Shakespeare 400: Art and theatre meet in spectacular Compton Verney and Royal Shakespeare Company exhibition

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Astonishing art and theatre combine in a powerful exhibition at Compton Verney with the Royal Shakespeare Company

Shakespeare was a master of dramatising human emotions in their myriad forms. His plays continue to find new relevance and remain a vital source of inspiration for artists as well as for readers, theatregoers and actors the world over.

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Compton Verney's new exhibition has been developed as a celebration of artistic responses to some of his most popular plays, including The Tempest, Hamlet, King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (all of which are being performed by The Royal Shakespeare Company in 2016).

A series of theatrical encounters unite historic and contemporary art, with a sound score and readings by leading actors from partners the Royal Shakespeare Company. The works have been chosen for their emotive responses to Shakespeare’s texts.

In 1968 David Farrell photographed Sir Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed in the house and grounds of Compton Verney. The cast featured a host of screen stars including Dame Judi Dench, then aged 33, who reprised her role as Queen Titania, and, among others Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Diana Rigg and Sir Ian Holm.

In 1970 Farrell shot Peter Brook’s stage version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, followed by his film production of King Lear, set in windswept Jutland, with Paul Scofield in the title role.

Farrell began his career as a violinist. After joining the RAF bomber command in World War II, he turned to photography. He is now well known for his portraiture of the most prominent artists, actors, authors and musicians of his time, including Yehudi Menuhin and Laurence Olivier, Lynn Chadwick and Henry Moore and bands including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

George Romney’s dramatic depiction of The Tempest, commissioned for the John Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, appears as a series of surviving fragments from the original painting and in its more complete form as an engraving by Benjamin Smith.

At more than five metres wide, the original painting reflected the scale of Romney’s intensely emotive and gestural treatment of Shakespeare’s tempestuous shipwreck scene.

From the far right of the engraving Prospero and Miranda look upon the stricken ship, and Prospero holds his hands aloft as if he is conjuring the scene unfolding before him. The courtiers aboard appear focused on restraining Alonso from jumping into the sea, while beside him to the extreme left a leaping Ferdinand surrenders to the swirling waves.

Henry Fuseli regarded Macbeth as one of Shakespeare’s most poetic and emotive plays, and it is the subject of many of his early works.

Fuseli’s highly gestural depiction of the Three Witches in the opening scene of Macbeth isolates the hooded heads of the witches, each with an arm outstretched, and with the other hand drawn to the mouth, echoing Banquo’s words: "each at once her choppy finger laying / Upon her skinny lips".

Fuseli’s interest in focusing on the foreboding appearance of the soothsaying Witches may have been inspired by David Garrick’s production of Macbeth, which Fuseli saw in London in 1768. Garrick’s interpretation used trapdoors to help the witches disappear, and it retained musical additions to their later scenes which underlined their prominence in the play.

Fuseli undertook a highly charged exploration of the powers at work within The Tempest. His placing of the viewer within Prospero’s cave, looking out to the tempest at sea, provides a unique perspective on Shakespeare’s opening text.

The composition of the painting reflects the seemingly opposing sides of Prospero and Caliban: Prospero’s all-seeing magic against Caliban’s grounding in the natural history of the island.

However, Fuseli’s use of outstretched arms - a motif thought to be referencing The Creation from the Sistine Chapel - could allude to the fundamental similarities in these conflicting characters.

Ellen Terry played Lady Macbeth opposite Sir Henry Irving in his 1888 production of Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre, London. The work was subsequently bought by Irving, haning in an alcove at the theatre.

At the first performance of the play, Sargent was struck by Terry’s striking appearance and persuaded her to sit for a portrait. Her arrival at his studio in Chelsea was witnessed by Oscar Wilde, who remarked: "The street that on a wet and dreary morning has vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler can never again be as other streets: it must always be full of wonderful possibilities."

Sargent has invented a pose which shows Lady Macbeth about to place a royal crown on her head, presumably during her husband’s (offstage) coronation as the usurping King of Scotland. This incident does not occur in the play, and there is no indication in the actress’s prompt-books that it was a dramatic invention by Irving.

The sensational gold-embroidered dress adorned with a thousand iridescent beetle wings was designed by Alice Comyns Carr to shimmer like the scales of a serpent. The Times reported the painting as encapsulating "the clash of two supreme emotions – of ambition, and of the sense of crime accomplished and the moral law thrown down".

This new commission reimagines the final scene of Ophelia’s death, to the accompaniment of Queen Gertrude’s narrative. The photograph was shot on location on the edge of the lake at Compton Verney earlier this year.

An East London artist, Hunter’s Living in Hell and Other Stories, which used lurid headlines from the Hackney Gazette to re-stage scenes from art history, was commissioned and exhibited by the National Gallery, London in 2006 - the first photography exhibition ever to be held there.

In 2010 Tom Hunter was also commissioned by the RSC to reinterpret A Midsummer Night’s Dream, producing a series of photographs which feature in the exhibition.

Prospero uses his powers to raise a storm which shipwrecks his enemies from the Court of Naples, leaving them stranded and divided on the island.

By the middle of the 18th century, artists’ responses to Shakespeare’s plays were transformed from theatrical portraits shaped largely by stage productions to scenes which evoked the poetic drama and emotional intensity of Shakespeare’s words.

The notion of the Sublime, put forward by the philosopher Edmund Burke in 1757, explored how extreme emotions could create emotional empathy. These ideas encouraged the imagination of artists to interpret Shakespeare’s plays subjectively. As Romney said: ‘"Composition is conceiving the subject poetically."

Although we see the beginnings of Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness in her celebrated sleepwalking scene, her offstage suicide is reported in few words, leaving the imaginations of visual artists free to depict this event.

Ophelia’s offstage drowning, by contrast, is described by Queen Gertrude in one of Shakespeare’s most famously detailed passages of narrative, which visual artists have competed to realize since the 18th century.

Both figures became popular subjects for Victorian painters, including those associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The aestheticized victimhood of Ophelia made her especially appealing to 19th-century sensibilities, and works showing her tragic end featured regularly in Royal Academy exhibitions of the time.

Fuseli’s aim was to become "the painter of Shakespeare". Macbeth was a play which he returned to on many occasions for inspiration.

His approach was to move away from more literal depictions of Shakespeare’s scenes and instead concentrate on the emotional intensity of the words to create stripped-back compositions often using extreme chiaroscuro (light and shade). His work moved painterly responses to Shakespeare into a new dimension of imaginative interpretation.

Fuseli was the first artist to portray Queen Katherine, from a scene in Henry VIII which later inspired William Blake to do likewise. Influenced by the classical figures of Greek vases, Fuseli’s reclining Queen Katharine gazes upwards to her vision of ethereal nymphs who take a human form.

To dramatise the other-worldly imagery of Fuseli’s version of Queen Katharine’s vision, a recreation of the Victorian stage illusion ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ is included in the exhibition.

• Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy is at Compton Verney until June 19 2016.

• See Culture24's Shakespeare listings to find a Shakespeare 400 event or exhibition near you.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

© Bolton Library and Museum Services

© Photo: David Farrell, courtesy David Farrell Estate

© Kristin and Davy McGuire

Philip James de Loutherbourg, The Tempest, Act I Scene I© Royal Shakespeare Company Collection

Dame Judi Dench as Titania with Paul Rogers as Bottom, playing mistaken lovers (1968)© Photo: David Farrell, courtesy David Farrell Estate

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"It was miraculous": The moment when conservators found John the Baptist in Shakespeare's Schoolroom

Comedies, histories and tragedies: Inside a magnificent 17th century Willliam Shakespeare Third Folio

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting-and-drawing/art552727-compton-verney-royal-shakespeare-company-tyrants