Picturing Shakespeare

By Jean-Louis CLARET

This study investigates the capacity of Shakespeare’s texts – obviously destined for stage performances – to generate images and mental colours in the readers’ and in the spectators’ minds. Such notions as Ut pictura poesis and the paragoneare discussed in the first part of this book, along with the function and nature of colours. After considering the sets of correspondences and the major differences between texts and images, the author presents and analyzes some of his own illustrations of Shakespearean characters. Jean-Louis Claret, both a university professor specialized in Shakespeare’s theatre and an illustrator, proposes to shed light on the process that led him from the perusal of the written text to the visualization of visages. The voice of poets is unconventionally called upon to shed light on the complex mechanisms he describes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839990618

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

After devoting a considerable amount of their lives to the study of Elizabethan drama, some academics may feel deep inside that the time has come for them to account for their activity, to explain how their lifelong dedication to authors who lived more than 400 years ago could nurture their present lives, how they could possibly benefit from the daily scrutiny of their works. The university scholars working on Shakespearean drama are a happy few. It is a rare privilege to spend one’s professional life probing and sharing with students and colleagues the views and ideas of an outstanding author who wrote some thirty-eight plays, three long poems and 154 sonnets. With the present creative research project, I wish to account for both an individual experience of Shakespearean drama and the inevitable impact this activity can have on its initiator, hence my use of the first-person pronoun which is hardly ever met in French academic works. I need to state right away that studying this corpus is also – unless it be ‘first and foremost’ – an inner journey that gives access to a more intense experience of life. Another unconventional ingredient in this book that wishes to meet scientific standards even though it sinks its roots into private experience is its regular convocation of the voice of poets. As a transdisciplinary study, it does not integrate poetry as a mere marginal, decorative ingredient aimed to shed entertaining light on a central theme written in a normative key. On the contrary, this newcomer brings valuable grist to the mill of the ongoing demonstration as mediating an autonomous thought actively involved in its construction, allowing all the while its readers to hear a rich inner dialogue. But poetry is a mischievous, unscrupulous guest who feels free to come along with unexpected friends. As a matter of fact, as Yves Bonnefoy puts it, ‘No work is ever just poetry’.¹ Of course, the choice of variegated hermeneutic tools is not innovative per se and the fact that philosophers are sometimes prone to put on poets’ clothes stands as evidence of this. Vladimir Jankélévitch, for example, was fond of interspersing his lessons and his books with the following enlightening though somewhat cryptic statement: ‘Do not waste your special Spring morning’.² And what should be made of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s pronouncement: ‘Space is the evidence of where’?³ After all, as Michel de Montaigne put it in his famous Essais, ‘Philosophy is nothing but sophisticated poetry’ and ‘Plato is a disjointed poet’.⁴

Elizabethan Studies are no ordinary research field. Andy Mousley⁵ contends that they teach how to live. Studying Shakespeare means encountering characters that look very much like their commentators. They are ephemeral reflections that invite the readers to reappraise their lives under the guidance of a playwright whom Coleridge described as ‘the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy’.⁶ It means plunging into deep waters and glimpsing creatures that provide puzzlingly resembling images. It also implies reading an amazing number of books that have shed subtle and forever-changing light on these multifaceted texts. Not to mention the encounters with actors, stage directors, poets, scholars, linguists, and translators – the various partners that share a common passion for the bard and nurture the critic’s activity. All these people strive in their own way to understand Shakespeare’s drama. But what does the verb ‘to understand’ mean in this context? Does the assimilation of a demonstration or the description of a mechanism bring the same processes into play? Can Shakespeare’s drama be understood with the intellect, with the emotions or by means of a specific ability generated by the plays under scrutiny that combines these two? In other words, does it not provide the key to its understanding, like the alchemic vignettes that were at the same time a riddle and the means to solve it? ⁷

I posit that the greatest and the most beautiful achievements in life reach full fruition only when they are offered or conceived as part of an exchange, and Shakespeare’s plays are not unlike the best things in life: they are made still more pleasurable by sharing. For that matter, one may also legitimately postulate that drama originates in an impulse to enable a community to benefit from a common experience. Elizabethan theatrical performances turn written texts into visible and audible speeches while the comedians, Hamlet recalls, hold a mirror up to nature.⁸ As for the Shakespearean looking glass, the fascination it exerts owes much to its poetic fabric. As the Elizabethan playwright destined his plays for the stage rather than for publication, the academic’s activity may appear as an unworthy exercise for it denies the dramatic text the breath and the movements that instil life in it. But this would seem to be an oversight: over the past decades, literary scholars have given more and more importance to the double necessity to make the texts heard and to restore their bodily dimension over the past decades. And indeed, researchers are now paying much attention to the history of the stage and to the recent hosts of the dramatic texts among which are comic strips,⁹ paintings, dance, movies, and many other media. Yet, the plays under scrutiny were conceived for a particular type of playhouse, namely a wooden open-air structure in which the bulk of the spectators would spend several hours standing in the cold and the rain, surrounding the bare stage on three sides.¹⁰ One should also keep it in mind that the female parts were played by young men who had not yet begun to grow a beard. In addition, the public was so unruly and inattentive that their attention had to be caught and kept by a show with high visual qualities. These requirements caused the Elizabethan playwrights to resort to specific writing techniques that ensured a powerful connection with the early modern public. And yet, Shakespeare’s plays are also universal achievements that have sounded contemporaneous to successive generations of spectators, and they continue to be performed successfully in our modern playhouses. That they are still useful to us is made clear by their being so often performed on our stages at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, Shakespeare scholars cannot be viewed as wistful archaeologists eager to unearth a long-lost past, their eyes riveted on the cold earth: they look up at the world around them and their gaze encompasses life.

Shakespeare haunts our world that bears the vivid memory of a precious poetic heritage whose presence is conveyed by the titles of films like Le Lait de la tendresse humaine,¹¹ directed by Dominique Cabréra and released in 2001, cartoons like Walt Disney’s The Lion king which is a modern rendition of the story of Hamlet, the names of characters like Topaze¹² in the eponymous play written by French playwright and novelist Marcel Pagnol or Césariot in César, a film by the same author who was also a film-maker. In The Lion by Joseph Kessel, a little antelope is named Cymbeline. A bookshop in Marseilles was called ‘Le Roi Lire’.¹³ ‘Julietta’ is a model of Alpha Romeo cars. Emil Cioran, an iconoclastic Romanian philosopher who lived in Paris, said that the older he got, the less he enjoyed ‘playing [his] little Hamlet’.¹⁴ When a young girl says that her name is Ophelia or a young man that his is Romeo those who asked them their names are likely to be overcome by heart-warming emotions. The name Caliban¹⁵ can be found in many films, TV series (in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, for example) and novels, and it is sometimes used as an antonomasia to refer to natives. The list is endless. European languages still bear the stamp of this heritage that surfaces when some words or phrases, made popular by translators, are uttered or read. There exist innumerable variations on the formula ‘to be or not to be’ and some even circulate in nursery schools in France.¹⁶ Shakespeare is still an active presence in the things we see and in the air we breathe. But this heritage reaches far beyond the simple handing down of words. Drama also conveys visual scenes whose memory is branded in western culture: the figure of old King Lear walking through the storm on a deserted heath followed by his faithful Fool, pensive Hamlet holding a skull in his hand, great Othello kissing his wife before he strangles her in a burst of mad love and the statue of Hermione springing back to life unexpectedly; this is another endless list. We tend to call ‘Shakespearean’ the stories that involve inextricable family feuds and the fusion of opposites. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare’s world is oxymoronic.¹⁷ It intertwines sweetness and brutality, love and hatred, birth and death. Emil Cioran has encapsulated this as follows: ‘Shakespeare: when a rose and an axe meet …’ ¹⁸

Language is the preferred medium for commentary. We tend to express what we feel and think with words, especially in the academic world that feeds on bookish knowledge and produces books with a view to spreading and sharing knowledge. Accordingly, ideas and emotions are mediated through a system that relates the subjectivities to a collective experience of communication. Hence, the regular attitude consists in writing texts when it comes to commenting on drama or on images. Spontaneously, we speak about what a performance enables us to see and hear, we comment on what an image says, what it tells its observers, and we invite it to engage in dialogue with a text. Not to mention the critics who propose to read images or to analyse what is ‘written’ in them. Many commentators and philosophers have doubts about the capacity of a system of codification based on the yoking of the signifiers to the signified to account faithfully for a visual connection to the world and to express the subtle variations this connection involves. Some of them go so far as to call into question the capacity of language to render precisely enough any manner of ‘being in the world’. Interestingly, Emmanuel Levinas suggests that, rather than building meaning, the mediation of the sign is made possible by the meaning that comes upstream.¹⁹ In other words, contrary to what is generally admitted, language might not create meaning: on the contrary, it is meaning, the philosopher contends, that makes language possible. Primal signification requires the use of texts and images that act as complementary items. Says René Char, ‘The eye and the mouth do not live on the same continent. Their sources come from opposed inspirations their waters have different colours, their effects vary in their analogy’.²⁰ George Steiner has observed how hegemonic language can be in conventional human relationships and compared the words of commentary to a ‘paper Leviathan’.²¹ And indeed, very few intellectuals actually turn away from language when they feel the need to share their experience of life, of literature or images, notwithstanding how unruly words can be. ‘The life of the mind is narrowed and arrested by the weight of its eloquence. Instead of becoming masters of language, we become its servants’.²² Keeping language under control is a challenge speakers must take up if they want to express their thoughts as faithfully as they wish. Jean Tardieu has said how difficult this task is:

One should be wary of words. They are too beautiful, too shiny and their rhythm carries you away, to the point that you mistake a rumour for a thought.

You must constantly pull the bridles lest these too fiery horses might go wild.

For a long time, I was after the simplest, the most ordinary, even the barest words. But there is more about it than this: what matters most is their combination.

Whoever knew the secret use of daily words would enjoy unlimited power, – and would be scary.²³

This is probably one of the unwieldy cruxes that prompted George Steiner to declare that ‘the best readings of art are art’,²⁴ which seems to imply that dance and music could relevantly account for literary or visual experience. Although the critic uses the term ‘readings’ to refer to this ability – and paradoxically wrote a book to denounce the supremacy of language – he mentions the case of Robert Schumann who sat back at the piano when asked to explain a difficult piece he had just been playing. ‘When it speaks of music, language is lame’,²⁵ Steiner adds. And indeed, how can one possibly say the ‘vapour of art’?²⁶ In a time when reading tends to be discarded to the benefit of more rapid accesses to knowledge, the Franco-American philosopher was probably right to fear that ‘tomes of academic explanation and judgement’ might soon be ‘out of print and sepulchred in the decent dust of deposit libraries’.²⁷ The doctrine of ut pictura poesis is one of the active forces likely to force verbal commentary to give way to a different modality.

The ut pictura poesis²⁸ formula is borrowed from Horace’s Ars Poetica. It refers to a trend of thought that tends to narrow the gap between words and images, making them members of the same community. It raises a problem Philip Sidney discussed in his famous Defence of Poesy²⁹: we may wonder with him whether poems are ‘speaking images’ and, reversely, whether images are silent poems. Or, to put it differently, whether words and images are different phenomena that meet in their common capacity to account for a given experience. Contrary to the ut pictura poesis doctrine, the humanist tradition of the paragone insists that one of the terms must be subservient to the other.³⁰ One trend bridges the gap while the other widens it.

Picturing Shakespeare contains a series of drawings whose prototypes appeared to my mind while I was studying the Elizabethan playwright’s works. My activity as a Shakespeare scholar is time-consuming and it is necessarily nurtured by the regular use of critical studies. The birth of the illustrations included in this volume went hand in hand with the conception of university courses, lectures and conference papers. Part of this activity was preparatory work for Agrégation courses³¹ at Aix-Marseille University. Accordingly, daily contact with Shakespeare’s plays led both to the drafting of structured textual analyses and to the elaboration of images that contributed actively, in their own way, to the construction of a multi-layered response to the plays under scrutiny. The analysis of the exchanges between words and images is a constant feature of my daily activities and I even use my own drawings sometimes during my lessons to drive a few points home. As Emmanuel Guibert puts it, ‘a good drawing gives in-depth information about its subject even though it remains at the surface of things.’³² One of the aims of this book is to rehabilitate the image as an adequate medium for deep analyses and an efficient tool in the elaboration of complex projects. Its field of action, I contend, is not limited to the surface or to immediacy: it can operate deep in the folds of complex thought. The use of the word ‘illustration’ to refer to my drawings is in no way meant to downgrade the image as a sidekick to the dramatic text to which it would simply be holding up a mirror, as a mere visual echo for a lexical phenomenon. Etymology reminds us that the Latin word Illustrare means ‘to light up’. Accordingly, illustrating a theatre text consists in shedding light on the complex mechanisms of a work that thrives on the response of the public during the performances. It also implies that a thought is conjured up that was hitherto contained in the text (the medieval word illustratio means ‘apparition’) but that language failed to raise to the surface. If this is true, images do not duplicate texts in a servile or a didactic manner: they express something lingering deep in the dramatic text that they alone are able to reveal. The performance – a polymorphous event combining the spoken text, music, dance and the actors’ gestures – for which the dramatic text is destined, propitiates this hermeneutic fruition. Therefore, illustrations may refer to something that lies beyond the texts, available even before they were written, and that is made visible by the image. They make visible what texts make readable and what the stage can show. ‘An amazing Spring exists’, René Char says, ‘scattered among the seasons that spreads up to the armpits of death. Let’s become its warmth: we will carry its eyes’.³³ Words and images are fruit from the same growth.

I have just suggested that illustrations do not repeat obediently what texts say. This explains why the present book does not propose to include images in a system of interpretation consisting of two equivalent, juxtaposed forms: my words and my images convey complementary and contiguous views on the plays. The readers read the commentaries and look at the images. The shift from one verb (read) to the other (look) makes quite a difference: I postulate that an image cannot be read,³⁴ even though the cognitive capacities it demands may look beguilingly like those required by a text. It is true that these specific requirements may overlap at times, but words and images obey different rules that their addressees must observe. Images ‘steer thought towards the eye’,³⁵ Bernard Noël says. They are dependent on observation and the visual encounter with shapes and colours engenders a specific form of thought: ‘To show is to think’,³⁶ Tzvetan Todorov asserts. For that matter, an image is a mental phenomenon: cosa mentale, Leonardo da Vinci said. Daniel Arasse adds his voice to the polyphonous celebration of thinking images by saying that the type of thought they convey is ‘non-verbal’.³⁷ And Paul Cézanne chimes in, saying that he ‘thinks in paint’.³⁸ An old tradition also reports that Abraham Ortelius, a cartographer, was fond of saying that the works of his friend Peter Bruegel contained ‘more thought than pure painting’.³⁹ And yet the thoughts conveyed by the image are like no others: pictures are a world apart due to their immediacy and to their capacity to place a point of view before the observer’s eyes, whereas texts are revealed little by little by the slow reading activity. Thickness is the key to the understanding of images while linearity is the secret of texts. The sedimentary time attached to thickness has little in common with the time that pertains with the lines that stretch across the page. Hubert Damisch⁴⁰ has pinpointed the differences between these two forms of temporality that demand different attitudes and produce unreconcilable narrative modes. Nevertheless, critics may be at a loss to comment on images without texts even if they remember the words spoken by Francis Bacon: ‘It’s always hopeless to talk about painting – one never does anything but talk around it’.⁴¹ Giving precedence to images is not an easy task since the messages they convey may dissipate in the uncertainty of the receiving glances. What may the observers of an image feel? How do they respond to it and what thoughts, what emotions may arise from this silent encounter? The present analysis is not unlike conventional academic works since, like its predecessors, it gives pride of place to words so that the readers may exchange – rather than ‘start a dialogue’ – with the images it contains. But this view needs to be qualified: if the commentaries in the second part of this book aim to account for the numerous trajectories that propitiated the birth of the images punctuating it, their function is also to reveal something that lies beyond speech, as was indicated earlier. Not only will the dramatic text be analysed but, as it needs no addition, a unique relation to the world will be brought to light that was fashioned by the demiurgic playwright who wanted to get it across somehow. The dramatic performance is the happy seat of this ‘being in the world’ to which the image can hold up a mirror.

There always lingers a private savour in illustrations. They interweave inextricably emotions and the intellect, developing little by little in the readers’ mind as their exchanges with the dramatic text intensify. They appropriate a modality – language – and then turn it into something that it is not – an image. My activity as an illustrator derives from the germination of texts. So, it is paradoxically engendered by words. Nowadays, more and more academic events are devoted to transdisciplinary studies: that step across the old barriers between distinct research fields has been stepped across and the hitherto irreconcilable modalities have come to be seen as complementary. The TIL research centres (Centre InterLangues), a few groups in the CAER and the CIELAM at Aix-Marseille University and Illustr4tio at the Université de Bourgogne, for example, organize conferences that investigate these exchanges. The theories of adaptation have now become an autonomous research area that interrogates, among other areas of study, films, video games, cartoons, TV series and graphic novels. By yoking drawings and texts, Picturing Shakespeare falls within such transversal studies.

The first chapter of this book deals with the interplay between words and images. The notion of illustration will be discussed, along with the way colours address the eyes. The following chapters are interspersed with my drawings that provide its structure and its rhythm to the rest of the book⁴²: I have combined what I have gathered from long years spent studying Shakespeare’s drama with a fairly recent activity that has enabled me to consider his works from a hitherto unsuspected angle. One must keep in mind that drama turns the written text into speech and reading into a sensory activity. Words fly away from the pages of books and conquer performance spaces. It is no accident that I decided to use visibility as a means to comment on dramatic texts that were conceived with a view to addressing the spectators’ eyes and ears. Says Jacques Rancière, drama is ‘first and foremost the space in which the visibility of speech is displayed, the complex locus where what is said is translated into something that can be seen’.⁴³ The French philosopher could have added that it is also the place where the visibility of silence can be displayed.⁴⁴ As a matter of fact, silence is the development of language, even its greatest achievement. Philippe Jaccottet explains that ‘silence, as a servant, enters to tidy up the room’.⁴⁵ It is the best possible place for meditation, maybe the only territory of the truth.⁴⁶ Isn’t it too, as Pablo Neruda suggests, a major ingredient of seduction insofar as, by elaborating the absence of the beloved, it manages to conjure up desire that will be slowly deconstructed by his or her awaited presence?

You charm me when you are silent for you seem absent,

And you hear me from afar, and my voice cannot touch you.

Your eyes seem to have taken their flight

And it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth.⁴⁷

As it is both necessary and painful, silence is a prerequisite to the love quest. It best demonstrates the absence of the lover and provides the obstacle that love’s conquest requires. Marcel Proust was well aware of this: ‘Nothing draws two people more irresistibly toward each other than what keeps them apart and what barrier is more impenetrable than silence?’⁴⁸ he asks. Silence signals the presence of an absence. It is not a mere blank and Shakespearean actors know that the bard’s silence is Shakespearean too, the way Mozart’s music is not only in the notes,