Storm of the Late Eighteenth Century: Fuseli's Reinvigoration of Nature in Shakespeare's The Tempest (2013)

Undergraduate: Dillon Crockett

Faculty Advisor: Janice Koelb
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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Nearly two centuries after the stage premier of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the Boydell Gallery in London hosted a different kind of premier—an exhibition of paintings and engravings which encapsulate the dramatic and literary elements of Shakespeare's plays into new visual forms. Among the artists commissioned for such a monumental challenge was Henry Fuseli, and included among the paintings Fuseli produced is a rendering of Act I, Scene II from The Tempest, of which an engraving is located at the Ackland Art Museum. What happens to Shakespeare's play as it transcends two centuries of social and aesthetic change, and what happens to his narrative as it transcends media? Fuseli draws upon the natural cues present in the early-seventeenth-century play while simultaneously creating a truly original landscape painting for his late-eighteenth-century audience.