In very Bard taste

'Vulgar and primitive,' was Voltaire's verdict on England's greatest-ever playwright. For figures of the Enlightenment, there must have appeared something quite coarse in such heroically charged emotions.

But this 'defect' also became the very reason that popular Parisian audiences fell in love with the Bard, and French artists such as Delacroix were naturally drawn to Ophelia on her watery deathbed and the inky-cloaked, philosophising Hamlet pondering death in the famous graveyard scene.

If you think that performing Shakespeare in the contemporary dress of the age only became the vogue in the 20th century, then you might be surprised to encounter Francis Hayman's flamboyantly bewigged Hamlet in Georgian attire, a curiously primped and preened figure, whose only concession to a morbid inner state is one slightly crumpled stocking.

With the Romantic era in England, the imagination kicks in with Fuseli's spooky interpretations of Macbeth. The spectral figure of the tragic thane shrinks in fear just as his Gorgonesque wife is about to manfully seize the daggers. And Richard III, surrounded by the spirits of all those he has wronged in life, offers the perfect subject for the necromantic visions of Blake.

This exhibition offers a lively gallop through the history of artists' interest in Shakespeare. But the best paintings of scenes from the plays can still be found in Tate Britain, in John Singer Sargent's monumental and spectacular portrait of the actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and in Millais's drowning Ophelia, a much more naturalistic rendition than the one offered by Delacroix here.