picturing of Alice as the subject in a poisoned counterfeit unconsciously articulates what he can only half-perceive about Alice at this stage in his adulterous affair with her. The dramatist has employed irony here, for we see the appropriateness of this deadly image of Alice far more clearly than Mosby does. Not until later in the play does Mosby turn on Alice to call her a counterfeit, bewitcher, and sorceress. Mosby angrily accuses her of having masked a deceitful self with the false image of an authentically devoted lover. Not only has she been playing Ardens abused wife, but also Mosbys loving mistress. He exclaims that he will break her spells and exorcisms (8.95), and spurns her by naming her for what she is, a base counterfeit: now the rain hath beaten off thy gilt / Thy worthless copper shows thee counterfeit (8.100101). The washing off of her gilt covering suggests that her appearance was a mere similitude like that of a false gold coin, or that created by cosmetics, ornament, dress, and personation. Indeed, Alices counterfeiting is that of a players; she is changeable, and her true feelings are often difficult to ascertain. While Mosby admires Alices show of devotion toward her husband as cunningly performed (1.419), and her public rejection of himself as cunningly dissembled (14.184), he turns these words against her when he is angered and when it suits his purpose. Ironically, Mosbys accusation that Alice bewitched him with a counterfeit image of herself resembles Alices own accusations against Mosby. The very first encounter between Alice and Mosby is fraught with high emotion and conflict. They are as much drawn to one another as they are repulsed. The lovers have already sworn to murder Arden, but Mosby, like Shakespeares Macbeth, appears reluctant to commit the crime. Alice, like Lady Macbeth, wrings his heart and reminds him of how their continued intimacy depends upon the murder. Alices bitterly passionate accusations reflect her awareness of Mosbys social ambitions and artful manipulation of her. She charges him with having used witchcraft and sorcery to win her love. She calls him base peasant and servant, declaring her own nobility in the face of his falsehood look (1.198, 204, 195). That look, the gaze of a lover intent upon conquest, is coupled with enticing speech, both of which Alice claims have ensnared her with their magical powers. We have yet another example of a lethal gaze. Later in the play, the lovers resume this argument, as Alice attempts to shame Mosby, who again wavers in the face of murder, by claiming that he is no more than A mean artificer [with] that low-born name (8.77). He has offered a false image of himself as someone who, to rise above his social station and to love a noblewoman, would commit any deed to seal that new identity. The title he bestows upon her, an odious strumpets name, is a dishonorable one
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compared to that of Ardens honest wife (8.72, 73). It must be witchcraft, she argues angrily, that caused her to fall in love with him, for why else would she, a gentlewoman, have consorted with a lowly commoner? In her passion and remorse, she resorts to a class-inflected language that clearly reflects her prejudicial attitude toward lower-class artisans. Descended of a noble house (1.202) and married to a wealthy gentleman of social prominence, she has high social standing in Kent, whereas Mosby is a mere botcher, or mender of clothing, as Arden dismissively calls him (1.25), a velvet drudge (1.322) who has Crept into service of a nobleman (1.27). His ambitions drive him to rise in society by any crafty means he can devise. Mosby takes pride in his rising, declaring resentfully that Arden and others should Measure me what I am, not what I was (1.321). The term artificer signifies more than just an artisan; the OED offers trickster as another meaning. Thus, Alice feels that the wily artisan has tricked her into having a sexual liaison that will advance him, yet can only ruin her. Alice calls him Base peasant, and exclaims that he has conquered her with witchcraft and mere sorcery (1.198, 200). Not only Alice, but Mosby, as well, is associated with Clarke, the other artificer in the play, who is equally as well a trickster, lover, and magician figure. Alices strategy to test Mosbys love proves to be an ambiguous dramatic act in which she uses rhetoric first to deny Mosby her love, and then to persuade him of her love. In the eighth scene, Alice appears typically in a chameleonlike manner; initially she appears to be remorseful for having betrayed Arden, but then, after provoking a passionate response from Mosby, she protests that she now sees how much Mosby loves her and will renew her devotion to him. This scene appears in a highly ironic light, as it follows Mosbys dark soliloquy in which he vows to kill, or be rid of, everyone involved in the Arden murder plot, including Alice. Her exuberant declaration of love has an idolatrous ring to it, for she claims that she will do penance for having tested his love. Her penance comes in the form of an anti-Christian ritual of burning her prayerbook. When she tears away the pages of the book, she holds up the cover and exclaims, in this golden cover / Shall thy sweet phrases and thy letters dwell, / And thereon will I chiefly meditate / And hold no other sect but such devotion (8.11922). This ungodly devotion to a lover involves sacrilegious actions: mutilation of the prayerbook, devotion to the word of Mosby, rather than Gods Word, and idolization of a lover. In another ploy for forgiveness, Alice also verbally promotes Mosby to the status of a king, gentle by his worth (8.145) despite his birth. Alices dangerous propensity to express irreligious attitudes is shared equally by Mosby. When Mosby makes another request for poison from the painter, the lovers appear united in their willingness to abuse an image. Alice had refused Mosbys initial plan to use her poisoned image to kill
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Arden, and then failed to carry out her own plan to poison Arden with the porridge. Now Mosby devises another plot involving the painters poisons, and Alice does not protest. He initiates an illicit business arrangement involving a scandalous imagea Catholic object of devotion, the crucifix. He reminds the painter of a secret conversation they had involving the poisoning of a crucifix. The notion of secret talk has a dangerous, even conspiratorial, air about it:
I do remember once in secret talk You told me how you could compound by art A crucifix impoisoned, That whoso look upon it should wax blind, And with the scent be stifled, that ere long He should die poisoned that did view it well. I would have you make me such a crucifix, And then Ill grant my sister shall be yours. (1.60916)
The poisonous gases would be inhaled, causing the devotee to suffocate. Because people typically kissed crucifixes, the scent did not have far to reach. As with the portrait, the poison would be conveyed optically, as well. This is yet another example of the lethal gazeto look upon the image of the crucified Christ would prove deadly to the spectator. The painter realizes the moral consequences of this abuse of a crucifix: I am loth, because it toucheth life (1.617), he exclaims, referring to salvation or the life to come, yet his desire for Mosbys sister, for sweet Susans love (1.618), surpasses his fear of the afterlife. The poisoned crucifix will serve as a means to erotic fulfillment. This malignant use of a crucifix would have stirred a number of different responses from theatergoers, depending upon their religious beliefs, fears, and practices. For recusant spectators or those nostalgic for the rituals of Catholicism, the idea of using a crucifix to commit murder would have been perceived as an appalling sacrilege. Many viewers may not have reacted so strongly, but would have found themselves at least somewhat disturbed. Crucifixes had not entirely vanished from England with the coming of the Protestant Reformation, although reformers were responsible for destroying many of them and forbidding their use. Queen Elizabeth herself had provoked controversy among her bishops and other reformers early in her reign by keeping a crucifix and two candles on the altar of her royal chapel. She refused to regard either the crucifix or the candles as idols, despite the iconoclasts insistence that they violated the second commandment. Reformer Thomas Sampsons complaint in a letter to Peter Martyr from 1560 is representative of the iconoclasts discomfit and fear:
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Oh my father, what can I hope for when the ministry of the word is banished from court? while the crucifix is allowed, with lights burning before it? The altars indeed are removed, and images also throughout the kingdom; the crucifix and candles are retained at court alone. And the wretched multitude are not only rejoicing at this, but will imitate it of their own accord.31
Although images were, in general, removed from churches, Sampsons fear about resistance to iconoclasm proved to be well founded. In a very real sense, the Queens chapel set the example for her nation; thus, it was not surprising that reformers attacked her use of the crucifix, for they considered this image of the crucified Christ to be a superstitious object that led the devotee with quick speed into idolatry. The cross, as well, with which Elizabeth apparently replaced the crucifix at some point, was regarded as idolatrous. These images were subject to at least four physical attacks in 1562, 1567, and 1570,32 which demonstrates how threatening they were perceived to be, most especially when used by the monarch. For the Protestant viewer, especially an iconoclast, the dramatic device of the poisoned crucifix would have stirred up hatred for an idol, and perhaps a perverse satisfaction in imagining the possessor of an idol (Arden) getting his just deserts. The poisoning of an idol might have been perceived as a form of breaking the image, but perhaps more accurately, it represents the true nature of an idol, which has a deadly effect on the spiritual life of the worshiper. Initially, when the crucifix is commissioned by the lovers, it does not literally appear before anyones eyes. It is not yet a stage property to be handled, much less gazed upon. The crucifix appears in the minds eye, but is nonetheless provocative enough to cause discomfort in the serious-minded, Protestant theatergoer. Images in the mind, as some reformers like William Perkins claimed, were to be feared as much as literal images in the material world. At a later point in the play, however, the feared object appears on the stage. When Alice approaches Clarke in the tenth scene of the play, she finds him engaged in a physical fight with Michael, another suitor of Susans. Alice intervenes and demands to know whether he has done what he promised, to which he replies, Ay, here it is; the very touch is death (10.7778). Because both the fumes and the material image itself are lethal, the crucifix must be well covered. Thus, the scandalous image remains veiled, a secret known only to Alice, Mosby, the painter, and the audience. The crucifix is to lay in wait as a last resort, if all the other plots fail. After this scene, however, the crucifix disappears and is not referred to again in the text. Another dramatic opportunity is lost, one might argue, but then again, the dramatist is loosely following the historical record, which asserts that Black Will and Mosby murdered Arden. One can only wonder, as well, whether it would have
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been possible for the Earl of Pembrokes company to pass such a scene murder by poisoned crucifixby the censors in the 1590s. The time of the plays action is important to consider, specifically because of the radical changes in religious practice and iconoclastic attitudes that came to dominate the period. Since the events took place in 1551 during Edwards reign, we must keep in mind that the young kings iconoclastic efforts were zealous in comparison with his sister, Elizabeths, for she attempted to maintain a moderate religious stance throughout her reign. Edward, together with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the Protestant Council, condemned in no uncertain terms a host of Catholic practices, such as pilgrimages, veneration of relics and images, processionals, and the use of the rosary; what is more, the Councils Injunctions of 1547, enforced by commissioners visitations to churches throughout England, ordered mass destruction or defacement of abused holy images and pictures, both in churches and in private houses.33 The conceit of a poisoned crucifix is meant to reflect powerfully on the moral corruption of Mosby and Alice, as well as the corruption of artisans who refused to abide by the religious reforms. In portraying this meeting with the painter, the dramatist exploits an iconophobic cultures fascination with and fear of the painters work. Alice reflects this fascination in moral and psychological terms. Since it is not her own image that is in danger at this point in the drama, she perhaps feels that it is safe to inquire about how the painter can avert the danger of being poisoned while handling the lethal chemicals. Once again, Alice is projecting her own anxiety about the corrosive effects of immoral behavior onto the painters profession and his cunning use of chemicals. Her technical questioning of Clarkes methods can be understood as a veiled attempt at questioning how she can prevent her own death or injury in both physical and spiritual terms. Why, Clarke, is it possible, she inquires, That you should paint and draw it out yourself, / The colours being baleful and impoisoned, / And no ways prejudice yourself withal (1.62124). Clarke is happy to oblige her with a response; here, after all, is a client, just as mercenary as he, showing interest in his dark art. That he confessed the nature of his work to Mosby and undoubtedly to others earlier reflects his arrogant pride in his abuse of images. He betrays his secret willingly, describing to Alice how he protects his eyes with spectacles and his nose with a leaf of rhubarb. Clarke protects both eyes and nose, so that neither the deadly fumes nor the gaze will have an effect on him. Clarkes practical approach to his murderous art exemplifies his, as well as Alices and Mosbys belief that they live in a world governed by the cunning and the passionate. To paint with poisons without doing harm to the self is as easy as putting on a pair of
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spectacles and blocking fumes from entering ones nose. There are no anticipated moral consequences for the poisoner, just as there are no mortal or physical consequences to the act of poisoning. As a cunning artificer, Clarke serves as the lovers foil, for they, too, are cunning artificers who can deceive, charm, and harm others without feeling the stinging pricks of conscience. Ardens servant, Michael, also mirrors the lovers illicit desires and machinations. Michael competes with Clarke for Susans love; the thought of winning her fuels his ambition. He agrees to murder his master and plots to kill his brother so that, with only a right-down blow (1.175), he will gain possession of Susan and his fathers farm in Bolton. Through acts of petty treason, he will make his wife more worth than twenty painters can (1.171). Michael, like all of the inhabitants of Faversham, is keenly aware of social status and the value of owning property. The painter is certainly not a gentleman, nor is he a property-owner. Socially speaking, he is of little worth. He has only his art with which to win Susan. Michael, however, is jealous of that art and attempts to undercut what little value it has. He tells Alice, when she claims that there is no matter between the painter and Susan, that Clarke sent her a picture of a dagger in the heart, with an accompanying verse stolen from a painted cloth (1.153). The value of this painted emblem lies in its ability to speak to its audiences heart. Susan treasures the image; whether it is well made or not is another matter. The dagger in a heart is a violent image, which resonates in a darkly ironic way with the murderous impulses of most of the characters, including Michael. The metaphor, however, is a traditional lovers trope, the love wound, or the lover slain by love. Michael wishes to undo this trope by writing a taunting letter, which will provoke a violent reaction in Susan, who will be driven to eat the heart with salt and throw the dagger at the painters head (1.15860). Because he is illiterate, Michael fantasizes about finding a poet who can compete with the painter on the level of art. The poet will taunt the painter and his emblem with his verbal images. Michael imagines Susans reaction as a bizarre hybrid of literal and metaphoric responses to art. She could simply tear or deface the image, but Michaels imagination makes literal the metaphors of appetite and death by having her eat and kill as if the images were real. Later in the play, Michael himself has a chance to taunt the painter verbally; he uses bawdy language to suggest that Clarke is an unworthy libidinous suitor to Susan. You painters, he says accusatorily, make but a painting-table of a pretty wench and spoil her beauty with blotting. . . . you painters paint lambs in the lining of wenches petticoats, and we servingmen put horns to them to make them become sheep (10.6364, 6668). The meaning is clearly lewd. The painting metaphor refers to sexual activity, which, in the first case, spoils the womans beauty, either
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with vulgarity or with sexual defilement. In the second case, Michael boasts that while the painter engages in what can be taken as either innocent romantic behavior or foreplay, the servant jumps in with his horn, or penis, to make love to the woman. Thus, he implies that he has been making love to Susan. When Clarke becomes angry and threatens to hurt Michael, the servant mocks him, What, with a dagger made of a pencil? (10.70). These words ring with irony, as we know that Clarkes pencil is often wet with poison. Clarkes battle cry, as he lunges for Michael, is Would Susans love lay upon this stroke! (10.72). Thus, the encounter between these rivals ends with violence and the artists expressed devotion to love. Alices devotion appears to be to eros, as well, or to her own amorous desires; thus, she says, Love is a god, and marriage is but words (1.101). Her own marriage vow is but words without spiritual substance, and her disposal of a servant in a marriage is of such little matter, that she can offer Susan to the highest bidder. The stakes are high, and so, too, must be the bidding: Alice will give Susan to the man who kills Arden. Since it appears initially that the painters poison with dispatch Arden quickly, Alice revokes her initial promise to Michael, and declares that Susan will be Clarkes. Although the painter works for pay, he agrees to provide poisoned images to Mosby and Alice on the condition that he is given the woman he loves. Like the adulterous couple, his imagination is governed by eroticism. He is willing to go so far as to kill for love. In fact, love provides something resembling noble justification for murder. He declares to Alice that she reflects a noble mind in venturing life and death for her beloved. He says that he will do the same for his Susan. According to pagan or courtly precepts of love, to stay with a husband one hates is to commit a sacrilege. Indeed Clarke bargains shrewdly for the woman he loves, reminding Mosby that he has already vowed that she will be his. His bargaining becomes more eloquent as he turns to an analogy between painters and poets. Just as poets need a muse, he argues, so, too, do painters, and his muse will be Love, which Susan Mosby inspires in him. Like Alice, love motivates his artistry and actions:
For as sharp-witted poets, whose sweet verse Make heavenly gods break off their nectar draughts And lay their ears down to the lowly earth, Use humble promise to their sacred Muse, So we that are the poets favourites Must have a love. Ay, love is the painters Muse, That makes him frame a speaking countenance, A weeping eye that witnesses hearts grief. (1.25158)
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He calls painters the poets favourites, that is, those who have been chosen for favor. Indeed, over the centuries, poets have turned to painting to find vivid representations of subjects, from pagan mythology to classical history, that are worthy of imitation. Yet the poets true source of inspiration derives from their love of their muse, Erato or Euterpe; poets then are the gods favorites. The painter argues that he needs a muse, too; his muse will be Eros. Erotic love inspires him to create expressive images. The speaking countenance and weeping eye express the inner life not only of his sitter, but of himself as well. Love, the painter claims, has the power to direct his art and animate his portrait. When Mosby declares that Susan shall be his, the painter responds with a solemn vow: Then, brother, to requite this courtesy, / You shall command my life, my skill, and all (1.26263). This is courtly discourse; Mosby and Clarke are brothers in a community of courtly lovers, as it were. A courtesy has been shown to him, and he must return it with what skills and powers he has at his disposal. After he has won Susan, the painter proclaims, in the language of his art, that he lays his colours to the life, / His pencil draws no shadows in his love; / Susan is mine (1.596 98). This recalls the sort of luminous painting Nicholas Hilliard was famous forpainting to the life without shadows. Hilliards description in his treatise of the painters emotional and erotic involvement with his subject as he paints from life is fitting here, in that the very description Clarke offers of painting and love conflates the two.34 The absence of shadows signifies both a cherished Elizabethan painting technique and the nature of his love as he wishes to figure itall nobility, light, and beauty. His desire for Susan, however, is of a shadowy, impure kind, for it drives him to accept a commission that is immoral in nature, the poisoning of a crucifix. The lyrical nature of the painters speeches and his passionate commitment to love and art cannot mask the reality of his mercenary practices and his dangerous skill with poisons. His willingness to aid and abet murderers for the sake of possessing his lover is as much a Machiavellian calculation as it is a debased expression of courtly love. In these contradictory qualities of the painter, the audience sees mirrored the conflicting desires and qualities of Alice and Mosby; the adulterous couple wish to be ennobled by a passionate love that only proves to be morally poisonous to them. Indeed, the intensity of Alices desire to possess Mosby, or at least to keep him enthralled by her performance, is as great as her desire to be rid of her husband. The painters abuse of art, his native cunning, and his association with black magic render him a compelling foil for the adulterous lovers who, like the painter, take the tropes of art seriously. The artisan Mosbys ambitions and Alices adulterous lust unite them in a horrifying murder plot, which eventually brings them to ruin. The
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painter, however, seems to have escaped punishment. In Holinsheds account, he is not listed among the group who were condemned and hanged (Michael, Mosby, Greene, Susan) or burned (Alice and Black Will). At the conclusion of Arden, the painter has disappeared; we are told by the Franklin in the epilogue that The painter fled, and how he died we know not (Epilogue 8). Of all the immoral characters in the play, the only one to have eluded justice, then, is the painter. The audience is left with the impression that the artist survived and perhaps moved on to ply his trade elsewhere. After fleeing Faversham, he surely must have employed his cunning in order to survive. In Clarke, Elizabethan audiences would have found their worst prejudices against painters confirmed, for he is an immoral artist, a poisoner, and a lover, whose abuse of images is an outright scandal. In dramatizing the tale of Ardens murder, the dramatist invented both the poisoned portrait and lethal crucifix in order to capitalize on his audiences fears about the power of images. Thus he chose to heighten the scandal surrounding the painter from Faversham, both for its dramatic potential and its shock value. In staging the illicit, secret life of the painter, Arden of Faversham not only reflected spectators prejudices against painters, but also actively promoted or fueled those sentiments. Other adult theater productions of the 1590s and early 1600s did not portray the painter in such a lurid fashion. Although he may appear to be inadequate to the task of meeting his patrons demands, the painter in such public theater dramas as The Spanish Tragedy and The Trial of Chivalry has his dignity and is far from conforming to the image of corruption presented in Arden of Faversham. In the following chapter, we shall examine the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy to uncover further artistic tensions, cultural anxieties, and mimetic possibilities associated with painting in the Elizabethan theater.
5
Stretch thine art: Painting Passions, Revenge, and the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy
Behold a man hanging: and tottering, and tottering as you know the wind will weave a man, and I with a trice to cut him down. And looking upon him by the advantage of my torch, find it to be my son Horatio. There you may show a passion, there you may show a passion. Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying The house is a-fire, the house is a-fire as the torch over my head! Make me curse, make me rave, make me cry, make me mad. . . . Addition to The Spanish Tragedy Poesie therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth: to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie
The author of the famous Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy was undoubtedly an appreciative, albeit critical, spectator at one of the early productions of Thomas Kyds popular revenge tragedy. A number of years after the plays first recorded performance at the Rose Theater in 1592, the anonymous author cast the tragic avenger Hieronimo, by then emblazoned as a stock image of paternal grief and madness in every Elizabethan theatergoers memory, in a compelling new scene. This addition differed in crucial ways from the dramatic style of the popular play. Retrospective in nature, the scene echoes memorable images and motifs from The Spanish Tragedy in a style that heightens the relationship between dramatic language and painting, yet refuses to bear fruit in spectacle. Although its language depends on the potency of images, the scene in performance places greater emphasis on the verbal element of dramathe scene is essentially a conversation, and the imagined pictures find their articulation in language through the elaboration of a painting trope. However, a most remarkable effect of this painting trope can be witnessed in performance: because the painting never materializes on the stage, the actor is motivated to enact the images with his face and body. The player becomes the painting; his performance unifies word and image. Thus, the 152
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visual element of theater asserts itself through the player in an extraordinary act of compensation for a suppressed visual image. In no early modern play examined thus far in this study have we witnessed such a fusion of the arts of painting and dramatic impersonation. The energies that resulted in this fusion are arguably competitive, or paragonal, in nature. The dramatist suppressed the material body of the painting in order to draw forth a more striking, moving dramatic painting in which speech, gesture, and passionate expression create living art. The complex nature of the Painter Additions speaking picture and its effects on the audience at an Elizabethan performance of The Spanish Tragedy will be the concerns of this chapter. We shall observe, as well, how the scene indulges the audiences iconophilia, while at the same time fostering ambivalence and moral anxiety about the dangers of image-making. In writing an addition for a play known for its spectacular effects and excessive passions, the Additions author chose, oddly enough, to present a quiet, moving encounter between two grieving fathers in which the action is conveyed primarily through the motives of rhetoric. A visually charged language compensates for lack of spectacle. A painter, whose son has been murdered, arrives mysteriously at midnight to appeal for justice from Hieronimo. The old Knight Marshal, magistrate of justice in Spain, has himself suffered the brutal murder of a son; extreme grief and cutting sorrow (3.12A.14) have driven him into a state of lucid madness in which he contemplates wild justice.1 The painters profession inspires Hieronimo to turn his attention to painting as a medium for consolation and revenge. He gives the artisan a set of instructions for a vivid narrative painting that would feature himself, his wife Isabella, son Horatio, and the murderers as portrait images; the final scene is to depict his revenge. This powerful and moving example of an Elizabethan painting trope reflects the influence both of paintingTudor portraits, memorial paintings, and the rare, scandalous revenge paintingand poetrypictorial poetry and the picture in the gallery motif.2 In synthesizing various influences from poetry and painting, the Painter Additions author attempts to get at the origin and purpose of the artistic impulse. Because he does this in a theatrical setting with characters who reflect back on prior action in the play, the dramatists invention of the painting trope proves to be based not only on pictorial genres, but also on an imitation of dramatic performance. The scene offers an allegory of imitation in which Hieronimo momentarily plays the painter, taking his material from nature and painterly models. The work of art he creates is a verbal painting that memorializes scenes from his life and projects new images that help create a meaningful narrative structure. This verbal painting is a fascinating hybrid of representational forms (drama, language, painting) that can be called ekphrastic, yet the extraordinary aspect of this
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ekphrasis is that it is not conveyed solely in verbal form, nor is it based solely on a visual form. The visual images in Hieronimos painting are realized through dramatic impersonation. As he speaks, Hieronimo suits the word to the action and dramatizes the word painting in an effort to make the images live through performance. The performers vitality and the vividness of his language (known as enargeia) infuse the painted images with the liveliness of drama itself. This scene intimately connects drama with painting and demonstrates through the players performance and a sophisticated use of the painting trope a vivid example of the Elizabethan notion of painting passions. First printed for Thomas Pavier in 1602 along with four other Additions to Kyds play, the Painter scene has been the subject of controversy for readers of later eras who have debated its authorship, date of composition, and early performance status. While some critics have speculated that Shakespeare, Webster, or Dekker wrote them, the most probable author seems to be Ben Jonson. This view is based on the record in Henslowes Diary of two payments made to Jonson for new adicyons for Jeronymo.3 Given the scenes lack of spectacle and appeal to the ear, Jonson would seem to be an appropriate candidate for authorship. In Timber: or Discoveries (printed 1640), he praised paintings ability to penetrate the inmost affection, while at the same time insisting that poetry is nobler and that Picture tooke her faining from Poetry.4 His well-known quarrel with Inigo Jones appears to have been the culmination of years of repulsion for theatrical spectacle. Furthermore, his known competitiveness with other dramatists could have motivated this critical addition to Kyds play. In writing the Painters scene, Jonson was not only competing with Kyd, but with his rival Marston as well, for he was arguably recasting the painter scene from Antonio and Mellida. Some critics have argued that Marston parodied the Painter Addition, but the most probable dates for these two works (1599 for Marston, 1601 for the Addition) render the argument untenable. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a playwright might take a satirical scene as inspiration for serious drama. I propose that this is what occurred. The 1602 title page features the Painter scene as one of the plays new attractions: Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late beene diuers times acted. This advertisement offers conclusive evidence that the Painters part was performed and written before the 1602 publication date, but the question of whether the scene replaced another one or was simply added to Kyds play remains yet another matter for speculation. In the half dozen quartos printed between 1602 and 1633, the Additions appear as interpolations in Kyds play. But as Levin L. Sch ucking has argued, if all the scenes were played, it would make for an atypically long Elizabethan play; the Addi-
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tions must have been substitutions that catered to changing tastes. He suggests that the Painter scene replaced the outmoded petitioners episode in which the senex Bazulto appeals to Hieronimo for justice for his murdered son.5 One can certainly detect verbal and thematic echoes of the petitioners scene in the Painter Addition. The author must have taken his cue from the portrait trope used by Hieronimo to express his identification with a grieving father, Bazultothe lively portrait of my dying self (3.13.85). Hieronimos passions ride high in that scene, for he tears up the citizens legal petitions with his teeth in a ludicrous demonstration of lost faith in justice. He also momentarily believes Bazulto to be his son Horatio come back from the dead to haunt him and to urge revenge. By 1601, Henslowe may have felt that these devices seemed laughable and therefore in need of revision if the play was to continue drawing audiences. Suffice it to say, editors have been baffled by the problem of what to do with the Additions and how to make sense of them as an integral part of Kyds play. In his 1901 edition of Kyds works, Frederick S. Boas praised the Painter scene as an unparalleled night piece, and a triumph of Elizabethan romantic art; he placed the scene between 3.12 and 3.13, exactly where it can be found in the plays seventeenth-century editions, but he agreed with a contemporary reviewer of another edition of Kyds play who commented that the five Additions turned the play into an unintelligent mingle-mangle.6 As a way to eliminate confusion, a number of modern editors have taken the liberty of placing the additional scenes in the appendices of their editions. Philip Edwards states their case succinctly: Unfortunately, those Additions (which are really substitutions for certain sections of the old play) only hinder ones grasp of Kyds purposes if one tries to read them with the original text.7 Most scholars, it would seem, have concurred with this view, for few studies of The Spanish Tragedy attempt to make sense of the Additions, and many fail to mention them at all. Yet the five Additions can be understood as meaningful extensions of Kyds play. If read thematically, Charles K. Cannon argues, the first four Additions make sense and seem well integrated with the contexts into which they were placed in the 1602 edition of The Spanish Tragedy.8 The Painter Addition in particular resonates with Kyds play because of its concern with arts purpose and potency and its elaboration of the plays central themesthe search for justice, the mystery of evil, and the pursuit of vengeance through art. The Painter Addition has not been entirely ignored, for it is undeniably good writing and makes for surprisingly good theater. The scene, in fact, demonstrates the power of theater as a mixed art form that need not rely on spectacle for its visual effects. Again, this point argues strongly for Jonsons authorship. Early in the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb reflected his appreciation of the Painter Addition by including it as the representa-
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tive scene from Kyds play in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808); he called the Addition the very salt of the old play.9 More recently, Francis Berry has referred to the superbly fine additions,10 and Peter B. Murray has called the Painter scene the greatest piece of writing in the play.11 Murray argues perceptively that the authors real purpose is to draw our attention to his own great art. In the concentrated power of its rendering of the scene that so well epitomizes the spirit of The Spanish Tragedy, the passage is a final microcosm in a play full of microcosms.12 Michael Hattaway offers a view of the Painter Addition that makes it artistically consistent with Kyds play. He rightly observes that Kyd created the scene as the elemental dramatic unit.13 Each scene in the play is replete with speaking pictures such as emblems, tableaux, and pageants.The Painter scene, then, extends Kyds pictorial method by having Hieronimo ask for paintings of scenes representative of high emotion; the Painter episode, in Hattaways view, is a digression apologetical for the nature of the play.14 It would seem logical, then, that this addition is in fact an addition to the drama, rather than a replacement for old material. Critics typically have focused on the artistic purpose of the Painter Addition, particularly as it functions to clarify Kyds view of art. Donna B. Hamilton argues that the Painter Addition should be regarded as an important part of the intellectual design of the play, which presents a progression from painting to poetry and song and finally to drama.15 She concludes with the astute observation that for Kyd and other Elizabethan dramatists, drama is the form most capable of expressing the human experience because it is both poesis and pictura, and has, as well, real sound and action.16 As a mute picture of literal images, Hieronimos painting fails where only drama can succeed, since drama offers pictures that truly speak both to the understanding and the senses. Like Hamilton, Peter M. Sacks notes Hieronimos move toward literalism in art, but he finds the collapse of difference between viewer and painted image to occur in the Knight Marshals use of dramatic art as well. It is literalism, not representation, that Hieronimo wants, and that is what he finally gets when he takes the theater trope seriously and produces real rather than represented deaths through dramatic performance. The Painter scene, Sacks argues, demonstrates Hieronimos loss of faith in artistic responses to suffering and death; art fails to compensate for real loss.17 In contrast, G. Wilson Knight regards the Painter scene as a moving attempt to find comfort and permanence through pictorial art. He remarks on the profundity of the scene in its attempt to imagine the painting as a living transcending of actuality.18 These critics have begun to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the Painter scenes significance. However, they do not fully account for the mysterious power of the Painter scene in performance, or for its sophisticated use of the painting trope. Let me start with the painting trope and its
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manifestation as ekphrasis. First, we should note the authors ingenuity in bringing a literal source for the trope, the professional painter, to the stage: the painter is present to serve as a catalyst for Hieronimos verbal painting. The imaginative work of ekphrasis and the actors/characters directing of passion into dramatizing this work brings the audience close to the creative process. One might call the painting produced a notional ekphrasis, or a verbal representation of an imagined work of art, as opposed to an actual ekphrasis, a verbal representation of an existing work of art, to use John Hollanders terms.19 Indeed, Hieronimo projects the narrative painting in his mind and creates a unique imaginary work of art. Yet some of the imagined scenes belong to Kyds play, which means that the audience has recently witnessed some of the painted events as dramatic action. What we are to perceive, given the suspension of disbelief, is that Hieronimo as artist imitates life; the Additions author, however, imitates art. Both understandings of imitatio, imitation of nature and imitation of artistic models, were current during the early modern period. The author, practicing the latter kind of imitation, has based part of the ekphrasis on another work of art that exists in two forms, as text and performance. This is an unusual kind of ekphrasis that functions on two levels: within the illusion of the drama, the artist Hieronimo creates a verbal painting that is an imaginary vision of life as a work of art; from outside the illusion, the author of the scene has created an ekphrasis that is based partly in the actual realm of dramatic performance/text, and partly in the notional realm of imaginary art (i.e., the unique images that are not in Kyds play). The Painter scene translates drama into painting and painting into drama; these two art forms do not have solid boundaries, nor for that matter do illusion and reality in The Spanish Tragedy. The verbal painting as performed has the effect of both distancing the spectators from violent action and bringing it vividly to mind again through an imaginative reenactment. The Painter scene is Hieronimos first of three artistic reenactments of the violent scenes of Horatios murder and his own passionate lament. In 2.4 of Kyds play, we witness the actual hanging and stabbing of Horatio. The scene begins ominously with Horatio invoking night and darkness as he leads his beloved Bel-Imperia into the bower. Their amorous discourse is interrupted by the villains Lorenzo, Balthazar, and servants, who quickly hang and stab Horatio, and kidnap Bel-Imperia. The scene that follows presents Hieronimos discovery of the murderous spectacle (2.5.9) of his son hanging from a tree in his own garden. His wife, Isabella, joins him, and together they lament the death of their son. Hieronimo vows revenge as he takes up his sons bloodstained handkerchief, a visual memento of vengeance. The Painter Addition of act three offers a reenactment of these scenes. Set at midnight, the scene opens with Hieronimos servants burning torches upon their masters order and speaking of his madness. Hieronimo
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enters the stage in a frantic state; he appears to be searching for Horatio. He cries out against night, the murderous slut (3.12A.31), and the moon that lay hidden on the night his son was murdered. He then berates the tree, wicked wicked tree (71), upon which his son was killed. Isabella calls out to Hieronimo, come in a-doors. / O, seek not means so to increase thy sorrow (54 55). At this moment, a painter arrives, and Hieronimo feels inspired to paint some comfort (73) for his sorrow by imagining a painting of the horror he has experienced; at the same time, he appears to have found a means to increase his sorrow through obsessive replaying of his terrible memories. The vivid description of a painting reenacts the two earlier scenes and projects the moment of revenge, which is yet to come. The second reenactment centers on vengeance; it occurs as an episode of metadrama in which Hieronimo casts the real actors in th accursed tragedy (3.7.41) of his sons murder as characters in his drama, The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda. The play-within-a-play recasts and mirrors Horatios tragedy and allows Hieronimo to take revenge in the guise of playacting a murder. He takes the role of the villain Bashaw, a role that corresponds to that of his sons murderer, Lorenzo, who in turn plays the role of Erasto (the Horatio character), husband of Perseda, played by BelImperia. Hieronimo has created an opportunity for vengeance, as his script calls for the Bashaw to stab Erasto. Ironically, the reenactment of his sons murder becomes the enactment of revenge for his death. The third reenactment occurs when Hieronimo reveals the corpse of his son as a strange and wondrous show (4.1.185) and emblem of justification for revenge. He delivers a public oration (4.1.184) that recalls again the murder and his discovery of the body. Thus, with the addition of the Painters scene, the drama reveals Hieronimo to be an artist who transforms personal tragedy and unfruitful words (3.7.67) into visual and verbal art forms. As the first aesthetic reenactment, the Painter scene adds an important stage in Hieronimos experimentation with artistic forms, for in it we witness the origin of a work of art and the passions that motivate it. Removed from the action, this scene offers a portrait of the artist engaged in the process of inventionimitating nature and arranging images into an agreeable form. We have a brief moment in which dramatic action is suspended; indeed, dramatic action becomes the subject of the imagined painting. The artistic functions of painter and player merge in the character of Hieronimo in this moment of heightened creativity. In his passionate desire to have the Painter see his painting, Hieronimo usurps the artists role and doubles as figurative painter. The Painter says little in the scene; his silence renders him a symbolic representative of his mute art and a compassionate spectator to Hieronimos verbal and performative art. Not only does Hieronimo describe what he wants to see painted, but also he physically enacts each pictorial scene with gestures and facial expressions
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so that the Painter may see the action and emotion he should represent. Hieronimo paints love, grief, rage, vengeance, and madness in a series of dramatic tableaux. While Kyds play depended on emblems and other pictorial sources for its dramatic presentation, in this scene the Additions author ingeniously makes use of stage pictures and dramatic actions from the play itself as inspiration for Hieronimos painting. This is an ambitious move on the dramatists part, for it suggests the mysterious power of theater lies in its absorption of the visual arts (pictures, sculpture, funeral effigies, painted cloths, tapestry, emblems, etc.). The theater, he implies, is a kind of superior painting that transcends the limitations of the painters medium. Hieronimo, in effect, desires to give the moving pictures of drama the constancy and iconic power of static images that one might gaze upon in awe in order to learn the truth. The connection between the painters and players arts can be seen in the way the term painting was used in Elizabethan discourses. As we have seen in previous chapters, painting referred to a variety of visual arts and to coloring the face with cosmetics; the term could also be used figuratively as a trope to indicate various ways of heightening or falsifying rhetoric and action. Thus, we find countless references to painting that signify verbal style (vivid pictorial description, deceitful speech, artificial or ornate uses of rhetorical colors) and behavior (pretense, playacting, displaying emotion). We can immediately see the linguistic affiliation between the painters and players arts: they both involve colors of a sort that intensify the effect of the work of art on the beholder; they both involve a kind of deception created through their medium; and they both deal in re-presenting life, or counterfeiting nature. The artistic process for both painters and dramatists/players fell under the general principle of imitation. The whole doctrine of Comedies and Tragedies, wrote Roger Ascham, is a perfite imitation, or faire liuelie painted picture of the life of euerie degree of man.20 Players were said to be painting passions, dramatists to be painting the very life of man. Thus, imitation and painting seem to have been interchangeable concepts in Elizabethan discourses. To phrase it another way, by the late sixteenth century painting had become a normative and evaluative term for imitation itself. Both positive and negative connotations could be emphasized in a writers use of these terms. A number of early seventeenth-century writers refer explicitly to painting in their descriptions of players impersonations. In Microcosmos (1603), John Davies of Hereford praises the players Qualitie (profession, skill), despite the common prejudice that the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud:
Players, I loue yee, and your Qualitie, As ye are Men, that pass time not abusd:
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And some I loue for painting, poesie, And say fell Fortune cannot be excusd, That hath for better uses you refusd.21
The some he loves for painting, poesie are W. S. (William Shakespeare) and R. B. (Richard Burbage). By way of explanation for the painting, poesie reference, Davies invokes the familiar sister arts analogy in the margin: Simonides saith, that painting is a dumb Poesy, & Poesy a speaking painting.22 He loosely applies this popular view of the arts to players who, at their best, become figurative painters. John Webster suggested a similar conceit in a character sketch of the excellent actor from 1615: the actor, he exclaims, is much affected to painting, and tis a question whether that make him an excellent Plaier, or his playing an exquisite painter.23 Webster creates a witty conflation of two meanings of painting: the player literally paints his face with cosmetics and figuratively paints his passions or affections with the colors of rhetoric. In this second meaning of painting, we find the actor presented not only as a word-painter and orator, dependent on the dramatists poetry, but as an expressive performer who gives language vitality and conviction through performance. In Websters locution, playing has a kind of agency of its own; playing creates the visual arena of the theater. Webster, like Davies, may be alluding to Richard Burbage in this passage, for the well-known actor was also an amateur painter.24 A connection to the Painter Addition may be inferred here, for Burbage was certainly known to have played Hieronimo. A Funerall Elegye on ye Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbedg . . . lists ould Heironymoe as one of the parts that liued in him.25 We might speculate that our clever dramatist wrote the Painter scene for Burbage, the player made famous for his passionate, lifelike performances. Another possible reference to Burbage playing Hieronimo occurs in Thomas Mays The Heir (1622). The opening passage from this play indicates that the conceit of painting grief was popularly associated with Hieronimo and that he was taken as the pattern for paternal grief (and subject for parody) for dramatists and players of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In The Heir, a reference to Hieronimo depends on this widely recognized view of Kyds character. When the old Lord Polimetes plans a jest in which he will counterfeit a fathers grief for his dead son, he believes that it will be difficult to feign such profound emotion. His servant Roscius, named for the much admired ancient Roman actor, quickly responds, Oh no my Lord, / Not for your skill, has not your Lordship seene / A player personate Jeronimo? Polimetes immediately sees the wisdom in modelling his performance after the players (Burbages) impersonation of Hieronimo:
By th masse tis true, I have seen the knave paint griefe

In such a lively colour, that for false And acted passion he has drawne true teares From the spectators eyes, Ladyes in the boxes Kept time with sighes, and teares to his sad accents As had he truely bin the new man he seemd.26
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Painting grief in the lively colour of rhetoric and with heightened naturalistic emotion was the recognized mode for personating Hieronimo, and it seems to have been Burbages trademark as an actor, as well. Elizabethan dramatists commonly employed the painting trope as a graphic mode of description that enabled their actors to externalize passions, intentions, and moral character. In Shakespeares Hamlet, for example, the painting trope forges a link between acting and painting. When the Players arrive at Elsinore, and Hamlet requests to hear Aeneass speech, the First Player comes to the famous passage where Pyrrhus is about to take his revenge on Priam. The Player vividly describes a moment of hesitation, the very moment that speaks to Hamlets own situation: for lo his sword, / Which was declining on the milky head / Of reverent Priam, seemd i th air to stick. / So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood / [And,] like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing (2.2.47782).31 Pyrrhus appears as an image in a painting, frozen in time with his sword stuck in the air above Priams head. The Player captures this tense moment of inaction in language, but he also has an opportunity for passionate playing here. Painted must have been read as a verbal cue for the actor. He should, in following Hamlets famous advice to the players, suit the action to the word and take on the physical attitude of the painted Pyrrhus in order to enhance the dramatic intensity of the moment for his spectators. The still moment of hesitation before action captured by the painting analogy indicates precisely how the actor should direct his energy and passion. Through the painting trope, the actor playing Hieronimo in the Painter scene receives a similar cue for playing. He is to evoke the visual power of images, both static and moving, not only through ekphrasis, but also through his expressive voice and physical movements. In Hieronimos painting, the author has achieved a compelling synthesis of verbal style and performance, word and image that extends Kyds own use of figures and visual images in a powerful way. The author of the Painter scene successfully produced a passionate language that dramatized the relationship between painting and playing. What emerges from this dramatization is not simply a critique of rhetoric, an assessment of the limits of impassioned speech, to invoke Jonas Barishs frequently cited argument;27 rather, the scene offers a compelling example of how the passions give shape and purpose to art. With the painting trope, Hieronimos speech becomes performative; not only do his words evoke scenes for the audience to imagine,
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but the player himself brings the verbal painting to life. Through passionate playing, the actor conveys a lively image of grief that demonstrates the very expressiveness he desires to see in the painted figures. In Paviers 1602 text and the subsequent quartos that appeared in the early seventeenth century, the Painter scene was placed between Hieronimos fruitless, lunatic appeal to the Spanish king for justice (3.12) and the momentous Vindicta mihi scene in which he resolves to take private revenge (3.13). This positioning is meaningful in that Hieronimo has just turned to the highest earthly authority for justice and has been unsuccessful in communicating anything but his own madness. The well-meaning King does not know that Horatio has been murdered; therefore he cannot understand the cause of his Knight Marshals unsettled mental state. In the scene following the Painter Addition, Hieronimo commits himself to meting out punishment to the murderers. Poised between the Kings rejection and his resolute adoption of the role of avenger, the Painter scene proves to be an imaginative rehearsal of motivation for and vicarious experience of revenge. Let us examine the Painters scene in detail. The scene is set forebodingly at midnight in the hideous orchard (3.12A.103) with the bloodsplattered tree signifying the violence that has erupted in the garden. Hieronimo laments that the tree he planted himself grew a gallows, and did bear our son. / It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant (70 71). A knock at the door interrupts this gruesome reflection on the trees death-serving fertility. Hieronimos servant Pedro announces, It is a painter, sir (72). A most unexpected arrival at midnight, the Painters appearance on the stage might suggest the realm of the absurd to a modern audience, but, for Elizabethan spectators, the situation would signal an allegory or symbolic scene in the making. Hieronimo accepts the Painters arrival without surprise and puns cynically on the word paint: Bid him come in, and paint some comfort, / For surely theres none lives but painted comfort (7374). Painted in this context refers to the falseness of appearances and inauthentic shows of feeling. Similarly in Hamlet, Claudius recognizes his own falseness in terms of painting, or cosmetics: The harlots cheek, beautied with plastring art, / Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it / Than is my deed to my most painted word (3.1.50 52). The falsifying or masking of language suggests to Claudius, as it did to many Elizabethan moralists, a resemblance to the literal falsification and masking involved in womens and players face-painting. For Hieronimo, all shows of comfort seem to be false representations of comfort itself. Yet the element of chance offers hope and despair alike: he calls the Painter in for, as he philosophizes, One knows not what may chance (75). Spoken as an antithesis, Paint some comfort and painted comfort may reflect Hieronimos sudden insight that art may actually offer com-
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fort. The Painter offers Hieronimo the opportunity to try out this possibility. The meeting with the Painter occurs when Hieronimo is at his most vulnerableemotionally spent, lonely in his grief, and given to spells of madness. Revenge has entered his consciousness and can no longer be suppressed. Hieronimo begins to perceive, inchoately at first, that some form of art might provide consolation and, later, perhaps a means to avenge Horatios death. The question of arts consolatory power, of the ability of figurative art to compensate for loss, is most urgent at this moment in the play. Like Lear and Gloucester in Shakespeares tragedy, the Painter and Hieronimo sit together and speak feelingly of their madness and suffering: Come, Hieronimo says, lets talk wisely now. Was thy son murdered? Ay sir, the Painter sadly replies. So was mine. How dost thou take it? Hieronimo asks, Art thou not sometimes mad? Is there no tricks that comes before thine eyes? O Lord, the Painter cries, yes, sir (10610). The language is very simple; they speak frankly of their experiences. The tricks before their eyes is the crucial image here. In their grief, these men hallucinate or see illusory shapes. The painting that Hieronimo imagines is also a kind of trick or visual illusion that comes before his eyes, yet, at the same time, it is a sort of remedy or corrective to the tricks of madness. His shaping fantasies are those of lunatic, poet, loving father, and avenger. His imagination bodies forth a painting whose images are truthful; they have a purpose and reality that hallucinations cannot claim to have. Art a painter? Hieronimo suddenly asks. Canst paint me a tear, or a wound, a groan, or a sigh? Canst paint me such a tree as this? (11112) he queries, as they look upon the tree that has served as his sons gallows. The Painter, perhaps bristling at the suggestion that he might not know his craft well and, at the same time, evading the impossibility of the request to paint groans and sighs, proudly indicates that he has a name, that is to say, a reputation: Sir, I am sure you have heard of my painting, my names Bazardo (11314). Hieronimo instantly recognizes the mans name: Bazardo! afore God, an excellent fellow! (115) he exclaims, and, with that assurance, he proceeds to describe with many precise details the painting he desires. This trick before his eyes begins to gain solidity as he imagines a narrative cycle with at least seven discrete images. Hieronimo seems to have in mind a large narrative painting that contains a series of individual scenes. This design reflects the authors perception of Kyds method of pictorial scene composition. Scenes from Kyds play appear complete as stage pictures yet, like Hieronimos continuous narrative painting, woven within a significant design based on symbolic images and meaningful actions. Hieronimo first asks for a family portrait that reflects private, emotional ties. This would require an imaginative reconstruction of an affectionate
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patriarch and his family as they were five years in the past. Id have you paint me . . . my gallery, he says to the Painter, in your oil colours matted, and draw me five years younger than I am . . . (11617).28 He insists that he wants historical accuracy in the depiction of his family: Do you see sir, let five years go, let them go (118). The paradox, of course, lies in the fact that the Painter must use artifice and imaginative license to create this sense of authenticity and truth. It is clear that Hieronimo is aware of the Painters materialsthe oil colours matted (11617), or colors dull in textureand of the artists ability to refine and embellish images in order to make the sitter appear younger. Hieronimos description of poses, gestures, and facial expressions depends upon the conventional iconography of Tudor portraits: My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking look to my son Horatio, which should intend to this or some like purpose: God bless thee, my sweet son: and my hand leaning upon his head, thus, sir, do you see? (11923). Isabellas look to their son should be a speaking look(120)her eyes, the expression of her face, and her posture should all suggest the expressive quality of speech. Hieronimo speaks the actual words the painted Isabella should seem to be saying: God bless thee, my sweet son (12122). He demonstrates his own pose with a gesturethus, sir, do you see? (12223)which expresses his affection for and pride in his son. The portrait exists as a complex example and reversal of Sidneys speaking picture trope: Hieronimo is picturing speech; the portrait is to be literal, the speech metaphoric. Yet it is through his speech and action that the painting gains presence. Here we seem to have a notional ekphrasis, an image that exists only through language. Yet he himself (the actor/character) transforms into the speaking picture. May it be done (123), he anxiously queries the Painter, who responds confidently, Very well sir (124). Hieronimo insists, Nay, I pray mark me sir (125), compelling the Painter to mark how he momentarily embodies the figures. He wants the Painter, like the spectators at the play, to envision the painting by watching his own demonstrations and listening to him speak the pictures. Why, we might ask, does Hieronimo ask for this imaginary family portrait? What will its purpose be in the narrative cycle? As Hieronimo begins to paint his history, he looks back to the past, when he and his family were untouched by violence and cruelty, when their lives seemed coherent, ordered, and meaningful. The family portrait establishes the past good fortune, happiness, and love that governed Hieronimos life; it is meant to be a truthful image that speaks in significant contrast to the other images of chaos, disorder, and wild passion in the painting. His narrative painting has a beginning in the image and an implied ideal of familial love.
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Hieronimo then moves to the middle of his narrative, to continue with the Aristotelian model, in which he projects the horrific events of the recent past. He turns to the fateful tree upon which his son was murdered, and asks if the Painter can paint me this tree, this very tree (12526). With the emphasis on very, Hieronimos desire for authenticity, for the representation of this particular tree, is made urgently clear. In the same breath, he asks, Canst paint a doleful cry? (126). The Painter responds, Seemingly, sir (127), which indicates that he could create an illusion of a person uttering a cry. Painting, he is reminding Hieronimo, is an art of suggestion and appearance; it depends wholly on what can be represented in visual terms. Hieronimo is calling for images that defy painterly representation the very tree, the sound of a cry. Nay, it should cry (128), he exclaims passionately, revealing that he wants the paintingor is it the tree?itself to be animated and crying in pain. The ambiguity in referent suggests that he might want the crying tree to reflect nature weeping at the brutal murder; he also might have in mind the tree as a metonym of both Horatios and his own pain. The painters single-word responseSeemingly (127) sums up the paradox of art and, in this case, of painting as an expressive form. Images can appear to weep or express affection, can appear to conjure the thing itself, but in the end they are mute images that rely on the beholder to imagine the implied sounds and narrative. Seeming implies a mode of substitution for the thing itself in a painting, which is created by means of style, technique, and conventional iconography. Hieronimos painting, like Tudor portraits, is based on patterns, symbolic images, and ideas. He pictures his son as the figure of a youth run through and through with villains swords, hanging upon this tree (129 30). This image is followed by a request for another pattern or figure: Canst thou draw a murderer? (130). He is asking the Painter for archetypal or significant iconographic images of youth and villainy rather than naturalistic portraits of the individuals themselves. As Sidney claimed in his Defence, the meaner sort of Painters (who counterfet onely such faces as are sette before them) and the more excellent, who, having no law but wit, bestow that in cullours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see.29 Hieronimo wants to see virtue and vice reflected in their extremity in the images. The Painter assures Hieronimo that he has the pattern of the most notorious villains that ever lived in all Spain (13132). Hieronimo urges the Painter to let them be worse, worse: stretch thine art (133); in other words, he wants the painted images to be the outward show and unmistakable example of villainy. He wants to see the villains painted with thick, threatening eyebrows and red beards to suggest Judas Iscariot, the archetypal betrayer and villain. He then pictures himself brought forth, much as had happened a few scenes earlier in the play: Then sir, after some violent noise, bring me
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forth in my shirt, and my gown under mine arm, with my torch in my hand, and my sword reared up thus: and with these words: What noise is this? who calls Hieronimo? (13539). The thus in my sword reared up thus (138) indicates an accompanying gesture to be performed by the actor, which would serve as the Painters model. In the text, the words he speaks are italicized and separated from the rest of his speech, which indicates that they are intended as written text in the painting. Hieronimo most likely wants them to appear upon a scroll unfurling above his head, much as they were in the illustrated frontispiece to the 1615 and 1623 editions of The Spanish Tragedy. To see words in a visual field such as a painting or woodcut was not unusual in the pictorial arts of Protestant England. The frontispiece is itself a typical example (figure 8). It presents Hieronimo with torch and sword discovering the body of Horatio hanging by a rope tied to the arch of a trellis. This is most likely a representation of the stage prop used in productions to create the arbor or bower. Hieronimos words issue directly from his mouth on an unrolled scroll, Alas it is my son Horatio, which echoes the plays text (2.5.14). The illustration also portrays, in simultaneity with the discovery, the previous scene with Bel-Imperia calling for Hieronimos help (her text reads, Murder, helpe Hieronimo, an echo of 2.4.62), and Lorenzo conveying her away with the words, Stop her mouth (2.4.63). Some modern directors of The Spanish Tragedy have taken their visual cue from this famous illustration. In one notable example from 1986, the actors in a production of the play at The Shakespeare Center in New York, startlingly brought to life the picture of Horatio hanging in the arbour.30 Like the author of the Painter Addition, the illustrator created a visual representation of the most impressive scandalous scenes from Kyds play. He appears to have followed Kyds original text in reproducing three moments from act two. He may very well have been inspired by the Addition in presenting simultaneous actions in visual form. Unlike the still images depicted on the frontispiece, Hieronimos pictorial description begins to defy the static quality of painting as he summons up the memory of the horrifying nocturnal scene of murder in which clouds scowl (144), the moon is dark, and the stars extinct (145). His language animates the scene and conveys a sense of dynamic action and sound: the winds blowing, the bells tolling, the owl shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock striking twelve (145 47). He wants to create a ceaseless present that resembles both the phenomenal quality of experience and the vivid tableau of painting. When Hieronimo describes his discovery of Horatios body hanging from the tree, he remembers first and foremost its movement as he sees it in his minds eye tottering, and tottering as you know the wind will weave a man (148 49). He relives his profound emotion, and cries to the Painter, There you
8. Frontispiece to Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy. London, 1623. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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may show a passion, there you may show a passion (15152). The actors/characters passion is clearly the model for painted passion here. Hieronimo accompanies his cry with a significant embodiment of emotion. The actor might point there to the very place in the bower where Horatio was hanged. He might also enact the gesture of cutting the rope and holding the torch above his sons face. The passion to be communicated is to be as intense as Priams passion was at the burning of Troy: Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying The house is a-fire, the house is a-fire as the torch over my head! (15354). As a classical figure of bereaved fatherhood, Priam is a recognizable model for representations of extreme grief. In Virgils Aeneid, amidst the flames of Troy, Priam witnesses Pyrrhus slaughter his son Polites; in his anguish he calls out for divine retribution. He takes up his sword and attempts to avenge his sons death, but Pyrrhus swiftly kills him. Like Priam, Hieronimo calls to the heavens to take notice of injustice; he, too, will pursue his sons murderer in a final effort to right the wrong that has been done. His world is disintegrating (represented by the burning house) and his inner world is a chaos of passions. Make me curse, he exhorts the Painter, make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance; and so forth (154 57). He has slipped into giving an impossible set of instructions to the Painternot only are sounds impossible to reproduce, but too many states of mind cannot be represented coherently, even if rendered by more than one or two images. Indeed, Hieronimo cannot finish the painting or see it as a contained object; his passion exceeds the bounds of controlled artistic creation. The Painter quietly asks, And is this the end? (158). Hieronimo laments, O no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! (159). In his anguish, Hieronimo is driven to distraction; he abandons the painting in a fit of passion as visions of death and madness occupy his raging mind. In attempting to give significant shape to his life through pictorial narrative, Hieronimo produces a painting that has its visual analogue in actual painting genres of Tudor England. The iconographic program he seems to be commissioning resembles an Elizabethan memorial painting. Quite popular in sixteenth-century England, memorial portraits of individuals or families typically functioned as memento mori, a remembrance of death. In the more unusual larger panels and monuments that fused portraiture with narrative, death is solemnly celebrated as mans earthly end. One example that bears some resemblance to Hieronimos painting is the wellknown, flamboyant panel (figure 9) depicting the life and death of the diplomat and soldier Sir Henry Unton (artist unknown, c. 1596). As with Hieronimos verbal painting, this work of art offers a selective visual biography, to use Roy Strongs terms.31 Unton appears as a large figure
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9. Artist unknown. The Life and Death of Sir Henry Unton, c. 1596. National Portrait Gallery, London.
seated off-center to the left with a blank paper and pen, as if he were about to write his life; he is the biographical figure, yet one might argue that he is portrayed as an autobiographer, flanked by the miniature figures of Fame at his left and Death at his right, his twin muses. As in an episodic and emblematic medieval painting that depicts the significant events in the life of a saint, Christ, or Mary, Untons portrait depicts a series of meaningful events in his life that can be read counterclockwise on the right side infancy, studies at Oriel College, Oxford, travels, diplomatic service, and deathbed. At the center of this half-circle lie images of banqueting and masquing at Wadley House. His funeral and death monument in Faringdon Church dominate the left (sinister) side of the panel, and the two sides are unified by the funeral procession. In what ways would this busy narrative painting of an Elizabethan mans life have functioned in English culture? In essence, this narrative portrait is an exemplary public record of an Elizabethan gentlemans life, both in terms of his public and private achievements.32 Yet, with the predominance of death images, the picture clearly must be a memento mori, which asks us to read Sir Henry Untons life in the shadow of death. Similarly, Hieronimos painting offers a portrait of a fortunate and loving family surrounded by images of death. Hieronimo falls short of imagining his own death; he still lives, but clearly he knows that death is near. Untons portrait emblematizes those moments surrounding his deaththe deathbed scene, the preparation and movement of the corpse, and the burial ceremony. Hieronimos picture illuminates his sons murder, the corpse hanging on the tree, and his discovery of the body. A crucial point to consider is how the commissioner of the work of art influences the choice of images and the function of the portrait. In the case
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of Sir Henry Unton, his wife, Lady Unton, requested the painting after her husbands death, as part of the death ritual. Its purpose must have been not only to display her husbands life as exemplary, but also to find consolation in the painted images. Hieronimos motive for wanting the visual record of the past, the murder, and his suffering may be partly ascribed to these same motivesto memorialize his once-happy family and to find consolation. Clearly, though, he wants more than a family memorial. His line has ended with the death of his son. And he most certainly is not seeking the aesthetic adornment of his gallery. These images are motivated by passionate grief and a fathers desire to see injustice rendered visible and his sons murderers brought to justice. A similar dramatic example of a patron requesting a particular image for emotional satisfaction is worth examining at this point. The Trial of Chivalry, probably written and performed in the provinces and London public theaters by the Earl of Derbys company around 1600 (printed in 1605),33 presents another demanding patron and a virtually mute painter who attempts to please, but is held to an unreasonable subjective standard of verisimilitude. The French Princess Katherina calls for a painter to use his cunningst Arte (sig. B2r) to draw the image of her beloved, the Earl of Pembrooke.34 After asking whether his colours are fresh, pencill smooth, hand unwavering, and head clear, she commands him, to the life set downe his counterfet (sig. B2r). Saying little but that he is well prepared, the Paynter agrees to observe the Earl discretely in order to draw his likeness. Very quickly, he produces a portrait, apparently sketched onstage, which Katherina dotes upon as if it were the man himself. The portrait serves as a material and figurative surrogate for an unattainable beloved. When the Earl rejects her advances, she turns to the Image far more kind,
Then is the substance, whence thou art deriud! Which way soeuer I diuert my selfe, Thou seemst to follow with a louing eye. Thee will I therefore hold within mine armes, As some small comfort to increasing harmes. (sigs. B4rv)
The portrait seems to be animated: its eyes follow her lovingly with their gaze, and the image even has a material body to be embraced. Within moments, however, she grows dissatisfied with this painted substitute for her love, not because it is a mere painting, but because it fails to represent the Earl faithfully. She turns upon the Paynter and chastizes him for grossly neglecting to represent the Earls stubborn heart: Where is his stubborne vnrelenting heart, / That lurkes in secret as his master doth, / Disdayning to regard or pity me? (sig. B4v). He takes the Princesss
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rebuke on a literal level and exclaims, Madam, his heart must be imagined / By the description of the outward parts (sig. B4v). The Princess argues that the portrait, although realistic and skillfully made, deceives the eyes, for it fails to reflect an essential element of the Earls character. To paint to the life means, in this case, to paint the subject exactly as the patron perceives him in a given moment of intense feeling. The dramatist has presented the impossible demands of a patron and, at the same time, rejected painting as an inauthentic and inadequate mimetic art. The danger of idolatry, as well, finds expression here. The Princesss rejection of the image reflects the dramatists critique of painting, and his defense of dramatic characterization and action as the more authentic, lively art. To return to Hieronimos painting, the last image he evokes in his torment belongs to the future; it is purely fictitious at this point, but indicates much about his purpose: At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers, were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down (16264). He invokes Achilles wrath and his vengeance against the Trojan Hector, who had killed Achilles friend Patroclus. Achilles killed Hector, and then had his body attached to a chariot and dragged three times around the city of Troy; when Priam came to plead for his sons body, Achilles returned the corpse to the father in an act of nobility. Hieronimo imagines his own anger as an Achillean fury that knows no bounds in the encounter with Horatios murderer; yet his essential decency and sense of justice, we might argue, are implied in the subtext of the justly returned body. While a moment ago, Hieronimo had invoked Priam as the archetypal grieving father, here he envisions Hector, Priams eldest son, as the pattern of ferocious warrior and killer of a loved one. His disordered mind is reflected in his mixed identification with representative figures in the Trojan war. In his thirst for vengeance, he momentarily sees Hector as an enemy and not a murdered son. In light of the revenge motif, Hieronimos painting can be read in a more provocative, scandalous light as a specific kind of memorial, a memento vindictae, whose purpose is to incite the viewer and the patron-commissioner to action. Might the author of the Painter Addition have conceived Hieronimos painting as a vengeance picture? While we cannot know if the author is alluding specifically to this unusual genre of painting, it does offer a useful analogy for interpreting the images in Hieronimos portrait and their effects on audiences of the time.35 There are a small number of extant revenge paintings, which are mainly Scottish in origin. One such painting is the life-size portrait of Henry Stewart, the bonnie earl of Moray. His corpse looms large in the picture, with death wounds visible on his chest; a scroll issues from his mouth demanding: God Revenge My Cavs. A panel in the upper right depicts the burning house from which Moray was forced and then murdered by the Earl of Huntley.
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10. Livinus de Vogelaare, The Memorial of Lord Darnley, 1568. The Royal Collection 2004, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The revenge painting was commissioned by Henrys mother to present to the King in Edinburgh in an appeal for retributive justice. The artist was most likely John Workman, a decorative painter employed at the Scottish court.36 Perhaps the most famous example of a Scottish revenge painting commissioned as part of a campaign for vengeance is The Memorial of Lord Darnley (figure 10), painted by the Antwerp artist Livinus de Vogelaare in England (1568). Vogelaare was instructed by his commissioners, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, to depict in specific iconographical and textual detail the scandalous history of their sons, Lord Henry Darnleys, murder at the hands of the Earl of Bothwell and Mary, Queen of Scots. Formally, the painting resembles a traditional Flemish religious donor picture. Darnleys family kneels in prayer, the effigy of a praying Darnley in arms lies in the center background, and the luminous figure of Christ beside the cross commands the viewers attention on the left side of the panel. The scrolls of text, however, belie the calm piousness of the picture. From the crowned infant James VI of Scotlands mouth issues the cry: Arise, O Lord, and avenge the innocent blood of the king my father and, I beseech you, defend me with your right hand.37 Upon close inspection of the
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paintings inscriptions, the viewer discovers that the images express purpose is to inspire revenge. On a tablet that appears in the upper right corner of the painting, an inscription declares the reason for this work: that if they, who are already old, should be deprived of this life before the majority of their descendant, the King of Scots, he may have a memorial from them, in order that he shut not out of his memory the recent atrocious murder of the king his father, until God should avenge it through him.38 A small rectangular inset to the bottom left depicts the surrender of Mary, Queen of Scots to the Confederate Scottish Lords and the escape of her new husband, Bothwell, whom the paintings texts indict as the murderer. Mary is also clearly implicated. The Lords are carrying a banner depicting Darnleys corpse with the inscription, Ivdge and Revenge My Cavse O Lord. As Margaret Aston argues, This inset is critical to the reading of the picture, and the painting as a whole may be seen as a monumentalized version of the famous banner. . . . This picture within the picture . . . forms something like a source from which the whole has developed.39 English viewers of the painting must have been moved by Darnleys cause and felt the appropriateness of the familys effort to keep the memory of the murder alive. Roland Mushat Frye has pointed out the tacit acceptance of Darnleys familys call to vengeance from at least one Anglican bishop. In a letter recounting the scandals in Scotland, John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, described (a bit inaccurately) Vogelaares painting and conveys not the slightest hint of criticism for that appeal to vengeance.40 Certainly members of the landed aristocracy (including churchmen) in England would have felt sympathetic with the rebellious Scottish nobility who arrested Mary and named Bothwell as the guilty party. In a similar vein, Hieronimos painting depicts an injustice done to the family of the Knight Marshal, representative of justice in Spain. For those audiencemembers concerned about, even critical of, the efficacy of law and the state to carry out justice, Hieronimos predicament may have struck a chord of profound sympathy. Eric Mercer has suggested that we might go so far as to read an English portrait of the Earl of Surrey (executed in 1547 for treason) as a kind of vengeance painting, for revenge may have been implied subtly by the Latin motto Satis super est inscribed on a monument in the painting if read as There is enough left over.41 His descendents, still alive, were left to take revenge. Neither the English monarchy nor the Church sanctioned private revenge, yet individuals may have refrained from morally condemning revenge causes, such as those of the Earl of Lennox and Surreys family. Hieronimos painting depicts images that specifically justify and motivate revenge. The author has used painting as an imaginative tool in the
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revenge plot in order to mirror Hieronimos tormented mind, but the images he sees in the mirror are not mere tricks of madness. They possess a degree of realism, as they capture the truth of experience and passion. Donna B. Hamilton argues that the painting fails to give Hieronimo emotional relief and must be rejected because it lacks the universal quality of good art: he is asking not for interpretive painting, but history in painted form; he wants the painter to paint the events precisely as they happened, and consequently, the painting suggests little relief to him.42 While Hamiltons focus on arts universal quality as an Elizabethan value is clarifying, her point could lead us to a different conclusion from the one she reaches. Hieronimo desires to see a paradoxical entityan illusion that is real, a seeming that is true, an absence made present. When Hieronimo asks the Painter to stretch thine art (133), we should understand that he sees the painters art as a vehicle for interpreting experience, that is, making sense of a morally chaotic world without justice. He depends upon symbolic gestures and color (red for a Judas beard, signifying villainy and betrayal), as well as antecedent models that have universal significancePriam as the figure of a grieving father and Hector as a representative of a fierce warrior and murderer. The verbal painting plays an important role in Hieronimos search for justice and comfort through art, for it embodies the paradoxical drives of art toward both realism and illusion. The final moment in this scene is ambiguous: Hieronimo beats the Painter in (stage direction) just after he describes how he will take revenge. After transforming the energies of violence into the energies of art, Hieronimo is now motivated by his own artistic work to pursue revenge. In fixating momentarily on the painted image of vengeance, however, Hieronimo comes perilously close to madness, for he seems to have truly mistaken the Painter for the murderer. He now literally dramatizes the imagined painted action by treating the Painter as if he were the murderer in his painting. He suffers from confusion between imaginary art and the tricks of lunacy. This hallucination resembles the error he will make shortly thereafter when he believes the old man Bazulto to be his son Horatio returning from the dead as a specter to chastise him. Addressing Bazulto, he laments, And art thou come, Horatio, from the depth, / To ask for justice in this upper earth? / To tell thy father thou art unrevenged . . . (3.13.13335). Hieronimos mistaking his aged double for his son can be explained as an effect of madness once he has recognized that justice is exiled from the earth (140). His mistaking the Painter, who is both compassionate audience and Hieronimos double, for his sons murderer signals a deeper, more troubling truth, which the plays spectators recognize again when they watch him assign himself the role of murderer in The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda. In beating the Painter, he betrays the
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dangerous blinding quality of revenge as it consumes the imagination. This moment anticipates Hieronimos use of drama to enact his revenge. Hieronimos excessive desire for justice is channeled once more into art as he turns to drama itself to paint passions and take revenge. In the conjuring of this painting, early modern spectators witnessed the dangerous power that resides in the artist and in his images, a power that can prompt men to bloody, scandalous actions. They beheld, as well, the actor animating these images with presence. It was a logical step, then, to move from a dramatized painting to the moving, speaking pictures of dramaor that is, to drama as an extraordinary living form of painting. The players passion, anticipated in the dramatic enactment of the painting, becomes fully realized in a dramatic performance of a script. Hieronimo turns to the theater because only there can he get results; unlike pure painting or poetry, drama is a mixed medium that depends upon live human impersonations and actions. Hieronimo takes theater one enormous step further than Hamlet does by using actors in a drama to perform real actions. Hieronimo has already determined the guilt of his sons murderers and uses a drama of his own to murder the unsuspecting actors/villains. The fruitless poetry (4.1.72) of his tragedy will bear bloody fruit when performed. Maurice Hunt has claimed, In essence, Hieronimos playwithin-the play provides the pattern for vengeance upon actual deeds.43 But hasnt the Painter Addition already anticipated this dramatic pattern for revenge? Hieronimos revenge painting serves as the model for a drama of speaking pictures that are not only visually compelling, but also capable of literal speech and, even more importantly, real action. He himself had instinctually supplied the speech and actions that made the painting live; the move to drama to take his revenge would seem inevitable. Hieronimos use of revenge drama stretches his art beyond typical royal entertainments, like the political masque he successfully presented earlier in the play. The illusory images of art serve reality, as real blood is shed during The Tragedy of Soliman and Perseda, and the spectacle of corpses fills the courts theater. Before his royal audience perceives what has happened, Hieronimo reveals the dead body of his son and begins to tell a tale of woe: See here my show, look on this spectacle (4.4.89). The show is an emblem of justified revenge: Horatios mangled corpse is the image, Hieronimos tale, the motto. Thus, the drama gives way to another painting of sorts, the emblem, which was the most popular kind of Renaissance speaking picture. Dramatic art, punctuated with an emblem, gives compelling aesthetic shape and potency to revenge. Hieronimo, however, loses control of his art, first when he witnesses Bel-Imperias unscripted suicide and then when he inexplicably murders the Duke of Castile, one of the newly bereaved fathers, before killing himself. As Hunt points out, the
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senseless killing of the duke of Castile suggests that the tragic protagonist who uses art as his model for experience can become so carried away by the spirit of his re-enactment that unjust outrages occur, bringing further damnation upon the artisans head.44 As Hieronimos words to the Painter predicted, there is no end: the end is death and madness! As I am never better than when I am mad, then methinks I am a brave fellow, then I do wonders (3.12A.15961). In his madness, he has performed wonders indeed and been avenged, but the revenge, while it may have brought death to the villains, bears no resemblance to the justice that he once safeguarded as Knight Marshal of Spain. Kyds frame for the play makes this end in lawless revenge inevitable, for Revenge, not Justice, has presided over the human drama like an indifferent theatrical impresario. After the deaths of most of the characters, Revenge proclaims, as if to say that the real show is about the start, Ill there begin their endless tragedy (4.5.48). Subject to a destiny watched over by Revenge, Hieronimo cannot quell his raging mind before the images he conjured for the Painter. In a cruel world with Revenge as the reigning deity, art can only momentarily serve the purposes of moral reflection and private consolation. The ingenious artist in Revenges play has no choice but to follow the imperatives of revenge art and employ its motifs and design. Like an actor whose passions overflow the measure, Hieronimo pursues his own wild justice, first through vengeance painting and then through revenge drama, which proves to be a thrilling and appalling spectacle to both onstage and offstage audiences. His use of art for private revenge follows the basic principles of Elizabethan art, originally defined by Horace and articulated by Sidneyto teach and to delight. The instruction, however, is far from morally edifying; it is dark, destructive, and bloody, and the delight, sublimely terrible in its irony. The King of Spain and the Viceroy of Portugal are left to mourn their dead and the loss of heirs (Lorenzo and Balthazar) to their thrones. For Elizabethan spectators, Hieronimos use of art (and Kyds metatheatrical device) must have carried a powerful emotional charge and have been perceived as a brilliant technical and aesthetic move, when performed well. The device vividly demonstrates the wondrous lifelike quality of theater and the paradoxes of artistic representation. In the tragic playlet, real action makes for compelling illusion, but, for the audience watching Kyds play, the performance of this real action is itself illusory. Its status as a representation, however, would not have mitigated against the spectators experience of visual pleasure and horror at seeing such sights. Ben Jonson, if he was indeed the author of the Painter Addition, must have found himself caught between fascination and horror as he watched Kyds brilliant and bloody celebration of the theaters power. In writing his
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own scene for the play, he chose a quieter tone, deliberately rejecting spectacle as a mode of visual presentation. The heartfelt, vivid images he has Hieronimo call up verbally inspire a nuanced and moving dramatic performance: the pictures speak through the actor, and the implied actions are given movement in time through his embodiment of the images. In this sense, the scene serves as a critical re-visioning of the play. Jonson offers an extraordinary allegorical scene of artistic imitation in which we, as spectators, enter into the creative process of image-making. Insofar as the illusory images of painting represent and provoke the real emotions of wonder, horror and sympathy, they are powerful, dramatically purposeful, and, as the iconoclasts would have it, potentially dangerous in the theater. The dual function of Hieronimos painting as memento mori and memento vindictae reflects Hieronimos moral dilemma and his conflicting obsessionsto sustain emotional pain, and perhaps find consolation through artistic imitation and vicarious revenge, or to use the compelling images of art to rouse himself to take action against injustice. As a dramatist, the Additions author recognized the superiority of drama over painting, yet, in this scene, it is an imagined painting that inspires him to tap into the primal destructive and creative forces that drive image-making in all the arts. He brings painting and playing into such intimate contact that we see the brilliant, imaginative melding together of artistic forms. To rephrase Horaces well-known comparison, ut pictura poesis, drama is like painting, or ut pictura theatrum. To see the implications of such an analogy played out extensively in the theater and in the dramaturgy of a single artist, we need to turn to the greatest of Elizabethan and early Jacobean dramatists, Shakespeare, who not only created a painter character of his own, but also made extensive use of the visual arts to elicit powerful and sometimes conflicting responses to images from his characters and the plays spectators.
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Images Lawful and Beguiling: Ambivalent Responses to Painting in Shakespeares Drama
Fair Portias counterfeit! What demigod Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes? Or whether, riding on the balls of mine, Seem they in motion? . . . Yet look how far The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow In underprizing it, so far this shadow Doth limp behind the substance. The Merchant of Venice O, shes warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. The Winters Tale
As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, both the appearance of painted images and their suppression or marring in early modern English theaters reflected calculated choices on the part of dramatists. When pictures or painter characters were used onstage, their appearance triggered passions of many kinds in characters, from eroticism to idolatrous worship. The element of scandal was apparent in many of these cases. I have also shown that painting and playing were often linked, sometimes in ways that reflected negatively on painting or both arts, as phrases like well-painted passion (Othello 4.1.257) indicate. This rhetorical connection between the arts reveals not only a particular mindset, but also a contemporary stage convention in which drama and painting were visibly shown to be convertible into one another. The Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy staged just such a conversion of media. While Shakespeare never conceived of a grandiose revenge painting to be enacted, he did believe that painting and passions went hand in hand. In his drama, characters are provoked not only to respond passionately to painted im178
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ages, but also to appropriate and dramatize paintings through rhetoric and accompanying gestures, or more radically, to present themselves as painted art. A characters relationship with art is always self-revelatory, always a test of moral character, in Shakespeares plays. No Elizabethan dramatist explored the complex, paradoxical nature of human responses to painted images as fully as Shakespeare did, nor did any of his contemporaries exploit paintings theatrical potential as extensively.1 Shakespeare staged many scenes in which a double vision of art emerges, a vision characterized by appreciation and wonder on the one hand, and skepticism, or fear, or irony, on the other.2 This chapter attempts to recapture a series of strikingly ambivalent visual moments involving pictures and painted art in Shakespeares theaters. In each case, the kind and quality of response is of crucial importance to characterization and to the impression the plays spectators are left with regarding arts powers. The most radical Shakespearean moments involving pictures are metamorphic, occurring when art itself is Nature (The Winters Tale 4.4.97), or nature is momentarily stilled into art: in Twelfth Night, the picture unveiled for Cesario/Viola is Olivia; in The Winters Tale, the painted statue presented before a group of onlookers is Hermione. These encounters with art produce stage images that are elusive for the reader of Shakespeares texts, and perhaps even for the modern director; for original spectators, however, such sights on the stage were designed to convey meanings, through familiar iconography, but also through the emotional, moral, and intellectual experience of watching a paradox take shape before ones eyes.3 Underlying Shakespeares stage unveilings of images was a competitive impulse to outdo the painter or sculptor by producing a more complex, wondrous visual art. During the course of his career, Shakespeare engaged in an extensive paragone with painting. By comparing the merits of drama and painting, Shakespeare set up his sister visual art as a foil for theatrical performance. By the time he staged this rhetorical device in his famous opening scene in Timon of Athens (c. 1607), Shakespeare had already exploited the energies of the paragone in many poems and plays. His painting sonnets (e.g., Mine eye hath playd the painter) and The Rape of Lucrece, with its positioning of Lucrece before a tapestry or painting of the sack of Troy, demonstrate not only an awareness of pictorial tropes, painting genres, and the emotionally charged relationship between viewer and work of art, but a competitive appropriation and ambivalent treatment of pictorial art as well.4 Shakespeares relationship with art is powerfully reflected in drama, a multi-media form far more complex than a poem, given the material realities of performancea painted playhouse, multiple acts of spectatorship, literal pictures, stage properties, and live performers. In his paragonal scenes with painting, Shakespeare explores modes of seeing that are some-
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times enlightening, sometimes problematic in perceptual and moral terms. The relationship between spectators and painted art calls attention to spectatorship in the theater, either by implicit comparison or emphasized difference. The emotions elicited by the sight of lifelike paintings and painted images resemble those inspired by witnessing the players impersonation. One such emotion shared by early modern theatergoers and dramatic characters involves the loving adoration of images and persons. Shakespeares characters are often guilty of passions that drive them to adopt the rituals and language associated with Catholic idolatry. Antonio, for example, expresses the intensity of his love for Sebastian in Twelfth Night by using religious rhetoric: to his image, which methought did promise / Most venerable worth, did I devotion. . . . But O, how vild an idol proves this god! (3.4.36263, 365). In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Silvia perceives that Proteuss gaze is dangerously iconophilic, she wishes to have her picture rather than her person treated as an idol. As James R. Siemon argues, Any account of Shakespeares plays or of their elements as image, icon, or allegory must remain very limited indeed if it fails to consider seriously the strains Shakespearean drama puts on its images and the pressures contemporary English thought brought to bear upon upon likenesses in general and upon visual images in particular.5 As I have emphasized in previous chapters, in Reformation England, gazing upon artistic imageseven those of a secular naturewas potentially immoral because of the danger of idolatry. Ambivalence about images was the inevitable product of iconoclastic controversy. Shakespeares awareness of this controversy and his defense of theaters capacity to produce potent and lawful images, to use the dramatists revealing term from The Winters Tale, can be seen readily in his deliberate, nuanced uses of visual rhetoric and the stage objects described as idols, images, pictures, and paintings. The awesome powers of art to provoke the passions, to capture a likeness, and to make what is dead or static appear to live, speak, and move absorbed Shakespeares attention from the very start of his writing career and became the focus of many crucial scenes involving painted art in his drama. These scenes suggest that there is a fundamental mimetic connection between painting and drama. Pictorial art is a primal form from which drama evolves or departs. Shakespeares dramas clearly transcend the limitations of painting, yet the implicit comparisons with painted art, as well as the cultivation of pictorial rhetoric, reveal painting to be a constant presence and an ambivalent muse for Shakespeare. Ultimately, Shakespeares dramatic use of painting served as an element in his defense of theatrical art and, in some cases, as the catalyst for an artistic synthesis and transcendence of difference in artistic media.
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I. Dost thou love pictures?: Eros and Pictures in the Comedies

Reactions to pictures tend be extreme in Shakespeares drama. Only in one case, that of the drunken Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, are pictures met with utter indifference. At times, spectators are invited to share the optical pleasures of characters by getting caught up in the beautiful, sensuous images of art; at other times, they are distinctly signaled to distance themselves through a recognition of the characters error in vision and understanding. In this section I will examine four comedies in which paintings are used by Shakespeare and his characters to instruct and delight. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a comedy from the early 1590s, the rhetoric of images, idolatry, shadows, and substance captures the wavering, superficial nature of desire and vision. Early modern dramatists and lyric poets often used the language of religious devotion and idolatry to speak of love. The portrait, however, became a material sign onstage for how the erotic eye leads the lover to commit secular idolatry. The portrait thus literalizes the many references to idols and pictures in a compelling stage image. At first, though, such references in this play are figurative. When the inconstant lover Proteus sees Silvia for the first time, he says to Valentine, his friend who loves her, I read your fortune in your eye. / Was this the idol that you worship so? (2.4.143 44). His comment is ironic, for he shortly becomes the one to idolize Silvia. As soon as he is alone onstage, he turns to the audience to exclaim how his love for Julia has thawd now that he has seen Silvia: Tis but her picture I have yet beheld, / And that hath dazzled my reasons light (2.4.20910). His love for Julia, like a waxen image gainst a fire / Bears no impression of the thing it was (2.4.2012). He figures both women as images: Silvia is a picture that dazzles the eye and mans reason, and Julia is a melting waxen image that cannot impress upon his imagination. When Proteus is unsuccessful in wooing Silvia, he begs for a compelling substitute, her picture. Since he has already figured her as a picture, it stands to reason that a literal picture would function metonymically in his imagination as his beloveds substitute. He argues, as does Princess Katherina in The Trial of Chivalry, that because his beloved is hardhearted and devoted to someone else, he needs something to which he can direct his devotion. Although he calls her picture a shadow, he promises to treat the picture as a living presence, speaking, sighing, and weeping to it:
Madam, if your heart be so obdurate, Vouchsafe me yet your picture for my love, The picture that is hanging in your chamber;
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To that Ill speak, to that Ill sigh and weep; For since the substance of your perfect self Is else devoted, I am but a shadow; And to your shadow will I make true love. (4.2.11925)
The conceit of a shadow making true love to a shadow reveals Proteuss idolatrous relationship with a picture, as well as the changeable, insubstantial nature of his identity. The conceit of woman as idol is suggestive of the moral problems inherent in romantic love and the desiring gaze: the lover is often driven to transform his beloved into a false god. In perceiving Proteuss error in vision and devotion, Silvia allows him to have her portrait so that his idolatry will be directed toward her picture rather than her person. She exclaims,
I am very loath to be your idol, sir; But since your falsehood shall become you well To worship shadows and adore false shapes, Send to me in the morning, and Ill send it. (4.4.12831)
In coupling the notions of idol, falsehood, and shadows, she diagnoses Proteuss love as misdirected veneration. The disguised Julia, who has been instructed by Proteus to claim Silvias heavenly picture (4.4.87), imagines the behavior the painting will inspire from Proteus. As an iconophilic, Proteus will actively express his devotion to Silvias image:
O thou senseless form, Thou shalt be worshippd, kissd, lovd, and adord; And were there sense in his idolatry, My substance should be statue in thy stead. (4.4.198201)
Sadly, Julia wishes that Proteus would direct his idolatry toward her; she figures herself as a statue, which could serve as the quasi-religious object to be kissed and adored. Ironically, she herself is guilty of treating the image as if it were living. She promises to use the portrait kindly, or else, by Jove I vow, / I should have scratchd out your unseeing eyes, / To make my master out of love with thee (2035). She addresses the painting directly and, like Lucrece in Shakespeares narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, thinks she can scratch something living in the painting with her nails. Standing before the painting of Troys ruin, Lucrece wishes she
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could find Helens image so that she could tear the womans beauty with her nails, but when she sees the deceitful Sinon, whose mild appearance reminds her of Tarquins, she tears the senseless Sinon with her nails (1564).6 The spurned Julia responds to Silvias image with passion as well, but she refrains from scratching the unseeing eyes, not because she realizes as Lucrece does that the wounds will not be sore (1568), but because she has observed Silvias empathy and been touched by it. Her assumption seems to be that the portrait is ontologically continuous with the woman; therefore, to harm the portrait is in some way to harm and dishonor the woman. The portrait disappears after this scene, but the discourse of false appearances (idolatry, counterfeit, shadow, and so forth) continues to the plays oddly ambivalent conclusion. In another comedy from the early 1590s, The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare coupled painting, eroticism, and theatricality. The plays treatment of images, unlike that in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, seeks to appeal to, even flatter, art connoisseurs with its references to beguiling erotic images. The drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, fails to respond at all to these images, which marks him as a laughable na f. In the plays Induction, a Lord and his company of actors undertake an energetic dramatic project to trick Sly into believing that he is a lord. In managing the jest, the Lord becomes a stage designer, manager, and player all in one, and has the unsuspecting Sly carried to his fairest chamber (Induction 1.46). As part of his effort to create an illusory spacea theater spacedesigned to convince a beggar that he is a gentleman, the Lord plans to have his man hang wanton pictures (Induction 1.47) all around the chamber. The Lord and his players offer to entertain Sly by showing him Ovidian pictures for his aesthetic and erotic delight. Here, Shakespeare transforms the classical writers erotic images into visually provocative descriptions designed to be enticing to listeners. Ovid was one of Shakespeares greatest sources of inspiration; as Francis Meres claimed, the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare.7 Shakespeare may very well have based his images on those he saw in illustrated editions of the moralized Ovid or engravings of continental paintings of Ovidian scenes. These pictures, however, never appear literally on the stage, as can be inferred from the Second Servants conversation with Sly. Dost thou love pictures? he asks Sly, and then proceeds to describe a series of erotic, mythological images which he will fetch thee straight (2.49). A number of conclusions about Shakespeares verbal play with Ovidian images can be drawn here. They are invoked rather than shown, undoubtedly because the Lord Chamberlains Men did not possess such paintings, but, that material fact aside, there are various ways that these invisible pictures signify meanings. In socioeconomic terms, an Elizabethan gentleman or member of the lower nobility would, according to his status, be
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expected to have paintings adorning the chambers in his house. Thus, Shakespeare indicates the Lords social rank in the fact that he owns paintings. The paintings subjects depend on the patrons aesthetic and literary proclivities, which can be revealed only in the relative privacy of the room where the pictures are hung: wanton pictures were for private entertainment and erotic enticement best fit for a single gentlemans chamber. As for style, the descriptions of the paintings emphasize their realism, or lively quality, which associates them closely with dramathe sedges seem to move with Cythereas breath, Jupiters beguiling of Io was As lively painted as the deed was done, and one shall swear she [Daphne] bleeds and Apollo weeps (2.52, 56, 58). These lively images anticipate Shakespeares later painted images that actually come to lifeOlivias self-portrait and Hermiones statue. The verbal portraits are closely followed by a description of Bartholomew the Page, who plays Slys wife: a lady far more beautiful / Than any woman in this waning age whose tears Like envious floods oerrun her lovely face (2.6263, 65). The description of Ovidian painted ladies and Apollos workmanly drawn tears elides subtly into a description of the fictive tears Slys wife cried over his blasted wits, and her beauty, which is quite obviously created through costume, wig, and cosmetics. Christopher Sly responds to this vision of his lady, but remains silent about the paintings. This significant lack of response to painted art is most likely conditioned by class, or social rank; because he does not recognize these images from their original source and has no idea how to respond to the aesthetic-critical description of them, they fail to penetrate his imagination. Since they are not present on the stage, he does not have the sensuous immediacy of pictures, which need no text to arouse interest. The lovely verbal images of these paintings, thus, seem absurdly wasted on Sly, who is no more a lover of art than he is of theater. As an unwitting and parodic figure of the London theatergoer and art connoisseur, he is startlingly oblivious to the demands of the role he has been given. He can hardly keep awake during the first scene of the Players performance of The Taming of the Shrew, the central form of entertainment offered to Lord Sly. He glibly passes judgment on the play, Tis a very excellent piece of work, but then wishes it twere done! (1.1.25354). The audience is thus made to appreciate the irony of the situation in which two kinds of lively images, pictures and drama, become part of the undifferentiated dreamlike haze of sensuality that convinces Sly he is what he is not, a Lord. The violent conclusions to the Ovidian tales of Adonis and Cytherea (Venus), Io and Jupiter, and Daphne and Apollodeath, rape, metamorphosis can be inferred by those who know the stories; yet the emphasis in the verbal images is placed on the lovers pursuit, hiding, and surprise at discovery. These erotic images thus point to the plays images of pursuit,
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taming, and revelation, with the thinly disguised presence of violence lurking as an implied subtext of eros. In The Merchant of Venice (performed c. 159697), painting and eros are again coupled, this time in a riddling game of courtship. Portia entertains a host of suitors who are forced to choose from among three caskets to win her. While some critics have treated these scenes as ornamental, John Doebler points out that Shakespeare has assigned Bassanios choice of the right casket the place of climax in the middle of the play. . . . Despite the far greater fame of the trial scene, Bassanios casket scene is possibly an even greater triumph of art.8 This scene would have been staged as a visually engaging ritual in the discovery space on the Globe and Blackfriars stages. A curtain would have been drawn aside to reveal the caskets; music would have played; and the suitor would have gone through the ritual of making his choice. Importantly, this triumph of art is achieved onstage in an iconic manner with the necessary, even self-conscious, aid of the visual arts. Each casket contains a visual icon: a skull lies in the gold casket, a portrait of a fool in the silver, and Portias heavenly picture (2.7.48) in the lead. She tells her suitors: The one of them contains my picture, / If you choose that, then I am yours withal (2.7.1112). The suitors choice of casket uncovers the icon that mirrors his values and assumptions about appearance and reality. Not only love, but death as well, has a disturbingly prominent place in this courtship game. The casket test was devised as a deathbed inspiration of Portias father, and the caskets themselves seem to resemble coffins.9 Ironically, the first suitor, the Prince of Morocco, regards the lead casket as a coffin; yet, his choice of the gold casket is the one to yield up the deaths head, a memento mori. The scroll resting in the skulls eye socket instructs Morocco in the spiritual reality of glittering appearances: All that glisters is not gold. . . . Gilded [tombs] do worms infold (2.7.65, 69). The second suitor, the Prince of Arragon, chooses the silver casket, which contains the portrait of a Fools head: Whats here? the portrait of a blinking idiot, / Presenting me a schedule! (2.9.54 55). He then observes, to comical effect, How much unlike art thou to Portia! (2.9.56). The text enclosed with the portrait emphasizes the foolish embracing of illusion, or shadow: for those who desire and kiss shadows, only a shadows bliss shall be their reward. The portrait mirrors the suitor himself who now represents all of the deliberate fools (2.9.80) who have played Portias suitors. Arragon laments, With one fools head I came to woo, / But I go away with two (2.9.7576). His foolishness costs him dearly, for he has sworn to woo no other woman if he loses Portia. In the ominous words of Shakespeares sonnet 3, he will die single and his true image (his essence reflected in a son) will die with him. Portias approach to her third suitor, Bassanio, differs greatly from her
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treatment of the gallery of fools who have visited her previously. To Bassanio, she reveals the spiritually deadening effect of the casket game: I am lockd in one of them; / If you do love me, you will find me out (3.2.40 41). Portias striking identification between herself and her hidden portrait reveals the confined nature of her existence; spiritually, she is as good as locked away and buried with her portrait in the airless, lead casket. A weary melancholy has set in, which she reveals in her first line in the play, By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world (1.2.12). Her urgent insistence that love lead Bassanio to find her out indicates her desire to be freed from the oppressive farce of courtship. The scene in which Bassanio chooses the correct casket, however, can only strike spectators with ambivalence. We remember Bassanios first words about Portia, In Belmont is a lady richly left (1.1.161) and his identification of himself with Jason and Portia with the golden fleece her sunny locks / Hang on her temples like a golden fleece (1.1.16970). Bassanio has objectified Portia as a golden prize, which will bring him material wealth. Portia, as if intuiting Bassanios baser motives, has a song about fancy being bred in the eyes sung for him. This song prompts Bassanios meditation on outward shows and penetrates deep enough into his consciousness to allow him to sidestep the gold and silver caskets. When Bassanio correctly chooses the lead casket, he takes out Portias portrait in an action that symbolizes Portias liberation: because she identified herself with the portrait, it is not only a representation of her, but also a figurative icon of her. Yet the material presence of her portrait onstage and the worshipful, ekphrastic response it elicits from Bassanio complicate this moment of revelation and freedom not only by delaying the lovers embrace, but also by deflecting Bassanios desire from a living woman to her iconic representation. When faced with an alluring portrait of his beloved, Bassanio forgets all that he has just meditated upon and becomes enamored of an image. Bassanio is awed by the painters godlike power of creation; indeed, he is ravished by the portrait and takes Portias represented self, her counterfeit, for a real presence or spirit: Fair Portias counterfeit! he exclaims, What demigod / Hath come so near creation? (3.2.11516). The portrait appears so lively he believes the eyes are moving, or perhaps his own eyes have animated the painted eyes, a perception that renders him the animator of the image. Here we have an example of competing optical theoriesdoes the image strike Bassanios eyes, or do his eyes rays animate the picture? The passage turns on this ambiguity involving the source of the portraits liveliness and the mysterious nature of the painters power:
Move these eyes? Or whether, riding on the balls of mine, Seem they in motion? . . .
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But her eyes How could he see to do them? Having made one, Methinks it should have power to steal both his And leave itself unfurnishd. (3.2.11618, 12326)
As Nicholas Hilliard wrote in his limning treatise, the eye is the life of the picture.10 Here Bassanios gaze is powerfully drawn to the life of the picture, the eyes, which he perceives in a momentary fantasy as having such power, that one eye alone would have blinded the painter with its beauty. Bassanio is playing with tropes here; he entertains the notion that painting the eyes brings the work to life. He uses the strange figure of the painter playing the spider, a figure that points imaginatively in three directions at oncedrama, painting, and literary art. The literary subtext is Ovids Metamorphosis in which Arachne competed with Minerva in a weaving contest and was punished for her presumption with her metamorphosis into a spider. Although her work of art is perfect, according to Ovids tale, her pride warrants punishment. This is a disturbing allusion to an ancient tale that warns against the human artists overweening pride and failure to honor the divine source of skill, but we also hear an echo of the golden fleece image earlier invoked by Bassanio. He looks directly at the painted golden hairs of Portia, which are as beguiling as the image of the golden fleece was, but his response now is one of wariness. His perception is double here: on the one hand, he sees the portrait as a counterfeit representation that expresses the pride and vanity of the artist, and, in that light, it mirrors back to him his vain, selfgratifying pursuit of Portia as golden image; on the other hand, he senses a living presence with sweet breath in the portrait, as well as a kind of dangerous power. Perhaps he detects and fears what David Freedberg calls the body in the image. We refuse to acknowledge our engagement with it [the image], he claims, and we deny recognition of those aspects of our own sexuality that it may seem to threaten or reveal.11 Bassanios wonder quickly yields to caution, ambivalence, even iconophobia. He is suddenly driven to reduce the portrait to a shadow that limp[s] behind the substance (3.2.12829). He exclaims, perhaps with relief,
Yet look how far The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow In underprizing it, so far this shadow Doth limp behind the substance. (3.2.12629)
Both words and woman are given substance; the portrait is named twice as shadow, if we allow an ambiguity of referents for the second use of the
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term. The pun on substance of my praise suggests that while an ontological hierarchy, from lowest to highest, of words-painting-woman is posited, in fact Bassanio cannot quite discount the living quality of his own words of praise. The real woman, of course, stands nearby waiting for Bassanio to claim her as wife, but he seems tentative about acting upon his claim. As one who has been guilty of objectifying his desires and overvaluing appearances, he can only exclaim finally that he is doubtful whether what I see be true, / Until confirmd, signd, ratified by you (3.2.147 48). Only moments earlier, he had waxed philosophical in his speech on outward shows, the very speech that led him to choose the least showy casket, the one made of pale lead. Once he lifts the lid, however, he encounters a fair outward show in the guise of Portia, which he joyously and fearfully contemplates, such that he entirely forgets the woman herself. Bassanio reveals a contradiction basic to human natureeven though he has understood the deceptive nature of appearances on an intellectual level, he is vulnerable to the lure of images. He is caught in a dangerous moral state, widely recognized by iconoclasts. Despite his better judgment, he cannot avoid emotional and aesthetic responses to art. There seems to be something in the portrait that demands a response, and the ambiguity of the situation lies in that word seems. Judith Dundas has argued that the living thing
Always outdoes its painted representationthis is a favorite topos in Shakespeare; yet implicit in its use is a praise for the poets own art. . . . What Shakespeare is really praising is the image in his own mind, to which his words can only allude.12
Dundass emphasis on the image in Shakespeares mind seems misplaced however. The character of Portiathe living thing that outdoes her painted representationlives through the players performance. Shakespeares praise is for the theater itself. Shakespeare was not such a Platonist that he held the ultimate plane of reality to be the world of invisible Forms. A complicated awareness of the relationship between art and nature, and between art and the self, lies at the heart of Shakespeares use of painting in this scene. While hidden, the painting is overdetermined with significance; its happy discovery also is fraught with meanings as Bassanio reads and animates the image. Shakespearean ambivalence is at work herealthough Portia herself invests the image with her own liveliness or spirit, and Bassanio joins her in the investment, the long static moment on the stage that begins with the song and is only broken when Bassanio claims the living Portia with a kiss indicates the strangeness and unnaturalness of their emotional investment in painted images. At best, the scene
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represents Bassanios and Portias liberation from sterile, illusory images. As Sidney Homan argues, Portia is now free to play the artist herself. Shortly after this scene, she takes a disguise. In disguise, she not only moves freely in the world of men and commerce, but also subjects all who look upon her to an effective imitation,13 much as the portrait painter had done with her image. Shakespeares paragone with painting is evident here: dramatic art surpasses the confines of the painters art. Bassanios encounter with Portias counterfeit is riddled with ironies, all of them centered on the references to counterfeit and shadow. Since these terms refer both to pictures and players, the casket scene calls attention to playing, specifically to the character of Portia as actor (and subtly to the actor playing the character). Shakespeare intensifies our awareness that the latter [the painting] is as much a work of art as the former [Portia], as Lois Potter argues.14 Portia had claimed that she lay in the casket containing her picture, a claim that highlights psychological and mimetic connections between the player/ character who creates a stage picture and the fine-art portrait. Dramatic and pictorial representations of Portia are set in competition with one another. Bassanios rejection of the picture before he claims Portia is a ritual exorcism of a false imagePortia (the players representation) is deemed the true image. Shakespeare explores the trope of woman as portrait in metaphysical and theatrical terms again in Twelfth Night, a comedy performed around 1601. As in The Merchant of Venice, the painted image is set in contrast with the performers art. There are numerous allusions to pictures and images in Twelfth Night, such as Mistress Malls portrait hidden behind a curtain, the We three picture of two fools that renders the spectator the third, the devils of hell drawn in little, Olivias jeweled picture, and funeral statuary of Patience on a monument. Most significant, however, is the curious scene in which Olivia coyly unveils herself as a picture to be gazed upon by the disguised Viola. Shakespeare has the actor/character dramatize a picture tropeOlivias face becomes a natural perspective that is and is not. The trope of unveiling is related to the plays festive source, the Feast of the Epiphany, in which reality is unveiled in the recognition of a god under a familiar shape. Olivias unveiling is a secular epiphany of a modest kind, even a parody of the great Christian epiphany, yet an essential reality about her character is uncovered in this meta-artistic moment. In the first act, Olivia and Viola have both concealed themselves rather artfully. Olivia wears a mourning habit and suffers from an addictive melancholy. She has submitted herself to the trappings and the suits of woe (Hamlet 1.2.86) to honor her dead brother, but her excessiveness is betrayed in her desire to play this role for seven years. Viola conceals
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herself also partly in response to the supposed death of her brother, yet she finds herself vulnerable in a new land and must take a disguise for protection. She transforms herself into an image of her own makingthe eunuch Cesario, who sing[s] / And speak[s] . . . in many sorts of music (1.2.5758). As the boy Cesario, Viola finds an occupation in serving the lovelorn Orsino, whom she promptly falls in love with. She is constrained then to act his woes by reciting his lovers script to Olivia and taking his part in courtship. While in disguise and in Orsinos employ, Viola perceives herself as an actor whose shape is both inhibiting and liberating, monstrous and erotically enticing. The tensions between art and nature run high in the first meeting between Viola/Cesario and Olivia. As Orsinos ambassador of love, Viola finds herself in a doubly false position, which produces an ironic selfconsciousness in her language of courtship. She claims to have studied her part (1.5.78, 79) and tells the veiled lady before her, whose identity she does not yet know, that the speech is excellently well pennd and con[ned] (17374). Violas insistence on wooing as an artful practice that involves writing, study, practice, and performance fails to win Olivias admiration; rather, it confirms the Countesss suspicion that that is all it isan artificial, mechanical ritual of wooing. Viola opens with a highflown rhetorical gesture, Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty, which leads to Olivias taunting question, Are you a comedian? (17071, 182). Violas performance is momentarily reduced to a players comic entertainment for a noble audience. Her response is equivocal: No, my profound heart; and yet (by the very fangs of malice I swear) I am not that I play. Are you the lady of the house? (18385). Keeping her identity concealed, she provokes Olivia into confessing what role she plays. Olivias riddling acknowledgment of her identity involves a pun on usurpation, which resonates with Violas own position in her masculine usurpd attire (5.1.250): If I do not usurp myself, I am (1.5.186). Her metaphor of usurpation hints at self-counterfeiting as well as a wrongful supplanting. Viola takes up this latter meaning and its metaphoric relations to sexual reservation, hoarding, and childbearing when she echoes the sentiments of the speaker in Shakespeares procreation sonnets and says: Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp yourself; for what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve. But this is from my commission (18789). Determined to keep to her text, she sighs, Alas, I took great pains to study it, and tis poetical (195). Her emphasis is on the actors labor; to this she adds poetical as an aesthetic enticement, but Olivias sharp retort equates poetical style with falseness: It is the more like to be feignd (196). Thus far in this scene, Olivias face has remained hidden behind her veil. This stage image creates the impression that she withholds herself, that there is something yet to be revealed. When Viola boldly demands, Good
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madam, let me see your face (230), new emotional and erotic currents are released in the scenewith the unveiling of the face, spectators expect to see a revelation of an intimate kind. Shakespeare then wittily enacts the linguistic root of revelation, a word derived from the Latin re-velum or revelo, meaning to unveil or to draw the curtain. We will draw the curtain, Olivia exclaims with mock-imperiousness, and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this present (1.5.23334). In drawing up her veil, Olivia turns Violas text, which was based on Orsinos constant image of the creature / That is belovd (2.4.1920), into her own trope of self as image. She physically embodies the trope by revealing herself as a picture. Ist not well done? she demands (235). She expects Viola/Cesario to gaze admiringly at her beauty now staged as a painters skillfully wrought vision. The ingenuity of the trope demands a high level of appreciation, which she challenges her audience to give. Olivia has given fleshly substance to her metaphorshe made it good with her own face. Olivias self-presentation as a work of art reveals the self-possession that wit affords, but there are unmistakable tensions here between vitality and lifelessness, release and constraint; one senses this in the melancholic undertone and ephemeral quality of the revelation. As Geoffrey Hartman argues, there is no moment of pure being. Yet a sense of epiphany, however fleeting, is felt; a sense of mortality too and of artifice, as the text is sustained by Olivias wit.15 When Olivia claims, such a one I was this present, this strange conjunction of past and present suggests selfdivision, yet this is a division contained within a paradoxical union of art and life. She unmasks herself only to reveal an image of that self, which is a text to be read in the present. The original upon which the painting is based is elusive. We perceive the metaphysical dimension of Olivias selfsplitting into we. Like Violas implied self-portrait as Patience sitting on a monument smiling at grief, Olivias portrait betrays the pathos of nature petrified as art. The disturbing union of grief and desire in both characters seems to have inspired their imaginative transformations of self into artificial, static forms of being. Viola criticizes Olivias artful ploy to usurp herself through art by turning the trope once again. She takes aim at Olivias vanity, suggesting that she uses cosmetics to paint her face: Excellently done, if God did all (236). With this witty retort, we catch a glimpse of another reality, that of the boy actor onstage, whose face would in fact have been excellently done with painting. Olivias sly reply equivocally reasserts the theatrical illusion that what is not, is: Tis in grain, sir, twill endure wind and weather (237). Her natural colors, she mockingly insists, are fast-dyed, and being indelible, they will not wash off despite exposure to the elements. The trope, however, has been undone by Violas frank responses;
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Olivia has no choice, as the scene concludes, but to abandon artfulness. This she does, in part, because she has fallen in love with another artful imageViolas personation of the lovely boy, Cesario. Olivias self-presentation as portrait betrays her narcissistic involvement with her own image. Her interview with Viola/Cesario makes this evident, even as it ritually stages her move beyond self-absorption. In falling in love with Cesario, Olivia abandons her own image for love of another image. She not only finds Cesarios truth-telling tongue compelling, she is also beguiled by his fair appearance, the shape in which Viola has chosen to conceal herself. It becomes clear, as well, that Olivia has abandoned the unnatural mode of being, represented by the painting trope, when she offers a painted miniature, an actual picture, of herself to Cesario. In wishing to give away her image rather than keep it concealed behind a curtain, Olivia reflects a healthy desire to love and to be loved. The ambiguous representation of characters as images, however, continues to the joyous conclusion of Twelfth Night, when a curious double image is presented to spectators on the stage and in the theater. Viola in her male disguise, which resembles the physical form of her twin brother, Sebastian, appears side by side with him. This sight inspires awe and the sense that a new perspective on identity and love is in the making: One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, / A natural perspective, that is and is not (5.1.21617). Olivias response to this natural perspective may seem unreflective, but it promises the possibility of inner transformation. Indeed, her response models one of the best kinds of responses spectators can have to theatrical images, as far as Shakespeare was concerned: Most wonderful! (5.1.225).
II. Paintings Moral Status as the Glass of Truth in Hamlet

In Hamlet, a drama performed at about the same time as Twelfth Night, moral responses to art become a central preoccupation for both dramatist and his tragic antagonists, Hamlet and Claudius. In this tragedy, Shakespeares relationship with painting is highly ambivalent and figuratively connected to playing: both visual arts take on the negative connotations of counterfeiting and falsehood, yet also function on literal and metaphorical levels to prompt characters to see more clearly the moral nature of others and of themselves. The rhetoric of playing and painting makes up a discourse of ambivalence about representation and vision. On the one hand, painting is clearly associated with negative qualities, such as dishonesty, lifelessness, and inaction. Hamlets references to womens painting reflect a conventional misogyny; his obsession with the bloody Pyrrhus centers on the image of a painted tyrant (2.2.480) who Did nothing (482); and
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Claudius uses a picture metaphor to describe Ophelias descent into madness: poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts (4.5.84 86). On the other hand, painting is treated as a glass, similar to the mirror of drama, which reflects truth and provokes a moral response in the viewer. Hamlet, for example, uses a portrait trope to convey his empathy with Laertes: For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his (5.2.7778). Furthermore, Hamlet makes use of literal portraits to provoke catharsis, or an expression of guilt and remorse. As he holds up the portraits of Old Hamlet and Claudius before Gertrudes eyes, Hamlet betrays his belief that pictures can offer compelling images not only of a mans visage, but, more importantly, of his inward self. Like Hamlets use of theater, his use of painting is designed to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image (3.2.2223). Hamlets assumption about mimetic art is that it both reveals the inner self or moral character of the depicted person and acts directly upon the hidden self of the spectator. While the opaque surfaces of the material world, the human face, and language can easily hide intention and obscure a secret self, the transparent moral clarity of the work of art, in Hamlets view, can strip away these surfaces to reveal the underlying truth. Thus, Hamlet understands drama and painting to be similar in their function as mimetic arts. Through compelling representations of significant actions and persons, art can strip bare the moral nature of both action and self. To use Hamlets metaphor, art is essentially the mirror up to nature, a mirror whose purpose is to induce moral vision. As Howard Felperin argues, Hamlets view of art conflates two notions: the work of art as a moral entity, which suggests medieval and Tudor allegory, and art as a naturalistic illusion, which reflects continental Renaissance techniques. The personification of virtue and scorn in his description of theater is indicative of Hamlets allegorical turn of mind.16 Felperin suggests that along with the staging of the play-within-a-play, Hamlets private encounter with Gertrude presents an archaic and antimimetic scene in which Hamlet speaks like a medieval preacher.17 In confronting his mother in her closet, Hamlet casts himself as a virtue figure in a morality drama of his own making. He expresses confidence in arts ability to reveal stable truths. This confidence, however, depends on his being able to make distinctions between false and true images. When Hamlet betrays anxieties about art, they are deeply rooted in his anxieties about appearances, human behavior and motivation. Hamlet is concerned with distinguishing between authentic representations of the self and mere appearances, which resemble playacting. He expresses a loathing for insincere acting in his first encounter with Claudius and Gertrude, when he exclaims against shows of grief: the inky cloak, forcd breath, river in the eye, dejected havior of the visage, / Together with all forms, moods, [shapes] of grief . . . (1.2.77, 79, 80, 8182)
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These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (8386)
Hamlet is repulsed by pretense or inauthentic action, the very sort that can be played or visually manifested on the stage. Claudius also figures the inauthentic self with an artistic metaphor. When he asks Laertes whether his father was dear to him, he uses a painting trope: Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart? (4.7.1089). He knows, after all, what it is to paint sorrow and to be a face without a heart. His painting trope implicitly suggests a connection with playacting, for painting sorrows in life as well as onstage involves acting. While he is morally sensitized to the dangers of playing, Hamlet is nonetheless fascinated by the art. This can be seen most readily in his treatment of the Players who visit Elsinore. He greets them with a taste of his own talent, as he begins to recite the passionate speech (2.2.432) from Aeneass tale to Dido, which he has requested to hear from them. In this speech, the bloody revenge of Pyrrhus and the terrible grief of Hecuba resonate with Hamlets own emotional crisis. The image of Pyrrhus pause (2.2.487), above all, bears a striking resemblance to Hamlets delay in taking revenge. He watches as the Player enacts the image of the arrested descent of Pyrrhuss sword, which seemd i th air to stick:
So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood [And,] like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. (2.2.47982)
Just as Hamlet claimed to see the portraiture of Laertes cause in the image of his own, here he hears a corresponding verbal image and witnesses the Players enactment of another revenger, Pyrrhus. Like a painting, Pyrrhus pauses with sword in hand above Priam, very much the way Hamlet will pause, sword in hand, above or near the praying Claudius a few scenes later. This pause is figured in the tale as a moment of profound silence and stillness, both qualities inherent in painting; what is more, these qualities are made visible in the natural scene the Player depicts:
But as we often see, against some storm, A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below A hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder

Doth rend the region; so after Pyrrhus pause, A roused vengeance sets him new a-work. . . .
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(2.2.48388)
Thus, the moment of hushed stillness in which all of nature takes on the quality of a painting is a moment of forces being gathered. It is the great, swelling pause before the act; as in painting where depicted characters literally do nothing, yet seem to represent potential forces of energy, this moment in the tale reflects back to Hamlet how he does nothing, like a mere painted avenger. In his soliloquy delivered in response to the Players performance, he reflects unhappily and cynically on how he cannot act in any sense of the word. The action he decides to take proves to be an indirect, artful one; he devises the plan to use theater as a glass to catch the conscience of the King (2.2.605). He claims that he will observe his looks and tent [probe] him to the quick. If a do blench, / I know my course (596, 597 98). Dramatic art becomes a gauge that can measure Claudiuss guilt by striking his eyes and soul with images that correspond to his own vices. The very cunning of the scene (590) will work on the conscience of the spectator, provoking either a confession or a true sign of that within which passes show (1.2.85). Claudiuss guilt is first confessed in an aside when he refers to his most painted word, and then in his passionate response to the play, and finally unequivocally in a soliloquy. Thus, two instances in which Claudius reveals himself depend on tropes of art. The painting trope is crucial in Act 3, scene 1 where Claudius and Polonius use Ophelia to test the source of Hamlets madness. Polonius gives Ophelia a book so that she will appear natural in her solitude: Read on this book, / That show of such an exercise may color / your [loneliness] (3.1.43 45). Here, the notion of show suggests the public performance she must give, and color suggests both painting and cosmetics use. Ironically and paradoxically, color is used to refer to something false that will lend an air of naturalness or authenticity. Polonius reflects on the moral situation and universalizes this act of hypocrisy:
We are oft to blame in this Tis too much provd that with devotions visage And pious action we do sugar oer The devil himself. (45 48)
Upon hearing this, Claudius is provoked into honest reflection:

O, tis too true! How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
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The harlots cheek, beautied with plastring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burthen! (4853)
Poloniuss verbal portrait of devotions visage / And pious action sugaring or ornamenting wickedness speaks directly to Claudiuss moral condition. The emphasis on visage and action places hypocrisy in the realm of appearances. A visage can refer both to an outward appearance and a face; its root lies in visus, meaning a look and videre, meaning to see. Claudiuss example of the harlots painted face follows directly from Poloniuss reference to a visage, and finds an unexpectedly disturbing echo in Hamlets passionate accusation of Ophelia: I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another (3.1.141 44). Ophelia is not quite innocent of the implications of this charge, for she has obediently taken on devotions visage. Indeed, she becomes a player, one of those creatures accused by antitheatricalists of taking on second selves, painting their faces, and prostituting themselves. Ophelia is placed in the false position of playing out a paradox unwillingly; as an honest young woman, she has had no commerce with artifice of any kind. But now she appears to give Hamlet proof that beauty and honesty cannot coexist. She must speak and act with artifice in a scene contrived against her will. She does not wish to paint her face any more than she wishes to act. Yet she is fundamentally compromised by her father and king, who demand that she color her appearance in the scene and playact innocence. The activities of painting and playing are inextricably linked in this scene as forms of dissembling or falsehood. Claudiuss dearly bought queen, Gertrude, is also guilty of devotions visage and the painted word; her guilt rises to the surface when Hamlet forces her to see her own visage through the painted images of her dead husband and Claudius. The emotionally harrowing closet scene is a moment of crisis in which Hamlet makes use of paintings in an attempt to strip away Gertrudes social mask. Her inward guilty self is bared. He has already played the playwright and used drama to catch the conscience of the king; now he will use painting, the twin portraits of Old Hamlet and Claudius, to catch the conscience of the queen. Hamlets purpose as a dramatist and figurative painter is to show the viewer his or her own vices, and to honor his dead father by making his virtuous character visible. Fueled by moral fervor, Hamlet confronts his mother with the counterfeit presentments of Old Hamlet and Claudius which, despite their stated ontological status as counterfeits, have the ability, in Hamlets eyes, to reveal the truth of these mens characters. The
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metaphor of presentment signifies a dramatic as well as pictorial showing; underlying this notion is Hamlets intention to stage a reformation of his mothers character. In showing Gertrude these portraits, Hamlet plays the painter, which is to say, he places himself in the role of an artist presenting pictures to a viewer. Furthermore, his words figuratively paint moral portraits, partly of his own creation, for Gertrude and the plays audience. In many productions of the play, past and present, Hamlet holds up a miniature of his father, which he either wears upon a chain or pulls from his pocket, and compares it to Claudiuss miniature, which is sometimes hanging upon a chain around Gertrudes neck. Arthur Colby Sprague argues that the treatment of the counterfeits as miniature portraits has been the traditional practice. He cites an eighteenthcentury critic, Tom Davies, who wrote that it had been the constant practice of the Stage, ever since the Restoration, for Hamlet, in this scene, to produce from his pocket two pictures in little. 18 Some book illustrations and engravings of the closet scene depicted the paintings as miniatures. Perhaps the earliest of these depictions, Francesco Bartolozzis 1796 engraving based on a design by William Hamilton, shows Hamlet seated uncomfortably close to Gertrude with his fathers miniature in his left hand (figure 11). Gertrude gazes upon the picture in little, arms gesturing in the opposite direction. Her right hand, which corresponds visually to Hamlets left hand with Old Hamlets portrait, is empty, giving the appearance that, in her distraught condition, she has just dropped Claudiuss portrait. Given the popularity of miniatures during the Elizabethan era, it seems fitting that Shakespeare would have employed them more readily than larger portraits on the stage. There is clearly an advantage in Hamlets using small portraits that cannot be seen in detail by the plays spectators his figurative painting, which is moral, purposeful, and competitive with the image itselfbecomes the focus of the scene. Hamlets dramatic presentation and verbal representation of the two portraits are designed to guide Gertrudes responses:
Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperions curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a [heaven-]kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. (3.4.5363)
11. Francesco Bartolozzi, engraving after a design by William Hamilton, Hamlet and his Mother, 1796. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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Hamlets reading of his fathers image is clearly an idealization of the man who, in the sons mind, appears like the sun-god, or even Jove himself. Indeed, Hamlets description of the portrait is not a literal record of what he sees, but a verbal painting that glorifies, even divinizes his father. This verbal painting, or ekphrasis, lends the picture a touch of something living, something divine.19 Indeed, Hamlet gives the portrait presence, and what is more, the presence of a god. By invoking Hyperion, Jove, Mars, and Mercury, Hamlet places his father in the divine pantheon; indeed, Hamlet does not even use a simile in the first two allusions. The painting of old Hamlet also functions as a memorial, and as such Hamlets verbal painting reflects one of the main functions of Elizabethan portraitureto preserve the memory of the deceased for his descendents. Hamlet has persistently, even obsessively, worked to keep his fathers memory alive, despite Gertrudes and Claudiuss glib arguments in favor of a healthy forgetfulness. The sons memory, in compensation for the kingdoms memory loss, glorifies the father, who like the herald Mercury, continues to light his imagination. After verbally painting an idealized image of his father, he turns his gaze upon the portrait of Claudius, and there findsor proceeds to present through ekphrasisa debased image:
Look you now what follows: Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear, Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, And batten on this moor? ha, have you eyes? (3.4.6367)
Hamlets vision of Claudius as a rotting head of corn upon which Gertrude gorges herself reflects a disturbing moral vision; here Hamlet looks beyond the surface image and sees in Claudiuss picture the moral rot that infects the man. Claudius metaphorically becomes the tainted ear that withers or shrivels (blasts) his healthy brother, a fitting echo of the image of his pouring poison into old Hamlets ear. Hamlets appeal to Gertrude, strongly phrased as it is, insists on a kind of moral vision that can penetrate her heart: Have you eyes? he cries. In reaction to Hamlets verbal portraiture, Gertrudes vision is directed inward where she perceives her own true image colored with blackness:
O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turnst my [eyes into my very] soul, And there I see such black and [grained] spots As will [not] leave their tinct. (3.4.8991)
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The foul tinct of guilt is fast dyed in her soul. Thus, Hamlets use of the paintings to provoke moral recognition and catharsis in Gertrude is as successful as his use of theater, perhaps more so. The response he provoked in Claudius strongly suggested guilt, but not moral reform. At another moment in the play, Hamlet understands Claudiuss picture in political terms as a tool wielded by a crafty monarch. We hear from Hamlet in his conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Claudiuss portrait miniature has circulated about the kingdom. The market value of his image has increased, given his new status as king. Hamlet comments on the unnaturalness of this value inflation, perhaps suggesting the fickleness of the people of Denmark; at the same time, he notes the kingdoms obsession with Claudiuss false visage:
My uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths [derisive faces] at him while my father livd, give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats a-piece for his picture in little. Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. (2.2.36368)
While Ophelias part is forced upon her, Claudius is unequivocally guilty of playing a self-determined part, of using devotions visage / And pious action to appear innocent and to gain popularity. His foul deed is covered by painted words and actions that seem to express beneficence, love, and goodwill. His picture in little undoubtedly conveys the false image he has cultivated; his success at self-painting and playing king can be measured by the great popularity of his image. In Hamlet, images can be abused just as readily as they can be used for positive moral purposes. Shakespeares alignment of painting and drama in his implicit paragone betrays how great the powers invested in both visual arts were in early modern England. Shakespeares view of art is, of course, larger than that of Hamlets; indeed, he often uses painting and drama as trick mirrors, which show the theaters spectators as much about the onstage viewers as they do about arts powers. In his stage image of Hamlet presenting Gertrude with two portraits, Shakespeare confronts us with something subtle and psychologically compelling. A painted image can represent a human face with emotional and moral traits skillfully implied; yet, the reading of an image is clearly the joint effort of the painter and the viewer who colors and animates the image with his own desires, fears, memories, and perceptions. When Hamlet quickens the painted images of Claudius and Old Hamlet with his passionate ekphrasis, we understand that Hamlet believes these painted images to be charged with presence, as David Freedberg puts it.20 As Freedberg argues, images have traditionally been invested with liveliness and have been attributed with great powers. English reformers fought vehemently against this mindset;
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ironically, Shakespeares reformer Hamlet would have been condemned by Protestant reformers for his belief in the liveliness of painted images. Hamlet, like many early modern spectators at Shakespeares play, accepted the premise that pictures have speaking looks and lifelike touches. Despite the work of iconoclasts, many Elizabethans believed that pictures can function as surrogates for persons, as well as revelatory icons that bare a persons moral being to the viewers eye. Furthermore, in Hamlet Shakespeare invests both portraiture and drama with the power to stage a revelation or figurative unveiling of spectators.
III. Shakespeares Paragone with Painting in Timon of Athens and The Winters Tale
Shakespeare staged his most explicit paragone with the painter in the first decade of James Stuarts rule, a time when Jacobean dramatists and scenic designers exploited theaters visual elements far more aggressively than the Elizabethans had dared. At court, the masque thrived under the creative inspiration of Inigo Jones; his spectacular designs set a new standard of visual opulence. In Londons theaters, dramatists such as John Webster and Cyril Tourneur flamboyantly exploited visual effectsfor them, theater was the opportune place for seeing sex, violence, and the macabre on display. Their treatment of painting (especially face painting) became emblematic of this new theaters decadence. For the most part, the subtlety of the Elizabethan theater was lost. While he employed elements of the masque in later plays, Shakespeare never resorted to sheer spectacle or gratuitous violence in order to dazzle his spectators eyes. Rather, he intimated that art had its quasi-religious or magical elements, which could be witnessed through seeing wondrous images on the stage. By the end of his dramatic career, he argues implicitly that theatrical art is lawful magic, following natural and divine laws. Images may beguile viewers, as the reformers feared, but they also may be lawful as eating if viewed aright. This study of early modern English dramatists paragone with painting culminates in an examination of two Jacobean plays, Timon of Athens and The Winters Tale, in which Shakespeare explores widely divergent views and uses of painted art. In the former, portraiture is used to flatter and win patronage; in the latter, painted art is used to stage a secular miracle that reunites a family. Curiously enough, Shakespeare chose Timon of Athens, a bitterly dark tragedy dated from about 1607, as the drama in which to stage the Renaissance paragone, a rhetorical comparison or competition between painting and poetry.21 A further curiosity lies in the fact that this is the only Shakespearean play in which the character of a painter appears, and his portrayal
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is far from idealized. Shakespeares poet, as well, appears in an unflattering light, and his work is all but ignored by his patron, Timon. For some viewers and critics, the play gives the disturbing impression that Shakespeare is attacking artists. As Philip Edwards puts it, Shakespeare seems to mount a special attack against them.22 The opening scene presents an ambivalent image of Poet and Painter as they stand onstage with the products of their artspoem and paintingsubtly attacking one another through the rhetorical device of the paragone. Neither wins the debate, for the Poet and Painter succeed mainly in impressing the audience with their competitive desire for patronage, their insincerity, and professional dislike for each other. While the Poet aggressively co-opts the Painters work through mock-hyperbole and ekphrasis, he can do nothing when the patron prefers an image to a poem. The Painters art, however, is more vulnerable to attack on the English stage because of the anti-painting prejudice, as well as the traditional associations of painting with flattery, falseness, and dumbness. These associations resonate throughout the play with the repetition of the painting metaphor, as when Timons false friends are called painted and varnishd (4.2.36), and Timon calls the women in the play, Whore still, / Paint till a horse may mire upon your face (4.3.147 48). As Michael Leslie observes, the plays opening scene contains a series of insistent references to sight and interpretation, to mimesis, and to art.23 The artists paragone calls attention to the respective powers of painting and poetry and implicitly to the greater powers of theater, which encompasses both arts and provides an ironic stage for this dialogue. Artistic discourse is fraught with ambivalence, which betrays both the traditional rivalry between artists and their necessary competition for patronage. The Painter rightly assumes that the Poet has been at work on a poem for Timon: You are rapt, sir, in some work, some dedication / To the great lord (1.1.1920). The Poet responds coyly, A thing slippd idlely from me (20), and then proceeds to mystify the poetic process as a kind of creative gum that oozes From whence tis nourishd (22), and a flame that Provokes itself (24). He then turns to the picture carried by the Painter and asks, What have you there? (25). The Painter quickly responds, A picture, sir, and then inquires, When comes your book forth? (26). The Poet implies that publication is dependent upon his presentment to Timon, who will then, one assumes, give remuneration for the work and legitimate its publication. The Poet then asks to see the Painters piece, since the fruits of his labor are visibly present. Tis a good piece (28), the Painter responds in quick self-defense. The Poet responds, So tis. This comes off well and excellent (29). His praise, whether mocking or sincere, echoes Hamlets advice to the Players, as the Arden editor, H. J. Oliver, notes: Now this overdone, or come tardy off
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. . . cannot but make the judicious grieve.24 The phrase, To come off, refers to the achievement of an artistic effect; the phrase also signals the close rhetorical connection between painting and playing. The term presentment, which appears significantly in Hamlet as well, refers to a visual representation, either through picture, drama, or graphic description (OED). Thus, this scenes rhetoric emphasizes how the mimetic arts theater, painting, and poetryeach engage the visual realm and depend on acceptance from a patron and audience. The Poet emphasizes paintings incompleteness as a silent art when he insists upon playing the role of interpreter, reading the paintings images, and making articulate the face and bodily gestures depicted there. By responding with a discourse that parodies ekphrastic wonder, the Poet emphasizes paintings dumbness:
Admirable! How this grace Speaks his own standing! What a mental power This eye shoots forth! How big imagination Moves in this lip! To th dumbness of the gesture One might interpret. (3034)
The images need one who might interpret, one who can make painting articulate its latent poetry. The Painter does not take offense at this; after all, if the Poet can respond in such a way, the images convey meaning effectively. He says merely, It is a pretty mocking of the life. (35). The term mocking refers to imitation, but also to counterfeiting and acting. These other connotations of the word suggest the Painters selfdeprecation and ambivalence about the value of his work, as does the belittling word pretty. The term mock is also used during Timons exchange with the Jeweller who wishes him to pay more than the jewels value. When he pleads his case with a flattering appeal to Timon You mend the jewel by the wearing it (172)Timons reply is, Well mockd (173). The sense of this term is ambiguous again. On the one hand, there may be some appreciation on Timons part for how well the Jeweller has performed his role, yet there is also the sense that the Jeweller underestimated Timon and succeeds only in mocking him with flattery. The Painter turns again to the Poet for approbation, pointing to a section of the painting where there is a touch, and asks, Ist good? (36). He is rewarded with poetic hyperbole: I will say of it, / It tutors nature. Artificial strife / Lives in these touches, livelier than life (3638). It has become apparent at this point that the Poet is far better with words than the Painter, as one would expect, but the Painters deference and underlying anxiety about his competitors criticism reflect the Poets arrogance re-
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garding his art and its established social position. To say that art tutors nature and that the touches of the Painters pencil are livelier than life is to indulge in rhetorical excess and clich es of artistic praise. The Poet deliberately inflates his praise of the Painters excellence. To call attention to artificial strife is to emphasize an ambiguous point about the Painters achievement: in his work lies both arts strife or paragone with nature to produce images more lifelike than hers and the artificial endeavor of this pursuit. When the Poet speaks for his own rough work in which he has shapd out a man (43), his metaphors ironically depend on an implicit spectatorship and the priority of visual art. He describes an allegory in such a fashion that the audience is called to see the verbal picture. This is a compelling example of Sidneys speaking picture, in which Poetrie ever setteth vertue so out in her best cullours, making Fortune her welwayting hand-mayd, that one must needs be enamored of her.25 The Poet declares,
Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feignd Fortune to be thrond. The base o th mount Is rankd with all deserts, all kinds of natures, That labor on the bosom of this sphere To propagate their states. Amongst them all, Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fixd, One do I personate of Lord Timons frame, Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her, Whose present grace to present slaves and servants Translates his rivals. (6372)
The Painter responds to the inherent visual quality of the allegory: Tis conceivd to scope. / This throne, this Fortune, and this hill, methinks, . . . would be well expressd / In our condition (7273, 7677). Our condition may refer to the painters profession in two ways: the Painter could conceive as well, if not better than the Poet, an image such as the one described. The reference may also have to do with the artists social position. In the figures of those at the base of Fortunes mount, the Painter may see an image of himself and other artists. The Poet finishes his poems description with the image of Fortune spurning her beloved Timon, while his flattering dependents let him fall. The Painter is not impressed, except perhaps by the moral of the piece, for in his view words fail to give the potency that charges actual visual images. What is more, the inconstant goddess Fortuna has been the subject of countless visual representations, especially emblems:

Tis common: A thousand moral paintings I can show That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortunes More pregnantly than words.
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(8992)
Further countering the Poets subtle attack on the Painters work is Timons favorable reception of the painting. Timon holds it up and proclaims, Painting is welcome:
The painting is almost the natural man; For since dishonor traffics with mans nature, He is but outside; these pencilld figures are Even such as they give out. I like your work, And you shall find I like it. (15661)
As a patron, Timon publicly approves of the Painters work and indicates his willingness to compensate him. His moral comments on the painting, however, are of equal significance. Since he welcomes painting in a show of interest that he fails to bestow upon poetry, we may conclude that he is attracted to a flattering visual image of himself, which gratifies the senses at one glance. He deems painting a valuable art in that it can represent almost the natural man; the painted man, morally speaking, is better than the natural man, for an image does not allow for an interiority that may harbor deceit, or the dishonor that traffics with mans nature. The outward man as represented seems to be what he in fact is. Timons praise for painting depends on this idealistic assumption about paintings abilities. Another way to gloss this speech, however, is to hear the ironies implicit in it, or the intriguing semantic ambiguity, as Rolf Soellner calls it.26 From this perspective, Timon speaks more truthfully than he realizes. Ironically, art is more honorable than nature because in essence, art is an appearance, and is therefore precisely what it purports to be; whereas the human person may dissemble, wear a mask of honesty upon his face, and in general, give out an appearance or a mocking of someone he is not. Timon deems the portrait to be well done; it pleases him, and therefore must offer a representation of himself that he wishes to fulfill. As HansGeorg Gadamer wrote of the relationship between the subjects and the pictures ontology, It is because the ruler, the statesman and the hero must show and present himself to his followers, because he must represent, that the picture gains its own reality. . . When he shows himself he must fulfil the expectations that his picture arouses.27 Perhaps, however, it is merely
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a superficial, flattering portrait of a man who would be flattered, as the professional cynic, Apemantus, would take to be the case. Art can, after all, be a fraudulent, deceptive appearance, a flattering glass for a monarch. Timons speech figures ironically in ways that he cannot predict at the moment, just as the Poets allegory does. While the poem would speak more directly to Timon in warning him of his impending misfortune, the Painters image has in a sense blinded Timon. He asks Apemantus how he likes the painting. The cynics reply is riddling: The best, for the innocence (1.1.196). By innocence, he may mean foolishness or lack of harmful intent, perhaps desiring to contrast the work with the man who painted it. Timon persists, Wrought he not well that painted it? (197). Apemantus responds, He wrought better that made the painter, and yet hes but a filthy piece of work (19899). While the Painter can only spit back, Y are a dog (200), the Poet actually tries to spar with the cynic, but succeeds only in being outwitted. Apemantus accuses the Poet of lying, the traditional charge against poets since Plato, and gives him a specific instance, his poetic feigning of Timon as a worthy fellow. When the Poet protests that he does not feign, Apemantus insists that Timon is worthy of thee, and to pay thee for thy labor. He that loves to be flatterd is worthy o th flatterer (22527). In his representation of the Painter, Shakespeare makes use of the classical coupling of flattery and painting found in his source, Plutarchs essay, How to tell a Flatterer from a Friend. In this piece, Plutarch claims that the flatterer has no character of his own . . . like a mirror, he catches the images of alien feelings, lives and movements.28 Indeed, the Poet in Timon speaks of the glass-facd flatterer (1.1.58), the metaphor suggesting as it did in Plutarchs essay how the flatterer reflects back to a man his own self-conceit, moods, and desires rather than the flatterers own truthful regard of the man. The glass was a well-known emblem of pride, as Clifford Davidson notes, and thus we see that Timons flatterers appeal specifically to his pride.29 Because the Painter traffics in appearances and holds up a visible flattering glass to Timon, he, more than the Poet, is implicated in the plays problematic examination of false appearances. Timons praise of painting and his implicit attraction to his own image become emblematic of his own pride and his inability to tell a flatterer from a friend.30 When the Poet and Painter seek Timon in the woods later in the play, their frank discussion about seeking gold is overheard by Timon who calls them two honest men (5.1.56) with bitter irony. The artists show themselves as honest men and offer Timon only their counterfeit performance, hoping to reap a reward for their good show. About the difference between promising and producing a work of art, the Painter claims:

To promise is most courtly and fashionable; Performance is a kind of will or testament Which argues a great sickness in his judgment That makes it.
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(5.1.2730)
This is a curious argument against productivity; the sickness in judgment ironically describes the deceitful performance that replaces the portrait. Timons aside about the Painter indicts him morally: thou canst not paint a man / So bad as is thyself (5.1.3132), which confirms Apemantuss view of the artist. Timon mocks the artists and condemns them for becoming literally what their work purports to be: the Painter counterfeitst most lively (82), and the Poet is even natural in thine art (85). Significantly, both artists have become players in life who counterfeit passions and virtuous intents; they have rejected the truth of their own art forms in favor of an artificial display of naturalness. As Plutarch emphasized, the flatterers act is all show or display.31 Indeed, his activity is like an extravagantly wrought picture, which by means of gaudy pigments, irregular folds in the garments, wrinkles, and sharp angles, strives to produce an impression of vividness.32 They strive to make an impression on Timon, but he is not fooled by their act. By the fifth act, the play moves relentlessly toward Timons death, which is rendered visible on the stage only through inscribed speech figures captured by wax from his tomb. There is no body to carry off the stage. We are left only with self-composed doggerel verse, Timons selfrepresentation as misanthrope, which serves as an epitaph on his tomb. Timons wish for the Senators comes in the form of a riddle: he wishes to let his grave-stone be your oracle, and Graves only be mens works, and death their gain! (5.1.219, 222). Language, which he wished to end, is given its final form for Timon in the insculpture, or inscription on the tomb: Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft (5.4.70). Alcibiades, upon reading the wax imprint, recognizes that the poetry contains only his latter spirits (74). This leaves the audience with the plays final terrible irony, that in Timons attempt to represent himself, after rejecting the Painters and Poets efforts to do so, he leaves a lasting impression that captures only his worst spirit, his misfortune, and misanthropy. The drama ends as it began with the emphasis on the incompleteness and ambivalence of representation. What underlies Shakespeares use of the paragone is a subtle defense of the greater representational capacities of live drama, which is seen and heard, felt and perceived as a complex, phenomenological whole. Broadly speaking, Timons rejection of painting and poetry as artistic modes of
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revelation might be understood as a justification of theaters more complicated mode of representation, as John Dixon Hunt suggests.33 Hunt argues, precisely in the theater was the rivalry between poet and painter that preoccupied his nondramatic contemporaries actually capable, not of simple resolution, but of a new and richly suggestive symbiosis. The implication, thus, was that theater transcended the achievements of either poetry or painting.34 Transcendence lay specifically in the theaters ability to go beyond the speaking picture metaphor. By giving his characters the power to represent themselves and others through artistic forms and rhetoric, as incomplete as they may be, the actors who play these characters seem ironically all the more real onstage. As I have been emphasizing throughout this book, early modern dramatists regarded painting as a rival art that shared a fundamental element with theaterits visual nature. Conflicting attitudes toward images and imagemakers in early modern England produced highly ambivalent representations of painters and their art in the theater. Shakespearean ambivalence yielded its most negative portrayal of painting in Timon of Athens. About five years later, however, Shakespeare presented the painted work of art in a more complicated, positive light. In The Winters Tale, Shakespeare unveils a painted statue in a scene that approaches religious revelation; yet as a miracle of art rather than religion, the theatrical image and what it represents can be understood as lawful. In one characters words, This is an art / Which does mend Naturechange it rather; but / The art itself is Nature (4.4.9597). Art is nature in a literal sense, for the statue of Queen Hermione is in fact no statue, but rather the living woman herself. Her devoted friend, Paulina, seeks to mend Nature by bringing the statue to life. Paulinas art, it is subtly implied, has a dark element to it, as one intuits by the very fact of its deceptiveness. B. J. Sokol rightly observes, a pervasive theme of The Winters Tale is the necessity for the dark side of human creativity;35 indeed, Shakespeare emphasizes this element when he has Paulina work to quell her spectators fears about black magic. Yet Paulinas art is essentially a response to Leontess darker art, for she betrays the destructive power of Leontess Medusa-like gaze. The very unnaturalness of Leontes jealous gaze is figured metaphorically in the petrification of his wife.36 Her stoniness reflects Leontes hardened heart and her loveless condition. By literalizing the metaphor and then reversing it through the creative power of theatrical art, Paulina does indeed mend the worst part of human nature. Her stone seems to rebuke Leontes, prodding his heart to soften as his evils [are] conjurd to remembrance (5.3.37, 40). Fundamentally, Shakespeare revels in the theaters ability to deceive spectators eyes. The multiple deceptions of the final act produce not only wonder, but moral enlightenment, as well,
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both of which serve to defuse iconoclastic fear and suspicion about arts powers. As in The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, the work of art in The Winters Tale is concealed, which creates an expectation that something of great import is soon to be revealed. Paulina keeps Hermiones statue behind a curtain, which she draws away in a carefully orchestrated scene for her spectators. Like the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice, Paulinas presentation of the statue was undoubtedly performed in the discovery space on the Globe and Blackfriars stages: this space might have been curtained, which would have allowed for a dramatic moment of revelation and a heightened emotional response from those who gazed upon a secret sight. That this space is called a chapel by Paulina suggests a sacred element to the ritual. Everyone from the two royal families has gathered at Paulinas chapel to see something of an extraordinary nature, the birth of a new grace in the unveiling of the Queens picture (5.2.173 74). As the First Gentleman exclaimed, Who would be thence that has the benefit of access? Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born (5.2.10911). This scene is preceded by an important exchange among three unnamed gentlemen, who verbally recreate a series of extraordinary, moving scenes not shown on the stage. Curiously, these scenes are withheld from spectators eyes, and we are told that they cannot be spoken of either (5.2.43). Shakespeares juxtaposition of these scenes is important to our understanding of how responses to the visual are figured in the play; the inadequate verbal accounts of scenes unseen produce a sense of anticipation or suspense in the audience as everyone waits to see what cannot be expressed in words. The anticipation is for theatrical embodimentacts that can be witnessed onstage. The description of Leontes and Camillos responses when they learn of the lost Perditas identity betrays as much, for it is rendered in striking visual and dramatic terms:
There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they lookd as they had heard of a world ransomd, or one destroyd. A notable passion of wonder appeard in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th importance were joy or sorrow. (5.2.1318)
The emphasis here lies in the extremity of emotion that marks the appearances of these men: they are transformed and silenced by having found what was lost. When the Third Gentleman learns that the other gentlemen did not see the meeting between Polixenes and Leontes, he exclaims, Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of (42 43). Shortly thereafter, he paints a vivid compensatory word-picture
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of Perditas grievous reception of the news of her mothers death One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes (5.2.8283). Although the audience has lost a sight which was to be seen, we are promised another sight, a work of art that beguile[s] Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape (5.2.99100). The ekphrastic descriptions of scenes compete with the idealistic report of the statue; with the latter, the Gentleman was spectator to the act, and was moved by the performance. He acknowledges that his ekphrasis is an inadequate verbal representation of living drama. The implicit praise for drama is quite apparent here. In his account of the unveiling of Hermiones statue, the Gentleman relies on hearsay and knowledge of the artists reputation. Indeed, the artist, Giulio Romano, is a figure or cipher in the play: he is known only by his absence as a rare Italian master whose claim to fame lies in his ability to put breath into his work:
A piece many years in doing and now newly performd by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer. (5.2.95102)
It is well known that the only historical painter Shakespeare ever named in his works was Giulio Romano, a famed artist-in-residence at the Gonzago court in Mantua. Romano had a reputation in England, for he is mentioned by other writers as well, including Ben Jonson, who lists him as one of the six famous Italian painters in Timber: or, Discoveries (printed in 1640). In The Winters Tale, the Italian artist is invoked not as a painter per se, but rather as the master who performs Hermiones lifelike painted statue. He is called a carver at one point, but the emphasis seems to be on the act of newly performing the piece, which has the connotation of laying the final touches, or colors, to the statue. These, of course, are the touches that make all the difference, that seem to bring inanimate stone to life. A number of critics have explored the range of connotations Romanos name would have had for Shakespeare and his audience. As Betty Talvacchia rightly argues, The reason to insert Giulio Romano into The Winters Tale was to present him as the epitome of the artist who could deceive the beholders eye into mistaking plaster and pigment creations for natures moving and living beings.37 Stephen Orgel, however, wisely points out, For Vasari, Giulios crucial quality is not only his illusionistic talent, but the ability to represent the human as divine, particularly through sexuality.38 Many educated Elizabethans had read or heard recounted Romanos biography from Giorgio Vasaris Le vite de pi` u eccellenti pittori,
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scultori, ed architettori (published in Italian in 1550 and 1568), and, what is more, some would have known about his wanton engravings in I Modi, or The Postures, which also contained the erotic poetry of Pietro Aretino. Anne Barton argues, most of the members of Shakespeares audience, at least at the Blackfriars, would have recognized Romanos name, and probably known something of his work.39 Romanos work reflected an abiding interest in the amorous disposition and sexual couplings (or positions) of humans and gods. B. J. Sokol has proposed that Shakespeare gently parodied enthusiastic court tastes for Italian sculpture, particularly those of Prince Henrys voguish circle.40 This seems possible, though the parodic element is quite subtle, a sort of wink at the cognoscenti who would have perceived Paulina as the knowing mistress of her art (akin to Shakespeares) quietly mocking spectators who absurdly wonder, like Leontes, at a picture. Leontes lament that he is mockd with art (68), however, suggests elemental powers in art to deride, torment, and provoke passions. As in Timon of Athens, the term mock suggests not only imitation, but artful trickery as well. Sophisticated spectators might have been tempted to remain aloof in face of such trickery, yet the very dynamic of the scene demands emotional engagement and suspension of disbelief. Paulinas secret wink of the eye ultimately brings about the birth not of a mockery, but of a new grace, the work of art made flesh. The joke is on the sophisticates in the audience when the statue literally moves and speaks. Surely it is gracious fooling or mocking at work here, for the emphasis in this scene is on grace, that great classical and Renaissance artistic virtue, as well as Christian blessing that comes from the heavens to restore humanity. Hermiones first words affirm this: You gods, look down / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughters head! (5.3.12123). Surely something wondrous is celebrated in this scene, which tends to produce an empathetic, emotional response in theater spectators, rather than a sophisticates smugness. Shakespeare invokes the name of Giulio Romano as maker of the lifelike statue not to ridicule the responses of his characters, but rather to give them, as well as theatergoers of the time, a sense of the statues efficacy. According to Giorgio Vasari in his 1550 Vite, Romanos art breathed: one of his lost epitaphs was said to contain the following text: Videbat Iuppiter corpora sculpta pictaque / Spirare aedes mortalium aequarier coelo / Julii virtute Romani (Jupiter saw sculpted and painted bodies breathe and the mortals homes made equal to those in heaven through Giulio Romanos skill).41 As an Italian artist invoked for an English audience, an aura of wonder surely surrounded his name, promising the splendid illusionism of Italian artwork that spectators had either heard about or seen on trips to the continent. His name also would have conjured pleasurable and dangerous imaginings, if
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not actual images, of artistic competition between art and nature, and mortals and gods. Leonard Barkan importantly emphasizes the paragonal nature of the epitaph, for it continues with a description of how Jupiter, in his anger, summoned a council of the gods and removed Romano from earth. To Vasaris readers, then, Romano would appear as a great and godlike creator, master of many arts and worthy opponent of Nature herself.42 Romano, of course, is a mask for Paulina, the true artist and white magician of Sicilia, whose artistry lies not in literal sculpting and painting, but in animating the spirits of spectators and making wonders seem familiar. She stages the quickening of an image, therefore making good the Elizabethan figure of the speaking picture. The notion that Romano (Paulina) performs the piece signals an imaginative link and competitive spark between theater and painting/sculpture. Paulina indeed will appear to have completed her work (one meaning of perform), yet the material she works with, the living human body, is never complete in the way a static work of art is. It is always in the performance mode, that is, in the act of completing itself. When Paulina unveils the statue, the revelation is met with silence and wonder. As the mistress of this ritual and keeper of the stone, she proclaims, Behold, and say tis well (5.3.20). Although Leontes, more than the others, will say again and again how well done the statue is, the scene most vividly demonstrates that the statues visual presenceindeed its living presence cannot be adequately described or made sense of. Again we are confronted with a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of (5.2.42 43). I like your silence, Paulina says, it the more shows off / Your wonder (5.3.2122). Her comments, directed as much to the theaters spectators as to Leontes, strike an ambivalent note, however; on the one hand, she affirms that we are in the presence of something so remarkable that an awed silence is the best response; on the other hand, she insists upon the artificial status of the piece, which she calls a dead likeness (5.3.15) and a lively mockery of death. The piece is the life as lively mockd as ever / Still sleep mockd death (1920). Paulina directs her audience to see the artistry at work in creating the wonder of a stone so near life: Comes it not something near? (23). Leontes, however, is taken only with how natural, how lively, the statue appears: Her natural posture! (23), he exclaims rapturously. The trope of liveliness competes with that of mocking, for in this scene these two ways of framing ones response to art are held in tension. This scene ritually stages the mysterious and fearful process of art metamorphosing to life, which seems to make a mockery of our reason. Liveliness is also a key response to arts disturbingly animate, even erotic quality. Talvacchia argues that Leontes outcry about Hermiones posture would have carried an erotic charge for those who knew of Romanos Postures.43 What is
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more, the myth of Pygmalion and his statue Galatea would have been perceived as a significant subtext for this scene. The longer Leontes gazes at the statue, the stronger his desire becomes to touch and kiss it; Leontes gaze at the statues posture is tinged with desire. Leontes speaks to the statue as if the spirit of the woman represented actually inhabits the statue. Just as the Third Gentleman reported, the statue prompts one to speak to it and hope for an answer: Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she / In thy not chiding (24 26). His response reveals a belief in the ontological consistency between Hermione and her representation: that the statue is so lifelike, one presumes, contributes to Leontes sense that his wife is present in the stone. The stone paradoxically has the very quality of the woman herselfit does not chide him. Leontes first hint at the sculptures strangeness comes in his observation that Hermiones image possesses wrinkles. This observation prompts Paulinas praise of our carvers excellence (30)he made the years pass so that the image appears as Hermione would in the present. This is a curiosity in that the piece has been many years in doing and now newly performd (5.2.96), which leaves us with the impression that the work of art is organic, aging as a living person would. The statue begins to seem more and more lifelike as Leontes responds to it. It comes as no surprise when he associates the piece with magic; not only can the image conjure memories, but it can also turn admirers to metaphoric stone:
O royal piece, Theres magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjurd to remembrance, and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee. (5.3.38 42)
On the stage, Perditas posture, like that of a monument, mirrors her mothers; she is frozen in admiration. Her verbal response to her mothers image makes the reference to magic more potent, for she expresses the desire to kneel before the image and ask for its blessing, behaviors that are associated with veneration of religious images. She exclaims, however, that this is not superstition, referring to idolatry, or a Catholic devotion to images. Yet her behavior is beyond the rational: she addresses the statue, Dear queen, that ended when I but began, / Give me that hand of yours to kiss (5.2.45 46). As she reaches to kiss the hand of the statue, Paulina must quickly intervene, perhaps with a bit of exasperation, O, patience! / The statue is but newly fixd; the colors / Not dry (46 48). As Paulina notes the effects her poor image (57) has on Perdita and Leontes, she
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undoubtedly sees both the dangers and the success involved in her show. With each of her attempts to draw the curtain closed, Leontes stops her, for it is as if he is spellbound, simultaneously mocked and transported by art. Like Bassanio, he thinks of the extraordinary skill of the maker, exclaiming, What was he that did make it? . . . The fixture of her eye has motion int (63, 67). He is so convinced that the statue breathes, he moves to kiss it, caring nothing for the mockery that action might call forth. Paulina steps in, as she did with Perdita, and warns, The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; / Youll mar it if you kiss it; stain your own / With oily painting (8183). At this point, Paulina promises Leontes more affliction and amazement if he will submit himself to art. But she necessarily must say that her art is not to be associated with wicked powers (91). Leontes agrees, and she proclaims, It is requird / You do awake your faith. Then, all stand still (94 95). An act of vivification is about to unfold that is highly suggestive of religious ritual. As Hermione begins to move and is stone no more, Paulina exclaims, her actions shall be holy, as / You hear my spell is lawful (104 5). Paulina gives the newly awakened Hermione to Leontes, who receives this living work of art as an extraordinary gift: O, shes warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating (109 11). This moment is sacred: what was once dead, lives again through art. Leontes wish is Shakespeares wish: let this be an art lawful as eating, with all of the pleasures and life-sustaining effects that come with sharing food in good company. There is no mockery in Paulinas voice when she insists, That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale (11517). Redemption lies in the act of seeing and, more specifically, in actions that are holy and a spell that is lawful. Essentially, Paulina is describing the transformative effects of theater, which Shakespeare asserts as an art/Lawful as eating. Although not entirely free of ambivalence, The Winters Tale represents Shakespeares greatest defense of theatrical art in an explicitly visual manner. In the words of Leonard Barkan,
If drama is the equivalent of sculpture, it can yet triumph over the frozen medium just as great statues (like Hermione herself ) can triumph over their frozenness. All of Shakespeares art consists of statues coming to life, for compared to it all other media are dead.44
As I have demonstrated in this book, drama is also the equivalent to painting, yet it triumphs over that static form. We can add to Barkans claim by emphasizing that Shakespeares theater consists of statues and paintings coming to life. Shakespeare is first and foremost a visual artist who understands the power in creating moving, disturbing, and wondrous stage images. A central tenet of Shakespeares art, however, is that there must be a balance between the seen and unseen, belief and doubt, faith and
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reason. When sights are withheld, we are asked to imagine them and to compare them with the sights we see on the stage. Imaginative conceptions are powerful in their own right and serve to heighten those embodiments of vision brought before our eyes in performance. But some actions in drama must be seen for special reasons. Paulinas art must be made visible so that something of a quasi-religious nature can take place: this can only happen through a communal ritual in which she plays the role of high priestess, and Hermione that of a miraculous work of art. The presence of Hermione, first as the lifelike work of art, then as the metamorphosed human who can intervene with the gods, ignites the faith of the courtiers who bear witness to the miracle. What we have here is a positive, celebratory paradigm for theater as a lawful visual art:
Music! awake her! strike! Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; Strike all that look upon with marvel. . . . Start not; her actions shall be holy, as You hear my spell is lawful. (5.3.98100, 104 5)
Impersonation is a marvel that surpasses painting, while at the same time sharing some of that arts attributes and arousing some of the same anxieties and phobias. While at times Shakespeare and his contemporaries perceived painting as a dark or inadequate double for their own art, in Shakespeares painted statue, theater spectators found a momentary reconciliation between painting and drama, indeed a fusion of the arts in a theatrical marvel. Such a marvel demonstrates vividly that Shakespeare was no iconoclast. His sympathies lay with the image-lovers, yet, as we have seen, he acknowledged the moral and perceptual dangers inherent in image-making and idolatry. At times, his answer to iconoclasts came in the form of morally edifying visual spectacles, such as the statue coming to life. At other times, he crafted scenes in which distinctions are drawn between kinds of images and kinds of vision. For those who have eyes to see, the reverence shown to Hermiones image bears a striking resemblance to Catholics veneration of images, but Shakespeare diverts his spectators attention from the negative aspects of such an association by demonstrating the virtues of the law of art. Theater does indeed weave a spell on spectators, but it is not the spell of black magic, idolatry, or any other scandal of images. Rather, it is the spell of art, which, at its best, has the power to newly mold the hearts of spectators.
Notes
Introduction: Ut Pictura Theatrum: The Dramatists Ambivalent Muse
1. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable and Co., Ltd., 1903), 119. 2. Giles Block, Interview with Heather Neill, program, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, dir. Giles Block (Shakespeares Globe, Bankside, London, summer 2000), 11. 3. In The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Jonathan Bate remarks similarly that Yoricks skull functions as an icon, a memorable visible representation, of mortality. . . . It is not [Hamlets] words [at this moment] that stick in the spectators mind, but the visual image that is made possible by the stage prop of the skull. An iconic moment such as this endures in the popular imagination because it means the same thing in 1600, in 1800, in 2000. It will only lose its power when we find a way of cheating death (254). See John Doebler, Shakespeares Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1974) for an excellent study of the influence of traditional iconography on Shakespeares stage images. The Swiss student Thomas Platter noted the Elizabethan theatrical custom of using an afterpiece: At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance (Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923], 365). 4. Ascham, Scholemaster, 119. See Dieter Mehl, Visual and Rhetorical Imagery in Shakespeares Plays, Essays and Studies 25 (1972), for a visually sensitive interpretation of Hamlet as a most colourful dramatic spectacle (84). Mehl rightly argues that the plays visual appeal in any production that is not too spartan is very considerable and forms an indispensable part of our total conception of the play (84). 5. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. B4r. 6. In Hearing or Seeing a Play? Evidence of Early Modern Theatrical Terminology, The Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001), Gabriel Egan reports the findings of his search on the Literature Online (LION) database. Limiting his search to writers whose lives overlapped the period 1550 to 1650, Egan found that the preponderance of visual over aural phrasing is more than twelve to one (332). He had ninety-seven hits for various forms of seeing a play, and only eight hits for forms of hearing a play. His conclusion is that plays were much more commonly thought of as visual rather than aural experiences in the literary and dramatic writing of the period (332). Egan fails to draw a further conclusion, which I believe is evident in the texts he examined: the visual bias in language does not necessarily indicate a positive impression of the theater as visual art. 7. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeares London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9394. 8. Sir Philip Sidney, sophisticated poet, diplomat, and courtier, may have been the first writer to use the term spectator. It appears in his 1584 revision of Arcadia. See Andrew Gurr, Audiences or Spectators, in Playgoing, 8698, for an enlightening discussion of the historic conflict between the descriptive terms audience and spectator and the inadequacy
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of both in describing the playgoers sensuous experience in the theater. About the use of these terms during the early modern period, Gurr avers, the competition was on fairly even terms (90). 9. About the early modern inheritance of classical and medieval optical theories, David C. Lindberg claims, only on rare occasions were [Renaissance artists and others] able to depart from their medieval teachers in more than small details. The traditional framework, though occasionally questioned, remained basically intact until early in the seventeenth century (Theories of Vision From Al-Kindi to Kepler [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976], 147). 10. Cited in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:200. 11. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582). 12. Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (London, 1580), 141 42. 13. Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. Edward Henry Blakeney, in Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 133. 14. See A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 15801642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163. Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson list notable examples of picture properties, including Tarletons picture, and uses, such as staging a discovery, violence against a picture, and kissing a portrait. 15. A record of payment (16, 13s, 4d) for The Painters Daughter is noted in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4: 93, 151. 16. See David Bevington, Visual Interpretation: Text and Context, 134, in Action is Eloquence: Shakespeares Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) for an excellent overview of criticism on stage imagery. 17. George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 2. 18. Bevington, Action is Eloquence, 11. 19. See Bevington, Action is Eloquence; Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeares Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewers Eye (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1977); Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Dessen, Recovering Shakespeares Images (Word & Image 4.3/4 [July-December 1988]: 61825); and Leonard Barkan, Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship (Renaissance Quarterly 48 [summer 1995]: 32651). 20. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeares Images, 619. 21. Barkan, Making Pictures Speak, 338. 22. John Ronayne, Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem. The Interior Decorative Scheme of the Bankside Globe, 121 46, and Siobhan Keenan and Peter Davidson, The Iconography of the Bankside Globe, 14756, in Shakespeares Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 23. Much of the extant contemporary testimony is critical rather than admiring, mainly because these sources are religious in nature. The vicar Thomas White, for example, complains in a sermon preached at St. Pauls in 1577 that the sumptuous Theatre houses [are] a continuall monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly (cited in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:197); in another Pauls sermon delivered in 1578, John Stockwood discommende[d] the gorgeous Playing place erected in the fieldes [the Burbages Theater] (cited in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4:200). 24. John Astington, English Court Theatre, 110. 25. Philip Henslowe, Henslowes Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 319.
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26. John Weever, The Mirror of Martyrs (London, 1601), sig. A3v. 27. Ben Jonson, Works (1925), ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson and Evelyn M. Simpson, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 610. 28. Ibid. 29. Mitchell, Iconology, 47. 30. Freedberg, Power of Images, 388. In their article, Mine eye hath playd the painter, Carol Banks and Graham Holderness place Elizabethan theater within the contexts of the visual arts and the Protestant war against idolatry. Their emphasis on the visual power of stage images complements mine. Their argument, however, takes a different course from my own. They focus on how Shakespeares plays (e.g., King Lear and Richard II) allude to scenes from the life and Passion of Christ. Both text and staging from such plays recall sacred Catholic images (even though the outward guise sometimes appears as ironic parody or travesty of an icon). 31. All references to Shakespeares works are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 32. Margaret Aston, Gods, Saints, and Reformers: Portraiture and Protestant England, in Albions Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 15501660, ed. Lucy Gent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 186. 33. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988), 118. 34. Over forty years ago, Sir Roy Strong initiated a movement to resurrect, restore, and re-evaluate Elizabethan and Jacobean painting. Through cleaning, identification, and analysis, many paintings have not only come to light, but have evidenced a technical skill and aesthetic power formerly not granted them by scholars of English art. During his directorships at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Strong curated a number of shows that featured Elizabethan and Jacobean painting. His publications on the subject are extensive. The exhibition entitled Dynasties at the Tate Gallery (October 12, 1995January 7, 1996) recently gave prominent notice to early modern English painting. Notable scholars who have published studies in this area include Erna Auerbach, Edward Croft-Murray, Mary Edmond, Susan Foister, Karen Hearn, Sir Oliver Millar, David Piper, and Ellis Waterhouse. 35. Barkan, Making Pictures Speak, 339. 36. In The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680 1768 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), Iain Pears notes the virtual absence of a main patronage centre (133) in early modern England, and indicates that the period between 16801760 saw the virtual invention of the English art market as in effect before this time there was no permanently established commercial system which dealt with the distribution or redistribution of works of art. . . . The first time that something approaching a real market structure can be seen in England is with the disposal of Charles Is pictures after 1649, which caused the appearance of a second level of distributors in transactions (51). 37. Jonas Barishs The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981) offers an excellent analysis of the Platonic foundation of antitheatricalism and ample evidence of this prejudice in early modern England, even among dramatists, the most notable being Ben Jonson. See esp. 537, 80154. 38. Few assessments of the painter character, painting properties, and the painting trope in early modern English drama have been included in the extensive criticism on Elizabethan theater and drama. The two major studies of early modern stage properties, Frances Teagues Shakespeares Speaking Properties (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1991) and Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Kordas Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Press, 2002), fail to include analysis of the painting property altogether. For a brief, incomplete survey of early modern dramas with the painter artist, see Anat FeinbergJ utte, Painters and Counterfeiters: The Painting Artist in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama, AAA-Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 16 (1991): 312. The pioneering works on Renaissance arts from Jean H. Hagstrum, Rensselaer W. Lee, Mario Praz, and Wylie Sypher are worth mentioning here since they established a modern critical tradition of interdisciplinary studies and paved the way for future studies such as the present one. Since the groundbreaking publication of Syphers Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 14001700 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1955), interdisciplinary criticism in early modern visual and verbal arts has come to represent an important field of knowledge. Significant contributions in this field include: Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 15601620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, England: James Hall, 1981); Norman K. Farmer, Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austen: University of Texas, 1984); Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Murray Roston, Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); John Greenwood, Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style: Mannerism in Shakespeare and his Jacobean Contemporaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990); David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); and Judith Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1993), and Hulse and Peter Erickson, editors, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 2000). 39. On the visual arts and the English masque, see especially Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 Vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), and Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). On relationships between the emblem and early modern theater, see especially Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 13001660, 2 Vols. in 3 (London: Routledge; New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, 1963, 1972); Dieter Mehl, Emblems in English Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Drama 2 (1969): 3957; Clifford Davidson, Drama and Art: An Introduction to the Use of Evidence from the Visual Arts for the Study of Early Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, 1977), esp. Art and Renaissance Drama: the Example of Shakespeare; Davidson, Iconography and Some Problems of Terminology in the Study of the Drama and Theater of the Renaissance, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 29 (198687): 714; and Tibor Fabiny et. al., Shakespeare and the Emblem: Studies in Renaissance Iconography and Iconology (Szeged, Hungary: Attila J ozsef University, 1984). 40. Ascham, Scholemaster, 119.
Chapter 1: The Power of Images in Early Modern England: Prejudices Against and Defenses of Painting and Playing
References to The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham are from Martin Whites New Mermaids 1982 edition (London: A and C Black; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
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1. For discussions of the Protestant Reformation that focus on iconoclasm in England, see John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 15351660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On illicit or clandestine forms of iconoclasm, see Aston, Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine, in Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 47 91. 2. See Clifford Davidson, The Anti-Visual Prejudice, in Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 33 46. On the religious attack against a secular theater, see Michael OConnell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and William Ringler, The First Phase of the Elizabethan Attack on the Stage, 15581579, Huntington Library Quarterly 4 (1942): 391 418. 3. Qtd. in Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), n. 32, 365. 4. Henry R. Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church (New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1901), 539. 5. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 3. 6. Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18, and passim. 7. Diehl, Staging Reform, 215. 8. Fredson Bowers dates The Noble Spanish Souldier at about 1610, or the years just following; see The Stabbing of a Portrait in Elizabethan Tragedy, MLN 47 (June 1932): 37885. The play was first recorded in the Stationers Register in 1631, and an edition of the play was published in 1634. Cases of image-destruction can be found in Elizabethan poetry as well. In Shakespeares The Rape of Lucrece, for example, Lucrece attempts to deface the image of Sinon in the Trojan tapestry. I argue, however, that there was more at stake in dramatists use of images and theatrical iconoclasm, for their very profession was under attack by reformers. 9. See chapter 4 for a discussion of two cases of treasonous image-abuse recorded in William Camden, The History of Princess Elizabeth (London, 1630). 10. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig. L8r. 11. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 66. 12. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), sig. **1v. 13. Fynes Moryson, Shakespeares Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the 16th Century, Being Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Morysons Itinerary, ed. Charles Hughes (New York: B. Blom, 1967), 476. 14. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig. G8v. 15. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 115. 16. See OConnell, The Idolatrous Eye, 14 35, esp.1920. OConnells argument follows phenomenological ideas previously articulated by Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); and Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). 17. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. X4. 18. See OConnell, Idolatrous Eye, 14 35 passim. The antitheatricalists recognized the inherent theatricality of the Catholic Mass. OConnell cites John Rainolds, an Oxford
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divine, as representative of this attitude, for he charged that Popish priests . . . have transformed the celebrating of the Sacrament of the Lords supper into a Masse-game, and all other parts of Ecclesiastical service into theatrical sights (15). See also Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology, Helion 7 (1980): 5174. Montrose argues that the London theaters appropriated forbidden Catholic rituals for the stage as a means of compensation for a cultures loss of magic, mystery, and spectacle. Dissenting arguments have been made by Huston Diehl, Staging Reform and Robert Knapp, ShakespeareThe Theater and the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), both of whom emphasize the impact of Protestant doctrine and religious practice on the theater. Diehl locates the source of the reformers attack on a secular theater in a Calvinist distrust of the imagination and a fear that any act of the imagination is potentially idolatrous, seducing people from God (69). I agree; however, I believe that the moral problem of presencethe god living in the imageand its visual allure is the most pressing issue for the antitheatricalists. 19. In Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 52. 20. My understanding of Aristotles artistic theory owes much to S. H. Butcher, Aristotles Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1951). 21. 15.8; Butcher, Aristotles Theory, 57. 22. This quotation from Romans is taken from The Geneva Bible, A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 23. Tertullian, Apology, De Spectaculis, trans. T. R. Glover (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), 287. 24. Qtd. in E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4, 255, 257. 25. In The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes, 15431664, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 78. 26. Ibid., 78. 27. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 120. 28. Heywood, Apology for Actors, sig. B4r. 29. Ibid. 30. Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 212. 31. Munday, Second and Third Blast, sig. B1v 32. S. K. Heninger Jr., Sidneys Speaking Pictures and the Theater, Style 23, no. 3 (fall 1989): 399. 33. Sidney, Defence of Poesie, 89. 34. Ibid., 88. 35. Ibid., 90. 36. Ibid. 37. Aston, Englands Iconoclasts, 1718; Gent, Picture and Poetry, 637 passim. 38. John Stow, The Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1615), sig. Oooo2v. 39. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, sig. C2v. 40. Ibid. 41. Thomas Tuke, A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women (London, 1616), sig. K1r. 42. Ibid. 43. Frances E. Dolan, Taking the Pencil Out of Gods Hand: Art, Nature, and the FacePainting Debate in Early Modern England, PMLA 108 (March 1993): 236.
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44. Ibid., 231. 45. Tuke, Discourse Against Painting, sig. C1v. 46. Sir Thomas Overbury, The Overburian Characters To which is added A Wife, ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 92. 47. Sir Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 3. 48. James Orchard Halliwell, Tarletons Jests, and News Out of Purgatory (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1844), 87. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 88. 51. Qtd. in Strong, The English Icon, 3. 52. Nicholas Ridley, A Treatise of Dr. Nicholas Ridley . . . Concerning Images, that they are not to be set up nor worshipped in churches, in The Works of Nicholas Ridley, ed. Rev. Henry Christmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1841), 85. 53. Ibid., 87. 54. William Perkins, A Warning against the idolatrie of the last times (Cambridge, 1601), 94. 55. Ibid., 31. 56. Qtd. in Aston, Englands Iconoclasts, 408. 57. Stow, Annales, sig. Oooo2v. 58. Susan Foister, Paintings and other works of art in sixteenth-century English inventory, The Burlington Magazine 123 (May 1981): 279. 59. W. A. D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (London: Chapman and Dodd, Ltd., 1923), 46, 41 42. 60. Ibid., 51. 61. Sir Ernest Pooley, The Guilds of the City of London (London: William Collins, 1945), 42. 62. See Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Elizabeth I (London: University of London Press, 1954), 109; and Mary Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver: The lives and works of two great miniaturists (London: Robert Hale, 1983), 77. 63. Stow, Annales, sig. Oooo2v. 64. On Hilliards gentility, see the family arms and line of descent submitted by Laurence Hillyard in Sir Henry St. George, The Visitation of London, Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635, ed. Joseph Jackson Howard and Joseph Lemuel Chester, vol. 1 (London: Harleian Society Publications, 1880), 386. Nicholas Hilliards grandfather, John Hillyard of Cornwall, bears the title of gentleman. 65. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 73. 66. This transcription of the paintings text was taken from Karen Hearn, Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 15301630 (London: Tate Publishing, 1995), 107. 67. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (Menston, England: The Scolar Press Limited, 1970), sigs. C8r, D1v. 68. Ibid., sig. C8v. 69. Ibid. 70. William Segar, Honor Military, and Civill, contained in foure Bookes (London, 1602), sig. Y1v. 71. Ibid. 72. Qtd. in Englefield, History of the Painter-Stainers, 58. 73. Richard Haydocke, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge Written First in Italian by Jo: Paul Lomatius Painter of Milan and Englished by R. H. Student of Physick (Oxford, 1598), sig. iiiijr.
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74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., sig. Bjv. 76. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 62. 77. Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing (London, 1606), sig. C4v. 78. Ibid., sig. C1r. 79. For records of payments to painters and an inventory of paintings and painted cloths commissioned for use by the companies at the Rose Theater, see Henslowe, Henslowes Diary, 6, 9, 11, 13, 93, 218, and 320. The few specific descriptions of painting, Tassos picture and a clothe of the sune and moon, indicate that Henslowe made use of both portraits and hanging cloths. These were typical theatrical properties. See also Keenan and Davidson, The Iconography of the Globe, for a persuasive account of what might constitute a plausible decorative scheme within the Globe Theater. They examine contemporary sixteenth-century accounts, dramatic allusions, and English Renaissance design in order to draw conclusions about theatrical iconography, which includes painted cloths and hangings. 80. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeares London, 65. 81. Mary Edmond, Limners and Picturemakers, Walpole Society 47 (197880): 60 224. 82. Sylvia Thrupp, Aliens in and around London in the Fifteenth Century, in Studies in London History, ed. A. E. J. Hollander and W. Kellaway (London: Hodder, 1969), 258 59, 271. 83. Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeares Time and Their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 68. 84. John Marston, Iacke Drums Entertainment: or The Comedie of Pasquill and Katherine (London, 1601), sig. H3v. 85. Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 21; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1952), 45. Harbage concludes that most private halls charged a shilling for the best seats with the sixpenny places stigmatizing their occupants as genteel groundlings (45). 86. See Frederick Gard Fleay, A Chronicle History of the London Stage, 15591642 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1890), 189, 375. The information regarding James Sandes was drawn from the will of player Augustine Phillips, who died 4 May 1605.
Chapter 2: John Lylys Campaspe and the Subtle Eroticism of the Elizabethan Miniature
References to Campaspe are from G. K. Hunter and David Bevingtons Revels edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 1. Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone, trans. Irma A. Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 26, 28. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Arthur Feuillerat (London: David Nutt, 1908), 145. 4. In The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), Peter Saccio views the staging of Campaspe entirely in an allegorical light (see especially 1125). The three houses represent three points of view and three ways of life, which come into conflict and require some sort of harmonious resolution. He argues that stage properties used at Court were genuine dramatic symbols that figur[e] forth themes and ideas crucial to the plays action and meaning (25). 5. Critics views on the importance of love in Campaspe vary, although they typically
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do not grant Lyly the power of representing eros or the painter in compelling emotional terms. In The Children of Pauls: The Story of a Theatre Company, 15531608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), W. Reavley Gair, for example, asserts that Lylys characters are not so much persons as intellectual vehicles, a movement into rather than away from symbol. . . . (102). Muriel Bradbrook similarly finds that passion in Campaspe is nothing more than a position (The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 65). Mary Beth Rose concurs in The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), although she grants Lyly the distinction of being the first major Elizabethan playwright to recognize the importance of the erotic love theme to the coherence and design of his plays (22), she holds that erotic love is dramatized as an abstraction that is inherently undramatic (26). She contends, as well, that Lyly prefers sublimation, because he distrusts sexual love and idealizes social order (24). In John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), G. K. Hunter grants love a place in the drama, but he focuses on Alexanders love, rather than that of Apelles and Campaspe. He holds that Alexanders love may be the central emotion of the plot; [but] he moves away quickly to the renunciation of Campaspe as the supreme example of his virtue (162). 6. In his excellent book The plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), Michael Pincombe regards Apelles as Lylys author-figure. His view differs somewhat from mine in that he characterizes Apelles primarily as a harmless but helpless royal entertainer; it is in this respect, Pincombe argues, that he is remarkably similar to his creator (41). 7. For biographical information, I am indebted to R. Warwick Bond, The Complete Works of John Lyly, vol.1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902); Mark Eccles, John Lyly in Brief Lives: Tudor and Stuart Authors, Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 8689; Albert Feuillerat, John Lyly: Contribution a ` lHistoire de la Renaissance en Angleterre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901); and Hunter, John Lyly, 3688. 8. I have modernized spelling and punctuation in this transcription from Harleian MS. 1323, fols. 24950. See Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly, vol. 1 for an exact transcript (64 65). While there are four extant copies of this petition, the version from which I quote appears to be the best one. 9. Hunters John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier is the seminal study of Lyly as a courtly artist and remains one of the best works on Lylys life and art. 10. See, especially, Hunter, John Lyly. See also David Bevington, John Lyly and Queen Elizabeth: Royal Flattery in Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, in Renaissance Papers 1966, ed. George Walton Williams (Durham, N.C.: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1967), 5767; and Saccio, The Court Comedies. For a dissenting view that counterbalances the traditional assessment, see Pincombe, The plays of John Lyly, in which he sets out to revise our idea of John Lyly as a specifically courtly dramatist by insisting on other noncourtly or counter-courtly aspects of his life and work (1). He argues that Lyly approached the court with wariness and uncertainty because he felt that it was dangerous to write so near to the centre of political and economic power (1). Lylys petitions to the Queen, however, provide evidence for Lylys desire to have a paid position at the center from which he could wield some degree of power over artistic entertainments at court. 11. This reference to John Donnes The Storme. To Mr. Christopher Brooke is from C. A. Patrides edition of The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1985). 12. Rose, Expense of Spirit, 2627. 13. The Elder Pliny writes in Natural History 35.79: praecipua eius in arte venustas fuit, cum eadem aetate maximi pictores essent; quorum opera cum admiraretur, omnibus conlaudatis deesse illam suam venerem dicebat, quam Graeci [charis] vocant. His art was
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unrivalled for graceful charm, although other very great painters were his contemporaries. Although he admired their works and gave high praise to all of them, he used to say that they lacked the glamour that his work possessed, the quality denoted by the Greek word as charis (trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). Quintilian claims similarly in Institutio Oratoria, ingenio et gratia, quam in se ipse maxime iactat, Apelles est praestantissimus (12.10.6). . . . and Apelles for genius and grace, in the latter of which qualities he took especial pride (trans. H. E. Butler, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 14. Pliny, Natural History, 35.96. 15. Ibid., 35.91. 16. Leonardo, Paragone, 23. 17. David Cast, The Calumny of Apelles, A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 188. On textual and painterly versions of the Campaspe-Apelles-Alexander anecdote, see Alice Hayes Reid, Alexander, Apelles, and Campaspe: An Illustration of the Artist as Propagandist of His Profession, masters thesis (Brown University, 1969). Reid accounts for interpretive variations in paintings of this subject from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, focusing on the artists handling of theme, composition, and allegory, as well as the influence of patronage. 18. Ibid., 188. 19. A number of ballads involving the figure of Apelles were entered in the Stationers Register in 156566. Among them, Thomas Warton lists A ballett intituled an history of Alexander, campaspe and apelles, and of the faythfull fryndeshippe betwene them and The Songe of Appelles in History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, vol. 4 (1871; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), 302. R. Warwick Bond adds to Wartons list A ballett of Appelles and Pygmalyne to the tune of the fyrst Appelles and a songe of Appelles with an other Dytty (Complete Works of John Lyly 2:306, n.1). 20. I follow Leslie Hotson in attributing the Entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Mitcham to Lyly. For a discussion of the evidence, see the forward to Hotsons edition of the Entertainment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 21. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 2:3. 22. Ibid., 2:6. 23. Ibid., 2:5. 24. Ibid., 2:6. 25. Pincombe, plays of John Lyly, 45. 26. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 2:59. 27. The comparison of Pygmalion with Apelles was not unusual in Elizabethan England; a popular broadside published in 1566, for example, featured a poem called A strife betwene Apelles and Pigmalion. Bond mentions a ballad called A ballett of Appelles and Pygmalyne to the tune of the fyrst Appelles (Complete Works of John Lyly 2:306, n. 1). 28. Claudius Aelianus, Varia Historia, trans. Diane Ostrom Johnson (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 12.34. 29. Pliny, Natural History, 35.85. 30. Ibid., 35.8586. 31. Ibid., 35.8687. 32. Ibid., 35.72. 33. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 1:179. 34. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1561; London: Dent, 1928), 97, 96. 35. Ibid., 97. 36. Ibid.
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37. Hunter, John Lyly, 5. 38. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 1: 23, n. 4. 39. Christopher Brown, British Painting and the Low Countries from 15301630, in Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 15301630, ed. Karen Hearn, 30. 40. David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 90, 304, n. 8. 41. Strong, The English Icon, 6; Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver, 6970. 42. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 75. 43. In The English Face, ed. Malcolm Rogers (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1978), David Piper claims that the Elizabethan portrait resembled a domesticated tomb-effigy: its object to fix and perpetuate the mortal achievements, the rank, wealth and lineage of its subject; to demonstrate him in his own long gallery, by his own hearth (45). Many portraits, especially of major aristocratic figures such as Leicester and Burghley, did in fact seem to be mass-produced with the very qualities that Piper indicates. Many portraits also had a masklike quality, which reflected, in part, womens use of cosmetics. Yet there were portraits that betrayed personality and emotion. Piper isolates Nicholas Hilliard as the exception to the rule. Much of Hilliards fascination, he argues insightfully, lies in the tension between his masterly sense for design and his respect for the individuality of the sitter (56). 44. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 63, 65. 45. Sir James Melville, Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill, 15351617, ed. A. Francis Steuart (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 94. 46. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 77. 47. Ibid., 79. 48. Ibid., 77. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Hulse, The Rule of Art, 147. 53. Pincombes perspective on the blemish is worth noting. He claims that Lyly uses the device of the defaced portrait as an emblem of the way he felt his own art might be deformed by the pressures of writing in a political context such as that of the court, in which, as his own play shows, one had to be very careful what one said or wrote (plays of John Lyly, 46). 54. Rose, Expense of Spirit, 22. 55. C. A. Du Fresnoy, The Art of Painting, trans. John Dryden (1695), in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott, vol. 17 (London: William Paterson and Co., 1892), 483, 48384. 56. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 87. 57. Ibid., 85. 58. John Pope-Hennessy argues convincingly that Elizabeths views on painting resemble those of the Italian mannerists. See A Lecture on Nicholas Hilliard (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949). 59. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 89. 60. Ibid., 87. 61. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 2:141. 62. Gair, The Children of Pauls, 100. 63. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 544 46, 562. These ancient topoi were transmitted from classical to early modern writers through the well-known texts of Cicero, Boethius, and Clement.
notes
64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. Peacham, Art of Drawing, sig. B2v. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 65. Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 2:59. Leonardo, Paragone, 16. Ibid., 24. Frances Teague, Shakespeares Speaking Properties, 30. Hunter, in Lyly, Campaspe, 4.4. n. 14 15. Lyly, Queen Elizabeths Entertainment, 1314. Ibid., 1720. Pliny, Natural History, 35.96. Lyly, Queen Elizabeths Entertainment, 19799. Ibid., 200201. Ibid., 220, 22228. Ibid., 234 40. Ibid., 250. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 75.
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Chapter 3: Dramatic Uses of Portrait Properties and Face-Painting in the Boys Theater at St. Pauls
References to John Marstons Antonio and Mellida are from G. K. Hunters edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). The play was entered in the Stationers Register on October 24, 1601. References to The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll are from M. N. Matsons critical edition of the play (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980). 1. Trevor Lennam, Sebastian Westcott, the Children of Pauls, and The Marriage of Wit and Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 49. 2. Ibid., 489. 3. Playing at St. Pauls was suppressed for nearly a decade, c. 159099, because of the companys involvement in satirizing the Marprelates. John Lyly and Thomas Nashe both produced pro-episcopal works for St. Pauls that attacked religious schismatics operating under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate. This group of Puritans advocated a democratized hierarchical structure in the Church. Participation in religious controversy proved fatal to the company. See Bond, Complete Works of John Lyly 1: 4962; and G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 19 48. 4. W. Reavley Gair stands alone among Elizabethan childrens theater scholars in recognizing a degree of significance in the portrait properties used at St. Pauls. See his important book, The Children of Pauls, 7778, 99100, 12223, 128, 137, 162. 5. Gair speculates in a similar fashion in The Children of Pauls, 162. 6. Nicholas Hilliard, for example, resided in St.Vedasts parish, just northeast of St. Pauls. Many limners and miniaturists, especially foreign-born, lived in the parishes of St. Anne Blackfriars and St. Bride Fleet Street, just southwest of St. Pauls. A significant number of painters also resided in the parishes of St. Giles, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and St. Andrew Holborn. See Edmond, Limners and Picturemakers, 6365. 7. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, 89. 8. See William A. Armstrong, The Audience of the Elizabethan Private Theatres, Review of English Studies, NS 10 (1959): 234 49; Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, 45; Gair, The Children of Pauls, 7273, 8889. 9. While Chambers and Harbage speculated that Pauls theater, like the Blackfriars, sat four hundred, Gair determined, through meticulous research, that the boys performed in a
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two-story area of the Chapter House in Pauls Cathedral. This area would have seated between fifty and one hundred people. See E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 2:526; Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, 43; Gair, The Children of Pauls, 44 74. By contrast, one of the largest public amphitheaters, the Swan, sat as many as 2500. See Alfred Harbarge, Shakespeares Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 30. 10. Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 68. 11. The Puritaine, sig. A4v. The reference to The Pvritaine or the Widdow of Watlingstreete is from the 1607 printed text (London), which indicates that the play was Acted by the Children of Paules. Authorship is uncertain. The title page enigmatically lists W. S. as author. Some scholars argue that Thomas Middleton wrote the play, but they are not able to make a thoroughly convincing case. See W. D. Dunkel, The Authorship of The Puritan, PMLA 45 (1930): 804 8; and David Lake, The Canon of Middletons Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Another example of the use of picture tropes in attacking Puritans can be found in Oliver Ormerods anti-puritanical dialogue called The Picture of a Puritane (London, 1605). His defense for taking up the pen (or pencill, as he calls it) against the Puritans is couched in painters lore and pictorial tropes. He invokes the well-known classical painters as his muses, for as he argues, he will need great skill to produce a verbal portrait of that chameleon, the Puritan. Yet, all which notwithstanding, the painting of a Puritane is so hard and difficult, as that the ioynt skil of Appelles, Pyrgoteles, Praxiteles, and all the cunning Painters in Saint Chrisostoms time, will scarce reach this object (sig. A3). The sight of this picture (i.e., the reading of this tract), he claims, should produce the full detestation of the Puritan-faction (sig. B4). 12. Gair, The Children of Pauls, 77. 13. The reference to John Redfords Wit and Science is from English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes, ed. Edgar T. Schell and J. D. Shuchter (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1969). 14. Gair, The Children of Pauls, 78. 15. Freedberg, Power of Images, 192245. 16. According to J. Osborn, the editor of The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), Whythornes manuscript was discovered in 1955. He calls it the first intimate autobiography composed in English (v). 17. A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, The Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1926), 54 61. 18. Whythorne, Autobiography, 6. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid., 12. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. References to Thomas Dekkers Blurt, Master Constable are from Thomas Leland Bergers A Critical Old-Spelling of Thomas Dekkers Blurt, Master Constable (1602), (Salzburg, Austria: Universit at Salzburg, 1979). 25. References to John Marstons The Fawn are from Gerald A. Smiths edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 26. Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), 90, 91. 27. On the notion of dual consciousness in the theater, see Samuel L. Bethells discussion of planes of reality and the ramifications of multiconsciousness in Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1944) 28 42, 132 69. See also Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and
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Windus, 1962); Arthur Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), and Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 10312. Only Kirsch and Shapiro associate this mode of vision explicitly with the childrens troupes in private theaters. Kirsch claims that the spectacle of children playing adults gave Jonson, as it helped give all writers for the childrens companies, a built-in emphasis upon the artificiality of the play world itself and an intrinsic means of manipulating the audiences sense of distance from the stage (18). 28. See also Michael Shapiro, Childrens Troupes: Dramatic Illusion and Acting Style, Comparative Drama 3 (1969): 4253; and R. A. Foakes, John Marstons Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonios Revenge, Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 22939. As Foakes argues, By the end of the Induction [in Antonio and Mellida], in fact, it is clear that the play to follow will parody old ranting styles, make the children out-strut the adult tragedians, who were still performing the plays of Kyd and Marlowe, and burlesque common conventions. It will be a play in which the author, consciously using child actors for a special effect, will keep his audience consciously aware that they are watching children imitating adults (22930). 29. Adrian Weiss, A pill to purge parody: Marstons manipulation of the Pauls environment in the Antonio plays, in The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 8384. 30. See Gair, The Children of Pauls, chapter 4; and Gair, The Presentation of Plays at Second Pauls: The Early Phase (15991602), in The Elizabethan Theatre VI, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Ontario: University of Waterloo, 1978), 2327. 31. Weiss, A pill to purge parody, 87. 32. Hunter notes Florios definition in his edition of Antonio and Mellida. 33. See G. Cross, The Date of Marstons Antonio and Mellida, MLN 72 (1957): 331; Gair, The Children of Pauls, 12223; and Gairs Revels Plays edition of Antonio and Mellida (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 2324. 34. Similarly, in Campaspe, mutton haunts the imagination of the painters hungry apprentice, Psyllus, who complains to the other apprentices about his master:
I serve Apelles, who [when he] feedeth me . . . at dinner . . . commendeth counterfeiting. When I would eat meat he paints a spit, and when I thirst, O, saith he, is not this a fair pot? and points to a table which contains the banquet of the gods, where are many dishes to feed the eye but not to fill the gut. (1.2.5763)
Instead of feeding his apprentice, Apelles recounts legends about painting (how the birds fed on painted grapes and lovers fed their eyes with their mistresss picture) and shows him pictures that can only glut the eye. His argument is poetic, but to the hungry Psyllus, the notion that one can fat by colours (1.2.67) is ludicrous. The servants humorous conclusion to his complaint is that when he should be drawing a womans face, hunger drives him to draw a lambs head or a shoulder of mutton instead, for semper animus meus est in patinis or my thoughts are always in the stewpan (1.2.79). 35. In Painted faces on the Renaissance stage: the moral significance of face-painting conventions (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1994), Annette Drew-Bear argues that the frequent references to face-painting throughout the play are important to Marstons satire and reflect a trope common among playwrights of the period. The male face-painting scene became meaningful theatrical shorthand (74) for folly and moral vacuousness in plays such as Jonsons Every Woman in Her Humor, Glapthornes The Lady Mother, Massingers The Bashful Lover, and Fords The Fancies Chaste and Noble. She points to the new glasse-set face in Antonio and Mellida as a significant image of moral impoverishment and artificial sexuality (76). See especially 74 76. Drew-Bear, however, does not discuss the painter scene (5.1), which, although not about face-painting, further reveals the corruption of the Venetian court.
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36. Lucy Gent assumes that gentility was compatible with the practice of painting, although Lassingberghes morals are not above reproach, so his character confirms the old prejudice that painters are morally unreliable (Picture and Poetry, 42). 37. The reference to the Children of Pauls appears on the title page of the original printed text (London 1600). 38. Matson Critical Edition of The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, 11718. 39. Ibid., 3067. 40. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia; Wits Treasury (London, 1598), sig. F3r. 41. Du Bartas, The Devine Weekes, trans. Joshua Sylvester, ed. Francis C. Haber (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1965), sig. Q8r. 42. See George Peeles The Arraignment of Paris 1.1.74 107 for a similar rare device. Floras picture of Juno, Pallas, and Venus, however, does not hide the goddesses lovely parts behind flowers and other natural ornaments; rather Flora ingeniously unites art and nature by grafting flowers into the picture. Peeles play dates from the early 1580s and was produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal at court. See Oliphant Smeatons edition (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1905). 43. John Marston, The Works, ed. Arthur Henry Bullen, vol. 3 (1887; Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 7984. 44. See Matson, Critical Edition of The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, 184, n. 7277. 45. Ibid., 62. 46. In Peachams Art of Drawing, D urers name appears in precisely the same form as it does in this play. 47. George Hakewell, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (Oxford, 1627), sig. Hh4v. 48. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 69. 49. Peacham, Art of Drawing, sig. F3r. 50. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 77. 51. In Toward a Textual Study of The Wit of a Woman, The Emporia State Research Studies 15.1 (Sept. 1966): 817, June J. Morgan argues persuasively that the plays euphuistic tendencies, its similarity to A Woman Will Have Her Will (performed in 1598), and its Italian influence place the dating of the comedy at some point in the 1590s and support the supposition of Anthony Munday as author. 52. References to The Wit of a Woman are from W. W. Gregs edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913). 53. June J. Morgan mentions that the setting calls for Italian perspective staging (Toward a Textual Study, 12), but fails to note the significance of perspective in Rinaldos rhetoric in the scene where he makes a pretense of painting Isabella.
Chapter 4: Scandalous Counterfeiting: Iconophobia, Poison, and Painting in Arden of Faversham

References to The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham are from Martin Whites New Mermaids edition (London: A and C Black; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 1. M. L. Wine, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1973), xlvii. 2. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1587), sig. Kkkkkiv. For an informative discussion of how the Arden story and Holinsheds version relate to various kinds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography, see Richard Helgerson, Murder in Faversham: Holinsheds impertinent history, in The his-
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torical imagination in early modern Britain, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13358. 3. The entry in the Wardmote Book of Faversham is printed in M. L. Wines edition, 16063. 4. Holinshed, sig. Kkkkkiir. 5. Ibid. 6. Ian Ousby and Heather Dubrow, Art and Language in Arden of Faversham, Durham University Journal 68.1. (Dec. 1975): 49. 7. Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1602; London, 1797), 48. 8. Ibid., 51. 9. In The Audience and the Poisoners of Elizabethan Tragedy, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 36 (1937): 491504, Fredson Bowers indicates that there was a significant body of early modern literature containing diatribes against poison. He notes the popularity of using poison through food and drink, which disguised the taste of the chemicals. He discusses contact poisons, as well, which were widely believed in at the time; however, there is little reason to credit the efficacy of this method of poisoning (494). The king of Renaissance poisons was arsenic, which was often purchased in the form of ratsbane (492). Bowers also discusses ingenious devices, such as the poisoned knife blade, and a poisoned ring, which, in scratching the wearer, released the poison. Regarding Elizabethans fear of poisons, he cites Sir Edward Coke, who wrote in 1602 that poison . . . is, as hath been said, the most horrible, and fearfull to the nature of man, and of all others can be least prevented, either by manhood or providence (497). 10. See Luke Owen Pike, A History of Crime in England, vol. 2 (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1968), 82; Bowers, The Audience and the Poisoners, 49697; and Coke, Third Part of the Institutes, 48. 11. Sixteenth-century examples of murder by poisoning in Stows Annales can be found on signatures Ccccccvir, Ffffffivr and vir, Ggggvir, Ssssvv-Ssssvir. The most notorious case of poisoning during Elizabeths reign was an alleged case. The Queens doctor, Dr. Lopez, was accused of attempting to poison the Queen and convicted of high treason in 1594. A later, equally notorious case was that of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. The murderer, Richard Weston, poisoned his broth and tarts. For an informative discussion of early modern historical and dramatic representations of petty treason and murderous wives, see Frances E. Dolan, Home-Rebels and House-Traitors: Murderous Wives in Early Modern England, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 4.1 (winter 1992): 131. 12. Bowers, The Audience and the Poisoners, 503. 13. Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 186. 14. Moryson, Shakespeares Europe, 406. 15. See Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 810, 1578 passim. About generic innovation, Orlin argues, The story of Thomas Arden blurs those distinctions [between comedy and tragedy], with a comic hero (a private person), a comic setting (an unimportant household), and a comic action (love affairs and seductions) achieving a tragic denouement (death and reversal). By its impertinence [Holinsheds term], Arden of Faversham altered the landscape of generic possibility in English drama (75). In History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare (1831), John Payne Collier offers one of the earliest uses of the term domestic tragedy to identify the genre of Arden of Faversham and other plays similarly focused on domestic affairs. Modern critics who identify Arden of Faversham as the first domestic drama include Arthur Eustace Morgan, English Domestic Drama (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1912); Arnold Hauser, The Origins of Domestic Drama, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth,
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England: Penguin, 1968), 40319; and Andrew Clark, Domestic Drama: A Survey of the Origins, Antecedents and Nature of the Domestic Play in England, 15001640, 2 vols. (Salzburg: Institut f ur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975). 16. Alexander Leggatt, Arden of Faversham, Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 123. 17. Dolan, Home-Rebels and House-Traitors, 27. 18. See E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4: 25556 for the character of A common Player: The Statute hath done wisely to acknowedg him a Rogue errant, for his chiefe essence is, A daily Counterfeit (4: 255). The author, identified only as J. Cocke, has not been satisfactorily determined; the satirist John Cooke, however, seems to be the most likely candidate. 19. For the history of optical theory from antiquity to the Renaissance, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision. 20. For more information on William of Conches, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 91 92. 21. Julie R. Schutzman, Alice Ardens Freedom and the Suspended Moment in Arden of Faversham, Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 309. 22. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 123. 23. Ibid. 24. Thomas Dekker and Samuel Rowley, The Noble Soldier, ed. John S. Farmer (Edinburgh: The Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1913), sig. B3v. 25. Ibid., sig. B4r. 26. Sir Roy Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 39 40. 27. Ibid., 40. 28. I am grateful to Carole Levin for calling my attention to these examples of picture magic in Camden. Quotations from William Camdens The History of Princess Elizabeth are taken from the fourth edition (London, 1688). 29. Ibid., sig. Nnn1v. 30. Ibid., sig. Ooo1r. 31. Qtd. in Aston, Englands Iconoclasts, 308. 32. Ibid., 31314; John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 15351660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), n. 48, 127. 33. The Councils Injunctions of 1547, extensions of the Henrician 1538 Injunctions, ordered the destruction of all kinds of images, including relics, pictures, paintings, and even stained glass, in churches. Furthermore, the clergy were instructed to have parishioners destroy images in their own houses. See Aston, Englands Iconoclasts, 254 59; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 45052. 34. See Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 77.
Chapter 5: Stretch thine art: Painting Passions and the Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy
References to The Spanish Tragedy are from J. R. Mulrynes Norton edition, 2nd ed. (London: A and C Black; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 1. Revenge is a kind of wild justice, Francis Bacon wrote in his essay On revenge, which the more mans nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. See Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis, and Other Pieces, ed. Richard Foster Jones (New York: The Odyssey Press, Inc., 1937), 13. 2. In Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge
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University Press, 1980), Muriel Bradbrook briefly mentions the Painter Addition as a dramatic example of this motif (124 28). She also locates its use in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet, Websters The Duchess of Malfi, and Beaumonts The Maids Tragedy. Bradbrooks best illustratration of self-dramatization through the picture motif is Websters The Duchess of Malfi where the Duchess laments, Who do I look like now? / Like to your picture in the gallery, / A deal of life in show but none in practice. Hieronimos verbal painting, however, is unlike the other examples Bradbrook cites as it reflects a long sequence of images analogous to a Tudor program that might have been commissioned by a patron. 3. Henslowe, Diary, 203. Editors C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn M. Simpson point out that we have no guarantee that Jonson actually produced these Additions. They assume that Henslowe made Jonson loans rather than payment for completed work. The second date (June 1602) is notably too late for publication in the 1602 edition of the play. See Jonson, Works, 237 45. The payment, however, could have been made for completed additions. 4. Jonson, Works, 610, 611. 5. Levin L. Sch ucking, The Spanish Tragedy Additions: Acting and Reading Versions, Times Literary Supplement (12 June 1937): 442. 6. The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. Frederick S. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), lxxxix n 1. Boas is quoting from a review of J. Schicks edition of The Spanish Tragedy in The Athenaeum (Oct. 5, 1899). He continues, Of the mingle-mangle there is no doubt, but as the Additions were intended chiefly to satisfy the popular craving to see more of Hieronimo in his lunacy, I have little doubt that both Scenes were acted (lxxxix). 7. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen and Company, 1968), 42. Philip Edwards, J. R. Mulryne, and David Bevington are examples of recent editors of The Spanish Tragedy who have placed the Additions at the back of their texts. 8. Charles K. Cannon, The Relation of the Additions of The Spanish Tragedy to the Original Play, Studies in English Literature 2 (spring 1962): 231. 9. Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1911), 11. 10. Francis Berry, The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1965), 132. 11. Peter B. Murray, Thomas Kyd (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969), 158. 12. Ibid. 13. Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 104. 14. Ibid., 105. 15. Donna B. Hamilton, The Spanish Tragedy: A Speaking Picture, English Literary Review 4 (spring 1974): 215. 16. Ibid., 204 5. 17. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 7273. For another interpretation of the scene as a representation of the failure of painting, see Anat Feinberg-J utte, Painters and Counterfeiters, who views this scene as a harsh condemnation of the painters art. This interpretation seems harsh itself, as the painter is undoubtedly aware of the extreme nature of Hieronimos passion; Hieronimos impossible program of painted images reflects his state of heightened emotion. In performance, it is quite possible that the actor playing the painter can compensate for the implicit negative view of painting that Feinberg-J utte detects. For example, when Peter Reeves played the Painter in The Royal Shakespeare Companys production at The Swan Theatre in Stratford that opened April 30, 1997, he patiently, even stoically, listened to Hieronimo. This performance seemed to lend a quiet
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power to the character of the Painter. See Peter Happ es review in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 37 (1998): 70. 18. G. Wilson Knight, Visual Art in Kyd and Shakespeare, in Shakespearian Dimensions (Sussex: Harvester Press; New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984), 95. 19. See John Hollanders The Gazers Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) for a discussion of different kinds of ekphrases, 391. The central distinction Hollander makes is between notional and actual ekphrases, the former based on imagined or lost works of art, the latter on real and existing works that may even have been present before the poet as he or she wrote. In a fundamental way, however, all ekphrasis seems to be notional, in that the linguistic construction of visual experience will always be different in kind and phenemonal experience from its visual source. W. J. T. Mitchell makes this point when he argues that ekphrasis create[s] a specific image that is to be found only in the text as its resident alien, and is to be found nowhere else (Picture Theory, 157, n 19). 20. Ascham, Scholemaster, 119. 21. John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos (London, 1603), sig. Ff4r. 22. Ibid. 23. Overbury, Overburian Characters, 76. 24. E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 2:308. Chambers argues that Burbage was apparently the model for the Character of an Actor in the Characters of 1615 (2:308). 25. Ibid., 2:309. 26. Thomas May, The Heire, An Excellent Comedie (London, 1622), 1.1. 27. Jonas Barish, The Spanish Tragedy, or The Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric, in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 9 (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1966; New York: St. Martins, 1967), 82. 28. I have followed the 1602 edition for these lines; Mulryne and Bevington edit the line to read, Id have you paint me in my gallery. I believe that Hieronimo imagines the portrait being painted for his gallery, rather than the gallery serving as the background motif for the painting. The OED indicates that by 1600 gallery signified an apartment or building devoted to exhibiting art. Boas took this meaning of the term, as he added for in the line: Ide haue you paint me for my Gallirie. . . . In altering the line, he follows Schicks edition of The Spanish Tragedy. 29. Sidney, Defence of Poesie, 90. 30. Harry Keyishian, Review of The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare Bulletin 4 (MayJune 1986): 10. 31. Sir Roy Strong, Sir Henry Unton and his Portrait: An Elizabethan Memorial Picture and its History, Archaeologia 49 (1965): 53. 32. In The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), Nigel Llewellyn emphasizes the public nature of the picture in its depiction of Untons various public personae, 1316. He discusses the painting as an example of the extended death ritual in Elizabethan England. See also Strong, Sir Henry Unton. 33. On the dating of The Trial of Chivalry, I have followed E. K. Chambers. 34. References to The Trial of Chivalry are from the text edited by John S. Farmer (Amersham, England: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912). 35. Roland Mushat Frye makes similar use of revenge paintings in The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) to establish a context for understanding how an Elizabethan audience would have perceived Prince Hamlets imperative to avenge his fathers death, 2937. In The Memorial of Lord Darnley, King James VI, son of the murdered King of Scots, is represented as the likely candidate for the act of revenge. In the paintings text, his grandparents explicitly call for revenge.
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36. This is Duncan Thomsons reasonable speculation. For a reproduction and history of the Earl of Morays portrait, see Painting in Scotland, 15701650 (Edinburgh: The Trustees of the National Gallery of Scotland, 1975), 34. 37. Qtd. in Duncan Thomson, Painting in Scotland, 19. Two contemporary versions of this painting exist: the royal copy descended through the Stewart family of England is at Holyroodhouse, and the other is at Goodwood. The Goodwood version contains the original sixteenth-century inscriptions, while those on the royal painting have been altered, probably by James I and VI in an effort to present his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in a more favorable light. 38. Ibid., 18. 39. Margaret Aston, The Kings Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 24, 25. 40. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, 37. 41. Eric Mercer, English Art, 15531625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 16364. Mercer speculates about the riddling Latin motto: If questions were asked, and they were, it could be explained away as meaning nothing more than There is enough above, his heavenly reward is enough; the other meaning, however, was probably the intended one, There are enough left over, his descendants are still alive, with its many and far-reaching implications (163). 42. Hamilton, The Spanish Tragedy: A Speaking Picture, 214. 43. Maurice Hunt, Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus, Studies in English Literature 28 (spring 1988): 212. 44. Ibid.
Chapter 6: Images Lawful and Beguiling: Ambivalent Responses to Painting in Shakespeares Drama
1. Scholarship on the visual arts and Shakespeares dramas is too extensive to cite fully here. Notable works include Margaret Ferrand Thorp, Shakespeare and the Fine Arts, PMLA 46 (1931): 67293; Arthur H. R. Fairchild, Shakespeare and the Arts of Design (Columbia, Missouri: The Artcraft Press, 1937); William S. Heckscher, Shakespeare and His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 1314 (197071): 517; Roland Mushat Frye, Ways of Seeing in Shakespearean Drama and Elizabethan Painting, Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1980): 323 42; Frederick O. Waage, Be Stone No More: Italian Cinquecento Art and Shakespeares Last Plays, Bucknell Review 25, 1 (1980): 5687; Knight, Visual Art in Kyd and Shakespeare; Alex Aronson, Shakespeare and Rembrandt: Metaphorical Representations in Poetry and the Visual Arts (Essen: Verlag die blaue Eule, 1987); Greenwood, Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style: Mannerism in Shakespeare and his Jacobean Contemporaries; Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (New York: St. Martins Press, 2001); Philip Armstrong, Shakespeares Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze (London: Routledge, 2001); and Kiefer, Shakespeares Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. Additionally, a number of fine essay collections have focused on Shakespeare and the arts. Some of these essays feature analyses of pictorial arts and the visual elements of theater: Shakespeare and the Arts: A Collection of Essays from the Ohio Shakespeare Conference, edited by Cecile Williamson Cary and Henry S. Limouze (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982); Shakespeare and the Arts, edited by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999); and Shakespeare and the Visual Arts, edited by Holger Klein and James L. Harner (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).
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2. Some critics offer examples of Shakespeares negative use of painting tropes and painted art as evidence that the dramatist had a fundamentally skeptical or iconoclastic view of the visual arts. See, particularly, Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Italian concept of art, in Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). 3. As Alan C. Dessen argues, What was an integral part of the theatrical imagery or iconography witnessed by the original spectator . . . may now be invisible to the reader, editor, or director. . . . The interpreter today . . . attending only to the words on the page, may totally miss an on-stage effect or configuration that would have been obvious to an Elizabethan playgoer and important for the original strategy. . . . With effort, however, some of these lost or blurred signals can be recovered and reinvested with meaning (Dessen, Recovering Shakespeares Images, 618). 4. For an excellent analysis of the tapestry or painted work in The Rape of Lucrece, see Clark Hulse, A Piece of Skilful Painting in Shakespeares Lucrece, Shakespeare Studies 31 (1978):1322; on the painting sonnets, see Clark Hulse, Shakespeares Sonnets and the Art of the Face, John Donne Journal 5 (1986): 326. 5. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm, 910. 6. References to The Rape of Lucrece are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare. 7. Meres, Palladis Tamia, sig. Oo1v. 8. Doebler, Shakespeares Speaking Pictures, 43, 49. 9. Doebler makes this provocative suggestion in Shakespeares Speaking Pictures, 49 51. He interprets the iconic image of the caskets in light of Renaissance death motifs such as the memento mori and ars moriendi. Although casket did not literally signify a coffin in Elizabethan English, Shakespearean wordplay seems to have forged such an association. As evidence, Doebler cites Shakespeares use of the empty casket metaphor for Arthurs body in King John; it is only one more step to seeing a coffin as a casket or a casket as a coffin (49). 10. Hilliard, Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 79. 11. Freedberg, Power of Images, 12. 12. Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique, 65. 13. Sidney Homan, Shakespeares Theater of Presence: Language, Spectacle, and the Audience (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 166. 14. Lois Potter, Seeing and Believing in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama, ed. Murray Biggs, et. al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 117. 15. Geoffrey Hartman, Shakespeares Poetical Character in Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 51. 16. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 45 46. 17. Ibid., 49 18. Albert Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays (16601905) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 16768. For a brief performance history of the closet scene and the staging of the counterfeit presentments, see Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992), 67587. In Giles Blocks 2000 production at The Globe, to cite a recent example of this tradition, Hamlet wore his fathers miniature about his neck and Gertrude had Claudiuss portrait standing upon her vanity; young Fortinbras also had a miniature of his father upon a chain, which he produced and kissed in a moment
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of filial devotion. The miniature has been understood as an influential artistic form in Shakespeares Hamlet in more complex ways than I suggest here. See, for example, Helen M. Whall, Hamlet and the Manner of the Miniature, Interfaces 5 (1994): 295312. Whall ingeniously argues that Shakespeare parodies the portrait miniature and miniaturists techniques in Hamlet. 19. On ekphrasis in Hamlet and the pervasive use of ekphrasis in Shakespeares drama, see Stephen Orgel, Counterfeit Presentments: Shakespeares Ekphrasis, in Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 25360. 20. Freedberg, Power of Images, xxiii. 21. Anthony Blunt published the first examination of the paragone in Timon of Athens in his brief essay, An Echo of the Paragone in Shakespeare, JWCI 2.3 (Jan. 1939): 26062. Many analyses of this subject have appeared in print since the publication of Blunts seminal piece. Notable articles include W. M. Merchant, Timon and the Conceit of Art, Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 24957; Michael Leslie, The Dialogue between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poesy in the English Renaissance, Word and Image 10 (1985): 16 30; John Dixon Hunt, Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of Timon of Athens, in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Delaware: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988); John Dixon Hunt, Pictura, Scriptura, and Theatrum: Shakespeare and the Emblem, Poetics Today 10:1 (spring 1989): 15571; and A. D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989). 22. Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, 135. 23. Leslie, Dialogue between Bodies and Souls, 29. 24. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. H. J. Oliver (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1959). 25. Sidney, Defence of Poesie, 99. 26. Rolf Soellner, Shakespeares Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 130. 27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 125. 28. Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 1, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1969), 285. 29. Clifford Davidson, Timon of Athens: The Iconography of False Friendship, The Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1980): 181200, 187. 30. For the analogy between painters and flatterers in Plutarchs essay, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, see Plutarch, Moralia, 289, 295, 307, 311, 313, 339 41, 347. 31. Ibid., 337. 32. Ibid., 339, 341. 33. Hunt, Pictura, Scriptura, and Theatrum, 166. 34. Hunt, Shakespeare and the Paragone, 52. 35. B. J. Sokol, Art and Illusion in The Winters Tale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 5. 36. Jonathan Bate makes a similar point in his excellent reading of the plays Ovidian subtexts in Shakespeare and Ovid, 236. See also Leonard Barkans brilliant study, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Barkan emphasizes the elemental tensions throughout the play between death and life, expressed as between hardness and softness, and observes how Hermione becomes, as in the familiar Renaissance version of the Pygmalion story, a stony lady, a donna petrosa not quite in the Dantesque and Petrarchan sense but with a more mutual, indeed more marital, definition of love (284). 37. Betty Talvacchia, The Rare Italian Master and the Posture of Hermione in The Winters Tale, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 3 (1992): 165.
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38. Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: The History of Texts and Visions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 122. 39. Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 86. 40. Sokol, Art and Illusion, 88. 41. The Italian language reference to Giorgio Vasaris Le Vite de pi` u eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori (1550) is taken from G. Milanesis edition (Florence, 1906), 5: 557. The translation is my own. 42. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 285. 43. Talvacchia, The Rare Italian Master, 17071. In his chapter, The Pornographic Ideal, from Imagining Shakespeare, Stephen Orgel emphasizes the subtle influence of Vasaris Lives and the obscene, suppressed prints and poetry of I Modi on Shakespeares imagination. He claims, The imagined world of sexuality in The Winters Tale, too, is the world of Giulio Romano, both in its idealized Ovidian incarnation and its Aretine naturalism; these are inseparable complements in the play, just as the subtext of Giulios idealized Marriage of Cupid and Psyche is the uncontrollable libido of I Modi (125). 44. Leonard Barkan, Living Sculptures: Ovid, Michaelangelo, and The Winters Tale, ELH 48 (1981): 662.
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Index
Aelianus, Claudius, 77, 92 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, 69, 79 Alcibiades, 69 Alexander the Great, 72, 7374, 76, 77 anti-painting prejudice, 26, 27, 3234, 44 53, 129, 130, 151, 202 antitheatricalism, 1718, 26, 28, 30, 34, 35 42, 218 n. 37, 22021 n. 18 Apelles of Cos, 27, 60, 68, 7278, 95, 114, 128, 224 25 n. 13, 225 nn. 1719, 225 n. 27, 228 n. 11; Venus Anadyomene, 60, 73, 82, 89, 128; Venus at Cos, 89 Arden, Alice, 131, 13233 Arden, Thomas, 131, 13233 Arden of Faversham, 20, 2728, 29, 34, 64, 13051 Aretino, Pietro, 211 Aristotle, 38, 40, 42 43, 44 45, 60, 165, 221 n. 20 Ascham, Roger, 15, 16, 28, 159 Astington, John, 21 Aston, Margaret, 25, 45, 173, 220 n. 1 Auerbach, Erna, 218 n. 34 Bacon, Francis, 153, 232 n. 1 Banks, Carol, 218 n. 30 Barish, Jonas, 161; The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 35, 36, 41, 42, 218 n. 37 Barkan, Leonard, 2021, 25, 212, 214, 237 n. 36 Bartolozzi, Francesco, 197, 198 Barton, Anne, 211 Bate, Jonathan, 216 n. 3, 237 n. 36 Beaumont, Francis: The Maids Tragedy, 233 n. 2 Berry, Francis, 156 Bethell, Samuel L., 228 n. 27 Bevington, David, 2021, 233 n. 7, 234 n. 28 Bible: Deuteronomy, 39; Exodus, 39; Romans, 39; Wisdom, 51 Blackfriars Theater, 62, 63, 70, 71, 185, 209, 211, 227 n. 9 Block, Giles, 15, 23637 n. 18 Blunt, Anthony, 237 n. 21 Boas, Frederick S., 155, 233 n. 6 Boethius, 226 n. 63 Boitard, Fran cois, 74 Bond, R. Warwick, 80, 224 nn. 78, 225 n. 27 Bothwell, Earl of (King of Scots), 172 73, 234 n. 35 Botticelli, Sandro: The Birth of Venus, 82 Bowers, Fredson, 220 n. 8, 231 n. 9 Bradbrook, Muriel, 224 n. 5, 232 33 n. 2 Buc, Sir George, 24, 27, 45 46, 71 Bullen, Arthur Henry, 116 Burbage, James, 16 Burbage, Richard, 64, 16061, 234 n. 24 Burbages Theater, 16, 18, 217 n. 23 Burghley, Lord, 60, 70, 226 n. 43 Calfhill, James, 52 Camden, William: The History of Princess Elizabeth, 141 42, 232 n. 28 Canadian Conservation Institute, 65 Cannon, Charles K., 155 Caputi, Anthony, 107 Cast, David, 74 Castiglione, Baldassare, 43, 90, 108; The Book of the Courtier (Il Cortegiano), 78, 91 Catholic Church, 37, 45, 5051, 220 21 n. 18
253
254
index
Dundas, Judith, 188 D urer, Albrecht, 60, 121, 128, 230 n. 46 Earl of Derbys Men, 170 Earl of Pembrokes Men, 127, 131, 147 Earl of Warwicks Men, 20 Edmond, Mary, 62, 218 n. 34 Edward VI, 50, 51, 131, 147 Edwards, Philip, 155, 202, 233 n. 7 Egan, Gabriel, 16, 216 n. 6 ekphrasis, 23, 31, 73, 119, 123, 12526, 15354, 157, 161, 164, 186, 199, 200, 202, 203, 210, 234 n. 19, 237 n. 19 Elizabeth I, 20, 33, 52, 54, 55, 60, 61, 63, 7071, 8586, 94 95, 9697, 102, 141 42, 226 n. 58, 231 n. 11 Elyot, Sir Thomas: The Book Named the Governor, 5860, 61 Empedocles, 91 Erasmus, Deciderius, 60 eroticism, 23, 25, 33, 34, 37, 6697, 105 6, 11529, 14950, 178, 18192, 21213 Euclid, 17 Eworth, Hans, 54 face-painting, 26, 27, 30, 4650, 101, 11113, 143, 159, 162, 192, 196, 201, 226 n. 43, 229 n. 35 Faversham Wardmote Book, 132 Feinberg-J utte, Anat, 219 n. 38, 233 n. 17 Felperin, Howard, 193 Fleay, Frederick, 64 Florio, John, 108 Foakes, R. A., 107, 229 n. 28 Foister, Susan, 218 n. 34 Ford, John: The Fancies Chaste and Noble, 229 n. 35 Freedberg, David: The Power of Images, 15, 23, 102, 187, 200 Frye, Roland Mushat, 173, 234 n. 35 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 140, 205 Gair, W. Reavley, 88, 1012, 107, 224 n. 5, 22728 n. 9 Galatea. See Pygmalion Gallant Cavaliero Dick Bowyer, The. See Trial of Chivalry, The Gent, Lucy, 45, 230 n. 36 Gilman, Ernest B., 30
Catholicism, beliefs and rituals, 24 25, 37, 45, 5051, 6667, 128, 145, 147, 180, 213, 218 n. 30, 22021 n. 18 Chalcidius, 139 Chambers, E. K., 22728 n. 9, 232 n. 18, 234 n. 24, 234 n. 33 Charles I, 218 n. 36 Children of the Chapel Royal, 70, 230 n. 42 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 226 n. 63 Clement of Alexandria, 52, 226 n. 63 Cocke, J.: A daily Counterfeit, 39 40, 138, 232 n. 18 Coke, Sir Edward: The Third Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, 134, 231 n. 9 Collier, John Payne, 231 n. 15 Collinson, Patrick, 25 Cranmer, Thomas, 147 Croft-Murray, Edward, 218 n. 34 Dance of Death, 15, 16 Darnley, Lord Henry, 17273 Davidson, Clifford, 206 Davidson, Peter, 223 n. 79 Davies, John of Hereford: Microcosmos, 15960 Davies, Tom, 197 Day, John: The Ile of Gulls, 17 De Critz family, 6263 de Heere, Lucas, 80 Dekker, Thomas, 154; Blurt, Master Constable, 104 6; and Samuel Rowley, The Noble Spanish Souldier, 33, 141; Satiro-mastix, 101 Dessen, Alan C., 19, 2021, 217 n. 14, 236 n. 3 Deus artifex, 91 Deus pictor, 91 de Vere, Edward (Earl of Oxford), 70, 71, 7576 Diehl, Huston, 31, 221 n. 18 Doebler, John, 185, 216 n. 3, 236 n. 9 Dolan, Frances E., 48, 138, 231 n. 11 Donne, John, 48, 71 Drew-Bear, Annette, 229 n. 35 Dryden, John, 85 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, Les Sepmaines (The Devine Weekes), 118 Dubrow, Heather, 133 Du Fresnoy, C. A.: Art of Painting, 85
index
Glapthorne, Henry: The Lady Mother, 229 n. 35 Globe Theater, 1517, 21, 63, 64, 65, 185, 209, 223 n. 79, 23637 n. 18 Goodwood House, 235 n. 37 Gosson, Stephen, 18, 36, 42 Gower, George, 5558, 114 Gower, Sir John, 56 Gregory of Nyssen, 30 Gregory the Great, 30 Gualter, Rudolf, 51 Gurr, Andrew, 17, 62, 21617 n. 8 Gyles, Thomas, 99 Hacket, William, 142 Hagstrum, Jean H., 219 n. 38 Hales, Christopher, 51 Hamilton, Donna B., 156, 174 Hamilton, William, 197, 198 Hampton Court, 20, 21 Hands, Terry, 133 Harbage, Alfred, 100, 223 n. 85, 227 28 n. 9 Hartman, Geoffrey, 191 Harvey, Gabriel, 70 Hatfield House, 15 Hattaway, Michael, 156 Haydocke, Richard, 47, 6061, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 220 n. 16 Helgerson, Richard, 23031 n. 2 Heninger, S. K., Jr., 43 Henry VIII, 51, 58, 60 Henslowe, Philip, 2122, 155; Diary, 18, 21, 62, 154, 233 n. 3 Herford, C. H., 233 n. 3 Heywood, John, 103 Heywood, Thomas, 16; An Apology for Actors, 41 42, 44 Hilliard, Alice, 81 Hilliard (Hillyard), John, 56, 222 n. 64 Hilliard (Hillyard), Laurence, 56, 222 n. 64 Hilliard, Nicholas, 54 56, 58, 59, 60, 71, 8082, 84, 85, 86, 9697, 150, 222 n. 64, 226 n. 43, 227 n. 6; A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, 61, 8081, 82, 84, 91, 97, 121, 124, 150, 187 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 78, 91 Holbein, Hans, 54
255
Holinshed, Raphael: Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 13133, 151, 231 n. 15 Hollander, John, 157, 234 n. 19 Holyroodhouse, 235 n. 37 Homan, Sidney, 189 Horace: Ars Poetica, 18, 21, 26, 44 Hotson, Leslie, 225 n. 20 Hulse, Clark, 84, 236 n. 4 Hunt, John Dixon, 208 Hunt, Maurice, 17576 Hunter, G. K., 71, 80, 93, 224 n. 5, 224 n. 9, 229 n. 32 Huntley, Earl of, 171 iconoclasm, 1920, 2327, 28, 2933, 47 48, 58, 60, 61, 6768, 84, 97, 145 47, 180, 220 n. 8, 236 n. 2 iconophobia, 30, 5152, 65, 68, 13051, 179, 187, 209 idolatry, 17, 19, 24, 26, 30, 3233, 34, 3537, 39, 42, 48, 5152, 65, 6668, 72, 7879, 84, 90, 94, 101, 104, 119 20, 12628, 144, 146, 180, 18183, 213, 215, 218 n. 30, 221 n. 18 images: ambivalence about, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 32, 44, 68, 102, 153, 179, 180, 18689, 208, 214; destruction and marring of, 29, 33, 84, 91, 9394, 141, 226 n. 53, 232 n. 33; idolatrous worship of, 1920, 32, 50, 6667, 79, 178, 180, 18183; scandal of, 24, 26, 28, 46, 50, 93, 99, 145 47, 151, 17174, 215; veneration of, 24 25, 30, 50, 6667, 141, 145, 213 impersonation. See personation James I and VI, 33, 172, 201, 234 n. 35 Jones, Inigo, 154, 201 Jonson, Ben, 22, 65, 101, 154, 17677, 218 n. 37, 229 n. 27, 233 n. 3; Every Woman in Her Humor, 229 n. 35; Timber: or, Discoveries, 22, 154, 210 Judas Iscariot, 165, 174 Keenan, Siobhan, 223 n. 79 Kernodle, George R., 20 Kiefer, Frederick, 2021 Kirsch, Arthur, 229 n. 27 Knapp, Robert, 221 n. 18 Knight, G. Wilson, 156
256
index
Mehl, Dieter, 216 n. 4 Melville, Sir James, 82 memento mori, 15, 168, 177, 185 memento vindictae, 171, 177 Mercer, Eric, 173, 235 n. 41 Meres, Francis: Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasvry, 118, 183 Middle Temple, 17 Middleton, Thomas, 101, 228 n. 11 Millar, Sir Oliver, 218 n. 34 Mitchell, W. J. T., 22, 234 n. 19 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 221 n. 18 Morandini, Francesco, 73 Morgan, Arthur Eustace, 231 n. 15 Morgan, June J., 230 n. 51, 230 n. 53 Moryson, Fynes: Itinerary, 35, 134 35 Mulryne, J. R., 233 n. 7, 234 n. 28 Munday, Anthony, 21, 36, 42, 127; A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, 18, 42; A Woman Will Have Her Will, 230 n. 51 Murray, Peter B., 156 Nashe, Thomas, 41 42, 44, 227 n. 3; Pierce Penilesse His Svpplication to the Divell, 47, 134 Natura artifex, 91 Neoplatonism, 42 43, 45, 78, 118 OConnell, Michael, 3637, 22021 n. 18 Oliver, H. J., 2023 Oliver, Isaac, 58 ORork, Brien, 142 optical theory, 17, 18, 139, 186 Orgel, Stephen, 210, 237 n. 19, 238 n. 43 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 13637, 231 n. 15 Ormerod, Oliver: The Picture of a Puritane, 228 n. 11 Osborn, J., 228 n. 16 Ousby, Ian, 133 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 50, 231 n. 11 Ovid (Ovidius Naso), 18384, 237 n. 36, 238 n. 43; Amores, 125; Metamorphosis, 187 Painter Addition to The Spanish Tragedy, 20, 28, 64, 151, 15277, 178, 233 nn. 27, 23334 n. 17 painters: as dramatic characters, 19, 20, 23, 34, 64, 99100, 10777, 2017, 218 n. 38; as professionals in England,
Kyd, Thomas, 130, 229 n. 28; The Spanish Tragedy, 20, 28, 64, 151, 15277, 178 Lactantius, 52 Lamb, Charles, 116, 15556 Lee, Rensselaer, 219 n. 38 Leggatt, Alexander, 137 Leicester, Earl of, 82, 226 n. 43 Lennam, Trevor, 98 Lennox, Earl and Countess of, 172, 173 Leonardo da Vinci, 6667, 73, 92, 97 Leslie, Michael, 202 Levin, Carole, 232 n. 28 libido videndi, 17 limning. See under portraits and paintings, minatures Lindberg, David C., 217 n. 9, 232 n. 19 Llewellyn, Nigel, 234 n. 32 Lollards, 37, 40 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 43, 47, 60, 61, 85 Lopez, Dr. Roderigo, 231 n. 11 Lord Admirals Men, 21 Lord Chamberlains Men (Kings Men), 64, 183 Lyly, John, 7072, 9697, 224 nn. 56, 224 nn. 910, 227 n. 3; Campaspe, 17, 27, 31, 6697, 115, 22324 nn. 4 5, 229 n. 34; Euphues, 70, 72, 74 76, 78, 86, 92; Queen Elizabeths Entertainment at Mitcham, 20, 74, 9596; Sappho and Phao, 71 Marlowe, Christopher, 130, 229 n. 28; Doctor Faustus, 17, 31 Marprelates, 227 n. 3 Marston, John, 99, 100, 107, 110, 229 n. 35; Antonio and Mellida, 20, 27, 98, 99, 101, 10714, 154, 229 n. 28, 229 n. 35; Antonios Revenge, 112; The Fawn (or Parasitaster), 104 5, 1067; Histriomastix, 16; Jack Drums Entertainment, 63; The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image and Certain Satires, 11920 Martyr, Peter, 145 Mary, Queen of Scots, 17273, 235 n. 37 Massinger, Philip: The Bashful Lover, 229 n. 35 May, Thomas: The Heir, 16061 Medusa, 18, 208
index
24, 25, 44 46, 50, 5265, 99100. See also individual painters Painters Daughter, The, 20, 217 n. 15 Painter-Stainers Company, 54 55, 59, 60, 64 painting. See portraits and paintings; individual painters paragone, 2223, 27, 28, 40, 73, 67, 79, 8990, 94, 9596, 123, 153, 17980, 20115, 237 n. 21 Parkhurst, John (Bishop of Norwich), 173 Parrhasius, 60, 74, 78 Pauls Boys, 98129, 22728 n. 9 Pauls theater (in St. Pauls Cathedral), 27, 62, 63, 71, 98129, 227 nn. 3 4, 227 28 n. 9 Pavier, Thomas, 154, 162 Peacham, Henry: The Art of Drawing, 61, 69, 12122, 230 n. 46 Pearce, Edward, 99 Pears, Iain, 218 n. 36 Peele, George: The Arraignment of Paris, 230 n. 42 Perkins, William: A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 52, 146 personation, 24, 28, 3637, 39, 41 42, 1078, 110, 126, 15354, 16061, 180, 192, 215 Petrarchan love, 84, 117, 237 n. 36 Phillips, Augustine, 64, 223 n. 86 Philo of Alexandria (Judaeus), 24 Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 91 picture magic, 140 42 Pincombe, Michael, 76, 224 n. 6, 224 n. 10, 226 n. 53 Pindar, 91 Piper, David, 218 n. 34, 226 n. 43 Plato, and Platonism, 17, 26, 3738, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 69, 76, 91, 139, 188, 206, 218 n. 37 Platter, Thomas, 216 n. 3 Pliny the Elder, 73, 80, 85, 89, 90, 139; Natural History, 73, 7778, 95, 224 25 n. 13 Plutarch, 206, 207, 237 n. 30 poison, 23, 2728, 34, 64, 13051, 199, 231 n. 9, 231 n. 11 Pope-Hennessy, John, 226 n. 58 portraits and paintings, 15, 31, 33, 51, 52 53, 55, 5859, 64 65, 6667, 74 75,
257
79, 81, 83, 8586, 89, 102 4, 114, 117, 133, 139, 140 43, 164, 165, 168, 189, 226 n. 43; memorial paintings, 153, 16870; miniatures (limnings), 15, 55, 58, 59, 65, 67, 8082, 84, 86, 1056, 110, 189, 192, 197, 23637 n. 18; properties in theaters, 19, 23, 25, 27, 3233, 37, 67, 8789, 9293, 98 129, 136, 18183, 18589, 192, 193, 196208, 217 n. 14, 21819 n. 38, 223 n. 79, 227 n. 4; revenge painting, 28, 153, 155, 17174, 177, 178, 234 n. 35 Potter, Lois, 189 Praz, Mario, 219 n. 38 Prynne, William, 35, 36 Puritaine, The, or the Widdow of WatlingStreet, 101, 228 n. 11 Pygmalion, 68, 76, 7879, 90, 93, 118, 11920, 213, 225 n. 19, 225 n. 27, 237 n. 36 Quintilian, 77, 225 n. 13 Rainolds, John, 22021 n. 18 Redford, John: Wit and Science, 101, 112, 125 Reeves, Peter, 233 n. 17 Reformation (English Protestant), 19, 22, 23, 25, 3132, 44 45, 51, 66, 145 46, 180, 200201, 220 n. 1 Reid, Alice Hayes, 225 n. 17 Ridley, Nicholas: A Treatise . . . Concerning Images, 5152 Romano, Giulio, 21012; Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, 238 n. 43; I Modi (The Postures), 211, 212, 238 n. 43 Rose, Mary Beth, 84, 224 n. 5 Rose Theater, 18, 21, 63, 152, 223 n. 79 Rosenberg, Marvin, 236 n. 18 Rosignoli, Carlo, 74 Royal Shakespeare Company, 233 n. 17 Rubens, Peter Paul, 54 Saccio, Peter, 223 n. 4 Sacks, Peter M., 156 Sampson, Thomas, 145 Sanders, John (Sandes, James), 64 65, 223 n. 86 Schick, J., 233 n. 6, 234 n. 28 Sch ucking, Levin L., 154 55
258
index
Stuart, Henry (Prince of Wales), 211 Stubbes, Philip: The Anatomie of Abuses, 34 Surrey, Earl of, 173 Swan Theater, 228 n. 9, 233 n. 17 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 116 Sylvester, Joshua, 118 Sypher, Wylie, 219 n. 38 Talvacchia, Betty, 210 Tarletons Newes Out of Purgatory, 5051 Teague, Frances, 93 Tertullian, 37, 3839, 52; De Spectaculis, 39 Thomson, Duncan, 235 n. 36 Thomson, Leslie, 19, 217 n. 14 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 73 Timanthes, 74 Tourneur, Cyril, 201; The Revengers Tragedy, 31 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, A, 40 41 Trial of Chivalry, The, 20, 151, 17071, 181, 234 n. 33 Tudor, Mary, 5051 Tuke, Thomas: A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women, 4850 Unton, Lady, 170 Unton, Sir Henry, 16870, 234 n. 32 ut pictura poesis, 26, 28, 38, 177 ut pictura theatrum, 15, 26, 177 Van Dyck, Anthony, 54 Van Haecht, William, 73 Vasari, Giorgio, 21012, 238 n. 43 Vavasour, Anne, 70 Venus, 6890, 123, 127, 128, 184 Virgil (Virgilius Maro, Publius): Aeneid, 168 Vogelaare, Livinus de, 172; Memorial of Lord Darnley, 17273, 234 n. 35 Warton, Thomas, 225 n. 19 Waterhouse, Ellis, 218 n. 34 Webster, John, 135, 154, 160, 201; The Duchess of Malfi, 233 n. 2; The White Devil, 136 Weiss, Adrian, 107, 108 Westcott, Sebastian, 98 Whall, Helen M., 237 n. 18 White, Thomas, 217 n. 23
Schutzman, Julie R., 140 Segar, William: Honor Military, and Civill, 60 Serenus (Bishop of Marseilles), 30 Shakespeare, William, 64 65, 130, 154, 160, 177, 17880, 236 n. 2; Hamlet, 1516, 17, 65, 98, 135, 161, 162, 189, 192201, 216 n. 3, 233 n. 2, 23637 n. 18; King John, 236 n. 9; King Lear, 163, 218 n. 30; Macbeth, 143; Measure for Measure, 29, 3334; The Merchant of Venice, 115, 178, 18589, 209, 233 n. 2; A Midsummer Nights Dream, 115; Othello, 29, 33, 65, 135, 136, 178; The Rape of Lucrece, 141, 179, 18283, 220 n. 8, 236 n. 4; Richard II, 218 n. 30; Romeo and Juliet, 115; Sonnets, 50, 185, 236 n. 4; The Taming of the Shrew, 115, 181, 18385; Timon of Athens, 19, 20, 23, 65, 179, 2018, 211, 237 n. 21; Titus Andronicus, 31 32; Twelfth Night, 179, 180, 18992, 209; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 25, 29, 3233, 34, 180, 18183; The Winters Tale, 16, 17, 28, 178, 179, 180, 201, 20815, 238 n. 43 Shakespeare Center, The, 166 Shapiro, Michael, 100, 107, 229 n. 27 Sidney, Sir Philip, 216 n. 8; A Defence of Poesie, 42 44, 92, 152, 164, 165, 204 Siemon, James R., 180 Simonides of Ceos, 26, 160 Simpson, Percy and Evelyn M., 233 n. 3 Soellner, Rolf, 205 Sokol, B. J., 208, 211 Spenser, Edmund, 70 Sprague, Alfred Colby, 197 Spranger, Bartholomaeus: Venus und Adonis, 82, 83 Stanley, William (Earl of Derby), 99, 100, 110 State, Bert O., 220 n. 16 Stewart, Henry (Earl of Moray), 171, 235 n. 36 Stockwood, John, 17, 217 n. 23 Stow, John: Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England, 24, 45 47, 56, 132, 231 n. 11 Strong, Sir Roy, 50, 51, 141, 168, 218 n. 34
index
Whitehall, 17, 21 Whythorne, Thomas: Autobiography, 102 4, 228 n. 16 William of Conches, 139, 232 n. 20 Wine, M. L., 131 Winghe, Jodocus a: Apelles malt Kampaspe, 74, 75
259
Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, The, 20, 31, 98, 99, 107, 114 27 Wit of a Woman, The, 20, 12728, 230 n. 51, 230 n. 53 Workman, John, 172 Zeuxis, 60, 74, 75, 92

Marguerite A. Tassi The Scandal of Images Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama 2005

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Marguerite A. Tassi The Scandal of Images Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama 2005

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The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama

Susquehanna University Press

The Scandal of Images

The Scandal of Images

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

printed in the united states of america

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The Scandal of Images

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Introduction Ut Pictura Theatrum: The Dramatists Ambivalent Muse

When I visited Londons reconstructed Globe Theater in June

the scandal of images

the scandal of images

the scandal of images

the scandal of images

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the scandal of images

Elizabethans were as much in love with images, as they were

the scandal of images

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The Polemical Battle over the Theater

the scandal of images

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The Anti-Painting Prejudice in England

the scandal of images

the scandal of images

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The Pencils Trade and the Defense of Painting

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the scandal of images

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the scandal of images

2. George Gower, Self-Portrait, 1579. Private Collection.

the scandal of images

the scandal of images