Textual Critique through the Artist's Eye: John Austen's Illustrated Hamlet

Abstract

Textual Critique through the Artist's Eye: John Austen's Illustrated Hamlet explores the way in which the non-verbal, non-explicit mode of interpretation afforded by visual art allows a kind of free play to potentially subversive interpretations of characters' implied interiority in Shakespeare. It takes John Austen's highly aesthetic, art nouveau illustrated edition of Hamlet, dating to 1922, as a case study. Austen's images represent a distinctive contribution to critical debate surrounding the play, anticipating later critical and performative interpretations of the play. His illustrations present a dark prince almost unprecedented in visual art, present in the text but invisible to many of his contemporaries and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears, a complicated and independent Ophelia, a diabolical Ghost, and host of disturbing, deeply symbolic, supernatural, feminine entities. Women are no longer relegated to the background in his Hamlet, as in so many onstage, visual artistic and filmic adaptations of the twentieth century; instead, they are granted a position centre-stage, with the Greek goddess Nemesis ("Vengeance") as their fierce, relentless champion.