Pictura, Scriptura, and Theatrum: Shakespeare and the Emblem

Abstract

The emblem and the theater are forms par excellence where the verbal and visual cohabit. Not surprisingly, therefore, the study of that moment of English theater when it achieved new heights, new sophistication, under the genius of Shakespeare and a cluster of other dramatists has recently been much concerned with invoking emblems, which also enjoyed prominence in late-sixteenth-century Europe.' Yet the invocation of emblems as a means of elucidating the crucial but elusive conjunction of word and image in the theater is by no means satisfactory. The dynamics of theatrical experience are more complicated, more fluid and volatile, than in the emblem, 2 and this fact has important consequences for the isolation and discussion of verbal and visual elements. Indeed, the methodological concerns of verbal-visual criticism seem (understandably) to get submerged in the historical scholarship of the emblem, and the assumptions that word and image

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