The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature

Description

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume　offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote.　Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section　explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation.　Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise　early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.　 Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Figures List of Editors and Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: To Look or Not to Look at Pictures? 1 An Edifying Pictura Loquens: Alberico Gentili’s Commentatio and His Defense of Drama in Elizabethan Oxford 2 Looking At and Through Pictures in Donne’s Lyrics 3 “A painted devil”: The Matter and Making of Images in Macbeth 4 Mirrors, Pictures, Optics, Shakespeare PART II: Confluences: English Texts and European Paintings 5 Over the Edge: Shakespeare, Judith, and the Virtuous Use of Female Indiscretion and Deception 6 “Be her sense but as a monument”: Lost Icons and Substitutive Figures in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline 7 The Notion of Picturing in Early Modern Literature: The Case of the Miniaturist Isaac Oliver (c. 1585–1617) PART III: Portraits on the Page and the Stage 8 “Take this picture which I heere present thee”: The Art of Portraiture in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences 9 Narrative Portraiture 10 Picturing in Little or in Stone? Miniature versus Monument in The History of the Tryall of Chevalry (Anonymous, 1605) 11 Performing Portraits: The Portrait as Prop and Its Performative Dimension in Early Modern English Drama PART IV: The Power of the Visual and the Verbal 12 Prospero’s Rainbow: Political Miracles in The Tempest 13 “Picture is the invention of heaven”: Ben Jonson and the Paradox of the Visual Index