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Sunday, September 02, 2007
A shout for Droeshout
There’s been a typically Valvy flurry of comics-related articles recently, and I thought I’d add to it with this recognisable image:
The last TLS but one (I think it was; my copy has already disappeared into the recycle bin) had a three-page article about the various portraits of Shakspere, as the Victorians, and indeed first Elizabethans, liked to call him. One thing the author of that article did was to denigrate the Droeshout engraving at the expense of other images, and in particular the Chandos portrait.
The Chandos portrait flatters us into thinking that we’re looking at a real human being. That 1970s-era wide-lapel white shirt instead of that stuffy old ruff! That earring in the left ear; so modern, so theatrical! As for Droeshout, as somebody (was it Frank Kermode?) memorably said: we can only hope his fee was as small as his talent.
But it occurs to me that the very thing that leads so many scholars and Shakespearianists to despise Droeshout’s portrait—it’s cartoonishness—is the very thing that makes it so perfect a portrait of Shakespeare. It’s barking up the wrong tree to want to connect with Shakespeare as actual human being. Shakespeare, or the Shakespeare with whom we have to deal, was precisely cartoonish. Cartoons are up-front about the level of modelling representation involves, the simplifying antiversimilitude. No Shakespeare character has the detail, the layers of paintwork and effect, of Proust’s characters, or Woolf’s; they’re all drawn with relatively few strokes. They just happen to be the right strokes--to be lines that are endlessly expressive and suggestive of character, lines full of life and motion, not leaden impasto. We know an enormous amount about Stephen Deadalus’s life and milieu; we know next to nothing about Lady Macbeth’s, not even how many children she has had. Yet she is the livelier, the more vivid, the realer individual, despite being the more melodramatic. More real because more cartoony.
More, it’s Droeshout’s cartoony mode, not Chandos’s painterly one, that enables us better to identify with Shakespeare, and surely this business of identification is one of the corner-pillars of the Shakespeare myth. I’m talking about the icon’s seemingly paradoxical doubleness: that, whilst he is of course a genius and far above us, at the same time, somehow, he is us: he is ordinary, usual, Everyman. Jonathan Franzen has this to say about the appeal of cartoons:
Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise Understanding Comics, argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves.
Comments
Interesting post, Adam. There’s a lot of work to be done here.
If you haven’t done so, you ought to read McCloud himself; it’s a really good piece of work. He has quite a bit to say about how the level of abstraction in a cartoon regulates our ability to participate in the image by imaginatively supplying what the artist hasn’t.
I must get round to McCloud’s book; I’ve heard good things about it from various sources.
McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” is really, really good.
And one reason it’s very good is because it’s about how comics are built. How they are built, not what the bleep! they mean.
As an independent comics geek of sorts, I’m not sure that “Understanding Comics” is really best described as really, really good. It’s certainly not thought of in that way universally throughout the comics community; I’ve seen a number of hostile parodies of it. Mostly, its force comes from its precedence—it was one of the first books to be written about the techniques of comics by a comic artist that attempted a critical view, in the sense of theoreticization at least to the extent of identifying common modes and so on. (Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art was first, but I don’t think that Eisner quite made the critical attempt that McCloud did.) So it’s as if someone wrote the first book about poetry that looked at meter and rhyme rather than what poems were about. It is, unavoidably, sometimes naive—for instance, McCloud includes a wholly unnecessary and unresearched general theory of art. But that naivete is a good thing, because otherwise the book might not have been attempted.
Matt Feazell’s Understanding Minicomics is a masterpiece of concision, though.
Is Chandos the Chandos, of the “Chandos Letter”?
No; it was owned by the first Duke, whence the name. The Chandos Letter was another Chandos.