Macbeth and the Case of the Painting

(This is the final part in a three part essay series. Part 1. Part 2.)

It has been said too often of British painting that its inspiration lies always in literature. As painters, our artists are no better than illustrators of poetry or fiction.
—Sacheverell Sitwell, Narrative Pictures

In his book Painting Shakespeare, Stuart Sillars describes and interprets a painting of Macbeth by John Wootton. In the foreground of the painting, Macbeth and Banquo (clothed in Scottish dress nearly a quarter-century before Macklin’s 1773 London production did so in the theater) encounter the three witches. In the middle ground, two attendants hold the soldiers’ horses, while Macbeth’s army can scarcely be seen in the distance.

(Click to Enlarge)

Sillars argues that rather than illustrating theatrical practice, Wootton’s painting uses techniques drawn from art history to offer a “reading” of Shakespeare’s play:

Wootton’s painting is an early example of a discursive medium increasingly significant during the eighteenth century: the visual image that offers a critical reading of one of the plays of Shakespeare. This it does in three linked ways. It stresses the collapse of Macbeth’s moral universe as implicit within the first meeting with the witches; it suggest later events by the use of emblematic detail in the presence of the owl, magpie, and crows; and it visualizes the language of the disturbance of the natural world and its order. (1)

The essay reminds us that even in the absence of a contemporary criticism with an interpretive emphasis, people in the eighteenth century were perceptive readers (or watchers) of Shakespeare.

This approach, though, inflicts upon the painting a double belatedness. Its meaning, to the extent that a painting can mean, exists as a gloss on a prior work of art. Moreover, the structure of Sillars’ argument requires an existing verbal criticism, of the twentieth and twenty-first century, for “visual criticism” to anticipate. In this sense, Sillars justifies a priority claim—that the visual criticism precedes the verbal in time—on the back of a relinquished authority—the painting now depends on a prior play and a later criticism.

I don’t mean to suggest that Sillars believes this precedence is all there is to the painting. I wonder, though, if the ideas of fictional worlds and the anaclitic that I have been worrying can lead to a more productive understanding of the relationship between this painting and Shakespeare’s play.

* * *

Macbeth and the Witches stands out within Wootton’s oeuvre in its choice of a subject from literature. Wootton illustrated Gay’s Fables and painted one piece owned by Pope (said to have affinities to that author’s writings) but the majority of his work, particularly in oil, depicts horses, hounds, or sporting scenes, in idealized classical landscapes. Years later, in 1836, Constable would complain of this combination: “The absurdity of imitation is nowhere so striking as in the landscape of the English Wootton, who painted country gentlemen in their wigs and jockey caps, and placed them in Italian landscapes resembling Gaspar Poussin, except in truth and force.” (2)

(Images: Starting for the Hunt: Composition of Numerous Figures and Hounds, in an Extensive Landscape, John Wootton (left); The Chestnut "Arabian" of Hampton Court, John Wootton (right). Photographs of paintings via ARTSTOR. Click to Enlarge.]

But in the middle of the eighteenth century, English gentlemen—and ladies—were prone to finding themselves placed in Italian landscapes, resembling Gaspar Poussin, or Claude Lorrain, or Salvator Rosa. Many travelers looked at particularly charming views through what were called Claude glasses, small dark convex mirrors which would reflect a prospect with lower light levels, as if painted.

(Image: Claude Glass, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Wilder vistas, with massed rock, trees with broken limbs, or turbulent water were imagined as Salvator Rosa paintings.

Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring’s wonderful 1927 book Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England attempts to capture something of the influence of these Italian painters. She suggests that the landscape painting taught, in the early part of the century, a compositional approach to natural description that filtered through English writing, and she follows the impact of this new way of looking through to end-of-the-century handbooks that taught tourists how to view the landscape themselves as a composition.

At one point in mid-century, it seems, you could go out for tea and find yourself in a Claude Lorrain, or more horrifyingly, a Salvator Rosa. Thus Elizabeth Montagu, in 1754:

We drank tea yesterday in the most beautiful rural scene that can be imagined, which Mr. Pitt had discovered in his morning’s ride…. After tea we rambled about for an hour, seeing several views, some were as wild as Salvator Rosa, others placid and with the setting sun, worthy of Claude Lorrain. (3)

Or later, her friend Mrs. Carter:

The sublime views of wild, uncultivated nature, the silence of a desart, and the melancholy repose of a ruin, strikes the imagination with awful and affecting ideas. In such a situation the soul expands itself, and feels at once the greatness of its capacities and the littleness of its pursuits. (173)

Outlaw Parliamentarian John Wilkes strikes a similar mood in the visitor’s book at the Grande Chartreuse:

The savageness of the woods, the gloom of the rocks, and the perfect solitude conspire to make the mind pensive, and to lull to rest all the turbulent guilty passions of the soul. (178)

For each of these writers, the encounter with wild nature demands a doubled vocabulary, aesthetic and moral at once. Reading Manwaring's book, I am struck by the repeated occurrence of "delightful horror" to describe a view that looks like a Rosa. Here, "wild," "awful and affecting," "savageness," "conspire," and "the turbulent guilty passions of the soul" strike a tonal note that seems just right for a description of Macbeth. And isn't it the greatness of his capacities and the littleness of his pursuits deplored by Lady Macbeth as she seeks to drive him to kill the king: "Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valour/ As thou art in desire?" (I.vii.39-41)?

Like Montagu's view, Wootton's painting has the golden sunlight of a Claude (4) with the wild sky and massy rocks of a Rosa. Or, as Macbeth puts it, "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" (I.iii.38). Riding off from the battle, the two soldiers wander into a strange prospect that gives them "awful and affecting ideas." The experience of the sublime in nature not only provides a reference for Macbeth's experience, it aligns our sympathies temporarily with his. After all, the viewer's experience of this painting should also strike the imagination in the mode of the landscape sublime.

This is neither a reading of the play Macbeth, exactly, nor an illustration of a theatrical performance. There is very little natural description in Shakespeare's version at all, besides "fair and foul": we learn from the witches of the "fog and filthy air" and (I.i.12) the "setting sun" (I.i.3), but there is no description of rocks, caves, trees, or even the crossroad. Nor, despite Wootton's friendship with scene painter George Lambert, is the background of the painting a stage backdrop, given the centered road and background army.

In the previous essays, I have argued that we might consider anaclitic works of art as "revisiting" rather than "revising" their originals. The original, that is, is an occasion and an opportunity. One website featuring the Wootton painting suggests that the "work is only superficially interested in his subject and the main effect is achieved by the landscape and the lowering sky." Paintings, though, are entirely surface. The difference between this painting, and a more romantic Macbeth painting, like Fuseli's (left), is not one of surface and depth, but of style and affect. Painting a quarter-century later, Fuseli has taken the relatively shallow foreground of the Grand Style and made it even tighter, in order to heighten the drama.

To a modern eye, I suspect that Fuseli's image is more compelling, but a contemporary review complains as follows:

In the characters of these imaginary "bubbles of the earth," this Artist has indulged the wildness of his fancy, with his usual enthusiastic energy: but he has carried it too far, in the real characters of Macbeth and Banquo; for although they may be surprised at what they saw, yet Shakespeare's language gives no warrant for this extravagance of action, in the English Drama, whatever it might do upon an Italian Stage. (6)

I don't mean merely to oppose a modern aesthetics of surface and depth to a eighteenth-century concern with fancy and warrant. The leaning work of art--Godzilla lunchbox, Macbeth painting--uses its original as a sort of implied depth. But that depth relation is defined and constructed by the later work. Moreover, even were one to pick out of Shakespeare's text, or an eighteenth-century performance, all of the words, phrases, and details that might give one warrant, most of the work of art is made in the artist's fancy.

James Thurber's short story "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" (text here--Go read it if you haven't; it's much better than the rest of this essay) describes a conversation between the narrator and "an American woman [he] had met... in the English lake country." Quite the fan of murder mysteries, the woman picks up Macbeth by mistake and sets out to discover who was the real killer:

"I don't think for a moment that [Macbeth] killed the King," she said. "I don't think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty or shouldn't be, anyway." (7)

Based on her close reading of the text, the woman suspects Macduff, concluding that Macbeth and his wife each act guilty to protect the other. No one, she points out, carries a candle to walk in their sleep. The narrator, amused and bewildered, orders another brandy and then asks to borrow the book: "'I believe,' I said, 'that you have got hold of something. Would you lend me that "Macbeth"? I'd like to look it over tonight. I don't feel, somehow as if I'd ever really read it.'"

This seems exactly right-- the anaclitic work of art often throws you back on the earlier work on which it leans. The American woman made Thurber's narrator wish to re-read Macbeth. In the review above, the reviewer's quotation of Shakespeare and the insistence on "Shakespeare's language" testifies to his own return to Macbeth. Even the Godzilla lunch box sent me back to the film and the animated series, in order to understand how the image works. But whenever I reread Macbeth to look for myself at the evidence against Macduff, I realize that there is no such evidence. There isn't even enough to warrant a search.(8) Nor is there landscape, nor extravagant action. The whole case was dreamt up in the woman's fancy--perhaps literally, as the woman read while "real comfy in bed."

When the narrator finally does reread the story, in the comfort of his own bed, though, he does not merely realize that the evidence is lacking for the woman's interpretation:

"Could I see you alone?" I asked, in a low voice. She nodded cautiously and followed me to a secluded spot. "You've found out something?" she breathed. "I've found out," I said, triumphantly, "the name of the murderer!" "You mean it wasn't Macduff?" she said. "Macduff is as innocent of those murders," I said, "as Macbeth and the Macbeth woman." I opened the copy of the play, which I had with me, and turned to Act II, Scene 2.

The question having been raised, he offers his own interpretation, and the process begins anew.

In Wright's formulation, Thurber has combined the "nouns" of Macbeth and the "verbs" of a detective story. What makes this combination work to the extent that it does is the quality Keats calls negative capability in the letter cited in the previous essay, albeit taken as a general principle of writing, rather than an individual talent: all "nouns" in writing are suggested, rather than existing by themselves; they are thereby left surrounded in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Put another way, writing, like painting, is surface with the illusion of depth. The anaclitic work of art starts from the point of those uncertainties, fills in some of them, and creates others anew.

The result neither revises nor interprets the original. It can't--the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts are as much a part of the original as the "nouns" and "verbs" were. And whenever one returns to that original, those gaps are insistently there. I find a better image in the road Wootton adds to his painting of Macbeth. A road painted on a stage backdrop must end in an obstruction or one of the wings, if actors are to follow it--you can't have your actors shrinking into nothing and then vanishing at a single point of perspective. Wootton's Macbeth, though, must follow this road, back into the depths of the painting.

(1) Sillars, Stuart, Painting Shakespeare, London: Cambridge, 2006.
(2) Allen, Brian. “Wootton at Kenwood. London,” The Burlington Magazine, 126:978 (September 1984) , p 586-587. Accessed via JSTOR, 4/17/08.
(3) Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England
(4) It's difficult to judge the color of a painting by a reproduction, and the many reproductions I have viewed all show slightly different coloration. Wootton's indebtedness to Claude is well-known, however.
(5) http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Wootton.Macbeth.html
(6) Repton, Humphrey, The Bee; Or, A Companion ot the Shakespeare Gallery: Containing a Catalogue-Raisonne of All the Pictures With Comments, Illustrations, and Remarks, London: T. Cadell, 1789.
(7) I'm using the online version of the text I linked to, for convenience. No page numbers given.
(8) Sorry!