Chapter 3 - Julia Margaret Cameron, Sympathetic Shakespeare, and Photographic Afterlives

Summary

Moving away from formal performance contexts, this chapter considers the act of posing for a photograph as a kind of performance, which can be morally and emotionally engaged. I focus on the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose images show models taking on Shakespearean characters in complex and ambivalent ways. The chapter considers Cameron’s engagement with Shakespeare in comparison to that of some of her contemporaries, including William Holman Hunt, Clementina Hawarden, Henry Peach Robinson, and George Frederic Watts. The final part of the chapter emphasises the instability of Shakespearean identities in the afterlives of Cameron’s works, showing how her image Iago Study from an Italian has accumulated biblical and Dickensian associations in addition to its Shakespearean caption.