I

Although the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites were influential in changing the approach to painting in both technique and subject, it would be a mistake to assume that visual treatments of Shakespeare's plays were completely redirected after the group's earliest work. Certainly, the concern for acute observation of the external world had an influence near to all-pervasive, and the intersection of this with moral statement, itself a reflection of larger attitudes, remained strong in many quarters. But often the former took precedence over the latter – or, at least, embodied rather lighter, more domestic moral statements – so that the reformist zeal of the Brotherhood is often absorbed into the already firmly flowing stream of anecdotalism. Such forces make the adoption of a simply chronological approach misleading. An approach through concept and technique does more to reveal the range of Shakespeare painting, and its visual mediation of the plays’ temporalism. True, certain shifts become apparent as the years pass. As the high tide of Victorianism began to recede, the awareness of history came to assume a different, more reflective position in a national aesthetic consciousness. Important in this were a number of concepts that have already been discussed. The concern with time shifts towards a darker awareness of transience, already apparent in In Memoriam and Pegwell Bay, which may either state its bleakness or attempt reconciliation through memory. Coupled with this was an increased awareness of the complexity of the workings of time in both scientific and experiential forms, which underlies many of the most important later paintings. But several of the approaches taken by paintings of the 1830s and 1840s, discussed above in Chapter 2, were still being followed in moderated form well into the century's maturity, alongside other stances that had achieved equal stature.

One direction of change leads towards a simplification of idea and technique. The saturated colour of the first generation Pre-Raphaelite painting is softened in the later work of the artists who introduced it, and in those who followed their example; the concerns with meticulous historical accuracy are diluted into a more general idea of pastness; and the intense experience and expression of what Tennyson called ‘the passion of the past, the abiding in the transient’ is, in the work of some, rekindled as something far gentler. In the later years of the century, painting in England moved towards different levels of narrative, historical portrayal and emotional appeal through character and situation. In its simplest form this is a continuation of something apparent in the first Pre-Raphaelite work, a concern with accuracy of historical detail balanced against immediate presentation of situation and feeling. Instead of being seen as contradictory, in Shakespeare painting these come together as evidence of the dramatist's timeless human insight. The result is that the contemporary viewer is drawn into the situation presented at a human level, both made more convincingly real and sharpened through visual difference by its setting in a different age. Essentially, the diversity of painting exists along a scale defined by different ideas of time. Detailed reconstructions of a significant historical moment remain popular, while paintings that present a longer narrative through allusion or symbol remain the exception. Probably the most popular approach was to combine faultless accuracy in depiction of historical setting with the presentation of character and feeling in accord with contemporary mores, a more limited and probably wholly unconscious moderation of the desire to relate past and present, though lacking its self-reflexive and often self-critical drive. A review by C. Rossiter in the Art Journal of a scene from Measure for Measure makes the duality explicit: ‘Isabella is a forceful figure, but Angelo is devoid of character. The room and appointments are admirably painted.’ Credible presentation of character within a convincing setting, then, is a major criterion by which many paintings of the period were both produced and judged, as evidenced by a large number of the paintings exhibited at the Academy and elsewhere, and reproduced in the illustrated journals that gained increasing readership, and enhanced authority, in the last quarter of the century.