Abstract

Considering intertextuality in the early modern period to be not only poetic but also figurative, this paper proposes an intermedial conversation between drama and painting, focusing on two particular iconographic topoi of visual representation in Shakespeare and Italian Renaissance art: the ekphrastic description of the sleeping woman portrayed as a mental rape in both Othello and Cymbeline and the narrator's description of the sleeping woman and the actual ravishing in The Rape of Lucrece. The juxtaposition of these two different literary and pictorial traditions of male fantasy may throw some light on Shakespeare's dramatic use of ekphrasis.