Schedule / Horaire
Saturday 26 April 2014, 15h-18h.
Room: ENS, salle des Actes.
Leader / Organisateur
Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)
Participants
- Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University (USA)
Ekphrastic Criticism in Practice: Making the (Reader) “See” Shakespeare-in-Performance - Elizabeth Howie and Dr. Tripthi Pillai, Coastal Carolina University (USA)
“So Full of Shapes is Fancy”: Photogenic Time and Space in Twelfth Night - José Manuel González, University of Alicante (Spain)
Painting and Representing Gender in the Drama of Early Modern England and Spain - Michele De Benedictis, University of Cassino (Italy)
The substantial pageant of majestic vision: Shakespeare, Stuart Masques, and the Theatrical Paragone of Arts - Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia (USA)
Deceiving Art in Venus and Adonis - Peter Latka, University of Toronto (Canada)
“All Adonises must die”: Shakespeare, Titian, and Elizabethan Visual Culture - Armelle Sabatier, University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France)
Roses and Blood: Depicting and Visualising Red in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece - Laura Beattie, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany)
“I understand her signs”: Ekphrasis and the Male Gaze in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus - Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
“Your painted counterfeit”: Drawing Portraits and Writing Sonnets - Keir Elam, University of Bologna (Italy)
“Wanton pictures”: The Baffling of Christopher Sly and the Visual-Verbal Intercourse of Early Modern Erotic Art - François-Xavier Gleyzon, University of Central Florida (USA)
Opening the Sacred Body: Shakespeare and Uccello - Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Two Scenes of Drowning: Ophelia and Clarence’s Dream - Julia Cleave, Member of the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy (UK)
“Well-painted passion”: Shakespeare and the Bassano Fresco - Guillaume Mauger, Paris IV-Sorbonne (France)
“I have drawn her picture with my voice”: Desiring Gaze and Perspective Tricks in Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Portraits - Hanna Scolnicov, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)
Both Goddess and Woman: Cleopatra and Venus - Olivia Coulomb, Aix-Marseille Université (France)
Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra: between Stasis and Movement - Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)
“Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow”: Visual Representation and Ekphrastic Tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece - Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
“Those foundations which I build upon”: Construction and Misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale - Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Maternity and the Visual Arts in Shakespeare’s Romances - Giuseppe Leone, Università di Palermo (Italy)
“Hath Death lain with thy wife”: Eroticized Death Iconography in Shakespeare
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University (USA)
Ekphrastic Criticism in Practice: Making the (Reader) “See” Shakespeare-in-Performance
The act of reading and re-viewing stage performance, of re-presenting or re-visualizing – alas, never replicating – a mise-en-scène, can perhaps be the more fruitfully considered if we are permitted to invoke an ancient rhetorical process, that of ekphrasis and its defining quality of enargeia (or “vividness”). Defined in the Progymnasmata as “a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes”, a way of “making the listener ‘see’ the subject in their mind’s eye”, it is an approach, finally, that makes listeners into “spectators”—with the additional effect of producing an emotional impact, involving them imaginatively and affectively in the event.
2. Elizabeth Howie and Dr. Tripthi Pillai, Coastal Carolina University (USA)
“So Full of Shapes is Fancy”: Photogenic Time and Space in Twelfth Night
Our paper explores the photographical logics of Twelfth Night through a reading informed by the theories of Barthes and Deleuze. We contrast Malvolio’s poetics of photogenic framing to Feste’s nomadicism, which lacerates the frame, calling attention to the event and moment of the punctum. Through photographical logics we examine characters’ mediation of vision in tropes of presence and absence, the extraction of moments from time, indexicality, light, madness, duplicity/duplication/multiplication, posing, and framing. Our strategically ahistorical methodology engages innovatively with the paradoxical movements and temporalities of empowerment and disempowerment that vehiculate the pleasures and agonies of staging appearance in the play.
3. José Manuel González, University of Alicante (Spain)
Painting and Representing Gender in the Drama of Early Modern England and Spain
Dramatists and painters achieved notoriety and artistic excellence in early modern England and Spain. The paper examines the ways in which dramatists appropriated painting to represent gender in the drama of early modern England and Spain as theatre was regarded as a visual art. By appropriating painting, dramatists enriched their dramatic and theatrical possibilities and heightened the visual impact of the performance. It also explores the aesthetic ideas on painting and gender representations as well as the interaction between painting, gender, and dramatic art in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and The Winter’s Tale and Calderón’s The Painter of His Dishonour that reflect the ambivalence and conflictive relationships of visual images and textual representations in Shakespeare and his Spanish contemporaries.
4. Michele De Benedictis, University of Cassino (Italy)
The substantial pageant of majestic vision: Shakespeare, Stuart Masques, and the Theatrical Paragone of Arts
Aware of the classical paragone of arts, royal masques at Whitehall privileged the primacy of visual artistry over poetical contents by the sophistication of sceneries and perspective. This paper focuses on the influence of masque aesthetics on current drama, as voiced in the rival claims by the Poet and the Painter in Timon of Athens and re-echoed by the chief creators of Stuart spectacles: the inventor of dramatic verses, Ben Jonson, and the stage designer Inigo Jones. Shakespeare’s inset masques-within-a-play contributed to this debate, reconsidering the visual display of court entertainments either as ephemeral shows or unique works of art.
5. Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia (USA)
Deceiving Art in Venus and Adonis
In this paper, I look at Shakespeare’s attention to the visual in Venus and Adonis. My focus is chiefly on two moments in the poem in which Shakespeare explicitly mentions visual art. The first is his reference to a painting of a horse in a scene in which he is discussing two horses in the poem; the second is a comparison between Venus’s sexual frustration and the famous story of the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Finally, I look at the importance of the act of seeing in the poem’s conclusion.
6. Peter Latka, University of Toronto (Canada)
“All Adonises must die”: Shakespeare, Titian, and Elizabethan Visual Culture
Shakespeare structures Venus and Adonis around two prominent iconographical episodes: “The Courtship of Venus and Adonis” and “The Departure Scene”. While Titian’s Venus and Adonis (1593), in which Adonis appears to be breaking away from Venus to pursue the hunt is infused with considerably more gravitas than Shakespeare’s depiction of a comic struggle, the similarities between Titian and Shakespeare’s innovations call attention to themselves. This paper investigates the relationship between these two representations of the “Departure Scene”, while maintaining an awareness of Coleridge’s observation that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is designed as a series of sharply etched scenes.
7. Armelle Sabatier, University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France)
Roses and Blood: Depicting and Visualising Red in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece
While many critics have studied the rhetoric of colours in Venus and Adonis, the subtle codification of colours in The Rape of Lucrece seems to have drawn little attention. This paper aims at exploring the meaning and aesthetic value of red in its association with white and black in this poem. By taking into account the rhetoric of colours in poetry and the varied literary conceits, this study will highlight parallels with Elizabethan visual arts. Likewise, Lucrece’s criticism of the painter’s art conceals the ongoing rivalry between the painter and the poet to depict and visualise colours in The Rape of Lucrece.
8. Laura Beattie, Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany)
“I understand her signs”: Ekphrasis and the Male Gaze in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus
Ekphrasis is commonly described as ‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan). However, Elsner suggests the true subject of ekphrasis is not ‘the verbal depiction of a visual object, but rather the verbal enactment of the gaze that tries to relate with and penetrate the object’ and this definition becomes highly significant in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus. By considering these texts in this way, we find that rather than merely indulging in the paragone, Shakespeare shows ekphrastic representation as a means of power with which violence, the male gaze and suffering are inextricably linked.
9. Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia (Italy)
“Your painted counterfeit”: Drawing Portraits and Writing Sonnets
My paper will analyze the way in which Shakespeare elaborates the traditional association between painting and poetry, with a particular attention to the ambiguous affinity, both theoretical and practical, between the art of drawing portraits, and especially miniatures, and that of verbal praising, and specifically of writing sonnets. I will show how the triumph of the sonnet sequences coincides with that of portraits and miniatures, and consequently demonstrate how the idea of sonnet writing as portraying, and particularly limning, is present in many Canzonieri of the period. I will then discuss Shakespeare’s complex reflection on this rhetorical and conceptual paragone.
10. Keir Elam, University of Bologna (Italy)
“Wanton pictures”: The Baffling of Christopher Sly and the Visual-Verbal Intercourse of Early Modern Erotic Art
This paper investigates the Lord’s cryptic order, in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, to “hang around” his chamber with his “wanton pictures”, in order to baffle Christopher Sly. The promised erotic pictures have a complex intertextual and interartistic verbal-visual history, ranging from Gascoigne’s adaptation of Ariosto’s Supposes to Marcantonio Raimondi’s lost engravings of Giulio Romano’s “wanton” drawings and Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi. The Induction’s brief ekphrases of the pictures, however, do not describe pornographic representations of sexual athleticism, à la Raimondi, but rather episodes of Ovidian eroticism, not unlike Romano’s frescoes decorating the Palazzo Te in Mantua.
11. François-Xavier Gleyzon, University of Central Florida (USA)
Opening the Sacred Body: Shakespeare and Uccello
The paper aims at rethinking the Eucharistic utterance “This is my body … This is my blood” not merely as the key formulation of representation, but first and foremost as a decisive role in the attempt to write the body as a site/sight of terror and torture. Focusing upon Shakespeare’s drama along with specific paintings by Crivelli, Cimabue, and Paolo Uccello, the paper traces the phenomena and events of opening and cutting that leave their ekphrastic imprints upon the textual landscape of The Merchant of Venice. It will not be a question here of repeating or returning to the paradigm of the circumcision, but of highlighting that Shylock’s attempt to open the body, to make an incision into the Christian body of Antonio represents and reproduces a willingness to attack and to profane the Eucharist.
12. Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Hacettepe University (Turkey)
Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Two Scenes of Drowning: Ophelia and Clarence’s Dream
Shakespearean ekphrasis involves the verbal representation of a certain visual representation. In Sir Philip Sidney’s words, “the speaking picture” describes this kind of painted imagery being treated as if it were a work of pictorial art. There are examples of verbal paintings of human suffering either physical or mental in the Shakespearean canon. In Hamlet Gertrude gives the ekphrasis of how Ophelia is drowned, singing her song and appearing like a blossoming flower. In Richard III Clarence in his prison cell describes his dream of drowning. My paper will deal with pictorial representation of drowning and thanatos in Hamlet and Richard III.
13. Julia Cleave, Member of the Academic Board of the Temenos Academy (UK)
“Well-painted passion”: Shakespeare and the Bassano Fresco
In 2008, Professor Roger Prior presented his discovery of a remarkable series of cross-references between three prominent families in the town of Bassano del Grappa and Shakespeare’s two Venetian plays. His most striking finding was the degree to which the details of an elaborate fresco, painted by Jacopo Bassano on the façade of the Casa dal Corno, illuminates otherwise obscure tropes in both these plays and, in particular, an enigmatic concatenation of imagery in Act III of Othello. The aim of my paper will be to assess the implications of these findings with reference to the rubric of the seminar.
14. Guillaume Mauger, Paris IV-Sorbonne (France)
“I have drawn her picture with my voice”: Desiring Gaze and Perspective Tricks in Shakespeare’s Rhetorical Portraits
The rhetorical portraits-verbal constructs through which the human figure is construed as a portrait-featured in plays ranging from Twelfth Night to Pericles, exhibit recurring patterns, such as an erogenous elusiveness of features, a dialectics of opposites through which no synthesis is achieved, a backfiring of the gaze evocative of the ‘Medusa topos’. This paper will argue that these portraits draw less from the art of miniature painting, which they may nevertheless be said to comment on, than from mechanisms inspired by the “turning-pictures” and anamorphic images that were popular in Shakespeare’s time.
15. Hanna Scolnicov, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)
Both Goddess and Woman: Cleopatra and Venus
Shakespeare describes Cleopatra on the barge as “o’erpicturing” Venus, thus elevating her above a wide range of Renaissance paintings and Classical frescoes of the goddess. In the Renaissance and the Baroque, the goddess of love and beauty is usually depicted as a seductive woman, almost nude, often in a semi-reclining position, sometimes with some mythical attributes. The tension between the two aspects of “Venus” as both goddess and human model is echoed in the figure of Cleopatra, whose golden statue was placed by Julius Caesar in the newly built temple of Venus Genetrix, in 46 B.C. Shakespeare’s characterization of Cleopatra reflects this duality.
16. Olivia Coulomb, Aix-Marseille Université (France)
Shakespeare’s Octavia and Cleopatra: between Stasis and Movement
In Shakespeare’s time, the visual arts were flourishing on the Continent, but one can wonder what their impact exactly was on the playwright’s vision of art. A play such as Antony and Cleopatra is characterized by a complex web of human statues coming from Europe and interweaving with a specifically Jacobean vision of art. On the one hand, the tragedy stages a seemingly conventional vision of art seen as seductive and potentially dangerous. Yet, on the other hand, it also introduces a more daring aesthetic approach, which is especially innovative as far as statues are concerned.
17. Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo (Italy)
“Pencill’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow”: Visual Representation and Ekphrastic Tension in Othello, Cymbeline, and Lucrece
Considering intertextuality in the early modern period to be not only poetic but also figurative, this paper proposes an intermedial conversation between drama and painting, focusing on two particular iconographic topoi of visual representation in Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance art: the ekphrastic description of the sleeping woman portrayed as a mental rape in both Othello and Cymbeline and the narrator’s description of the sleeping woman and the actual ravishing in The Rape of Lucrece. The juxtaposition of these two different literary and pictorial traditions of male fantasy may throw some fresh light on Shakespeare’s dramatic use of ekphrasis.
18. Muriel Cunin, Université de Limoges (France)
“Those foundations which I build upon”: Construction and Misconstruction in The Winter’s Tale
This paper aims to examine the presence of architectural imagery in The Winter’s Tale, a play that is most often cited for its evocation of Giulio Romano. This play, whose plot is built upon Leontes’ misconstruction, is also famous for its two-part structure hingeing on the pivotal presence of Time and bridging the gap between Sicily and Bohemia. This peculiar construction can be read in architectural terms as the opposition between Leontes and Paulina, as the opposition between two plots – the former devised by a bad architect, the latter devised by a wise architect, with Time playing an ambivalent role.
19. Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Roma Tre University (Italy)
Maternity and the Visual Arts in Shakespeare’s Romances
Twice in Shakespeare’s romances — in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale — a mother dies in order to resuscitate, as an agent of reconciliation. In both plays death is problematically related to childbirth and the uncanny side of pregnancy. What kind of metamorphosis (or transfiguration) does the mother undergo in the interval which takes her from death to life again? Drawing on the ways in which the female body ‘infects’ and finally clarifies the male gaze, I want to explore the ways in which romance, theology, and the Renaissance Italian visual art combined to influence this cathartic/purgational representation of the maternal.
20. Giuseppe Leone, Università di Palermo (Italy)
“Hath Death lain with thy wife”: Eroticized Death Iconography in Shakespeare
According to Philippe Ariès, during the sixteenth century a new representation of Death spreads throughout Europe. The new figurative topos abandons the image of the rotten skeleton with the scythe cutting down human bodies to set up a new artistic proposal which appears both violent and erotic. Actually, an unprecedented carnal impetus drives the representation of Death in the paintings or engravings by Dürer, Baldung Grien, Niklaus Manuel, Sebald Beham, also affecting a large number of literary works composed during the XVI-XVII centuries. This paper aims at exploring the occurrences of this dreadful-erotic figurative paradigm in Shakespeare’s canon.