The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama

The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama is an interdisciplinary study that brings to light the radical, inventive ways Elizabethan dramatists such as Shakespeare, Marston and Lyly appropriated and transformed painting for the stage. Through close examination of an unusual group of early modern English plays, some virtually unknown in the scholarly or theatrical worlds, this book offers a unique analysis of painting properties, picture tropes, and painter characters in light of the Protestant "scandal" of images and antitheatricalism. A central premise of the book is that Elizabethan drama was staged and experienced as a visual art, which led to its compromised status in an iconoclastic culture. In plays such as Campaspe, Antonio and Mellida, Arden of Faversham, and Timon of Athens , dramatists not only thematized cultural attitudes toward images, but also confronted another compromised visual art, painting, as a means to examine aesthetic, moral, and perceptual issues at stake in spectatorship. The iconophobia inspired by Protestant reformers caused images of all kinds to be viewed with discomfort and ambivalence by Elizabethans. Dramatists, therefore, could use painting to signify a range of forbidden, disturbing, and morally questionable experiences.