As the story goes, Protestantism's suspicion of iconography stunted the development of the visual arts in post-Reformation England, even as it laid the groundwork for the flourishing of its literary production. Of course, the period saw the rise of the theater, “England's lively pictorial culture” (Leonard Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak,” Renaissance Quarterly 48.2 [1995], 338). But drama repeatedly answered anti-theatricalist opprobrium by venerating the word and condemning the pictorial as the painted and the fake. As Hamlet famously says of Ophelia, in a moment often treated as symptomatic of the visual poverty of the age, “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough.”

Keir Elam's Shakespeare's Pictures joins a growing body of work challenging the oft-retold tale about the absence of visual culture in early modern England. Making use of the malleability of the word picture in the sixteenth century—it could mean both a painting and a description of a painting, refer to two- and three-dimensional objects (and hence both paintings and statuary), and connote both meanings of the word counterfeit (i.e., a perfect and a poor imitation)—Elam persuasively argues for a Shakespeare knowledgeable about visual objects and visual theory. Characters parrot and reframe classical and contemporary discourses on aesthetics in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Timon of Athens. Courtesy of Falstaff we learn about the cost and merits of various types of household decor in 2 Henry IV. Plays stage, or borrow from, other visual artforms—from vanitas and memento mori, miniatures, erotica, tapestries, painted cloth, heraldry, inn signs, and city views. The early modern theater, then, should be viewed as intermedial, enmeshed in and with other forms rather than set apart from them. By extension, Shakespeare's Pictures asks us to imagine a culture more enmeshed with the visual than has often been claimed—that is, as both wary and aware of visual artforms sufficiently so as to interpret and appreciate pictures, their invocation, and their deployment in plays.

Elam partially concurs with the received wisdom that Shakespeare's plays share the culture's suspicion about visual objects. A chapter on The Merchant of Venice traces the shifts in Bassanio's description of Portia's “counterfeit” from the Petrarchan (in praise of the artist) to the Platonic (the picture as pale imitation), a vacillation that echoes the play's treatment of visual objects as both desirable and deadly. In a chapter on Hamlet, we find the title character distrustful of iconography (“seems, madam?”) but also bound within its logic (“Look here upon this picture”). Elam also suggests, however, that a more benign, contemplative attitude toward visual objects can be found in Shakespeare's work. In a chapter on The Taming of the Shrew’s induction, Elam intricately weaves connections between the “wanton pictures” offered to Christopher Sly and visual and poetic erotica by Aretino, Raimondi, Romano, Elephantis, and Ovid (and Ariosto's response in I suppositi). In his final chapter, Elam explores the multiple and multiply deceptive visual objects in Twelfth Night (Olivia's jewel/miniature, Mistress Moll's picture, Orsino's “natural perspective”) that are less ideologically fraught than the objects in Merchant and Hamlet, even if, as he argues in the chapter's conclusion, the play seems to trump the “optical” and “pictorial” with the “actorial,” through its staging of the Viola-Sebastian trompe l'oeil (302).

Shakespeare's Pictures is a welcome book and a valuable resource. Its 380 pages cover a great many examples of visual objects in Shakespeare, while opening up possibilities for further research into other “pictures” (for example, maps, statues, or the pictures described in the narrative poems, all of which are touched upon briefly). The summary of the field and the application of visual theory are both capacious and clear, and the appendix provides close to a hundred definitions of terms with examples from Shakespeare's work. And the book is as richly illustrated as one would hope, with many examples of visual art contemporary to Shakespeare and with stills from contemporary performance. Some of the ground that Elam covers has been trodden before (Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night feature prominently in scholarship on Shakespeare and the visual arts). But his deep knowledge of European visual culture (particularly Italian influences) leads to rich and novel interpretations of a number of key moments. Shakespeare's Pictures successfully illuminates the drama's intertextual and intermedial relationship with other visual forms in circulation in England and on the Continent.