This is the sixth post in a series. To start from the beginning, click here.

In the past five posts, I have outlined an archive of images and demonstrated how visual analysis of images such as these can foster strong close-reading practices among undergraduate and advanced high-school students. Now I would like to turn my attention to the import of the digital medium in which my students are consuming the images. 

What is different about viewing these images online instead of on a projector in a classroom, in a museum, or in a rare-book room where one might find an older edition of Shakespeare containing, for example, engraved illustrations?

For one, the digital images are democratized in a way that the physical paintings cannot be. I believe that this manifests in two ways.  First, digitization allows for anyone with an Internet connection to view the images. Tufte, in her essay cited earlier in this series, taught at the University of Southern California and had easy access to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which just so happens to have a copy of the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost. Not everyone will be so lucky as to have access to a rare edition of an illustrated text; and in my case, my students are scattered all over the globe, so it would not matter any way. Even if Stanford had one of these paintings in its collection, I would still need to take a photograph and send it digitally to my students. Digitization makes images moveable so that a far greater number of people can enjoy them, and it allows for the creation of new viewing communities that would otherwise never exist. 

This brings me to a second effect of the democratization of images: whereas a painting or an illustration in a rare book can be fetishized to a certain extent, the proliferation of images through digital media makes an image more intellectually accessible for younger students. Anxiety about speaking about an image just isn’t as great when we diminish the magical qualities frequently associated with curated and archived objects and images. Rather than looking at an image in a museum or a library, students are consuming the image in their own spaces.

This is the fifth post in the series. To start from the beginning, click here.

The ambiguous nature of Ariel’s magic is also explored in the last image that I allow as an option for students: James Henry Nixon’s The Tempest (n.d.).

This watercolor depicts the report that Ariel gives about the tempest that he has orchestrated on Prospero’s behalf.  In this speech, Ariel says,

I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide, 
And burn in many places… The fire and cracks 
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune 
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble, 
Yea, his dread trident shake. (1.2.199-200, 204-7)

We see in Nixon’s painting that Ariel himself seems to be glowing as if he is on fire, or “flames amazement.” The landscape in this painting is tumultuous, mirroring Miranda’s description about the sea and sky being at war with one another: “The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch, / But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek, / Dashes the fire out” (1.2. 3-5).  In Nixon, the land is caught in this elemental battle as well, and it is difficult to tell where land stops and sea begins. Ariel is an awe-striking creature in this image, poised on a brink between a Christ like and a demonic figure. On the one hand, Nixon references a series of biblical images—the transfigured Christ, Christ walking on the water, Moses parting the Red Sea—but on the other hand, Ferdinand recoils in obvious horror. Nixon’s depiction of Ferdinand accurately represents the text on this point; Ariel explicitly says that Ferdinand goes quite mad with terror: “The King's son Ferdinand, / With hair upstaring—then like reeds, not hair— / Was the first man that leaped; cried, ‘Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here’” (1.2.213-216). Nixon takes Ferdinand’s comment about devils, which in The Tempest is directed to the storm itself, and applies it directly to Ariel. Whereas Fuseli and Fitzgerald emphasize one reading of Ariel over another, Nixon manages to convey both possibilities of Ariel’s character by focusing on the character’s connection to elemental nature through both his beauty and his power.

This is the fourth post in the series. To start from the beginning, click here.

The next group of images cluster around Ariel’s other song, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” (5.1.88); like in our last group, however, the two images work to present very different interpretations of Ariel’s character and the play.  John Anster Fitzgerald’s Ariel (c. 1858) focuses entirely on the sentimental, beautiful aspects of this song whereas Henry Fuseli’s Ariel (1800-1810) focuses instead on the darker, more macabre lines of this song. The song is worth quoting in its entirety to flesh out this difference:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. (5.1.88-96)

Fitzgerald’s watercolor merges the wholly positive images in this song—lying in the bell of the cowslip and living under a blossoming summer’s bough—into an image of a beautiful, androgynous figure reclining on the bough of a blooming tree that is filled with fanciful, diurnal birds. The stinging bee, the nocturnal owl, and the bat are nowhere to be seen.  

Fuseli's oil painting, in contrast, emphasizes some of the darker aspects of this passage.  Ariel flies on the back of a bat, which he controls with a star-studded rein. The sky behind him is mostly dark, which creates an ominous atmosphere in the painting. Underneath him, Ferdinand and Miranda lean in closely, and they appear to be moments away from embracing. Of course, in the play itself, we know that Ariel does not arrive in this scene by flying over them. He sings the song while dressing Prospero in the latter’s ducal attire. Ferdinand and Miranda are later discovered to be playing at chess (5.1.173. s.d.). Fuseli’s imaginative reworking of the scene suggests that Ariel has cast a spell over the lovers, and that the spell has its roots in dark magic even if the love itself is enlightening.