Envisioning the Miniaturist’s Art on Stage: the Case of The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll (Anonymous, 1600)

Printed in 1600, probably at the same period of time when Nicholas Hilliard was writing The Arte of Limning, the anonymous play, The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll, was performed at Saint Paul’s where many plays featuring painters and using paintings as stage properties had been produced. According to Marguerite Tassi, this seldom-studied comedy hinges upon the “paragone between jeweller and painter” (The Scandal of Images, 123), between the noble Lassingbergh who disguises as a painter to woo Lucilia, and the latter’s father, Flores, who is a jeweller and a miniaturist. This essay seeks to explore the aesthetic role played by miniatures as stage properties and objects in this comedy which confronts different works of art and artistic techniques, such as antique works, miniatures, goldsmithery and even embroidery. The comparison between the painter who produces counterfeits and the miniaturist who sets his pictures in gems and works on agate stones gives a new turn to the traditional neo-Platonist debate on shadows and substance, dramatized in William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona. This set of oppositions gives way to another paragone between the art of picturing and the art of drama, highlighting the connection between miniature-making and dramatic performance. The integration of miniatures on stage verges on interartistic contamination in act 3: using the power of verbal artefacts and visual objects such as gems and jewels to move and manipulate the beholders, the character of the Enchanter creates the vision of an actual miniature within the dramatic performance.