Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language. .

Alison Thorne. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000. xvi + 290 pp. + 16 b/w pls. index. illus. bibl. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-22657-8.

In Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare, Alison Thorne argues that, in Shakespeare's plays, "language has the capacity to function as a rhetorical equivalent or analogue of perspective [and] can be manipulated to achieve similar effects or work upon an audience in similar ways" (xiv). This equivalence or near-equivalence of perspective and language, or of vision and rhetoric, is displayed in the famous Horatian formula Ut pictura poesis, which Thorne shows to be not a stable formulation (as the rules of the painting can change, so can those of the poem), and in the synonyms "topos" and "commonplace," where words that are initially geographic designations, of phenomena thus susceptible to visual representation and reception, become terms in classical rhetoric for verbal structures.

Chapter one, "Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention," seeks "to draw attention to the shared concerns and compositional techniques animating these texts [Alberti's On Painting (1435) and Shakespeare's play], a commonality that must ultimately be seen as the product of a trans-European rhetorical culture which subsumed poetry and painting along with a whole plethora of [other] arts" (8). Although different emphases guide subsequent chapters, this statement well summarizes Thorne's premise that the symbiotic relationship between vision and rhetoric bespeaks a European culture, with the discoveries and codifications of visual arts feeding into verbal ones. In chapter one, Thorne notes the resemblance of the three stages Alberti posits in the creation of the historia--circumscriptio, compositio, and receptio luminum--to the inventia, dispositio, and co/ores rhetorical of rhetorical composition (3-4), and then, in a superb reading of As You Like It, shows how "interpenetration of the visual and the verbal occurs everywhere in Arden's iconic landscape," for instance, in the trees where Orlando carves his love poems (16). (Later, Thorne makes good use of Rensselaer Lee's Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, but she appears to have overlooked his Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art [1977], which would have been helpful here.) She concludes this part of her investigation with a succinct account of what she has done: "Reading As You Like It through the lens of Alberti's pioneering treatise on painting and the interest in copious invention it shares with Shakespeare's comedy has shown us that language has the capacity to function as a mode of seeing..." (58).

This discussion is followed by two chapters on the development in England of ideas of perspective (or what Thorne too often calls, annoyingly, "viewpoint"), and then by ones on Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. My guess is that the majority of readers of this book will be Shakespeareans interested in Thorne's art historical angle, rather than art historians seeking applications in Shakespeare; but either audience will come away grateful for, and enlightened by, an exciting intellectual journey. Her final chapter is "The Tempest and the Art of Masque," which offers, among other things, an important discussion of ways that that play "foreground[s] the relativity of perception" so that ideas of perspective contribute to an understanding of why "[t]o the optimistic Gonzalo the island looks marvellously lush and life-sustaining, whereas to Antonio's and Sebastian's cynical eyes the same landscape appears utterly barren and inhospitable" (214). More broadly, this chapter seeks to show not only how the tradition of the courtly masque, especially as practiced by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, is displayed in the masque of act 4, but also how the values that animate the courtly masque--the movement, for example, from disorder to order--are the values of Prospero throughout The Tempest; and moreover, how these values can never triumph absolutely because of the resistance of Caliban and the contrary style of the grotesque (documented here in Vasari; a glance at Ambroise Pare's Des Monstres and prodiges [1573] would have further illuminated the sixteenth century's fascination with grotesquerie). Thorne asserts that "Caliban's monstrously misshapen form is open to more than one reading," which perhaps begs the question since it can be argued that his form is not misshapen at all and is seen as such only because of the limitations of the perspective of the Europeans, or because of their self-interest; and she writes that "[a] strong Neoplatonic bias ... leads Prospero to interpret his servan t's outward monstrosity as a sign of inner spiritual deformity" (218). I think that Prospero dons and doffs this Neoplatonic bias at will; looking at Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian, he knows what, in Macbeth, King Duncan says after betrayal by the original Thane of Cawdor: "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face."

Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare contains nearly fifty pages of notes, which conduct a learned, subtle, and provocative discussion with the book proper. These notes follow the book's final chapter, so the reader must choose a) to ignore them; b) to read them separate from the argument that inspired them; or c) to do as I did, which I'm sure under the circumstances the author would have one do, and flip back and forth continually (almost continuously) from text to notes, text to notes, text to notes--a procedure that probably triples the reading time of the book. May I close by declaring that Thorne's publisher does her and her book no service by placing the notes at the end; in an age of computerized typesetting, notes to scholarly books should again, and always henceforth, be what they once were--footnotes.