Richard Wilson

Shakespeare’s picture in Hamlet of Pyrrhus with his ‘bleeding sword’ suspended above the head of Priam, as motionless ‘as a painted tyrant’, evokes the countless representations of Damoclean swords or hesitating warriors in actual paintings of the period, such as Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. There, the artist ‘associates this kind of frozen witnessing with the aesthetic’, and the mimetic fascination with violence is momentarily defeated, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit observe. Shakespeare’s eroticised figure of Pyrrhus likewise seems to represent the eternal stasis of a picture as an ethical turn away from sacrifice, an ‘interim’ of neutralisation which the author witnesses, like Caravaggio, by inserting himself into the background, with his signature image of the ‘speechless’ actor petrified before a Globe ‘as hush as death’.