Shakespeare, thou art (not)

An exhibition of painting of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays does him no justice

The idea was born over dinner in 18th-century London. John Boydell, a well-to-do publisher and politician, was convinced that England lacked a suitably accomplished tradition of history painting — the grand style of epic moments and great men, spread across huge canvases. So, after consulting with the eminent artists of his day, he decided to jump-start it — by commissioning dozens of paintings of scenes by Shakespeare.

Boydell’s gallery, a remarkably influential private museum that opened in 1789, is the subject of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s intriguing new exhibition: “Marketing Shakespeare: The Boydell Gallery (1789-1805) and Beyond”. It includes paintings commissioned by Boydell, and other artifacts that show the generally dizzy and appallingly sentimental craze for all things Shakespeare at the end of the 18th century.

Boydell opened his gallery, a 4,000-square-foot space in a very good neighborhood, as part of concerted campaign to promote Shakespeare and elevate English taste. He persuaded prominent artists Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, George Romney and Henry Fuseli, to participate. He spent heavily on mediocrities, too. The gallery opened with 34 canvasses. By the time it went belly up in 1805 there were 167 paintings, and at least one for each play.

The fascinating thing about the current show is how awful most of them are. But often his artists produced small domestic dramas, willowy young men courting pale women in flouncy dresses, surrounded by the markers of domesticity one might expect in a Dutch scene of daily life.

William Hamilton’s The Duke of York Discovering His Son Aumerle’s Treachery is typical. The scene is from Richard II; the subject, a father’s uncovering of his son’s participation in a plot to the kill the king. The painting feels decidedly stagy. This is not OUR Shakespeare. Of course, static images of live performance are almost always painful to look at. Just as human beings are not meant to be seen immediately upon waking up, they are not meant to be seen fixed in frozen form while cavorting on stages.

It’s also curious to consider what an odd project Boydell’s gallery was. The Folger’s Georgianna Ziegler, who curated the show along with Ann Hawkins, points out that there was not an abundance of art available to the English public at the time.

Boydell was throwing open art to a much broader public. Fanny Burney, the novelist and diarist, visited the gallery. Author Charles Lamb, perhaps the most brilliant mediocrity of his age, visited as well, and wasn’t amused. For Lamb, making Shakespeare visual and tangible in images was an insult to the purity of the Shakespearean experience.

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One might borrow a metaphor Shakespeare obsessed over in his career. Boydell’s paintings are like the imprints on a coin. They reduce Shakespeare to something easily exchanged. The public remembers not Shakespeare but a distilled version of Shakespeare.

-Philip Kennicott(LAT-WP)