셰익스피어와 영국 역사화(畵)

Shakespeare and English Historical Painting

&nbsp;&nbsp;Shakespeare&quot;s plays are the most fascinating sources of paintings along with the Bible and Greek myths. Pictures based on Shakespeare&quot;s plays accounted for about one fifth of the total number of literary paintings by British artists between 1760 and 1900. This number demonstrates how profoundly Shakespeare influenced British painters. In the contrary, the paintings evoked public interests in his plays and formed his popularity.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;John Boydell built the Shakespeare Gallery with an ambition to establish a school of historical painting in England and commissioned the leading English artists to illustrate Shakespeare&quot;s works. He issued engravings and prints based on the paintings. This endeavor is the first commercialization of Shakespeare. Some of the Boydell painters like Reynolds and Barry are showing a neoclassical style, very grand and symmetrical organized version of Shakespeare. They found visual equivalents of Shakespeare&quot;s sublime words and heroic actions in high classical paintings of Italy and followed the style of Michelangelo and Raphael to express Shakespeare.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;On the other hand, Hogarth who showed that Shakespeare&quot;s plays could be used as the basis for English history painting in advance of them tried to represent Shakespeare in English tradition of painting. And Other painters painted for the Boydell Gallery including Fuseli favored romantic themes : the grotesque and the fantastic.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Although Ralph Cohen stated that “illustrations are non-verbal interpretations,” paintings based on Shakespeare&quot;s works have been largely neglected in Shakespeare studies on the whole. Now, we have to embrace Shakespeare paintings as a tool to apprehend different reception of Shakeseare in different times.