Shakespeare remade

The German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) remarked when he was in London in 1770 that a book on William Shakespeare, the artist William Hogarth, and David Garrick, the leading actor of the day, should be written. Two and a half centuries later, Robin Simon, the art magazine Apollo’s editor from 1990 to 1997 and the founder and editor of The British Art Journal, has “taken up the challenge,” as he writes at the beginning of this stimulating, large, and copiously illustrated book. Simon has written and lectured about Hogarth, notably in his Hogarth, France and British Art: The Rise of the Arts in 18th-Century Britain (2007), in which he showed how Hogarth, happy to present himself as an archetypical English bulldog down to his puggish looks, was more open to and...