# The Painterly Materiality of Clouds in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet

Anne-valérie Dulac

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Anne-valérie Dulac. The Painterly Materiality of Clouds in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet. Re-naissance Studies, 2025, 10.1111/rest.70016. hal-05328709

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# The Painterly Materiality of Clouds in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet

ANNE-VALÉRIE DULAC

The cloud-gazing scene in *Antony and Cleopatra* resonates with a philosophical and poetic tradition which sees in clouds and vapours a suggestion of the insubstantial nature of human existence as well as the ‘externalization of the image-forming faculty as it were presented to itself’.<fnref n="1" /> Antony’s reverie on ‘black vesper’s pageant’ (4.14.8) has therefore often been analysed in relation to a wide range of sources and analogues, ranging from Aristophanes, Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny and Philostratus the Athenian, all the way down to Chapman’s *Bussy d’Ambois*.<fnref n="2" /> The fact that Shakespeare’s treatment of the *topos* both draws and departs from previous tableaus has also been well documented by critics.<fnref n="3" /> My argument is that most readings of the passage have failed to comment upon its unique engagement with contemporary artistic terminology, which gives these clouds a highly distinctive water-based texture and colour, differing altogether from other Shakespearean clouds, and perhaps most tellingly so from *Hamlet*, the only other play featuring a cloud-gazing scene.<fnref n="4" /> I will be building upon Rhodri Lewis’s exploration of *Hamlet’s* ‘visually compelling intensity’ by exploring further how Shakespeare’s clouds attest to the importance of the materials and techniques of portraiture in understanding the sky in both *Hamlet* and

<footnote n="1">¹ Alexander Nagel, ‘Structural Indeterminacy in Early-Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting’ in *Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art*, eds. Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (London: Routledge, 2016), 17–42, 26. All quotations from *Antony and Cleopatra*, cited parenthetically, are from the updated edition of *The New Cambridge Shakespeare*, gen. ed. Brian Gibbons, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990, 2005). Is this where I could thank my reviewers? if so then could please add: I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my reviewers for their invaluable feedback and many insightful suggestions.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See Bevington, *Antony and Cleopatra*, n. 8, 229 as well as the gloss in the Arden edition of the play, ed. John Wilders (London: Arden, 1995), 254.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ The most recent and complete discussions of the cloud-gazing scene in *Antony and Cleopatra* are found in Rhodri Lewis, ‘Shakespeare’s Clouds and the image Made by Chance’, *Essays in Criticism* 62.1 (2012): 1–24 and Sophie Chiari, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetics of Impurity: Spots, Stains, and Slime’, *Études Épistémè* [Online], 33 | 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.2164.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ All quotations from *Hamlet* derive from the New Cambridge Shakespeare, gen. ed. Brian Gibbons, ed. Philip Edwards, revised with a new introduction by Heather Hirschfeld (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985, 2003, 2019).</footnote>
*Antony and Cleopatra*.<fnref n="5" /> In doing so, I will probe into the incompatibility of Hamlet’s fretted firmament and Antony’s watercolour firmament, which will lead me to discuss the underlying parallel between clouds and ghosts and, more generally, the materiality of memory supports.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA’S TENUOUS CLOUDS

*Antony and Cleopatra* is heavily concerned with textures and materials: the ‘marble-constant’ (5.2.239). Cleopatra reigns over a kingdom of ‘clay’ and ‘dungy earth’ (1.1.37), whose plasticity owes in no small part to ‘Nilus’ slime’ (1.3.69) and its spontaneously generated creatures. These ubiquitous references to substantiality contribute to lending the tragedy its depth, thickness and rampant viscosity. The clouds in 4.14 add yet another translucent and watery consistency to the dramatic landscape and may be heard as a direct and ironic counterpoint to Cleopatra’s closing words in the previous scene: ‘To th’monument!’ (4.13.10) Antony’s visions in the clouds undo all forms of architectural stability and celebrate impermanence instead, not unlike Lucretius’s flimsy images: ‘Now then, learn/How tenuous is the nature of an image’.<fnref n="6" /> The tensity of *Antony and Cleopatra’s* clouds in Shakespeare’s tragedy is perhaps most powerfully conveyed by the Shakespearean coinage ‘dislimns’:

ANTONY Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forkèd mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs;
They are black vesper’s pageants.
EROS Ay, my lord.
ANTONY That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. (4.14.2-11)

The poetic creation of the word may have been partly motivated by
the homophonic pun with dislimbs, turning clouds into agents of dis-
membrance, deliquescing all monuments and memory. Yet Shakespeare’s
lexical invention, borrowing as it does from early modern pictorial termi-
nology, also ties in with other technical and intertextual references in the

<footnote n="5">⁵ This translation of *enargeia* is suggested by Rhodri Lewis in ‘Romans, Egyptians and Crocodiles’, *Shakespeare Quarterly*, Volume 68, Winter 2017, 320–50, 334. All classical sources for this notion are listed in footnote 33 (334). About *enargeia* see also Christina Faraday’s *Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England* (New Haven: Yale UP, 2023).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Lucretius, *De rerum natura*, trans. R. C. Trevelyan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1937), Book IV, l. 110, 133.</footnote>
text, adding a characteristically material dimension to the picture. The
word ‘limning’ then referred to a remarkably wide range of crafts and artis-
tic productions:

Limning could be used for illustrations in travel journals, for military purposes like mapping, heraldic images and decorative borders in documents for painting counterfeits from life, for studies of flora and fauna or for illustrating histories. Generally they were not made to be framed or to be hung on a wall but as illustrations for albums and portfolios. Well-known exceptions are exquisitely painted small portraits. The latter represent the highest quality limnings, as the most precious materials were used for their making.<fnref n="7" />

The reason why this sundry list of pictures may be gathered under one com-
mon label is primarily technical: ‘to limn is to portray or to paint, usually in
watercolour or some other kind of wash’.<fnref n="8" /> To what extent did the limner’s
choice of materials and techniques change what those images did to those
who viewed them?

Shakespeare does not use the word ‘limning’ and its cognates often. The
only other two occurrences are to be found in *As You Like It* and in *Venus
and Adonis*. In the comedy, the word is used to denote life-likeness and live-
liness, as Duke Senior recognizes late Sir Rowland’s features in Orlando,
his son:

If that you were the good Sir Roland's son,
As you have whispered faithfully you were,
And as mine eye doth his effigies witness,
Most truly limned and living in your face,
Be truly welcome hither.<fnref n="9" /> (2.7.198-202)

Limning is here granted a most striking power by making the absent present
again and bringing to life the remembrance of the dead. The rhythmical alliter-
ation and consonance upon which the phrase 'truly limned and living' is built
bring the life-likeness and liveliness in limning even greater import. Limning,
here again, seems to be working hand in hand with memory and monuments,
enabling as it does the resurgence of the past into the present.

The vital power and effect of ‘limning’ are confirmed further in *Venus and Adonis*:

<footnote n="7">⁷ Timea Tallian, ‘John White’s Materials and Techniques’, in *European Visions: American Voices*, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Research Publications, n.172, 2009), 72–6, 72.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Lewis, ‘Shakespeare’s Clouds and the image Made by Chance’, 8. About Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘water colour’ in Anne-Valérie Dulac. “[A] time/Of pell-mell havoc and confusion”: Shakespeare and the 2016 Paris Protests’, *Shakespeare Bulletin*, 2023, 41, 81–104, esp. 81–83.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ References to *As You Like It* are to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, gen. ed. Brian Gibbons, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, 2009).</footnote>
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportion'd steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one
In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone.<fnref n="10" />

In this variation on the trope of the competition between nature's workmanship and the limner's skills, the watercolour horse is compared with a dead horse, paradoxically superseding in energy and impression of life its living model. In both instances, limning seems to impart life to a dead subject (Rowland, the dead horse), thus producing moving spectral apparitions. The ghost-like presence of the limned subject should perhaps come as no surprise given that spectres were then still often considered as being 'made of a kind of emulsion of cloud'.<fnref n="11" /> The ghost-cloud association even finds explicit acknowledgement in *Macbeth*, when, following Banquo's apparition, Macbeth exclaims, 'Can such things be,/And overcome us like a summer's cloud,/Without our special wonder?' (3.4.1387-1389).<fnref n="12" /> The strong impression left upon viewers by ghostly visions and stories, calling for 'special wonder', seems to be matched in power by watercolour pictures of the dead only:

> The persistent power of ghost stories joins forces with the quality that poetics
> since Quintilian and Cicero has associated with prosopopoeia, in which a
> dead person, idea or object is made to speak, and which is termed *enargeia*.
> This term relates to the capacity of speech to present things so vividly that the
> listener imagines them to be present. *Enargeia*, the power of beliefs proper to
> certain figures of the narrative, is expressed by ghosts in a shrill 'raging'
> manner.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ All references to Venus and Adonis (then cited parenthetically) are to *William Shakespeare: Complete Works*, eds. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (London: Macmillan, 2007), ll. 289–94, 2401. On this passage and its relation to the *paragon* and *enargeia*, see Judith Dundas, *Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting* (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press/London & Toronto: Associated UP, 1993, 54–89, esp. 65), and Heinrich F. Plett, *Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence* (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012), esp. 123–124; 29–36; 65–68.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Caroline Callard, translated by Trista Selous, *Spectralities in the Renaissance: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries* (Oxford: Oxford UP), 2022, 52. About the origin for this 'web of interrelated ghost-cloud-image formations' see Alice Aurelia Roullière's introduction to her monograph on *Ronsard's Epic Clouds and Ghosts* (Cambridge: Legenda, 2024, quotation from p. 19). In it she traces the ghost-cloud association so ubiquitous in early modern poetry back to classical sources (among others), including the *Aeneid's* description of a simulation made of clouds in Aenas's image. I would here like to thank Alice Aurelia Roullières for kindly agreeing to share her work with me.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² References to *Macbeth* are to Anthony Dawson's edition for *Internet Shakespeare Editions* [online], University of Victoria, accessed July 2025. Available from: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Mac_M/complete/index.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Caroline Callard, translated by Trista Selous, *Spectralities in the Renaissance: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries* (Oxford: Oxford UP), 2022, 19.</footnote>
*Enargeia* was defined by Quintilian as the process ‘by which the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us’, of which ‘[t] he result will be *enargeia*, what Cicero calls *illustratio* and *evidentia*, a quality which makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it’.<fnref n="14" /> Therefore, although initially a rhetorical category, the ‘exhibiting’ power of *enargeia* centrally influenced visual artists and their own communication procedures. The ‘persistent power’ of limning, which equally ‘presents things [...] vividly’, may thus be described in surprisingly similar energetic and spectral terms.<fnref n="15" />

As images in clouds, ghosts and horses in water (colours) all seem to share the same intensity and ability to surpass and exceed life; if fleetingly, they testify to the poetic and pictorial puissance of a lively imagination. Yet Shakespearean clouds do not all share the exact same vaporous texture and substance.<fnref n="16" /> And the clouds most alien to Antony’s watery panorama in Shakespeare’s dramatic works are probably those found in Shakespeare’s murkiest tragedy, whose title doubles as the name of a ghost, *Hamlet*.

FRETTED FIRMAMENTS VERSUS LIMNED RACKS

Hamlet’s sky, contrary to Antony’s, is not ‘limned’ but ‘fretted’: ‘this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’ (2.3.283-286). The first actor playing Hamlet may have at this point gestured towards the elaborately ornamented ‘heavens’ at the Globe. There is no definite evidence about the technique that was employed to create the scene’s roof at the time, but Hamlet’s wording, and in particular his use of ‘fretted’, points to a very different artistic procedure from *Antony and Cleopatra’s* limned rack. ‘Fretting’ referred to carved, stamped or embossed work in decorative patterns, a meaning which crops up twice in other plays by Shakespeare. In *Cymbeline*, as Posthumus and Iachimo have just drawn a picture of Imogen in words strikingly reminiscent of Cleopatra on the River Cydnus, they next turn to the description of her bedroom. After commenting upon the art of the ‘cutter’ (2.4.83) on the carved mantel, Iachimo marvels at the memory

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Faraday, *Tudor Liveliness*, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ About the translation of rhetorical techniques into early modern visual culture, and Tudor and Stuart English art in particular, see Christina Faraday, *Tudor Liveliness*, the first ‘full-scale, systematic application of this approach’ ‘The Concept of “Liveliness” in English Visual Culture c. 1560–1630’, PhD diss. (St John’s College, University of Cambridge, 2019), 20. See also Caroline van Eck, *Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object* (Leiden: Leiden UP, 2016), esp. 31–48.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ This line from *Timon of Athens* (1.1.38) is quoted by B. J. Sokol in *Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets and Musicians in his Plays and Poems*. By B. J. Sokol. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018), 62. In this passage, Sokol explains how the ‘touches’ thus characterized may refer to Nicholas Hilliard’s technique, which I turn to in the next section.</footnote>
of '[t]he roof o'th'chamber/With golden cherubins [...] fretted'. (2.4.87-88).<fnref n="17" /> The only other use of the word in its artistic sense by Shakespeare further corroborates two key aspects of 'fretting' as a technique: its association with carving, first, and, second, with geometrical patterns. It is found in Cinna's description of daybreak in *Julius Caesar*: '[...] yon grey lines/ That fret the clouds are messengers of day'.<fnref n="18" /> Fretting, here again, implies a geometrical pattern ('lines') cutting through or chequering the clouds. *Hamlet's* fretted firmament perhaps still carries such connotations, given that its proximity to *Julius Caesar* is underlined by *Hamlet's* Polonius himself.<fnref n="19" /> In any case, *Julius Caesar's* clouds offer a precious clue regarding the textural and technical difference between the patterned firmaments it seems to be sharing with *Hamlet* and Antony's limned clouds in the sunset.

The blacks and blues of *Antony and Cleopatra's* vesperal sky much rather call to mind the watery panorama of the ‘occidental damp’ where ‘[m]oist Hesperus quench[es] her sleepy lamp’.<fnref n="20" /> The evening damp involves no fretting but instead undoes lines and patterns to make them indistinct, ‘as water is in water’ (4.14.11). Shakespeare’s plausible appreciation of the difference in the artistic rendition of clouds thus shows in the use of a remarkably specific lexicon that makes it clear that the clouds in *Antony and Cleopatra* are painted in a unique texture, most alien to Hamlet’s chequered firmament.

The idiosyncratic quality of *Antony and Cleopatra's* limned clouds also shows in the possible conflation of several meanings of the word ‘rack’, which appears in Antony’s reverie: ‘That which is now a horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct/As water is in water’ (4.14.9-11). As mentioned earlier, the gruesome pun on ‘dislimns/dislimbs’ is introduced by Antony’s reference to the ‘rack’, as the term can equally refer to a mass of cloud or to an instrument of torture consisting of a frame on which the victim was stretched by turning rollers to which the wrists and ankles were tied. I would here like to add another possible layer of meaning: the numerous references to colours in the passage, along with the pun on limns/limbs, may indeed conjure up the image of yet another frame, that on which parchment is stretched before drying so it can be used as a substrate fit for limners to apply their watercolours onto. The clouds in *Antony and Cleopatra*, unlike those in *Hamlet*, which herald ‘strange

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ I am quoting from the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of *Cymbeline* by Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ I am quoting from the Arden Shakespeare edition of *Julius Caesar* by David Daniell (London: Arden, 1998, 2006). 2.1.102-103. Enobarbus himself mentions the poisonous ‘damp of night’ at 4.9.16.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ As he reminisces about his acting days, Polonius reveals the following: ‘I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me.’ (*Hamlet* 3.2.92). This shout-out to *Julius Caesar* could not but playfully offer a hint at the fate awaiting the actor playing Polonius, soon to die at Hamlet/Brutus’s hands.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ I am quoting from the Arden Shakespeare edition of *All's Well That Ends Well* by Suzanne Gosset and Helen Wilcox (London: Arden, 2019), 2.1.161-2.</footnote>
eruption[s]’ (1.1.69), carry the threat of evaporation instead. The initially ‘dragonish’ cloud (4.14.2) of *Antony and Cleopatra* loses all capacity to breathe fire as it is quickly immersed in a sea of shape-shifting thoughts. Similarly, the fading sunset becomes drowned in the ‘blue promontory’ (4.14.5) of Antony’s imagination. Shakespeare’s addition of watercolour to the nebulous spectacle may therefore lead the audience to see this ‘pageant’ as both a theatrical display and a limner’s piece in a manuscript.<fnref n="21" /> Such close readings of the potentially technical meaning behind the words used to describe clouds in both plays are not just incidental: they, in fact, may help us grasp a far wider concern of both plays with the volatility (or lack thereof) of signs.

RENDERING CLOUDS: THE EVANESCENCE OF SIGNS

Although nodding to diverging technical and material approaches, both *Hamlet* and *Antony and Cleopatra* turn to clouds to reflect upon mimesis and the intensity thereof. Clouds, like smoke, posed a major challenge to representative arts and were very much at the heart of the paragon or rivalry between artists, most prominently so perhaps between painters and engravers. This is most clearly explained by Michael Gaudio in his monograph on Theodor de Bry’s translation of early modern watercolour pictures into engravings:

> The degree to which de Bry’s smoke stands out from the other forms in his engravings and commands our visual attention is due in part to the fact that smoke presents the engraver with a special problem of representation: its nebulous immateriality is antithetical to an art whose degree zero is the line. The engraver’s solution to the problem of representing smoke is of necessity quite different from that of the watercolorist [...].<fnref n="22" />

Clouds challenge the carver’s ‘instruments of inscription’ in comparable fashion.<fnref n="23" /> The ‘scriptive’ (derived from inscription) techniques of the ‘cutter’ and all such artisans of ‘fretted firmaments’, working in lines as they do, are antithetical to the limner’s own when depicting clouds.

Treatises on the art of limning by Nicholas Hilliard and Edward Norgate make it possible to look closely into the limner’s tools and materials at the time when Shakespeare was composing his own clouded sky for *Antony and*

<footnote n="21">²¹ ‘Pageant, n. and adj.’. OED Online. Oxford UP (accessed September 2025). I am here referring to the now obsolete meaning of ‘pageant’ as ‘a pictorial illustration, esp. in a manuscript [...].’</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Michael Gaudio, *Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 49. Gaudio makes the connection between smoke and clouds explicit by turning to Hubert Damisch’s argument in *Théorie du nuage* (Paris: Seuil, 1972) to probe into clouds and smoke’s semiotic function in Western art.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Gaudio, *Engraving the Savage*, 45.</footnote>
*Cleopatra*.<fnref n="24" /> Although unpublished or posterior to Shakespeare’s plays, these texts attest to practices and techniques used by limners to produce the jewel-like limnings which crop up as props or metaphors in many of Shakespeare’s plays, including *Hamlet*, as we will see.

Early on in his unpublished *Art of Limning*, Nicholas Hilliard praises limning as being far superior to engraving, although he deems Albrecht Dürer (whose engravings only, rather than drawings or paintings, are mentioned) 'worthy to be remembred in bouck to posterity': 'and heer I enter myne opinion consern-ing the question, whether of the two arts is the most worthy, *Painting, or Carueing*, I say if they be tow arts, painting is the worthier [...], againe I will Doe Cuning *Albert* [Albrecht Dürer] no wronge, but Right, dowbtles he was the most exqui-site man that euer leaft vs lines to vieue, for true delineation [...]'<fnref n="25" />

Paradoxically enough, Nicholas Hilliard thus advises aspiring limners to imi-tate engravers as meticulously as possible, so that part of the limning process becomes close to a form of delineation: 'forget not therefore that the principal part of painting or drawing after the life, consisteth in the truth of *the line* for shadow without line showeth nothing'.<fnref n="26" /> While lines confer a 'lively likeness', shadows show 'the roundness, and the effect of defect of the light wherein the picture was drawn'.<fnref n="27" /> Hilliard even recommends handling 'Pencells' (brushes) like pens:

> Shadowing in *Lymning* must not be driuen with the flat of the pensel as in Oyle work, distemper or washing, but with the pointe of the *Pencell* by littel light touches wth cullor very thine, and like hatches as wee call it wth the pen [...]/Wherfore hatching wth the pene in Imitation of some fine well grauen portrature of *Albertus Dure* small peeces, is first to be practised and vsed, before one begine to *Limme* [...].<fnref n="28" />

Yet clouds evade such descriptive gestures, as their essence lies in their very 'roundness' and 'effect or defect of [...] light'.<fnref n="29" /> There is no capturing the 'true' proportions of a rack whose shapes and lines keep 'dislimning'. The pictorial truth of the cloud thus lies in a fundamentally depictive rather than

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Nicholas Hilliard’s *Arte of Limning*, which survives in a non-holograph manuscript, is dated around 1598–1603. I will be using the transcript of the Edinburgh manuscript edited by R. K. R. Thornton & T. G. S. Cain (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992). As for Edward Norgate’s *Miniatura* (for which there are two main versions, one derived from a 1628 manuscript and a later revised version, which Norgate intended for print but did not have time to publish, dated around 1648). Norgate’s text in extremely interesting as it describes some of Hilliard’s techniques in even greater detail. I will be referring to Jeffrey Muller & Jim Murrell’s edition of his *Miniatura* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ *The Arte of Limning*, 50.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ *The Arte of Limning*, 64.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ *The Arte of Limning*, 80.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ See Hubert Damisch, *Théorie du nuage*, about the clouds’ challenge to delineation (347). See also Lorraine Daston’s ‘Cloud Physiognomy’, *Representations* 135, Summer 2016, 45–71: ‘When it came to clouds, art and science faced similar challenges of description: how to capture almost infinite variety and variability? Both variety and variability flummox description, whether in words or in images, but not in the same way’. (47).</footnote>
descriptive gesture, as appears quite clearly in Hilliard’s only rare limned clouds (Fig. 1).<fnref n="30" />

The white thinness of the tenuous clouds, although they have faded with time, still attests to the application of a range of contrasting techniques. The clouds have been limned over the floated blue background, the better to render their translucence. Hilliard has not used hatching to paint them, while his ‘littel light touches’ are visible on the surface of the white hands and face of the sitter and the mysterious apparition. The delineation of the clouds’ contours is also far lighter than the outlines of all other elements in the miniature, giving them a form of indescribable ‘nebulous insubstantiality’ (Gaudio).<fnref n="31" /> Edward Norgate’s *Miniatura* gives us an even more precise explanation of the specific treatment of clouds by limners of landscapes:

> The best and most pleasing kind of Landscapes are those that represent the morning or the Evening. For a rising or setting sun affoard such varietie and beauty of colours, by reason of those Blushing reflexions upon the nearer clouds [...]. The lowest part of your skie nearest the earth is exprest by Masicot, and White, with a little fine yellow oker, and the next is those reddish, and purple clouds, that fly between the yellow and the blew, which are made with faire Lake and White, and are to be faintly made, and gently to be wrought into the Yellow, for these two Colours are soe closely to meete that the partition be not distinguisht.<fnref n="32" />

Antony’s depiction of the ‘indistinct’ shapes forming and disappearing at dusk is strikingly close to the near invisibility of limned partitions mentioned in Norgate’s instructions. In this regard, the limner seems better equipped than the ‘cutter’ to render the tenuous poetry of clouds, as the following two examples taken from Albrecht Dürer, Hilliard’s model, will show.

In *Samson Rending the Lion* (Fig. 2), the clouds are the only uninscribed, unlined spaces in the woodcut. Yet the sharply delineated partition where they

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Clouds are rare in Hilliard’s portrait miniatures, the only exceptions known to this day being the piece discussed here and some of his cabinet miniatures, whose larger format allowed the depiction of a background landscape. Well-known examples are the Young Man among Roses (c. 1587, Victoria & Albert Museum, London), the portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (c. 1590–1595, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), or again the full-length miniature of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland (c. 1590). But in none of these pictures do the clouds play as prominent a part as in the Unknown Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud, the only one in which the cloud shares the foregrounds with the human figures. About the evolution of the representation of clouds by limners, see Pauline Duclos-Grenet, ‘Les Nuages dans la miniature parisienne du XVᵉ siècle ou splendeur et misère de la miniature’ in *Nues, nuées, nuages: XIVᵉ Entretiens de la Garenne Lemot*, ed. J. Pigeaud, (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 291–300 (doi:10.4000/books.pur.38591).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ The ‘nebulous insubstantiality’ of clouds was the stuff of the best limners only. See the copy of the miniature: https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5733085.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Edward Norgate, *Miniatura or the Art of Limning*, ed. Murrell & Muller, 85–6.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2 Albrecht Dürer, *Samson Rending the Lion*, c. 1497–1498. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3 Albrecht Dürer, *Landscape study of water, sky and pine trees*, c. 1497. © The Trustees of the British Museum</figcaption></figure>

cliff'.<fnref n="34" /> That the carver’s tools could not be further remote from the limner’s own, especially so when it came to representing clouds, was not lost on Dürer, who equally excelled in limning.

In his *Landscape study of water, sky, and pine trees* (Fig. 3), usually deemed one of his ‘most sensitive and atmospheric portrayals of nature’,<fnref n="35" /> Dürer used significantly less bodycolour than in other contemporary portrayals of the countryside around Nuremberg, which he painted upon returning from Italy. The British Museum watercolour of the evening sky with a setting sun offers what is perhaps the most visually compelling illustration of what Norgate writes about limned clouds, which, he says, ‘fly between the yellow and the blew’, and are to be ‘faintly made’ for the partition not to be distinguished.

<footnote n="34">³⁴ See Mira Schor’s post on ‘The worth of a Dürer wood-engraving measured in units of cows and more’, part of *A Year of Positive Thinking*, a blog she intended as a postscript to her book *A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics and Daily Life* (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), https://ayearofpositivethinking.com/2019/06/06/the-worth-of-a-durer-wood-engraving-measured-in-units-of-cows-and-more/ (accessed September 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ This is taken from the curator’s comments on the British Museum’s website (https://www.britishmusæum.org/collection/object/P_SL-5218-167, accessed July 2025).</footnote>
*Antony and Cleopatra's* faint and water-based evening sky thus differs from *Hamlet's* lined and fretted firmament much in the way the limner's clouds differ from the engraver's clouds. And in fact, these clashing procedures reverberate in at least two other moments in *Antony and Cleopatra*, which both show how description fails where depiction works. I am thinking first of Enobarbus's famous words about Cleopatra's famous apparition on the Cydnus, which I contend should be taken at face value: 'For her own person,/It beggared all description' (2.2.207-208). It is indeed telling that the portrait of Cleopatra on the river should remain the blind spot in a tableau that focuses on the fascinating effect she has upon her immediate surroundings – all burnished, beaten gold or silver. Cleopatra is located at the centre of an elaborate and luxuriously wrought display not unlike a goldsmith's *oeuvre*. Cleopatra herself remains invisible, enclosed as she is in a piece of jewellery reminiscent of the lockets where portrait miniatures were kept from view. Visual intensity here seems to defeat description altogether.

This failure of description also shows in the shifting shape of Scarus's wound:

> ANTONY Thou bleed'st apace.

> SCARUS I had a wound here that was like a T,
> But now 'tis made an H. (4.7.6-8)

Scarus, whose very name translates, as it were, to the 'sign' left by a wound, sees the letter inscribed in blood upon his body changing into another, yet again gesturing towards the volatility of lines and instability of signs in the tragedy. *Antony and Cleopatra* seems here again to be pointing to the poetry (or 'making') of evanescent and fluid apparitions, be they in water- or blood-colour.

## TRANSIENT COLOURS

*Hamlet*, interestingly, equally gestures towards the transience of limned objects. As the prince of Denmark is made aware of the presence of a company of players in town, he asks his friends about their reason for travelling to Elsinore:

> HAMLET [...] What players are they?

> ROSENCRANTZ Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of the city.

> HAMLET How chances it they travel? Their residence both in reputation and profit was better both ways.

> ROSENCRANTZ I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.

> HAMLET Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?

> ROSENCRANTZ No, indeed, they are not. (2.2.303-312)
As they then embark upon a further discussion of mysterious turns of tide
in theatre news, Hamlet concludes the conversation by making the following
comparison:

> It is not very strange, for my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would
> make mows at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred duc-
> ats apiece for his picture in little. 'Sblood, there is something in this more than
> natural, if philosophy could find it out.
> 
> (Hamlet 2.2.300-305)

This passage, which is missing from Q2 and condensed in Q1, is generally
considered ‘a bravura on contemporary theatre problems unique in
Shakespeare’.<fnref n="36" /> As it leaves the referent of these sudden changes unnamed, most
editors offer a wide range of plausible explanations without deciding upon one
only, while stage directors more often than not just do away with the whole
exchange for fear of losing the audience to this cryptically topical moment.<fnref n="37" />
More immediately relevant to the present essay is the fact that Hamlet gives as
another instance of such surprising ‘innovation’ the new fashion for portrait
miniatures of Claudius. As John Guillory has shown, fashion here becomes the
expression of ‘faction’ and offers yet another possible oblique reference for
‘innovation’ (which commentators have sometimes related to 1601’s Essex rebel-
lion).<fnref n="38" /> The mass production of these small portraits, coming to replace as they
do the miniatures of the former king, translates the ‘hurly-burly’ of the experi-
ence of the present in *Hamlet*.<fnref n="39" /> The ubiquitous visage of the new king, circulat-
ing via these newly fashionable portrait miniatures, thus conveys the disorderly
state of both Danish and English politics. Limning, in other words, reveals the
changing visage of power and politics. The little pictures therefore, act as a
medium through which Hamlet and the audience are made to look on the ‘pell-
mell havoc and confusion’ of their fast-changing present.<fnref n="40" /> This may in fact also
be the leading assumption behind another of *Hamlet’s* ‘stagings of the interpre-
tation of images’. In act 3 scene 4, the dead king’s son produces a pair of por-
traits of Claudius and old Hamlet (quite possibly miniatures) and enjoins his
mother Gertrude to face this ‘counterfeit presentment’ (3.4.54), in the hope of
making her realize how far superior her late husband was.<fnref n="41" /> The word ‘present-
ment’ resonates in this passage as a form of insistence upon the ‘presentness’ of

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Edwards’s gloss in *Hamlet*, n.313–33, 138.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ For a summary of recent inquiries into these metatheatrical references see intro p. 8–9.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ John Guillory, ""To Please the Wiser Sort": Violence and Philosophy in *Hamlet*, in *Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture* (London: Routledge, 2000), 82–109, esp. 95–96.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ I am borrowing the compound ‘hurly-burly’ from the passage in 1 *Henry 4* (5.1.78) where the word ‘water-colours’ appears for the first time in printed form to refer to a kind of painting (about this specific passage see Dulac. ""[A] time/Of pell-mell havoc and confusion": Shakespeare and the 2016 Paris Protests', *op. cit.*).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ This is another phrase borrowed from 1 *Henry 4*, 5.1.72.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Alan Galey, *The Shakespearean Archive. Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity* (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 124.</footnote>
limnings. The exhibition of the two portraits brings the memory of the dead king back into the present and into the same dimension, as it were (both temporarily and physically), as the living monarch, thus putting them on a par. But it also conjures up the very idea of the *present* itself, as these images are meant for Gertrude to realize what she has lost and what she has come to, compared to her previous station. Hamlet here intends the visual intensity in these limnings to be puissant enough to make her present condition appear to his mother in all its truth and transience. Such association may derive partly from the rapidity of execution of limnings:

> Unlike portraits in oil on panel or canvas, which could take months to complete, miniatures were painted over the course of three sittings, lasting between two and three hours each, with some additional finishing-up time for the costume and jewels. This relative speed of execution was made possible partly by the miniaturists' use of fast-drying gum arabic as a binder, as opposed to the slower-drying oil medium.<fnref n="42" />

Thanks to their quick art, limners were able to register rapidly changing states of affairs. Although less political than ontological and poetic, *Antony and Cleopatra's* clouds convey a comparable sense of ephemerality. Yet far from being censured or mocked as fickle or deceitful, Antony's volatile visions become the truest emanation of his own sense of dissolution. The limner's quick and translucent art offers the best reflection of Antony's experience of his present, mortal condition. Contrary to the 'quick comedians' whom Cleopatra fears that will stage and misrepresent Antony and herself '[e]xtemporally' (5.2.216), the tragedy's reverie on clouds offers the most moving and sincere *ad vivum* portrait of Antony – an arrestingly tenuous pageant whose memorable *enargeia* lives in the colourful yet impermanent substance of the playwright's chosen medium.

## OBNUBILATION IN *HAMLET*

*Hamlet's* clouds, on the contrary, do not so much dislimn as *obnubilate* all images by reason of their density and opacity:

> CLAUDIUS But now my cousin Hamlet, and my son –
> HAMLET (*Aside*) A little more than kin, and less than kind.
> CLAUDIUS How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
> HAMLET Not so my lord, I am too much i'th'sun.<fnref n="43" /> (1.2.64-67)

<footnote n="42">⁴² Christina Faraday, ‘Lively Limning: Presence in Portrait Miniatures and John White’s Images of the New World’, *British Art Studies*, Issue 17, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-17/cfaraday* (accessed June 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ All references to *Hamlet* are to Philip Edwards’s revised 2019 edition with a new introduction by Heather Hirschfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge Shakespeare). References to other plays by Shakespeare are to John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, eds. (1986) 2005. *The Oxford Shakespeare. The Complete Works*, 2nd edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.</footnote>
These four lines, resting as they do upon homophonic quibbles (kin/kind, sun/son), convey the full force of Hamlet’s ‘umbrage’ (5.2.111). Claudius’s question-*cum*reproach seems to corroborate this rather dismal weather forecast, as his wording and choice of verb in particular (‘hang on’) make it clear that he sees Hamlet as shrouding himself in clouds, a most ‘burdensome and depressing’ cloak.<fnref n="44" /> Rather than prompting Hamlet to look skyward, these ponderous clouds cause him to slope over and look down into the ground where graves are dug and decaying corpses are found: ‘Do not forever with thy vailèd lids/Seek for thy noble father in the dust’ (1.2.70-71). These clouds are the opposite of airy and light and signal gravity and opacity instead. The first quarto of the play offers yet an even more explicit acknowledgement of the stuff these clouds are made of: ‘What meanes these sad and melancholy moodses?’.<fnref n="45" /> Regardless of the long-standing academic discussion around the origin and status of Q1,<fnref n="46" /> the elucida-tion of the metaphor highlights a strong nexus between clouds and the excess of black bile. Clouds were indeed often associated with imbalance in early modern discussions of humours, as is attested by this passage from Burton’s *Anatomy of Melancholy*, borrowing from Lemnius:

> [A]s Lemnius well observes lib. 1. cap. 16. as a blacke and thicke cloud covers the Sunne, and intercepts his beames & light, so doth this melancholy ’Vapor obnubilate the mind, inforce it to many absurd thoughts and imaginations, and compell good, wise, honest, discreet men (arising to the Braine from the lower parts, as smoake out of a chimny) to dote, speake, and doe that which becomes them not, their persons, callings, wisdomes.<fnref n="47" />

Melancholy’s clouds, like Hamlet’s own, ‘hang[ing] on’ him, are ‘blacke and thicke’, and they here quite literally obnubilate the ‘sun’ (son).<fnref n="48" />

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ ‘hang, v.’ OED Online. June 2022. Oxford University Press (accessed June 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ There are many other allusions to Hamlet’s melancholy in the play, the most explicit of all being found at 2.2.554. About the various versions of Claudius’s opening question and their interpretation, see Johnson 2019: ‘[C]onsider the King’s initial question to Hamlet, rendered in Q2 as “How is it that the clowdes still hang on you” and F as “How is it that the Clouds still hang on you?”’ (substantially identical, but differing in punctu-ation and capitalisation). By contrast, Q1 reads: “What meanes these sad and melancholy moodses?”. The Q1 version does not contain a single word present in the Q2/F version. It is clear in both that the King inquires after Hamlet’s state of mind, yet the language is markedly different: “how is it” is a question of cause with a metaphor leaving Hamlet without agency (the clouds simply “hang” on him), whereas “what means” asks after the intention behind the moods. [...]. In any case, whether it could be explained as a misinterpreted note, a misremembered line or a deliberate revision, the Q1 text here clearly differs significantly in wording from Q2 and F, but it has been counted as possessing enough resemblance to count as an analogous line: it is a single iambic pentameter line asking a question.’ (132)</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ About the history of *Hamlet’s* quarto and folio versions, see Philip Edwards’ appendix 1, ‘Textual Analysis’ (Edwards 2019, 253–77).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Robert Burton, *The Anatomy of Melancholy* (London, 1621), 258.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ ‘Obnubilate’ is borrowed from Latin *ob-nubilare*, stemming from *nubilum, cloud*. See ‘obnubilate, v.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, and ‘obnubilate, adj.’ (accessed June 2025). About obnubilation and the power of clouds, see Steven Connor’s extended version of a 2009 talk broadcast in the series *The Essay* on BBC Radio 3 at https://stevenconnor.com/obnubilation.html (accessed June 2025).</footnote>
The corpulence and solidity of these earthly clouds are perhaps most pow-
erfully conveyed in the puzzling prelude to Hamlet’s violent confrontation
with Gertrude:

HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS By th' mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET Or like a whale?
POLONIUS Very like a whale. (3.2.339-344)

Contrary to Hamlet’s overt disagreement with Claudius, Polonius acts
very much the flatterer in approving of anything Hamlet encourages him to
see in the clouds.<fnref n="49" /> Besides concurring with the Prince’s visions, Polonius
adds weight and substance to them. In Hamlet’s initial question, his ‘almost
in shape’ is rearticulated and substantiated as ‘indeed’ (in shape/in deed),
so that Polonius’s choice of oath, ‘By th’mass’, may well be heard as a dou-
ble entendre (mass/Mass), anticipating Hamlet’s later description of
‘Heaven’s face’ as ‘solidity and compound mass’ (3.4.48-49). It is the mass,
substance and thickness of the clouds which give rise to this first image.
Similarly, Polonius’s following alteration of Hamlet’s suggestion of ‘weasel’
turns ‘Methinks it is’ into ‘It is backed’. Any trace of subjectivity (‘Methinks’)
is thus removed and Polonius ‘backs’ Hamlet’s vision by providing further
evidence. The final image has Polonius similarly adding weight to Hamlet’s
prompting, as Hamlet’s ‘Or like’ is echoed by the counsellor’s ‘Very like’

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ The cloud-gazing scene offers many possible intertextual references ranging from Aristophanes to Lucretius, Erasmus, or Plutarch. Vanessa Lim and Joanne Paul have argued that it may refer to Plutarch’s *How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend*, and more specifically to the description of the flatterer: ‘for the flatterer, mimicking friendship, “composeth his nature (as it were) some unformed matter ready to receive all sorts of impressions, studying to frame and accommodate himselfe wholly to all those things that he taketh in hand; yeah and to resemble those persons just by way of imitation whom he meaneth to set upon and deceive, as being souple, soft and pliable, to represent them lively in everie point”’. (Lim and Paul 2018, 3). Clouds thus illustrate the way people seize upon a deceptive, showy, and shifting appearance in lieu of friendship. Rhodri Lewis cites Erasmus as another key source for the passage: ‘The one indubitable analogue for Hamlet’s exchange with Polonius is to be found in Erasmus’s colloquy on “The Exorcism” [...]. Here, Erasmus’s two discussants consider the strategies through which Polus [is able] to convince the general populus that a local bridge is haunted by the “woeful howlings” of a spectre, a presence that will in due course be “exorcised” by Faunus’. In explaining how Polus achieved this, the point of comparison is the ease with which he was able to convince people that they could see a ‘huge dragon’ in the clouds. Despite the fact that they saw no such thing, his audience were so ‘anxious not to seem unobservant’ that they ‘finally declared that [they] saw it too’. Seeing images in the clouds becomes emblematic of the vanity and credulousness that underpin a certain kind of faux-worldly posturing, itself embodied in the figure of Faunus. (Lewis 2012, 11). Finally, Carlo Mazzio has shown how these changing clouds and Polonius’s readiness to acquiesce to all of Hamlet’s impressions may have conjured up memories of ‘collective witnessing in the matter of ariel phenomena’ (173) even closer to Jacobean audiences, such as those reported by William Fulke in *A goodly gallerye with a most pleasant prospect into the garden of natural contemplation* (1563): ‘One day in London, for example, Fulke reports, vivid images of persons, places, and things, all in action, could be seen in the upper region of the air [...] This brings us into a historically specific cultural climate in which “cloud gazing” could form the basis of cultural consensus’ (Mazzio 2009, 172–3).</footnote>
by comparing the player’s passion to his own inability to act upon the ghost’s revelation and command. Hamlet’s own ghost is thus equated or paralleled with the player’s ‘fiction’, effectively confirming the parallel drawn between the portrait of the painted tyrant Pyrrhus and other ghostly apparitions in the tragedy, all of which fail to prompt him to action.

And the depiction of Pyrrhus, like that of other cloud-like ghosts in the tragedy, is delivered, again, in a most specific and technical lexicon, borrowed from the painter’s workshop. The dominant colour is black, with distinctly racial connotations, and the technique is clearly reliant on materials and pigments which bear nothing in common with the limner’s art.<fnref n="53" /> Pyrrhus’s ‘sable arms’ and complexion, which ‘did the night resemble’, are ‘baked and impasted’ with blood (2.2.410-416). The thick red paste covering the avenger’s black body is then described as ‘o’er-sizèd with coagulate’ gore (2.2.420). Both the forms ‘impasted’ and ‘o’er-sizèd’ may be heard as references to the application of colours and pigments onto a canvas. While ‘oversize’ refers to the coat of sticky substance (‘size’) used to treat surfaces before painting on them (like a primer, ground or gesso), the word ‘impasted’ here anticipates later pictorial usages of the word referring to the laying on of colours, thick and bold. In other words, Hamlet’s fantasised self-portrait is couched in words reminiscent of pictorial techniques most unlike those transpiring through Antony’s own vision of himself in the clouds. The ghost of Pyrrhus and the spectre of textual sources and analogues appear in *Hamlet* as a dark figure covered in the same inky, viscous substance as the prince’s melancholy clouds.

## CONCLUSION: ARRESTING VISIONS

Although differing in texture, opacity and colour, the clouds and ghosts of these two tragedies all serve as mirrors held up to nature, allowing a reflection upon the materials of mimesis. Both plays stage the arresting nature of ghostly and cloudy apparitions. Not only are the latter fascinating, they are also primarily arresting: they mark pauses in the two plays. ‘Pyrrhus’ pause’ (2.2.445) offers a mise-en-abyme of the long pause in the dramatic action caused by the very players’ entrance, an interruption which Polonius does not fail to notice by commenting, in metatheatrical and ironical fashion, ‘this is too long’ (2.2.523). Antony’s reverie similarly interrupts the unfolding of the tragic process and anticipates the Roman ruler’s delayed suicide. Clouds, like ghosts, rend the fabric of dramatic time. They open up breaks through which the audience is made to reflect upon the very materials of mimesis and the efficacy (or lack thereof) of pictorial substances to bring evanescent visions to life, to bestow upon them a form of visual intensity so puissant that they will

<footnote n="53">⁵³ About the racial dimension in *Hamlet*, see Ian Smith’s chapter on *Hamlet* in *Black Shakespeare* (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022).</footnote>
bring the past into the present, or make the present more intensely present,
anticipating how it will ‘live in [our] memory’ and haunt us like impossible
monuments always already in the process of dissolving: ‘The cloud-capped
towers, the gorgeous palaces,/The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,/And, like this insubstantial pageant
faded,/Leave not a rack behind’ (*The Tempest*, 4.1.152-156).<fnref n="54" />

Sorbonne Université

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ I am quoting from the *New Oxford Shakespeare* edition of *The Tempest*, gen. ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, ed. Rory Loughnane (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2024).</footnote>
Abstract

This article examines the cloud-gazing scenes in Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet through the lens of early modern artistic theory and material practices, particularly the art of limning. Building upon existing philosophical and poetic interpretations of Shakespearean clouds as metaphors for ephemerality and memory, the essay argues that the two plays mobilize contrasting artistic vocabularies – Antony and Cleopatra through the translucent textures of watercolour limnings, and Hamlet through the heavy, ink-like density of fretted engravings. Drawing on treatises by Nicholas Hilliard and Edward Norgate, as well as visual analyses of works by Dürer and Hilliard, the study foregrounds Shakespeare’s use of highly specific technical lexicons to render the materiality of clouds and ghosts. These “painterly” elements illuminate the plays’ broader concerns with mimesis, memory, and the instability of signs. By attending to the distinct textures and techniques evoked in each play, the article reveals how Shakespeare’s dramatic poetics intersect with contemporary visual culture, offering arresting, spectral images that suspend time and challenge the viewer’s perception of presence and representation.