Ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter's Tale.(essay)(Critical essay)

Toward the end of Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Lucrece comes across "a piece / Of skilful painting" that depicts the events of the fall of Troy. (1) The action of the poem breaks off, and the narrator offers a lengthy description of this piece of visual art. This is perhaps the most explicit and unequivocal example of a Shakespearean ekphrasis--what W. J. T. Mitchell has called "the verbal representation of visual representation." (2) Yet Shakespeare appears to have been fascinated by the implications of representing the visual arts throughout his works, and often uses such representations to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of his own poetic and dramatic art. (3) In addition to the extended ekphrasis in Lucrece, there are various moments of narrative description in Shakespeare's dramatic works that allude to works of visual art, or compare figures to works of art, moments that might be described as ekphrastic. (4) For example, there is Iachimo's description of the decorations in Imogen's bedroom in Cymbeline, in which he describes the remarkably life-like figures on the chimney piece: "Never saw I figures / So likely to report themselves." (5) There is Enobarbus's rapturous description of Cleopatra's barge in Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra is said to "O'er-pictur[e]" a portrait of Venus "where we see / The fancy outwork nature." (6) There is also a suggestive narrative account in Richard II, when the Duke of York describes the absent scene of Bullingbrook's arrival in London, in which Bullingbrook is greeted by an admiring multitude. According to the duke, one would have thought "that all the walls / With painted imagery had said at once, / 'Jesu preserve thee! Welcome, Bullingbrook!'" (7) The Duke of York describes these onlookers as if they were, to use Philip Sidney's celebrated phrase, a speaking picture. (8) These absent spectators are described as "painted imagery," as if they were a work of pictorial art. But what are the effects of describing absent scenes in dramatic works as if they were works of art? Do narrative descriptions always aspire toward the pictorial? And to what extent do references to pictorial art make verbal art seem more real? In this article I examine briefly how Shakespeare explores the figure of ekphrasis in The Rape of Lucrece; I go on to discuss ekphrasis in The Winter's Tale, not only in terms of the way in which it represents a work of visual art, but also in the light of the broader definition of ekphrasis as vivid narration. (9) I argue that in both texts the extent to which the characters find it difficult to tell the difference between representation and reality is intriguingly related to the way in which the texts themselves seek to blur that difference for readers, audiences, and critics.

I

As with some of the most famous ekphrastic passages in classical literature--such as Homer's description of Achilles' shield in book 18 of the Iliad, and Virgil's description of Aeneas's shield in book 8 of the Aeneid--the action of The Rape of Lucrece breaks off as one of the characters studies a piece of visual art, of which the poet offers a lengthy description. This ekphrasis serves as an opportunity for Shakespeare to explore the competition--or paragone--between poetry and painting, and as such it represents the culmination of the poem's preoccupation with the relationship between visual and verbal modes of representation. (10) And yet, as various commentators have noted, this is an extremely literary rendering of a work of visual art. One of the inspirations for the painting in Lucrece is Virgil's narrative description of Aeneas observing similar images of the fall of Troy in book 1 of the Aeneid. (11) In addition, E. H. Gombrich has noted that some of the poem's supposedly pictorial images derive elements from Philostratus's verbal descriptions of paintings in the Imagines. (12) These sources suggest, therefore, that this passage has more to do with Shakespeare's reading of other ekphrastic works of literature than with his interest in pictorial art, and remind us that ekphrasis is a decidedly literary and textual phenomenon.

The painting that Lucrece studies is praised for its exceptional realism, and its trompe l'oeil effects. For example, the narrator states that "In scorn of Nature, Art gave lifeless life," and notes how "Many a dry drop seemed a weeping tear" (lines 1374-5). Such was the skill of the artist that his very medium--the long-dried drops of paint on the picture's surface--is mistaken for the tears of the characters that the picture represents. Thus, like much visual art that we find in ekphrastic works, this is a picture that one would be forgiven for mistaking for the thing itself. (13) Indeed, the painting is an example of what the narrator calls "Conceit deceitful" (line 1423), a phrase glossed by the poem's most recent editor as "a work of art so intricate that it tricks the eye." (14) But perhaps it is worth speculating why ekphrastic poets commonly delight in describing uncannily lifelike works of pictorial art. Why, one might ask, do ekphrastic poets rarely describe mediocre paintings, but instead works of art that are as good as, or even better than, reality? Perhaps one reason for this is the desire on the part of the poet that the reader will transfer this mimetic ideality onto the poem itself, and that we--as readers--will mistake the verbal surface of the poem for the visual objects (not only the artwork, perhaps, but also the figures looking at the artwork) being described. The reader is effectively warned against making the same mistake that the characters in ekphrastic works often make--being deceived by a seductively realistic work of art--and yet in order to conceptualize the visual art that the poem describes, the reader must allow oneself to be seduced by the verbal surface of the poem. The effect of much ekphrastic writing, then, is to collapse the distinction between representation and reality, or even, in the manner of Keats's Grecian urn, to "tease us out of thought." (15)

Lucrece comes to pity the figures in the painting--especially Hecuba--because they are unable to give voice to their suffering, and she goes on to narrate the plight of Hecuba, Priam, Hector, and Troilus. As she does this, however, Shakespeare implies a comparison (or even competition) between his own linguistic medium and the visual immediacy of the painting. In an intriguing formulation, Lucrece is said to carry out an aesthetic transaction with the pictorial artwork that she is looking at:

 
  Here feelingly she weeps Troy's painted woes; 
  For sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell, 
  Once set on ringing, with its own weight goes; 
  Then little strength rings out the doleful knell. 
  So Lucrece set a-work, sad tales doth tell 
  To pencilled pensiveness and coloured sorrow; 
  She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow. 
  (lines 1492-8) 

In his edition of The Poems, John Roe offers the following gloss for this last line: "Lucrece speaks for the silent figures in the painting, who in exchange teach her how to look sorrowful." (16) We might go further, however, and suggest that this figured exchange of "words" and "looks" amounts to a Shakespearean definition of ekphrasis itself. (17) Shakespeare suggests a mimetic borrowing of visual immediacy from the figures Lucrece studies in the picture, as she "lends them words." As Lucrece gives voice to the silent artwork, we are asked to imagine that she takes on the visual qualities of the picture: "she their looks doth borrow." Lucrece and the picture are said to supplement each other, but of course this is an example of "Conceit deceitful" on the part of the poet: the visuality of both the poem and the picture are created entirely by the poem's language. Leonard Barkan has written about this aspect of ekphrasis, placing considerable emphasis upon its deceptiveness: "It [ekphrasis] is not a visual figure so much as a figure of speech, and like all tropes it is a lie. The specific figural activity is akin to prosopopoeia, that is, the bestowing of a voice upon a mute object; and the larger lie is that these pictures have a prior existence independent of the poet, who is ostensibly merely 'describing' them." (18) Barkan's assertion--that ekphrasis is a "lie"--is on one level undeniable, but only insofar as all fiction is a lie. Perhaps a more interesting question is why, when it comes to ekphrasis, Barkan feels the need to remind us of the fact.