William Shakespeare

You know that old saying ‘never judge a book by its cover’? Well… I did. Back in September I made the dutiful trip to Waterstones to buy some Shakespeare plays for the forthcoming term, and when deliberating on which publication of Macbeth to purchase, I found that my eyes were being drawn toward the Oxford World’s Classics edition, which displayed a most captivating picture of a rather haunted-looking Lady Macbeth on the cover. A few weeks later, when I started reading the play, I became more and more mesmerised by this image and upon closer inspection found that the illustrator, Reginald-Grenville Eves, had based this cover illustration on John Singer Sargent’s portrait of 1889, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. After researching this astonishingly beautiful portrait, I began to think about the influence Shakespeare’s works have had upon the visual arts and how they have been able to inspire artists for more than four hundred years.

Widely held as one of the most notorious literary villains of all time, Lady Macbeth is one of the most formidable characters of Shakespeare’s creation. Ravenous at the prospect of becoming Queen of Scotland, Lady Macbeth takes the witches’ prophesy into her own hands and successfully persuades her husband to assassinate Duncan, the King, and frames his serving-men for his murder. In this painting Dame Ellen Terry, a renowned English theatre actress who donned the role in 1888, is seen adopting a very emphatic stance – one that was exquisitely captured by Singer Sargent for the purpose of the portrait – which shows Lady Macbeth presumably on the verge of crowning herself Queen of Scotland for the first time. The opulent colour palette employed by Singer Sargent in this portrait, which consists of rich emerald green, teal and glimmering gold, is most effective in endowing the painting with a sense of the theatrical, however, what I find most wonderful about this painting is how Singer Sargent has managed to capture the two defining aspects of Lady Macbeth’s character in one single portrait. Terry’s haunting, maddened wide-eyes and ghostly pale skin in this painting simultaneously convey her indefatigable determination to ascend to the Scottish throne, as well as presaging her eventual fate when she is driven insane by the guilt of King Duncan’s murder.

The most famous work of art to be inspired by a Shakespeare play is almost certainly Sir John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52). Millais’s painting depicts the tragic fate of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who, having been tormented into insanity by the recent deaths of her father and brother, throws herself into a river. Despite being one of the most famous moments in literature, Shakespeare chooses not to stage this scene, leaving it to our imaginations to conjure the gruesome image of Ophelia’s youthful and beautiful body submerged in the murky waters of death. The reason why this image is so potent is no doubt because we are obliged to devise it for ourselves, but Millais’s interpretation of it is, without question, a most peculiar one. Millais’s rendering of Ophelia’s death is profoundly influenced by the painterly style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists of which he was a founding-member in the mid-19^th Century. The Pre-Raphaelites were known for their highly elaborate, idealised depictions of nature, and evidence of this can be seen in Millais’s meticulous portrayal of each blade of grass, each leaf, and each petal in Ophelia. However, in this case, the artist’s approach to reproducing nature on the canvas appears to add a further narrative dimension to the subject. This almost obsessive attention to the gorgeous verdure of the flora and fauna surrounding Ophelia’s corpse appears to enhance the sense of tragedy of this scene; here was a young woman who was as beautiful and blooming as the flowers draped over her body, until but a few moments ago, when her life was brought to a devastatingly abrupt end.