Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare

Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare

A photographic journey into the imaginative world of Shakespeare's plays. In this collaborative work, photographer Rosamond Purcell and Shakespeare scholar Michael Witmore explore the transcendent emotion in Shakespeare's work through photographs, pairing the allusive power of images with the subversive effects of Shakespeare's language. The book takes advantage of oblique connections to reveal things that cannot be represented directly on stage. Purcell has pioneered the technique of capturing reflections in antique mercury glass apothecary jars, resulting in haunting images that seem to move with the liquid quickness of ideas. These images are an attempt to capture Shakespeare's expansive imagination in action―what Coleridge called his "myriad-mindedness": they take a visceral journey into the world of his plays. Witmore has paired each photograph with a short passage from Shakespeare's plays with an uncanny sense of the playwright's intent. 72 color illustrations Photographer Purcell admits predilections for visual conundrums and for glass objects that led her to purchase old mercury-glass apothecary bottles—double-walled, light-blocking containers, the inner walls of which are silvered like mirrors. The curved surfaces of both walls distort what they reflect, and the aging of the silvered interior one combines with the wear on the outer one to make them spontaneously “create” ambiguous imagery. When Shakespearean scholar Witmore suggested a project to marry the Bard’s rich verbal imagery to photographs, Purcell took the bottles out in a meadow and started shooting. The resulting matches encourage finding the words’ denotations in the pictures, not vice versa, but the wonderful murk as well as the distortion that the bottles enforce on what they reflect spurs the viewing imagination as might multicolored clouds. The results look rather like the work of symbolist painters skipping over expressionism and plunging into abstraction, as if Arnold Böcklin, say, or Odilon Redon, was trying to be Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning. --Ray Olson Rosamond Purcell is the author of Bookworm and Owls Head . She lives in Medford, Massachusetts. Michael Witmore is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.