Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

This was the age of the star. For the first time in the history of the theater, the playwright took second place to the actor; the interpretation of the role assumed primary importance in a assessing a performance. It was Mr. Kean's Hamlet first, and Mr. Shakespeare's second. What effects did this highly subjective, interpretive emphasis have on the drama? Where did it originate and how did it evolve? These questions are considered at length in the author's analysis of the nature of Romanticism itself as revealed in essays, novels, criticism, and by the actors themselves. The Jacobean origins of this revolutionary period are reviewed, followed by a close scrutiny of the critical writing of such contemporary thinkers as Hazlitt, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. This entirely new concept provides an important link between the practical theater and the contemporary philosophical thought of the time. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Shows how illustrated editions and paintings of the plays were originally produced and read as critical, social and political statements.