Remedios Perni a Fellow of Infinite Jest

Remedios Perni A Fellow of Infinite Jest

William Shakespeare approaches visual experience in most of his plays, either to privilege the power of sight over any other sense or to mistrust images for their fictitious simulation of true objects or people. Shakespeare’s reflection on visual stimuli is often related to artistic imagery. When the avid reader/spectator sees Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, she is actually experiencing the incarnation of a memento mori, one of the most reproduced iconographies in European art since the fifteenth century. Turned into the most common among illustrations of Hamlet, including paintings and photographs, this memento mori has re-emerged throughout time, attracting artists of all periods. This paper aims to examine the infinite circulation of energy from word to image and vice versa by focusing on the dialogic relations between Shakespeare’s plays and some old and recent visual appropriations of Hamlet’s memento mori.

There has always been a mutual interest between William Shakespeare and the visual arts. William Shakespeare addresses the visual experience in most of his plays, either to privilege the power of sight over any other sense – ‘I might not this believe / Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine eyes’ (Hamlet, 1.1 55-57)1 – or to mistrust images for their fictitious simulation of true objects or people: ‘I see thee still […] / There’s not such thing’ (Macbeth, 2.1, 45-47).2 The boundaries between illusion and reality become blurred through the madness of Lear, the hallucinations of Macbeth, and the Spectre of Hamlet’s father. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes observes that, when looking at his wife’s sculpture, ‘the fixture of her eye has motion in’t / As we are mock’d with art’ and also that ‘Art tutors Nature’, or even that Art is ‘Nature’s Ape’ (The Winter’s Tale, 5.3, 66-67).3 In this play, Shakespeare presents both Art’s dependence on Nature and Art’s ability to outdo Nature’s power: ‘Yet Nature is made better by no mean, / But Nature makes that Mean: so over that Art / which you say adds to Nature / is an Art that Nature makes’ (The Winter’s Tale).4 Remarkably, Shakespeare’s reflection on visual stimuli is often related to artistic imagery (the abovementioned sculpture, as well as the art of miniature, etc.). This acquaintance with the conventions of the visual arts

1 All Hamlet quotations have been extracted from Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, 1st edn, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 2 The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 223. 3 The Winter’s Tale, ed. by J. H. P. Pafford, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1963; repr. London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 4 Cited in Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 10. 32 Remedios Perni may often be seen in his use of art metaphors. Mushat Frye mentions the moment in which Claudius kneels by the side of Ophelia’s grave, playing the role of what he himself calls ‘a living monument’. Claudius says, ‘This grave shall have a living monument. An hour of quiet shortly shall we see’ (Hamlet, 5.1, 293-294). These lines refer to what he had earlier called ‘the painting of a sorrow: / A face without a heart’ (Hamlet, 4.3, 91-92).5 Claudius can be seen as ‘the living pantomime’6 of one of those figures of widows and children in stereotyped poses of mourning which garnished tombs in Tudor and early Stuart England in the 1590s, for instance The Tomb of Saint Peter’s Church, Titchfield, Hampshire, for the second Earl of Southampton. Underneath the rigid figure of the dead, who appears praying in horizontal position, it is possible to see his heirs as ‘weepers’ or ‘sorrows’, this latter term being the common denomination of such carvings.7 In order to provide us with an example of this practice, Merchant mentions Shakespeare’s comments on perspective in Richard the Second: ‘For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding Tears, / Divides one thing entire, to many objects, / Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon / Shew nothing but confusion, ey’d awry / Distinguish forme’.8 This image can be easily related to those elongated objects that have to be viewed at an oblique angle, specifically to Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533), in which the curious object in the foreground is a skull drawn in lengthened perspective. Placed at the bottom centre of the composition, the skull is rendered in anamorphic perspective, so that the spectator can see nothing but confusion until s/he looks at the picture from the side. Nonetheless, the most relevant example is still the image of Hamlet, contemplating Yorick’s skull, and embodying in his pose a memento mori, perhaps the most reproduced iconography in the history of Western art since the fifteenth century. It has survived in the popular mind as the most memorable single image of the melancholic Prince. But, again, although the introduction of this image was probably a remarkable innovation on the London stage (also appearing in The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur), Shakespeare was not creating something out of nothing. There was in fact a long and very popular tradition in which a man was shown carrying or contemplating a skull, and examples of this sprung in numerous art forms.

5 Also cited by Roland Mushat Frye, ‘“Looking before and after”: The Use of Visual Evidence and Symbolism for Interpreting Hamlet’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 45 (1982), pp.1-19 (p. 9). Frye quotes these lines in order to show the importance of visual symbols and visual references to understand Hamlet. 6 Frye, p. 10. 7 Ibid. 8 Merchant, pp. 9-10.