Shakespeare’s plays illustrated by Blake and Fuseli: The artists as critics

It has judiciously been pointed out that "pictures from shakespeare account[ed] for about one fifth -some 2 300!- of the total number of literary paintings recorded between 1760 and 1900" (R. Altick). As a matter of fact, the renewed interest in nineteenth century British art in the last decades made it easier to identify and see reproductions of the many paintings based on shakespeare's plays. These "history paintings", as they were called, reveal how deeply painters, actors, directors and critics influenced one another, and how interdependent they were in their critical interpretations, depictions and productions of shakespeare's masterpieces. In the nineteenth century, the relationship between literature and the graphic arts was much closer and the definition of "literary" criticism was broader than it is now. Some painters were even called "poets painters", in reference to the concept of "ut pictura poesis" and to the traditional analogy between painters and poets, "identifying the painter with the players, as artists equally capable of realizing the narrative import and the dramatic potential of the poet's imagined picture" (M. Meisel).