Six Characters in Search of Shakespeare: Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Shakespearian Mythos (William Shakespeare) (Critical Essay‪)‬

WHAT IS THE BEST MODERN ANALOGY for understanding the nature of Shakespeare's theater--is it television, with its democratic appeal and focus on popular entertainment? Or is it film, which shares with theater a marriage of sound and vision, but which sometimes rises to the level of art which television rarely does? Or, nostalgically, is it radio, which necessitates that listeners use their imagination to visualize what is not presented in the same manner as Shakespeare's theater asks viewers to imagine they are in Greece or Italy or Agincourt? I would like to suggest a fourth alternative: What about comic books? As with television and film, in comics there is a union of visual and verbal representation, but what is importantly missing is photographic realism, leaving much to the imagination and inviting the reader or viewer to participate in the creation of illusion. As one artist wrote, "Comics can actually be seen as falling somewhere between novels and films." A comic is static in that it can only provide "selected details of a scene" and forces the imagination to fill in the rest (Bender 5). These similarities are again described by the comic book artist Michael Zulli, who states that "[c]omics are often compared to film, but I see them as being more like theater, another medium that can't physically show everything and so must rely upon suggestion supported by a few perfectly chosen details" (qtd. in Bender 57). The result is a more intimate experience, which, unlike film but like theater, enables the audience to participate by using their imagination to cross the boundary between what is real and what is unreal, or what is shown and what cannot be. More importantly, the limitations of both mediums are defining characteristics of what makes the two art forms unique aesthetic experiences. In comic books, it is the very fact that the reader must participate which makes them most effective; the imagination is responsible for the creation of illusion in that, as Scott McCloud writes in Understanding Comics, it "takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea" (66). McCloud continues: "If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar" (67). Closure resides in the imagination of the reader: "I may have drawn an axe being raised [...], but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why" (68). Rather, we, as readers, are equal partners in the crime. The movement across this boundary between the represented and the fanciful unrepresented is important to understanding the role of imagination in the works under consideration here: Neil Gaiman's series The Sandman, particularly issues 19 and 75, respectively, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. I draw this comparison between comics and Renaissance drama as a way of suggesting that comics and theater, especially Shakespeare's theater, share certain key characteristics and that Gaiman uses these volumes to examine the relationship between the real and the imagined in ways which emphasize the shared aesthetic qualities of comics and theater, characteristics which raise important questions concerning the material conditions of artistic production. In turn, these aesthetic characteristics serve as meta-commentaries on art and artistic creation: throughout the Sandman series, myth is thematically treated as a dynamic and active collaboration between artist and audience, and between the artist and the artist's larger cultural tradition. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest both explore many of these same issues, namely through the Rude Mechanicals, whose attempts at staging a play call to mind the limitations of the medium of theater as well as the importance of audience participation in order for theater to function as effective entertainment, and through Prospero's "rough magic" which Shakespeare carefully equates with the theatrical experience; likewise, both plays bridge the gap b