[In the following essay, Davidson proposes that in the context of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, the term iconography may pertain to every visual aspect of a stage production. He also maintains that whereas Protestant iconoclasts of the period deplored the potential deceptiveness of visual images, Shakespeare and his contemporaries exploited the visual images of the Renaissance to enrich their plays.]

Peter M. Daly, in an important essay entitled “Shakespeare and the Emblem: The Use of Evidence and Analogy in Establishing Iconographic and Emblematic Effects in the Plays,” which deserves to be much better known, has provided some intelligent cautions concerning the use of terms such as “iconographic,” “iconological,” “iconic,” and “emblematic” in the discussion of dramatic literature.¹ While it is not entirely true that these terms have until recently been the province of the art historian alone, it is nevertheless useful, as Daly suggests, to keep in mind their precise meaning when applied to play texts and to theatrical production involving these texts: “Improper usage of terms leads to their debasement; our intellectual currency is devalued through inflationary spending.”²

Nevertheless, because the term “emblematic” as utilized to denote the theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time has become more or less accepted, it requires to be adopted as the preferred word to describe the stage of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The term was proposed by Glynne Wickham in the second volume of his Early English Stages in 1963.³ Wickham quite rightly saw something inherently medieval about the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage—something that set it off from the illusionistic stage which was associated with the Italian theater and which was first introduced into English practice by Inigo Jones in the Masque of Blackness in 1605. Just as the English visual arts of the Elizabethan period tended to revert to a new-medievalism that produced a retreat from realism in the paintings and sculptures by English artists,⁴ who mainly created works commissioned by aristocratic and other patrons of financial means, so too the theater (and the texts which formed the basis of theatrical productions) backed away from realistic stage portrayal. Instead of realistic portrayal (e.g., in a printed scene which might serve as a background to the action), the theater used its architecture, especially its façade, to establish the background of the stage action. It was therefore a theater which depended largely on the carefully costumed actors' ability to form tableaux and to act out visually meaningful scenes by the use of gestures.

Neither the tableaux nor the gestures were necessarily anything like a photographic image of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, but it is necessary that the visual dimension of the drama should be both vivid and explicable to the audience in attendance in a building with potential acoustical problems and imperfect sight lines. Every aspect of this stage, or of the drama designed for presentation on it, may not be comparable to the technique of the Renaissance genre known as the “emblem”: indeed, only the street pageantry of the time and the Jacobean masque were purely emblematic in this sense. Nevertheless, if we agree that “emblematic” can also be applied to a theater that manipulates visual scene in a non-realistic and often symbolic way, then the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is indeed properly designed by this term. In Shakespeare's case, his theater after 1599 was called the Globe; and, though the eighteenth-century evidence cited by Frances Yates to establish the roundness of the foundations of the theater has been called into question, its interior shape nevertheless may have been round.⁵ The Globe itself was definitely regarded as emblematic, and we further may be permitted, I believe, to use this term to denote the type of drama presented before its façade.⁶

Upon reflection, I think at the same time we need to be very careful about “iconic” as a general term to describe these dramas or this theater,⁷ since the word quite simply seems too closely related to a doctrine of picture which links the representation with the prototype.⁸ This doctrine in antiquity was associated with the Roman emperors, and it was widely believed that veneration directed to the pictorial representation was identical with that immediately directed to the person of the emperor in his actual presence. Transferred to Christianity, the doctrine became the focus of the well-known iconoclastic controversy in the Byzantine Church in which the iconodules insisted upon the usefulness of icons, illustrating the deity for worship and meditation. In the Western Church, the use of images of the deity and of saints became widespread, and in the high Middle Ages image theology distinctly influenced the modes of presentation of the music-drama (e.g., the Visitatio Sepulchri) in monastic churches and cathedrals. Particularity was avoided: generalized forms, joined with standard symbols (a key for St. Peter, for example), avoided the question of deception in the appearance of the individual figure in the visual arts. However, in the later Middle Ages the play of imagination, under the influence of new modes of thought, came to be the norm—a change which allowed a new emphasis on the particular instead of the earlier insistence on more idealized forms.⁹ Such representations, the objects of veneration, were precisely what were rejected by the more radical Protestants whose work of iconoclasm in England is well known. Oddly enough, in Protestant England, the religious icons of the Catholic past were replaced during the age of Elizabeth with new icons, especially in the arms of the queen, which appeared with great frequency in churches of the time. Though these are not realistic depictions of the monarch, they nevertheless are “iconic” in the sense that they are presented as objects of veneration as part of the cult of the virgin queen—objects which imply a transfer of earlier modes of veneration to the queen herself.¹⁰

It hence also will not serve to define an “icon” merely as “an image in which conceptual content predominates over the attempt to render perceptual knowledge”¹¹ and thus to apply this term either to the imagery present in the dramatic text or to the visual configuration on the stage in production in the early theater. The term is, of course, appropriate for those illustrations, including such non-representational ones, which feature the queen's arms—or which show forth the Renaissance impresa—but probably should not be regarded roughly as a synomym for “picture” or “picturable,” both terms which in themselves promote quite clear understanding. Further, the assumption that such images or stage configurations in the plays of a Renaissance dramatist must favor concept over precept will strike many as odd, for the argument here is based in modern preconceptions rather than in Renaissance ways of understanding ideas and perception. Seeing was recognized as more immediate than merely hearing words on the stage;¹² the spectacle was the source of experience beyond that contained in a lecture or sermon since it conveyed a visual display in which, at least in the context of the play, the spectator might participate.

Hence, too, the speeches of the play might be more affecting if they adopt references to visual objects, actions, etc., to make them more immediate to the experience of the audience. There is also, in the art of the greater dramatists of the English Renaissance, the possibility of drawing on the tension between picture and meaning,¹³ thus enriching the experience of seeing the play in the theater in the case of the spectacle and additionally stimulating the response also of readers who read the play as literature. The result can hence be complex indeed and involve a theatrical and literary art that possesses emotional and intellectual depth of a type that should be distinguished from the category which we have here distinguished as iconic.

A recent tendency to add the term “iconoclastic” to the vocabulary of criticism in relation to the handling of spectacle and imagery¹⁴ is unfortunate. The age of Queen Elizabeth was indeed an iconoclastic period of history, but the iconoclasm was aimed in large degree against those icons which had been the objects of veneration in Roman Catholic times. The deceptiveness of the images was stressed, and they were classified as “idols” through the Protestant denial of their efficacy in mediating between worshippers and the deity or saints.¹⁵ In the case of Shakespeare, his childhood must have brought him into contact with the destruction associated with the iconoclasm of the early part of Elizabeth's reign, when the town of Stratford-upon-Avon felt impelled to denude its Guild Chapel of most of its wall paintings—a task of iconoclasm that Shakespeare's father supervised shortly before his son's birth—and its parish church suffered from severe destruction of its images, a few of which remain in mutilated state to this day.¹⁶ Shakespeare probably shared the suspicion of the religious image that was current in Protestant England in his day, but the recognition of the potential for deception in an image generally is quite a different thing from the iconomachy directed specifically against the religious images that had been venerated.

When Lady Macbeth insists to her husband that they should “look like th'innocent flower, / But be the serpent under it” (I.v.74-75), she is not using the flower-serpent analogy to indicate any necessarily deceptive property of sight, but she is calling to mind a commonplace perhaps derived ultimately from Virgil's Third Eclogue¹⁷ and embedded in a well-known emblem in Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586). It is important to note that Whitney's explanation of his picture, a snake curled around a strawberry plant, emphasizes “flattringe speeche” (italics mine). Hence, by understanding the context of Lady Macbeth's statement, we recognize that her analogy is intended to reveal her hypocrisy and its attendant deception as an abuse of language as well as of appearance,¹⁸ but the audience is not thus deceived, for it is taken into her confidence in the play, which reveals what is in her heart. She thereafter attempts to appear to be the perfect hostess, but she does so in order to entrap the king by means of her hypocrisy. The audience, however, knows from the beginning that she is using a façade of honesty to achieve illegitimate goals.

Shakespeare is not here being iconoclastic, for he merely is dramatizing what the traditions of the theater and the visual arts had established concerning abuses of character. He is not questioning the honesty of aristocratic women presented on stage, but he is positing the possibility of deceptiveness in the human character—a deceptiveness of which he is aware in terms of his origin in the beginning of history when Eve was deceived by the serpent and was led thereafter herself to embrace deceptiveness in her relationships with her husband and the deity. The same potential for deceptiveness, may have led, in the view of many Englishmen in the Renaissance, to the creation of images to be venerated—images which the extreme Protestants of England regarded as not only deceptive but idolatrous. But the presentation of deception on stage is not the same as iconomachy or iconoclasm, the attempt to destroy images, usually of a religious nature.

On another level, the theater itself offered a place which its opponents saw as characterized by hypocrisy and deceit. Here actors dressed up in costumes appropriate for many different ranks in society; on the stage, as David Bevington observes, men were released from the normal legal restrictions concerning dress which would have each person garbed appropriately for one in his or her vocation.¹⁹ In the case of women's roles, the actors were perhaps most far from what their roles seemed to denote, since transvestism involved a kind of temporary transformation that some found particularly offensive.²⁰ But in any case, the anti-theatrical element in Elizabeth's time found the stage dishonest because, in the words of an earlier critic, it presented “signis without dede.”²¹ As Prynne insisted, God desires “all men at all times, to be such in shew, as they are in truth: to seeme that outwardly which they are inwardly; to act themselves, not others. …”²² That Shakespeare in particular found the function of the actor to provide a convenient analogue to deception is clear from Richard III, where the villain-hero of the play is a prize hypocrite and actor, and from Macbeth, in which the protagonist like a player puts on the costume of a king to disguise what underneath he is. In Hamlet, Claudius compares his hypocritical speech to that of the prostitute's painted face (III.i.49-52), but the face painting of actors was considered by the enemies of the stage to be equally dishonest.²³

While the motive of the enemies of the stage have been studied and their connections with the iconoclastic movement against the visual arts demonstrated, there is no evidence that Shakespeare, in spite of his occasional use of analogues derived from the theater as signs of hypocrisy and deceit, rejected the spectacle or the imagery of the theater and drama in the manner we would expect of the iconoclast or of one who thoroughly hates picture, which is for such persons to be totally rejected because it is not what it seems. Ben Jonson, in spite of his differences with Inigo Jones concerning the primacy of text in establishing the meaning of the stage spectacle of the masques, could still insist that the person who “loves not Picture is injurious to Truth: and all the wisdome of Poetry.”²⁴ No doubt Shakespeare and his fellow actors as well would have agreed with an assertion extending Jonson's statement to theatrical spectacle. To have thought otherwise would have been to write and act out of a sense of cynicism, a stance that would be totally inconsistent with the ethics promoted by the plays themselves.

The meaning of the visual aspects of the plays, however, is a subject of some controversy; it is not always possible in our time to fathom precisely what the playwright intended a particular scene to mean, and we cannot always know how audience responded to the imagery imbedded in the text or to the stage spectacle. In the instance of Simon Forman's attendance at a production of Macbeth in 1611, his reaction to three visual tableaux was apparently intense—i.e., the scenes of the bloody hands following the murder, of Banquo's ghost, and of the queen's sleep walking.²⁵ But how important was the iconography of the play in determining the spectator's response to it when weighed against the effect of the language of the drama?

The term “iconography” is a handy one, since it can include both the meaning of the imagery which is used rhetorically in the language of the play and the meaning of the visual tableaux actually seen by the eyes of the spectators who have come to see the play. Iconography, in other words, potentially involves the entire visual display of the drama as well as the “imagery” present in the text of the play. Included may be the use of costumes and stage properties.²⁶ Study of such aspects of the drama or staging should not, however, lead us to expect depths of meaning that may arbitrarily be read back into the play from the standpoint of the study of the visual arts or even upon occasion be grounded in certain descriptions of the type found in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, though on the whole this work can be extremely useful when treated with appropriate tact. When examining the iconography of a play, it is necessary that its symbolism should be sufficiently explicable, and also we need to recognize that iconographic tableaux in a stage work should not be so far removed from the experience of the audience that it is unable to make sense of it. As Dieter Mehl has pointed out, “Visual symbolism becomes almost meaningless if it is too subtle to be obvious to the majority of the spectators.”²⁷

But it is also important to stress that often the iconography, though it might seem opaque to modern readers and audiences, had a popular basis in the Renaissance and during that period had even informed the visual traditions utilized in the street pageantry.²⁸ The bloody dagger seen by Macbeth in a vision, and then the bloody daggers used by him in the murder, are iconographic signs which designate the injustice of this terrible deed of murder against one whose kingly being represents the unity and health of the state; at the same time, the bloody dagger is shown by Ripa to be a standard symbol of tragedy itself—the genre of which Macbeth partakes.²⁹ Macbeth's bloody hands, in turn, are signs of human guilt, which responds to deeds too terrible for the unhardened conscience to cope with without the assistance of the principle of forgiveness. The sociological implications of these scenes in Macbeth are of extreme interest, since the tensions in the play reflect the pressures that have been located in the social order itself—pressures which set the ideal of the unity and harmony against the striving for social position by persons located at various ranks in the hierarchically arranged society. In no sense should we attempt to understand patterns of iconography in a drama in formalistic terms alone, for the play is, as commonsense should tell us, rooted in the structures of Elizabethan society which were felt to participate in the natural hierarchy of the Chain of Being that Arthur O. Lovejoy identified more than three decades ago.³⁰ Even the symbolism of the costumes of the play, ranging from the flat caps of the citizens to the crowns of the monarchs, points to such social differentiation.³¹

Like the portraits painted by the English painters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the plays were not only non-realistic but also filled with details that appeal to more than merely the eye.³² The taste for combining elaborate symbolism with relatively realistic painting had been established by the Flemish painters of the fifteenth century; for English art in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the scene is laden with details which are indicative of social position or of other kinds of meaning that are designed to set the object in a larger perspective. With the turn away from perspective toward a kind of neo-medievalism, the result nevertheless is an art which cannot be approached successfully without recourse to iconological study. So, too, the study of the drama requires a knowledge of iconography and of the larger contents of that iconography—i.e., of the historical locus of the work³³ as well as of the phenomenological presuppositions of the time. In the case of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and theater, the action is oriented within a cosmos which is not the mechanical construct of post-Hobbesian thought,³⁴ and hence the handling of meaning involves more than an appeal to pre-formed concepts. The iconography of the age of Shakespeare needed to be lived rather than merely to be entertained as intellectual possibility, and this fact requires not to be ignored in our iconological study of the drama and theater of the period.

This survey of terminology is intended, of course, only as an introductory notice intended to clarify some matters of critical usage. The larger question of stage iconography and the relationship of drama to traditional visual symbolism and emblem literature properly remains an intense area for research. If such study avoids the pitfalls of source study and of formalist methodology, our knowledge may be considerably broadened with regard to our understanding of the iconographic contexts in which the drama and theater existed. This approach, which owes so much to Aby Warburg, the school of scholarship which he founded, and the Warburg Institute, is particularly appealing because it relates the study of Renaissance drama to the living structures of society and to the psychological forms of the period—a study which is worthy of the humanities, if indeed, as E. H. Gombrich is reported to have insisted, the humanities are to function as our cultural memory.³⁵

Notes

1. Peter M. Daly, “Shakespeare and the Emblem: The Use of Evidence and Analogy in Establishing Iconographic and Emblematic Effects in the Plays,” in Shakespeare and the Emblem: Studies in Renaissance Iconography and Iconology, ed. Tibor Fabiny, Papers in English and American Studies, 3 (Szeged: Department of English, Attila Jozsef University, 1984), p. 117.

2. Ibid.; see also the commentary by the same author in his Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979), passim.

3. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660, I, Pt. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 3-12.

4. See Roy Strong, The English Icon (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1969), pp. 13-20.

5. Frances A. Yates, Theater of the World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 130, citing Hester Thrale's account; cf. C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 6-7.

6. The importance of the façade of the theater for the Globe and similar theaters in London during Shakespeare's time has been established by George Kernodle, From Art to Theater (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 130-54; this view has recently been recommended by David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 11-12.

7. Obviously there will be those who will disagree with my caution; see, for example, John Doebler's term “iconic imagery” (Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures [Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1974]). Needless to say, Doebler's book is one that I have otherwise found most valuable.

8. See Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 8 (1954), 81-151; Sixten Ringbom, “Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 111 (1969), 159-70. See OED s. v. “iconic” (b). The term is also properly applied to portraiture in painting and sculpture.

9. See my From Creation to Doom (New York: AMS Press, 1984), Chapt. VII.

10. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 121; Frances A. Yates, Astraea (1975; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 29-87.

11. James Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 2.

12. Huston Diehl, “Iconography and Characterization in English Tragedy 1585-1642,” Comparative Drama, 12 (1978), 113-22.

13. See Daly, “Shakespeare and the Emblem,” pp. 51-52.

14. See Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm, passim.

15. See the study by Phillips, The Reformation of Images, passim, for a survey of the iconoclastic movement in England.

16. Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Statford-upon-Avon, ed. Richard Savage, Dugdale Soc., 1 (Oxford, 1921), p. 128; J. Harvey Bloom, Shakespeare's Church (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), passim.

17. George Lyman Kittredge, ed., The Tragedy of Macbeth (Boston, 1939), p. 116.

18. See Ann Barton's “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language,” Shakespeare Survey, 24 (1971), 19-30, and also Inga-Stina Ewbank, “’More Pregnantly Than Words’: Some Uses and Limitations of Visual Symbolism,” Shakespeare Survey, 24 (1971), 13-18.

19. Bevington, Action Is Eloquence, p. 37.

20. Though her article focuses on the medieval drama rather than the theater of Shakespeare's time, some important recent remarks on transvestism on the stage are contained in an article by Meg Twycross, “Transvestism in the Mystery Plays,” Medieval English Theatre, 5 (1983), 123-80.

21. A Middle English Treatise on the Playing of Miracles, ed. Clifford Davidson (Washington, D.C., 1981), p. 40.

22. Histriomastix, sig. X4; cited by Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 92. See also Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 29-51.

23. See Annette Drew-Bear, “Face-Painting in Renaissance Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama, NS 12 (1981), 71-93.

24. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, P. and E. Simpson, VIII (Oxford, 1947), as cited in Stephen Orgel, “The Poetics of Spectacle,” New Literary History, (1971), 370.

25. Macbeth, ed., Kenneth Muir, 9th ed., New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xvi-xvii.

26. See Bevington, Action Is Eloquence, pp. 35-66.

27. Dieter Mehl, “Emblematic Theatre,” Anglia, 95 (1977), 132.

28. See David Bergeron, “The Emblematic Nature of English Civic Pageantry,” Renaissance Drama, NS 1 (1968), 167-98.

29. See my “Death in His Court: Iconography in Shakespeare's Tragedies,” Studies in Iconography, 1 (1975), 78-79.

30. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936).

31. See the study by Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town,” Past and Present, No. 98 (1983), pp. 3-29, and, on costume, G. K. Hunter, “Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the Elizabethan Stage,” Essays and Studies, 1980 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), pp. 16-47.

32. On English paintings of this period, see Roy Strong, The English Icon (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 13-20.

33. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 11.

34. See my “Renaissance Dramatic Forms, Cosmic Perspective, and Alienation,” Cahiers Élisabéthains, No. 27 (April 1985), 1-16.

35. See Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 27.