Yay For Intertextuality!

Do you know what's cool? Paintings. You know what else is cool? Poetry. BUT, do you know what the coolest thing ever is? Poems that tie-in with paintings. Just throw in some connections to Shakespeare's King Lear and you've got the most awesome AP Lit assignment ever! Let's dive in, shall we?

Let's start with the pretty painting! This picture by renaissance master Pieter Bruegel is titled Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. This painting presents a fairly idyllic scene of ancient Greece. There's farmers farming, ships sailing, and a lovely town in the background. Among all of this however, there is an odd detail in the lower right corner. A pair of legs (belonging to Icarus) are sticking out from the sea.

But why are the legs so small and unimportant? Isn't this supposed to be a painting about the fall of Icarus?

Pieter Bruegel was a master of the style known as "world landscape". This technique takes famous historical or mythological events and put them into a larger context. The background dwarfs "the scene" in order to convey how small and unimportant the events occurring truly are. World Landscapes give viewers a sense of perspective on how little the world cares about any one person's struggles. So, while the title is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the painting isn't really about the guy's tragedy.

Due to the whole "great suffering going unnoticed by the world/society" thing, poets absolutely love this painting. William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden have both given the painting treatments in verse, but they each take a slightly different angle on how the world sees suffering. William's poem Landscape With the Fall of Icarus focuses on the farmers in the foreground and their ignorance of Icarus' plight. The poem refers to Icarus hitting the water as "a splash quite unnoticed" by the farmers plowing their fields. It's not that the farmers (and the world) knowingly ignore the drowning boy so much as they never even knew that he fell. This contrasts directly with Auden's view in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts. Auden's treatment of the painting focuses on the ship sailing next to Icarus. Auden talks about how the ships willingly turn away from the tragedy and keep on sailing. This shows that Auden feels that people know of other's suffering, but choose to ignore it.

How does this all connect to King Lear? Well, the largest parallel I see is in Goneril and Regan, Lear's daughters. Both of these women know that father has grown old and isn't in the best of shape. Yet, when he simply seeks a place to live, they shun him and plot to eliminate him. These characters are obviously like Auden's interpretation of the ship that turns and sails away from suffering. This arguably makes them much more malicious than a character who is merely ignorant of Lear's suffering.

The connections between these texts give us a deeper understanding of the themes of each work. The painting gives visual to the poems and the poems give focus to the painting. All of these show readers a theme in king Lear that lies slightly below the surface of the text. It's like, magic...