Europe's epicenter could best be found in the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Not since Julius Caesar had the world seen a man with such a will to glory guided by such an expansive intellect, and with enough physical courage to make his dreams his life. At least until Waterloo.
This human whirlwind, coming in the turbulent wake of the French Revolution, made neo-classical restraint seem old-fashioned, like yesterday's news for yesterday's people. In music, in poetry, in art, in literature, the new sensibilities of Romanticism were sweeping Europe and the message seemed clear: either dive into the maelstrom or trudge along in a life less lived.
Early traces of Romanticism can be found in a number of illustrations of Shakespeare's plays, as human figures in these artworks began to assume more vigorous postures in an evident attempt to mirror the tumult in their souls. This marked a departure from so much of the artwork that had been created prior to the Revolutionary years. These earlier Shakespearean illustrations tended to look more formal and restrained, accentuating the 18th-century belief that nothing is more dangerous to social order than an untethered emotion.
Pictured above are engravings from A Midsummer Night's Dream (upper) and Hamlet that show traces of this transition to a more expressive, aggressively vigorous depiction of human emotion. The Midsummer engraving, from a 1799 octavo copy (London, Printed by T. Bensley, Bolt Court, Fleet Street) shows Shakespeare's Helena, in Act II, suddenly coming upon a sleeping Lysander in the woods, and expressing her astonishment in a very reserved, stylized fashion, in keeping with the acting standards of the day.
In contrast, Johann Henry Fuseli's c1789 painting of Hamlet, and its subsequent engraving, shows the Prince of Denmark struggling to follow the ghost of his father on the battlements of Elsinore. The work shows traces of a transition in artistic expression in favor of a more emotive, unrestrained physicality. To live meant to strive, and the painter Fuseli seemed to embrace that ethic with a passion fit for a revolutionary age.
He became a prolific painter of scenes from Shakespeare's plays, and created works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London that were also engraved for a folio and an illustrated set of the great poet's works.
This less restrained artistic sensibility would continue, despite taking on a more subdued profile during the Victorian years, through much of the nineteenth century. The stiffness and formality of most 18th-century Shakespearean illustration created prior to the French Revolution no longer passed muster in this new whirlwind of Romanticism.
He became a prolific painter of scenes from Shakespeare's plays, and created works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London that were also engraved for a folio and an illustrated set of the great poet's works.
This less restrained artistic sensibility would continue, despite taking on a more subdued profile during the Victorian years, through much of the nineteenth century. The stiffness and formality of most 18th-century Shakespearean illustration created prior to the French Revolution no longer passed muster in this new whirlwind of Romanticism.
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