British art and drama’s emancipation from the French Academy
SHAKESPEARE, HOGARTH AND GARRICK
Plays, painting and performance
ROBIN SIMON
256pp. Paul Holberton Publishing. £55.
“WHAT A WORK could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three: intuitive knowledge of men of every class made comprehensible through words, engraving tool and gesture respectively.” This celebrated observation by the German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is often quoted, but in Robin Simon’s magisterial study it becomes the focal point of an inquiry into the relationship between theatre and the visual arts. It was a relationship of which Hogarth and Garrick were keenly aware. Hogarth often compared himself to a dramatic writer, remarking that “my picture is my stage, and men & women my players”. Garrick, for his part, cultivated his image through paintings and engravings while fashioning himself as a Shakespeare redux.
Garrick caused a sensation with his performance as Richard III in 1741, and something of the impact of his naturalistic style of acting was captured four years later by his friend and promoter Hogarth. In the last act of the play Garrick’s Richard is seen in his tent having awoken from a bad dream, swathed in ermine and clutching a sword. His body describes a diagonal across the canvas, while his agitated state of mind is conveyed by the splayed fingers of his right hand, raised eyebrows and staring eyes, all connoting fear.
If Garrick’s acting ushered in a revolution in the player’s art, then Hogarth’s composition presented a new kind of history painting, one grounded in theatrical productions. Yet, as Simon points out, the play that Garrick acted and Hogarth delineated was not Shakespeare’s, but a heavily revised version by one of their contemporaries, the actor and playwright Colley Cibber. So successful was Cibber’s version that it eclipsed the original Shakespearean text well into the nineteenth century.
Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick explores the evolution of theatrical paintings and their relationship to their literary sources across the long eighteenth century. More often than not the literary source was an emended version of Shakespeare’s plays, which were rarely performed according to his text. Critics such as Shaftesbury and Richardson, as well as actors like Garrick, were aware that Shakespeare fell foul of the unities of time, place and action that were central to French theories of drama and painting, exemplified by Racine and Poussin. Thus, King Lear was given a happy ending and The Tempest became a musical. The emancipation of British theatre and art from the diktats of the French Academy is a central theme of Simon’s text, and it wa
