Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-l4dxg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T20:59:49.203Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

16 - The visual record: the case of Hamlet

from Part V - How?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

By
Barbara Hodgdon
Edited by
David Wiles  and
Christine Dymkowski
David Wiles
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Christine Dymkowski
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Get access

Summary

‘Look . . . upon this picture, and on this’

(Hamlet, III.iv.53)

Like Hamlet, confronting his mother with portraits of his father and of the brother who murdered him, theatre historians work within a realm of loss, attempting to re-member who (and what) has disappeared. Yet visual traces of performance – engravings, paintings, drawings, cartoons and photographs – persist: ghosted images return to haunt us. Also like Hamlet, mapping one portrait’s features against another, inauthentic and authentic images of a father, what theatre historians most desire is a visual image that preserves the paradox of a ‘theatrical real’. For Shakespeareans, that ideal image might show costumed players at work in a 1590s theatre space, performing a moment recognisable as deriving from a particular play – even, perhaps, including spectators. In 1925, E. K. Chambers introduced a pen-and-ink drawing purporting to show just such a scene: since then, the ‘Peacham drawing’ – and the forty lines from Titus Andronicus transcribed below it – have undergone numerous interpretive changes.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History , pp. 246 - 266
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Jenkins, Harold (ed.), Hamlet, Shakespeare, Arden, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1982)Google Scholar
Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 22–7Google Scholar
Sillars, Stuart, The Illustrated Shakespeare 1709–1875 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Laureat (1740), p. 31
Buell, William A., The Hamlets of the Theatre (New York: Astor-Honor, Inc., 1968), p. 10Google Scholar
Cullen, Finlan, ‘Maclise and Shakespeare’, in Murray, Peter (ed.), Daniel Maclise 1806–1870: Romancing the Past (Cork, Ireland: Crawford Art Gallery, 2008), p. 174Google Scholar
Young, Alan R., ‘Hamlet’ and the Visual Arts, 1709–1900 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p. 192Google Scholar
London Morning Chronicle (14 March 1814)
Morning Herald (14 March 1814), p. 245
Mills, John A., Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 83Google Scholar
Mayer, David, ‘ “Quote the Words to Prompt the Attitudes”: The Victorian Performer, the Photographer, and the Photograph’, Theatre Survey, 43:2 (2002), 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salvini, ’s Autobiography (1893)
Hughes, Alan, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 39Google Scholar
Hunt, Marvin W., Looking for Hamlet (New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 6Google Scholar
Meisel, Martin, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Dramatic Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 405Google Scholar
Postlewait, Thomas, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 245–6Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dennis, Looking at Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 20–4Google Scholar
Bassett, Kate, Independent on Sunday (10 August 2008)
Theatre Record 28: 16–17 (28 July–24 August 2008), 957
Phelan, Peggy, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 3Google Scholar
Silverstone, Catherine, ‘Shakespeare Live: Reproducing Shakespeare at the “new” Globe Theatre’, Textual Practice 19:1 (2005), 31–50, p. 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland.Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Photographic Message’, in Heath, Stephen, ed. and trans., Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 15–31.Google Scholar
Hodgdon, Barbara. ‘“Here Apparent”: Photography, History, and the Theatrical Unconscious’, in Pechter, Edward, ed., Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), pp. 181–209.Google Scholar
Hodgdon, Barbara. ‘Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still’, in Worthen, W. B. with Holland, Peter, eds., Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 88–119.Google Scholar
Merchant, W. M.Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).Google Scholar
Sillars, Stuart.Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×