Drawings for King Lear :: William Shakespeare Plays Literature Essays

Drawings for female monarch LearWhile in Paris in 1843-4, Ford Madox Brown sketched a set of eighteen pen-and-ink studies for King Lear. devil designs he later developed as consummate paintings--Lear and Cordelia (1848-49) and Cordelias Portion (1866)--and a third he turned into an oil-sketch, Cordelia Parting from Her Sisters (1854). Sixteen of the drawings were shown in 1865 at his Picadilly Exhibition, and Brown wrote the captions that appear below the drawings for the exhibition catalog. The sixteen sketches with captions are have by the Whitworth G on the wholeery in Manchester, and the two without captions are in the metropolis Museum and Art Gallery of Birmingham. The drawings are done in pen and mahogany ink over pencil on paper they are near 11 x 14 inches in size.The idea of a serial such as this was not original with Brown the German artist Moritz Retzsch had completed his series of outlines of Shakespeares defends (1828-46), which included a series on King Lear, a nd Eugne Delacroix had published his series of thirteen lithographs for Hamlet in 1843, a year before Brown executed his drawings. Critics think Brown knew the oeuvre of both artists and was influenced by them.Brown regarded these sketches as no more than outlines, penning in the catalogue that accompanied his 1865 retrospective exhibition that they were never mean but as rude first ideas for future more finished designs (19). Despite their unfinished quality, they powerfully evoke what Lucy Rabin describes as a mistily remote historical period (52), a time represented by Shakespeare as post-Roman but still pre-Christian. Ford Madox Hueffer, the painters grandson, suggests that the crudity of the sketches was, in fact, deliberate--Browns travail to portray in bold, almost flat designs the barbarity of Lear and the era in which he lived (53).Brown reveals in these simple depictions an understanding of King Lear that outlying(prenominal) surpasses anything the critics had to say about a play that was not at all popular in the nineteenth century. Charles Lamb observed early in the century that Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage, and at the end of the century--as in, for example, a review of Sir Henry Irvings King Lear at the Lyceum Theatre--the critics were still quoting Lamb and asserting that King Lear would not be tolerated for an hour if produced without the name of Shakspere (Illustrated London News 101637). Small applaud that Sir Henry Irving was reportedly nervous and anxious when he produced this unpopular play at the Lyceum in 1892.