Fuseli’s Macbeth: bringing « the unclear » to light

Henry Fuseli was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1741, but he spent most of his life in England where he exhibited the majority of his works. The fact that English was not his mother tongue might sound insignificant, but it is of great interest since it is through Shakespeare’s plays that Fuseli acquainted himself with the English language.¹ It was his professor Johann Jakob Bodmer who introduced him to the playwright, back in his youth. Shakespeare’s plays soon became a source of inspiration for Fuseli’s art, to the point that Lavater – a famous contemporary poet – nicknamed him ‘Shakespeare’s painter’.² Fuseli had the reputation of being able to quote any of Shakespeare’s work on demand³ and even though this anecdote should probably be taken with caution, it is nonetheless a telling representation of how pregnant Shakespeare was in Fuseli’s mind.

In 1764, Fuseli found himself implicated in a political conflict. Having newly entered into holy orders, Fuseli and his friend Lavater were eager to reform and rejuvenate this institution. They took it upon them to bring down Magistrate Grebel, who was presumably taking advantage of his position as bailiff to steal property and acting as a tyrannical oppressor. The two men first sent a letter to Grebel, threatening to make his actions public if he did not restore property. The latter took no notice of the letter, and Fuseli and Bodmer subsequently published a pamphlet entitled The Unjust Magistrate, or the Complaint of a Patriot. Although this operation was successful, and the magistrate absconded, Fuseli’s reputation indirectly took a toll⁴. As John Knowles recounts:

This spirited act, on the part of Fuseli and his friends, was for some time the theme of public conversation at Zurich, and their patriotism was greatly applauded. But the disgrace which had fallen, by their means, on the accused, was felt by his powerful family, who considered, that, from their connexion with him, a part of the ignominy fell upon themselves. The tendency and natural consequences of such feelings were properly appreciated by the respective families of the young men, and they considered it prudent to recommend them to withdraw for a time from the city.⁵

Fuseli had no other choice but to flee abroad. Thanks to the help of the British ambassador to the Prussian court, who had been impressed by Fuseli’s first paintings, the artist was able to move to London.⁶ This sudden exile offered him the opportunity to see Shakespeare’s plays on stage, in its original language, on a very regular basis:

Fuseli considered the theatre the best school for a foreigner to acquire the pronunciation of the English language, and Garrick's performance an excellent imitation of the passions, which would give him a lesson essential to historical designs; he never missed the opportunity of seeing him act, and he was generally to be found in the front row of the pit.⁷

Throughout his life, Fuseli painted a profusion of works of art inspired by Shakespeare. Nathalie Padilla counted seventy of them, including but not limited to oil on canvas, ink drawing and watercolour.⁸

Amongst the Shakespearian plays, Fuseli developed a unique relationship with Macbeth. He dedicated a fair amount of his work to this play. In fact, Fuseli first acquired fame namely thanks to two of his representations of Macbeth: Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784) and The Three Witches (1783).⁹ Furthermore, at the end of the 1750s, Fuseli is believed to have translated Macbeth in German. Had it not perished in a fire, this translation would have constituted the first German translation of Macbeth.¹⁰ Looking at Fuseli’s painting technique and philosophy, it is no wonder why he chose to depict scenes from Macbeth. Fuseli was fascinated by opacity and obscurity. He used the chiaroscuro in many of his paintings. He even dedicated his Sixth Lecture¹¹ to this technique. Similarly, the Scottish play is rooted in reflexions and depictions of invisibility, ghostliness and strangeness. Macbeth is riddled with lies, pretence and dreamlike visions, which could lead us to claim that it is the epitome of ‘the unclear.’

In this paper, I would like to ponder on Fuseli’s use of light – and more precisely of darkness and obscurity – to shed light on Macbeth’s text. I intend to show how the painter is bringing what I have named ‘the unclear’ to light. By ‘unclear,’ I first mean everything in the play that is not explicit and deemed easily understandable by Fuseli. I will first of all study how he uses his paintings to illustrate Shakespeare’s text, in the first sense of the word – explaining it and making it clearer for his audience. Then, going back to Fuseli’s chiaroscuro, I would like to try and decipher how and why he uses darkness on purpose, not to make the text more obscure, but precisely to shed light on the text. In this second part, I will analyse how, paradoxically, Fuseli sheds light on Macbeth through darkness. The ‘unclear’ becomes both the obscurity in the paintings and what is not clearly understood. Finally, I will argue that Fuseli obscures Shakespeare’s text, making it more ambiguous. This last part will allow me to question the role of a painting, especially as Fuseli breaks away from the tradition of paintings as imitations, to create his own vision of the story of Macbeth. And we will see how, already in the 18^th century, breaking away from the fidelity debate allows both art forms to expand further and nourish each other.

Illustrating Shakespeare’s words: illustration and clarification

Literary paintings

First of all, it should be mentioned that Fuseli had a unique connection with literature. He was highly educated. As Eva Reifert writes, he ‘seem[ed] to have embodied the Reynoldian ideal of the artist possessed of a comprehensive literary education’.¹² Fuseli was also widely influenced by literature in the way he viewed paintings. Junod points out that while other painters refer to more traditional and pictorial categories, such as history, landscape, or portrait, Fuseli applies literary concepts to painting categories.¹³ In his Third Lecture, he explains the ranking he has established. According to him, paintings can be divided into three categories: epic, dramatic and historic. This hierarchy is based on the emotion produced on the spectator:

Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes; the second moves; the third informs.¹⁴

Using Cicero’s De Oratore, ‘Fuseli applies the functions of rhetoric – movere and docere – to the qualities of a work of art, adding to these the Burkean term “astonish”, which is a direct borrowing from the Philosophical Enquiry’.¹⁵ Thus, Fuseli’s art is far from being disconnected from other art forms. On the contrary, it finds its coherence as a whole with philosophy, literature and rhetoric.¹⁶

Fuseli’s connection with Shakespeare is also worth mentioning. In the second half of the 18^th century, Shakespeare was vastly popular in England. This cult of Shakespeare is a key moment in the history of England, as it is at this point that Shakespeare became the national author.¹⁷ At the time, many painters took their inspiration from the playwright. And the opening of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in 1789 reflects that fascination. More than thirty painters exhibited their work at the Gallery, including George Romney, William Hamilton, Robert Smirke, Richard Westall, Francis Wheatley. And amongst them was also Henry Fuseli, a fervent proponent of Shakespeare.¹⁸ The theologian Johann Gottfired Herder presents Henry Fuseli as such: ‘A genius sweeping one along like a torrent, an idolater of Shakesp[eare] and now Shakespear[earean] painter’.¹⁹ Yet he scarcely wrote on Shakespeare. Only a few remarks can be found in his writings. Karen Junod quotes the following aphorism: ‘Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your emotions. Shakespeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting’.²⁰ According to Fuseli, what makes Shakespeare so talented is that he manages to grasp emotions and to make his audience experience them with him. And this notion establishes a strong connection between Shakespeare and Fuseli. Indeed, Fuseli was very much audience-oriented. He was not painting for himself, for his own pleasure, and took the reception of his work at heart.²¹ When he illustrates the text in his paintings, this unique relationship between his brushstrokes and Shakespeare’s words is at work.

Bringing visibility to the words

According to Fuseli himself, what makes the specificity of a painting is that it can simultaneously be ‘big with the past, and pregnant with the future’.²² Painting seems to be the ideal art form to illustrate a story, to unravel what is contained in a specific scene or passage. And Reifert argues that indeed ‘[m]ost of his paintings accordingly adapt his sources of inspiration by distilling climactic moments and turning-points that reflect the action in a condensed form’.²³ In his paintings of Macbeth, Fuseli first illustrates the storyline. He makes what happens in the play visual and explicit. Karen Junod notes that in Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head, painted in 1793, the boiling cauldron is directly taken from the play.²⁴

The stage directions at the beginning of act IV, scene i are indeed: ‘A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron’.²⁵ Fuseli follows the directions to the letter, and puts the cauldron in the middle of the painting. The stage directions have become canvas directions. But Fuseli also adopts a pedagogical approach as he uses his paintings to illustrate dynamics between characters that can be noticed in the play but that are not explicitly stated. The canvas is used to explain Macbeth to the audience. For instance, in the watercolour Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (1766), the complex relationship of the couple is exhibited.

Stephen Leo Carr talks of ‘reciprocal attraction and repulsion’²⁶ between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Both characters are leaning backwards, creating a V-shape in-between them. They resemble two magnets pushing each other away. Yet, Mrs. Pritchard’s right hand is outstretched towards Garrick. And Garrick’s two daggers, extension of his two arms, are pointing at her. The characters are moving away from each other but are at the same time attracted to each other. Furthermore, in this same painting, Fuseli is also unravelling the intricacies of this specific passage: the famous ‘Give me the daggers’ of act II, scene ii (l.56). According to Carr, the two daggers could also point at the ‘double violation of taboo’²⁷ that occurred in this scene – Macbeth murdered the king and murdered his guest (who he is supposed to protect in the Scottish tradition). Fuseli is truly bringing meaning to the scene. Likewise, in the second version of this painting, entitled Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812), Fuseli gives information on the storyline to the audience through the colours of the painting.

The cold tones of this oil on canvas could be a reminder that the king was killed in cold blood. And the gold starting to appear on the bottom of Lady Macbeth’s dress and on Macbeth’s breast could be an indication that it is through this regicide that they have become king and queen. The same gold also reappears on Lady Macbeth’s finger, demanding that Macbeth stay quiet; this may indicate that his silence is the condition sine qua non to accede to the throne. Ironically, blue and orange, the two complementary colours in the chromatic circle, are also complementary in the story of Macbeth: cold-blooded murder goes hand in hand with the splendour of royalty. To use Harold Honold’s expression, Fuseli’s paintings are a ‘condensation’²⁸ of the story of Macbeth. But Fuseli does not only depict and unravel what happens in the scene of the regicide; he goes one step further and foreshadows the storyline. Looking once again at Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, Carr argues that the position of the knives are also foreshadowing Lady Macbeth as one of the next victims of Macbeth.²⁹ In these two paintings of act II, scene ii, Fuseli illustrates the scene; he explains the storyline and makes it clearer by pointing out what is at stake.

Enlightening the audience

‘The process of transforming a text into a pictorial composition has introduced a supplementary layer of signification’,³⁰ notes Carr. Indeed, looking at the Armed Head in Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793), it is abundantly clear that the painter does not refrain himself from adding elements to the original story, in order to make it clearer. This floating head on the lower right corner seems to have Macbeth’s feature. Yet the Armed Head is supposed to be another character, acting as a form of master of the Sisters in act IV. And with the structure of the painting, one cannot but notice their resemblance. First, the two Macbeth heads are on the same diagonal and in a symmetrical display. They also have a similar helmet on. Then, the Sisters act as an intermediary between them; all three are looking at Macbeth and pointing at the Head. The audience is guided across the painting through the characters of the witches. The fact that the three Sisters are already mirroring each other is another element conveying the notion of comparison and inviting the audience to have a closer look at what is depicted. Several explanations could be suggested as to why Fuseli represents Hecate and Macbeth with similar features. It is maybe a way to indicate to the audience that Macbeth alone is the one making his choices in the end. The Sisters have only suggested a path, but he was already on it by himself. Eva Reifert offers another explanation, for she sees it as a way for the painter to ‘remar[k] that nothing could be more sinister than an encounter with oneself’.³¹ With this painting, Fuseli acts upon what he has once resolved to do: ‘I have endeavoured to supply what is deficient in the poetry’.³² Although in this very instance, Fuseli is referring to a lack of terror in Macbeth which he wants to compensate, and not to a lack of clarity in the text, I would argue that he is pursuing the same goal. He is adding what is missing in the text – or what he thinks is missing.

To conclude this first part, let us remark that even when Fuseli is not actively trying to make the story of Macbeth clearer and more explicit, the very act of creating a painting based on a play removes some of the ambiguity of the original story.

Eighteenth-century aestheticians argued that the highest art, both visual and verbal, avoided this deflationary economics of imitation by idealizing its subject matter, by 'improving' it according to canons of ideal beauty or notions of general nature. […] Illustrations of literary texts seemed to counteract this fruitful ambiguity, for visualizations inevitably particularize what they imitate, specifying details texts leave to the imagination.³³

As it is particularly clear in the artworks studied above, paintings add details that are usually left to our imagination: a cauldron, someone’s features, the bodies’ positions, people’s interactions, etc. These details may enable the audience to discover hidden aspects of Macbeth, some details that were only hinted at by Shakespeare and remained in the obscurity of the text. To guide his audience, Fuseli also resorts to a technique that plays with clarity and obscurity, with light and darkness: the chiaroscuro.

Clarity through light and darkness

Using chiaroscuro to bring clarity

‘[Chiaroscuro] is legitimate when, as the immediate offspring of the subject, its disposition, extent, strength or sweetness are subservient to form, expression, and invigorate or illustrate character’.³⁴ In Fuseli’s own words, chiaroscuro should be used to illustrate. And indeed, when he uses chiaroscuro in his paintings of Macbeth, this move to obscurity allows him to better represent an obscure Macbeth. First of all, the idea of darkness overtaking light is already pregnant in Shakespeare’s text.

For instance, when analysing The Armed Head Appears to Macbeth (1774-77),³⁵ Junod notices how Macbeth is filled with light but moving towards darkness. The radiant light, she explains, is behind him, whereas he is looking at the Armed Head in the obscurity.³⁶ She then quotes a particularly telling passage in act V:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow […] (V.5.19-28, my emphasis)³⁷

Macbeth is moving towards obscurity in the play. And using chiaroscuro becomes a way to emphasise what is already in the text and to place it under the spotlight.

Chiaroscuro also allows Fuseli to add his personal view on the text and highlight hidden elements. In his Sixth Lecture dedicated to this technique, Fuseli is adamant that chiaroscuro is not (only) an imitation of a natural lighting.

Nature sheds or withholds her ray indiscriminately, and every object has what share it can obtain by place and position, which it is the business of art to arrange by fixing a centre and distributing the rays according to the more or less important claims of the subject: as long as it regulates itself by strict observance of that principle, it matters not whether its principal mass radiate from the middle, wind in undulating shapes, dart in decided beams from the extremities; emanate from one source, or borrow additional effect from subordinate ones.³⁸

So, by choosing where light hits and comes from, the painter is intervening in the representation of the story of Macbeth. He creates a hierarchy between the different elements on the canvas. Creating spaces of darkness, the chiaroscuro technique is also a way for Fuseli to refocus the scene. Nathalie Padilla explains how the ‘foyers d’action’ (which we could maybe translate by ‘sites of action’) are under the light whereas the rest of the scene is kept in the dark.³⁹ Darkness is a way to erase everything that is not primordial.⁴⁰ The painting Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812) is a case in point. There is almost no setting. On the left, Macbeth seems to be emerging from a simplified doorframe. And on the right, a semblance of a curtain reminds the audience of the theatrical dimension of the painting. What matters is not the location of the scene but the relationship between the two characters. Everything else has been erased.

Light has become artificial – in all its Latin and etymological complexity. First, it was crafted by mankind. And second, it is fake and results from a contrivance. And if the trick is well-executed, ‘guided by the subject[,] the most daring division of light and shade becomes natural and legitimate’.⁴¹ In a sense, the light of the painter becomes (un)natural: made natural by the painter. Junod has an interesting choice of words when analysing The Armed Head Appears to Macbeth (1774-77). She talks of a ‘supernatural light coming from the right’.⁴² On the one hand, this light is aimed at the witches and the Armed Head, so it is supernatural because it sheds light on supernatural beings. And on the other hand, this light is also supernatural as opposed to natural. It was created by Fuseli, who seems to get closer and closer to a potter modelling not clay but light (Isaiah 64:8).

Fuseli’s reversed chiaroscuro: what matters is in the dark

Fuseli opens his Sixth Lecture on chiaroscuro with a telling quote from Horace’s Ars Poetica: ‘Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem’⁴³ – smoke does not stifle the flame, but from smoke springs light. Taken literally, this sentence presents darkness as a foil for light. Yet if ‘light’ is taken figuratively, in the sense of meaning, then it is in darkness that light (meaning) can be found. Indeed, Padilla remarks that ‘[Fuseli] does not use clarity to take advantage of the lighting […] but to offer an opening on what is not there’.⁴⁴ In Fuseli’s chiaroscuro, brightness is used to shed light on darkness. And what matters is not necessarily what is under the spotlight. For example, in Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812), Lady Macbeth is wearing what seems to be a wedding dress with a veil and a long white dress. This would usually convey an image of purity. Yet the shadows, the spots of darkness on the dress, melting into the darkness of the background of the painting, could be informing the audience of the tainted innocence of this bride. Fuseli uses darkness to bring meaning to the representation.

Likewise, in Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784), the shade that crosses her body may also bear meaning. One might argue that this shade foreshadows her story and suggests that she is going to be engulfed by darkness – in the sense of madness, and death. Furthermore, as it is the shade of her own body, one could go as far as supposing that Lady Macbeth has caused her own downfall. And finally, the insect in The Three Witches (1783), flying in the dark, also bears a lot of meaning.

When first looking at the painting, one might not even see it. Yet Fuseli paints this moth precisely, and for a specific use. According to Padilla, this moth is most certainly a Death’s-head hawkmoth, recognisable with its skull-shaped pattern on its back. Indeed, the Acherontia atropos was named in 1758, only a few decades before the painting was made.⁴⁵ And Fuseli was known to be an entomology enthusiast. Padilla notes that in his biography, John Knowles even cites this specific species when talking about Fuseli’s passion for entomology: ‘He was not ignorant of natural history […] By skill and care, he sometimes reared in his house some of the rarer English insects, among them, the Sphinx Atropos, Sphinx uphorbiae, and others’.⁴⁶ If one only sees a moth, then the witches are seen as creatures of the night (as moths fly at night). But if one recognises this very specific moth, then the witches suddenly become messengers of death. Once again, Fuseli illustrates the story in the dark, with very subtle details. Eudo C. Mason talks of an ‘entomological sublime’⁴⁷ to express Fuseli’s fascination for insects. Playing on the paradigm of macrocosm and microcosm in his aphorism 156, Fuseli remarks that ‘[h]e who seeks the grand will find it in a trifle’.⁴⁸ Mason uses the word sublime purposefully, for Fuseli uses ‘grand’ synonymous with sublime.⁴⁹

Sublime in the dark

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Fuseli establishes a ranking of paintings. He associates famous authors with each level. In this hierarchy, Shakespeare is associated with the dramatic level: he moves the audience. But in order to attract more spectators and potential buyers, Karen Junod argues, Fuseli moves Shakespeare to the epic level. Indeed, as David H. Solkin remarks with the title of his book, Painting For Money, eighteenth-century artists had to sell their work to earn a living. This means that they had to consider the art public and their taste. While trying to express their individuality, painters also had to conform to the standards of the period.⁵⁰ For example, Laurent Bury reminds us that when Fuseli arrived in England, Benjamin West and his neo-classicism were popular. And painters mainly depicted aristocrats’ portraits. At that time, representing a ghost on a canvas did not fit in with the classical yoke. Yet Bury notes that ghosts were still a subject of fascination. And the newfound popularity of Shakespeare only amplified this taste for the supernatural, to the point that, in the last quarter of the 18^th century, spectres became more accepted on paintings, and even praised.⁵¹

To elevate Shakespeare, Fuseli has to astonish his audience, by means of a sublime approach. ‘The movere of dramatic invention is abandoned in favour of the “astonishment” of a sublime or epic painting’,⁵² explains Junod. In his Lectures, Fuseli demonstrates how to attain this epic level: ‘place [Macbeth] on a ridge, his downdashed eye absorbed by the murky abyss, surround the horrid vision with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses’.⁵³ It is precisely through darkness and obscurity that sublime can be reached. The notion of sublime he is referencing is the one theorised by Edmund Burke in the 18^th century, referring to a combined feeling of pain and pleasure. The sublime procures a feeling of awe and astonishment, to the point that the soul cannot think. And according to Burke himself, ‘a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture’.⁵⁴ Darkness, Burke claims, is a source of sublime, because it brings uncertainty: ‘the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those which are more clear and determinate’.⁵⁵ This form of sublime can be found in Fuseli’s paintings. As I have mentioned before, the setting is almost invisible in Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812). The curtain on the right is the only reference to the stage. The same observation can be made on The Armed Head Appears to Macbeth (1774-77), where the stage has become a ‘black immensity’,⁵⁶ to quote Karen Junod. Her choice of word is particularly interesting: immensity has no limit and cannot be totally grasped and defined. The uncertainty one feels when facing the painting is thus multiplied. In this respect, Fuseli was sometimes called ‘the painter of the abyss’⁵⁷ – of that territory that knows no end. In my opinion, the oil painting Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812) goes one step further in the sublime. As already mentioned, this painting has the same structure as Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, painted in 1766. But in the later version, ‘we witness a dematerialization or desubstantialization of the components’.⁵⁸ This remark applies to the setting of the scene, but also to the characters themselves. The latter have become ethereal, almost transparent at times. In chemical terms, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have undergone a sublimation of their bodies; they were solid in 1766 and are now resembling gas in 1812.

Chiaroscuro is a key element in Fuseli’s paintings of Macbeth. The painter uses an alternation of light and darkness to bring meaning to the scene. And the particularity of Fuseli is that darkness is not only used as the negative of light, but as a conveyor of meaning in itself. Darkness also brings meaning, while staying in the dark. But this form of reversed chiaroscuro begs the problem of the limits of darkness.

Painting and literature: obscure reciprocity

Obscuring each other

When Fuseli clarifies the plot of Macbeth through his paintings, whether through light or darkness, one can feel his presence. The subjective presence of the painter is so strong, that one might wonder whether Fuseli is not obscuring Shakespeare by trying to make Shakespeare’s work more explicit. Indeed, by removing the ambiguity that is at the core of the play, by adding clarity (both literally by adding light on the canvas and figuratively by making the plot of Macbeth more explicit and clearer), Fuseli is modifying Macbeth – or rather our representation of the play. Furthermore, Fuseli’s paintings do not always clarify the scene; they sometimes complexify it by providing the audience with a multiplicity of interpretations. The story of Macbeth then becomes more ambiguous. Looking at Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (1766), it is clear that Lady Macbeth is not bothered by Macbeth and his daggers pointed towards her. For Stephen Leo Carr, this might signify that she does not consider Macbeth to be a threat, which is arguably the first explanation that comes to mind. Yet Carr offers another interpretation, and wonders if Lady Macbeth is rather accepting her fate; her death will be a direct consequence of this regicide.⁵⁹ Paintings of Macbeth allow for different interpretations to emerge and coexist. Carr even offers a third interpretation: Macbeth could also be trying to control the knives, as if they were ‘animated characters’.⁶⁰ This analysis would bring a whole other understanding to Macbeth seeing a flying dagger in act II, scene i (« Is this a dagger which I see before me », l. 33). Macbeth is the only one seeing this weapon, just as he was the only one (with Banquo) seeing the witches in act I.

Also, precisely because Fuseli uses obscurity and chiaroscuro to shed light on Shakespeare, his paintings are literally less clear and obvious. The direct consequence of this chiaroscuro and lack of setting is a loss of boundaries. Analysing The Three Witches (1783), Padilla cannot but wonder if Fuseli was trying to represent act I, scene i (‘When shall we three meet again?’, l.1 ), or act I, scene iii (when Macbeth meets the witches), or even one of the scenes of act IV (when Macbeth and the witches meet again). The lack of context in the painting around the three characters obscures the painting and its connection to Shakespeare. It is consequently not making Shakespeare clearer. Reifert makes the same observation, arguing that even an attentive reader might not be able to recognise which passage is being illustrated.⁶¹ In that instance, it seems that – at first sight at least – Fuseli has failed his goal.

On the opposite end, Shakespeare is also obscuring Fuseli. When one reads the title Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (1766), one sees an illustration of a theatrical performance. The title invites the audience to see the fictional characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as much as the actors. And this information blurs our vision of the painting, and prevents us from fully engaging with it and all its plausible interpretations. ‘[W]e suppress the suggestion that the knives drag Garrick across the floor, for we know that no available tricks of stage craft could have produced this effect’,⁶² explains Carr. Paradoxically, adding text to the painting does not make it clearer. It does, in the sense that we now know who is depicted. But it does not, in the sense that it limits our vision of the painting to the status of an illustration.

Generally speaking, the audience’s knowledge of the play and Shakespeare’s words are obscuring the painting. Indeed, if one does not think of Macbeth as threatening in that same painting, it is also due to the fact that the original text does not present Macbeth as a threat. ‘Our knowledge of Macbeth mediates our perceptions and interpretations of the design, especially those that do not correspond with our sense of the play’.⁶³ Because we know what the painting is about, we paradoxically become blind to what it has to offer. Carr comes to the conclusion that ‘illustration and text half-reveal and half-conceal the significance of each other’.⁶⁴ Both artworks entertain a complex relationship, in which one needs the other to be fully understood, but in which knowing one prevents us from wholly seeing the other.⁶⁵ Macbeth has become a form of palimpsest. It never totally disappears, and no matter how hard Fuseli tries to erase, rewrite and highlight Macbeth, Shakespeare’s version can never disappear. Even if a spectator does not know the story of Macbeth when they first see the painting, it is likely that they will read Shakespeare’s text thereafter, to better understand the painting. Even when the text of the play is not there at first, it keeps on reappearing between the lines.

Beyond imitation

When Nathalie Padilla complains that she cannot know for sure which scene The Three Witches (1783) is a reference to, she mainly sees the painting as an illustration. She looks for the original in the adaptation. With this approach, painting and literature obscure each other. In the 18^th century, painting was indeed considered to be a ‘sister art’ with a derivative status, by many critics.⁶⁶ Because they made the story clear and explicit, literary paintings were seen as limiting the imagination. For Charles Lamb, illustration is ruining literature:

What injury did not Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare. To have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's Shakespeare, deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable!⁶⁷

Although I will not develop this point here, note how Fuseli is inseparable from light in Charles Lamb’s mind.

Even though the fidelity debate around adaptation appeared several centuries later, Fuseli was already very aware of the possibilities of his art, and he broke away from the tradition that saw paintings as illustrations. In his Third Lecture – Invention I, he points out the core difference between painting and poetry.

[A]s poetry and painting resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so they differ as essentially in their materials and their modes of application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they address, ear and eye. Successive action communicated by sounds, and time, are the medium of poetry; form displayed in space, and momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.⁶⁸

Their goal, which is to address the senses, is similar, but they reach it differently. To fit the modifications that occur when creating a painting of a play, and to counteract the obscuring of both artforms, Carr proposes to replace the idea of ‘illustration’ by that of ‘translation’.⁶⁹ This displacement from one medium to another necessarily means that the two versions will be different. Something of the original will be lost in translation. And conversely, something else will be added to the translation for it to be understood in the targeted language. ‘[T]he first demand of a work of art is that it constitutes one whole […] it ought to be independent’,⁷⁰ asserts Fuseli at the beginning of his Fourth Lecture – Invention II. For the painter, art is autonomous. It should not limit itself to try and fit the original, and Fuseli namely follows his own advice by playing with exaggerations and distortions.⁷¹ Quoting Eva Reifert, he « did not interpret the text so much as use it as a source of stimuli that animated his creative visual imagination and invention’.⁷² In the light of this theory, I want to offer another interpretation of The Three Witches (1783), which is more acceptable if one breaks away from what the text of the play suggests. A fourth head seems to be appearing in the dark, behind the Cerberus trio formed by the witches. Following several critics and artists that have worked on the connection between Lady Macbeth and the witches, one could see this fourth head appearing as a representation of Lady Macbeth (maybe on the verge of becoming a witch, by the end of the play?). Then, following that same interpretation, one might also see the Hawk moth as another manifestation of Lady Macbeth. She is following the instructions given by the witches and is a messenger of death, that will cause Macbeth’s downfall. Indeed, when Macbeth is tempted to renounce the plan, she is the one urging him to kill Duncan. And finally, the position of the witches’ hands is strikingly similar to Lady Macbeth’s hand positioning in Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784). The two paintings, created only one year apart, almost seem to be echoing each other. Lady Macbeth, succumbing to madness, grows closer to the witches. Is the right hand in the lower left corner of The Three Witches another indication of that connection?

By choosing to break away from pictorial tradition, Fuseli is shedding a new light on Shakespeare’s words. Once again, Fuseli is true to his beloved technique, and this new light stands out in the dark – barely visible in a corner or in the background.

Establishing an intermedial relationship

To fully tackle the question of adaptation, the connection between painting and poetry has to be seen bilaterally. Not only does Fuseli illustrate Shakespeare, but Shakespeare illustrates Fuseli as well. I want to argue that, by choosing not to represent all the aspects of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, by deliberately keeping some aspects of the play in the dark, Fuseli enables an intermedial relationship to bloom, where text and painting nourish each other. And darkness – in the sense of not faithfully drawing the whole text of Macbeth in the painting – is needed to see Shakespeare under a new light. ‘Painting is silent poetry / And Poetry is a speaking picture’, often repeats Fuseli.⁷³ In this maxim, one cannot exist without the other, but one defines itself by breaking away from the other. A telling example of that connection and interaction is the painting Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (1766). At the bottom of the painting, Fuseli wrote a few words from Shakespeare’s play: ‘My husband?’ (II.ii.13) and ‘I have done the deed’ (II.ii. 14). Macbeth’s text has penetrated the realm of the painting, and the two art forms are merging in one place. To push the fusion even further, Fuseli’s initials are embossed on a packet next to the quote.⁷⁴ Is this the name of the painter or of the author of those words, one might ask? Writing on the canvas, Fuseli uses these lines to point out what the painting is about. The text allows the audience to better understand the painting. And retrospectively, the painting enables the audience to better comprehend these lines. There is an intermedial relationship, and text and poetry nourish each other. The text informs the painting as much as the painting informs the text.

In Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (1812), the text corresponding to that same passage is not written on the canvas. Yet, looking at the painting, it is fairly easy for a Shakespeare enthusiast to hear the famous ‘Infirm of purpose! / Give me the daggers’ (II.ii.62-3). The approach is rather different from the previous painting; the audience can see the painting in itself, as a whole, before thinking about the plausible connections and echoes with the text of Macbeth. As with Garrick and Mrs Pritchard, our knowledge of the text will allow us to go further and understand the painting better. Notice for instance how Macbeth’s genitals have not been drawn; he is indeed ‘[i]nfirm of purpose’ in that representation. One can observe that element without knowing the play, but one’s knowledge of the play enables one to go further in the understanding of the painting. In that case, as the painting is shedding light on the text without mentioning it, it is the audience who has to act as the light and turn the spotlight on the connection that was once there in Fuseli’s mind.

Text and design then interact reciprocally, each revising the significance and formal structures of the other. This mutual supplementation enriches both text and design. Visualizing a text breaks the linear flow of language, and creates a space where the audience can linger and look beyond the verbal surface. Conversely, a text offers language to articulate the inchoate power of an image. It can unfold the complexities of a design, focusing attention on a set of features that may be neglected in a more purely visual apprehension of an image. The interaction of text and design thus fosters an energetic further exploration of both verbal and visual meaning.⁷⁵

Conclusion

In his paintings of Macbeth, Henry Fuseli illustrates Shakespeare’s text. He pinpoints what is unclear in the play and makes it clear and explicit. As it has been shown throughout this article, this endeavour was not always successful, as Fuseli’s clarity might have sometimes obscured Shakespeare’s work. The painter adds meaning to Macbeth and uses his artwork to unravel what is at stake in key passages of the play. The chiaroscuro technique enables him to further that initiative, by creating a hierarchy between the different elements of the painting, thus helping the audience to focus on what he wants to highlight. But Fuseli also uses the chiaroscuro in a very unique way and brings meaning in spaces of darkness. Reversing the traditional hierarchy between light and obscurity, Fuseli invites the audience to focus on darkness. Consequently, Fuseli goes back to the DNA of Macbeth, which is rooted in obscurity – literally and figuratively. Precursor of his time, Fuseli is also breaking away from the tradition of paintings as illustrations. As such, he manages to obscure Shakespeare’s text, to make it less clear, in order to shed a new light on it. Finally, Fuseli’s paintings of Macbeth open the door to a new connection between painting and poetry, in which one nourishes the other.

Following in the footsteps of many other painters of his time, Fuseli profusely depicted scenes from Shakespeare’s plays – thus taking part in a national movement that would progressively establish Shakespeare as the English author. Yet, in terms artistic movement, Fuseli did not follow the neo-classical trend. When he first presented The Nightmare, in 1782, the public was rather shocked by the themes represented and by the omnipresent horror, pertaining to the booming genre of the Gothic. These did not fit with the rational values of the Enlightenment. Refusing to moralize through his art, and breaking away from Bible-inspired paintings, Fuseli focused on emotions. He could be seen as a transitional painter, between the rigour of Neo-classicism and the irrational Romanticism – the latter emerging as a challenger to the former.

Furthermore, judging by the catalogue of art works exhibited at the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Fuseli was the only one to work on Macbeth with this specific take on light and obscurity. Reynolds, in his unfinished painting Macbeth and the Witches (1786), also plays with darkness, but in order to add a specific gloomy atmosphere to the scene. Darkness is only revealing insofar as it invites the audience to focus on the lighter parts of the painting. Reynolds seemed to have a more classical approach to light and darkness and to the chiaroscuro technique.

In the 21^st century, researchers are somehow walking in Fuseli’s footsteps, and by using the light of radiography to have a better understanding of his paintings. The radiography of Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1784) reveals that Lady Macbeth’s leg was further to the right in the first version of the painting. This little detail, hidden in the layers of the painting, establishes a closer link with the drawing entitled Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking (1781), in which the leg is further to the right as well. This gives us an insight at Fuseli’s creation process and mindset at the very moment when he started to paint the famous Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking of 1784⁷⁶.

Bibliography

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