Introduction: speaking pictures?

In the third Act of John Lyly’s comedyCampaspe, Alexander the Great attempts to learn to draw under the instruction of the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Midway through this unusual art lesson, the emperor finds that since he draws ‘like a king’ he is ‘nothing more unlike a painter’, and quickly abandons his attempt at image-making.¹ Alexander’s failure to draw is illustrative of the depiction of visual representations in many early modern English plays; the unsuccessful process of image-making is on display at least as much as is the image itself, which remains notably incomplete. In early modern England, ‘display’