Aug 21, 2008

Shakespeare's World | Painting and Other Fine Arts

Shakespeare and the Continental Arts
We may never satisfactorily explain how Shakespeare was able to represent so full a measure of human experience in drama derived from a provincial England. Amid the upsurge in Renaissance arts England often seemed an enclave apart, a society inhabited by aggressive provincials, intensely chauvinist in opinion and conduct, marauding at sea, and on land fond of spectacular pageantry—so fond, indeed, that their most ghastly executions were a public ritual of barbaric cruelty transformed into art. When we read in Titus Andronicus the stage...