The term illusion has an interesting history. The earliest occurrences cited in the Oxford English Dictionary relate it to derision or mockery, often devilish: Richard Rolle around 1340 writes of “the illusyone of the enemy”; in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Pandarus says the priests of the temple claim that dreams are revelations from the goddess but also “[i]nfernal illusions”). Other OED occurrences include Thomas More’s description of fantasies “[d]one by the deuil . . . for the illusyon of them that with ydolatry had deserued to be deluded” (from Dialogue Heresyes), Samuel Purchas’s “illusions of their bewitched mindes” (from Pilgrimage), and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, from which we learn that “by th’ Diuels illusions / The Monke might be deceiu’d.” Thus, in each of these late medieval and early modern usages, the idea of illusion is attached to a religious reference and is entirely negative. Illusion is to be avoided as the devil’s work.
By the end of the eighteenth century, a different kind of context began to become relevant. The most famous purveyor of the “optical illusions,” as they were described by the OED, was Philip James de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), a Franco-British painter whose well-known efforts to capture the Romantic sense of the sublime include Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) in London’s Science Museum and An Avalanche in the Alps (1803) in the Tate Gallery.18 In 1771 Loutherbourg settled in London, where David Garrick paid him £500 a year to design scenery and costumes and oversee the stage machinery at the Drury Lane Theatre. He is chiefly remembered for his mechanical inventions. One of these was called the Eidophusikon, meaning “image of nature.” It has sometimes been regarded as a kind of pre-cinema.19 Described by the Public Advertiser as “various imitations of Natural Phenomena, represented by moving pictures,”20 it was the fruit, its inventor claimed, of twenty years of experiment. Inside his Leicester Square house he built an opulent miniature theatre cum art salon. There, for a fee of five shillings, up to 130 fashionable spectators sat in comfort to watch a series of moving scenes projected within a giant peephole aperture measuring eight feet by six feet. The darkened auditorium combined with skillful use of concealed and concentrated light sources, colored silk filters, clockwork automata, and winding backscreens to create a uniquely illusionist environment. Audiences could watch five landscapes in action, each derived from his paintings or representing aspects of the fashionable sublime. Dawn crept over the Thames at Greenwich; the noonday sun scorched the port of Tangier; a crimson sunset flushed over the Bay of Naples; a tropical moon rose over the wine-dark waters of the Mediterranean; and a torrential storm wrecked a ship somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Between scenes, painted transparencies served as curtain drops, and the audience was entertained with violin music and song.21 Colored lantern slides and the ingenious lighting of transparencies represented the moon and stars and even the effect of running water.22 Garrick, who made extensive use of Loutherbourg’s skills, became “the first actor-manager to establish a watertight separation between the stage and the auditorium,” and so to make extensive uses of processes of illusion.23 In 1762 Garrick had managed to stop audience members from sitting on the stage, and the so-called fourth wall concept began to develop. A curtain marked the stage off from the audience, and the thrust or apron stage for which Shakespeare had written disappeared. Eventually, in 1880, the stage at the Haymarket was encased with a golden frame.24 Spectators were invited to contemplate the stage without any direct participation, as voyeurs.
Closer to the time when cinema was invented, the word illusion began to be distinguished from hallucination: illusions, we are told by an article in Nature (June 30, 1881) cited in OED, “must always have a starting-point in some actual impression, whereas a hallucination has no such basis.” Illusion and realism had become closely linked. Spectacular performances like those of Henry Irving included real trees, even real animals, and water: at Sadler’s Wells, technical devices like water tanks allowed for rain or storm, shipwrecks, and fountains to be simulated on stage. Painters like Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones, aided by advances in lighting, were employed to enhance sceneries and stage effects.25
Around the same period, the word illusionist came into use; possibly under French influence, it quickly became the equivalent of the much older terms conjurer, magician, and enchanter. Only in the twentieth century, according to the OED, did the adjective illusionistic appear: an article in the Modern Language Review in October 1938 writes of the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wöfflin’s conception of the baroque as defined by “the tendency . . . to employ an illusionistic realism for the purpose of sensationalism.” Thus, in the modern period, scientific and artistic contexts became relevant, replacing the earlier religious contexts; illusions can be produced by human skills.
One suggestive use of the word is when Horatio addresses the ghost of Hamlet senior as “illusion” (1.1.109).26 The play calls into question many inherited concepts, partly because it makes use of the rapidly changing and unstable nature of the English language. In this case we hesitate, as must the audience, between the earlier, often satanic, sense of the word, and a newer questioning about the relation of illusions to hallucination: are they the devil’s work or the brain’s? Hamlet’s ghost may be both. As we shall see, ghosts and trucage are often related: on the stage, still more so on film, Horatio’s cry “Stay, illusion” is richly ambiguous.
Early Shakespeare films never settled into any uniform understanding of how to manage illusions. On the one hand, we find delight in what the new art form could do to enhance the impression of the real, such as a ship viewed at medium distance floating in the sea from which Ferdinand staggers ashore onto the beach in the Percy Stow Tempest of 1908. On the other hand, the illusion can be disrupted in quite novel ways. At the end of Richard III (1916), Frederick Warde turns back into himself, and we see him sporting a tweed jacket and “bowing and smiling graciously to his adoring fans,” as if the cinema audience were present in his theatre.27 This is very like what Tom Gunning has called “the Cinema of Attractions,” when the actors smile at the camera or the assumed audience as if “to solicit the attention of the spectator” to themselves as actors, not to the character they play.28 Indeed, an arresting way to imagine the distinction between theatre and screen is to realize that from the actor’s point of view, the camera’s ability to see their eyes makes all the difference.29
Some recent Hamlet films even extend the permitted range of illusion in film. In Kenneth Branagh’s version, for example, we see a dagger being plunged into Claudius’s ear, and for a moment we may think Hamlet has finally done the deed. But immediately we are shown a shot of Hamlet still hesitating to stab his uncle. We quickly have to rethink what we have seen and realize that the film has taken us into Hamlet’s thought, his intentions, rather than showing us what actually happened. The moment exploits the inherent realism of cinema but makes us momentarily doubt its credibility. Similarly, in Michael Almereyda’s version, as her father is reading Hamlet’s love letters aloud to Gertrude and Claudius, Ophelia suddenly jumps into the swimming pool in an attempt to drown herself. But in the next shot she is still on the edge of the pool. She did not jump—or not yet. What the film showed us was her secret wish to commit suicide in water, which will happen later. These two instances of metacinema cannot but call attention to the nature of illusion itself. The film in which they appear is an illusion, but how much of an illusion if the viewer is jolted back into the larger film’s reality by experiencing the inset illusions? We are at least invited to think hard about the issue.