Pixels & Pedagogy
  • Pedagogy
  • About Me
  • Courses

Visualizing Shakespeare, pt. III

4/26/2014

0 Comments

 
This is the third post in a series.  To start from the beginning, click here.
Picture
William Hogarth's painting, A Scene from "The Tempest" (c. 1730), depicts the same moment in the play, but focuses attention on lines that happen just after, when Miranda sees Ferdinand for the first time and declares him, “A thing divine” (1.2.422), which not only draws attention to the human drama unfolding but also relies heavily on the religious undertones in the play.  In the Hogarth image, Ariel appears like a cherub.
Picture
Although Ariel’s fairy wings are visible, Hogarth is clearly drawing on religious iconography of childlike angels akin to Raphael’s cherubim in the Sistine Madonna.  
Picture
Ariel is also periphery to the action of Hogarth’s painting. Everyone in the painting looks at Miranda—the miraculous—whereas she looks intently on Ferdinand.  The colors she wears and the iconography associated with her, such as a lamb, make her into a strangely Marian figure; the scene, therefore, approximates the Epiphany, which is fitting since Ferdinand is discovering this wonder for the first time. Hogarth’s reading of this scene highlights the religious language of the text, but it downplays a more sinister side to the scene. In Shakespeare’s play, Ariel not only draws Ferdinand toward him with the tempting “sweet air” (1.2.397) but also threatens him with horrifying taunts about his father’s seeming demise: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes” (1.2.400-402).  In contrast, Hogarth’s Ariel appears wholly unthreatening as a childlike angel, and a lone angel at that (unlike the Dadd painting, wherein we see a bacchanalian community of spirits). Hogarth thus presents a strangely anesthetized version of the moment in the play, and he renders Ariel into a nonthreatening character. His religious interpretation suppresses the subversive pagan dance that Dadd suggests.

Next post
Last post
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Claire Dawkins

    English Instructor at Stanford's Online High School

    Archives

    August 2015
    May 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014

    Categories

    All
    Assignments
    Beaumont
    Behn
    Beowulf
    Bishop
    Brathwaite
    Cartier-Bresson
    Chaucer
    Coleridge
    Creative Writing
    Dickinson
    Donne
    Early American Literature
    Exams
    Gender Theory
    Genre
    Glaspell
    Horace
    John Smith
    Lesson Plans
    Literature Of Exploration
    Melville
    Milton
    My Smart Friends
    Ovid
    Pearl Poet
    Pynchon
    Queen Elizabeth I
    Rowlandson
    Shakespeare
    Sophocles
    Spenser
    Sterne
    Texts And Contexts
    Theory
    Visual Analysis
    Walker
    Whitman
    Williams
    Woolf
    Writing Instruction

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly