My time at the Center was devoted to identifying and examining photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) that took William Shakespeare’s plays as their subject and reimagined them as allegories of empire. This work built on my first and second books, continuing my analysis of Cameron’s allegorical subjects (Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire) and my emphasis on the artist’s roots in India as a British expatriate (Julia Margaret Cameron: The Colonial Shadows of Victorian Photography).

Cameron’s photographic methods were patently theatrical, as she turned boatmen “into King Arthur; [and] village girls into Queen Guinevere,” as Virginia Woolf described her interpretation of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. But Cameron did not romanticize her Shakespearean subjects as heroic and did not pose stage actors to reenact his plays. Nor did she universalize Shakespeare: Whereas other Victorian artists, writers, and critics used Shakespeare to illustrate moral virtues, Cameron interpreted contemporary imperial events through his iconography by visualizing common themes, including threats to hereditary succession, questions of political sovereignty, the perils of tyranny, and the benefits of good governance. During the 1860s, Britain’s colonial governments were shaped by these very questions. 

During my fellowship, I perceived that Cameron paid tribute to the allegories that Shakespeare wrote into his plays (which he did to flatter King James or Queen Elizabeth, or to mollify their censors) to explain why she chose dramas that were infused with political controversy, international conflict, and supernatural forces. I was also able to determine that she did not create her photographic “Shakespeare Gallery” all at once, like the series of Madonna photographs that she gave to the British Museum in 1865, or the Idylls of the King, which Henry S. King and Co. published in 1875. Rather, I found evidence that she chose discrete scenes to interpret in relation to prominent political events, such as the end of hereditary succession among the maharajas of the Punjab; the passage of laws regulating marriage and mourning in Britain and in India; and the assassinations of chief justice John Paxton Norman in Calcutta in 1871 and India’s viceroy, the earl of Mayo, in 1872. 

I plotted eight chapters for my new book, each addressing Cameron’s interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays. I worked on three chapters while in residence. As examples, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I analyzed how Cameron used the concept of “the changeling” in Shakespeare’s drama to visualize the real-life transformation of the maharaja Duleep Singh. In my chapter on Macbeth, I argued that Cameron’s photograph Sister Spirits was indebted to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of Macbeth, which was engraved by Robert Thew and published in 1803 by John and Josiah Boydell. The National Gallery of Art holds two copies of the publication, one in the library and one in the Department of Prints and Drawings. For Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I examined how Cameron represented her friend Sir Henry Taylor as Prospero in several images, and how she aligned the restitution of the Duke of Milan at the end of the play to Taylor’s identity as an officer in the Colonial Office. Additional chapters will examine Cameron’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.

I was able to establish that Cameron’s artistic process was also informed by paintings, engravings, and popular prints that appeared in Punch and The Illustrated London News, as well as the influence of her family, the close circle of Pre-Raphaelite artists that formed her network, and political friends who managed colonial affairs. While in residence, I also pursued research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, examining original documents from the 1860s that reinforced my interpretation of Cameron’s political agenda. Through close readings of original correspondence and diaries, critical reviews of Shakespeare’s texts and performances, and comparative analyses of her imagery to other works of art, research completed at the Center will contribute to my new book by helping me demonstrate how Cameron used Shakespeare to depict colonial encounters of immediate relevance to imperial Britain.

Newberry Library
Berger Collection Educational Trust Visiting Senior Fellow in British Art, June–August 2025

While he completes his new book manuscript, Jeff Rosen will continue as a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago.