"Keir Elam's book is the first full-length study of the role of graphic and iconographic images in Shakespeare and references performance history throughout. Chapters examine plays in which pictures are brought on stage as part of the dramatic action (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, among others); the embedding of images from the popular imagination in the action and discourse of the plays; the dialectic between optical and auditory illusion in the romance or late plays, or "how" the visual is "heard" in the theatre, and the question of perspective in the comedies, especially Twelfth Night. The book covers many of the most canonical and studied of Shakespeare's plays, giving new critical insight and argument. "--